Intentionality without intensionality
Item
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Title
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Intentionality without intensionality
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:edcba5fe732f:11637
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identifier
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12219
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Creator
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Bulnes, Matias,
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Contributor
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Michael Levin
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | Actions | Computationalism | Decision | Language | Mind | Symbol
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Abstract
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The main thesis of the dissertation is that the choice between individualism and externalism is a false dilemma. Individualism is the view that mental entities such as beliefs, desires, concepts, etc. are internal to an individual's body, individuated independently of what happens outside. Externalism is the view that they are external to the body, individuated by the relations between the individual and her environment. Both of these views disarm conundrums about the mind but are also plagued by their own problems. Yet the choice makes a material difference in nearly all mind-related problems. I do not wish to deny that they are mutually exclusive---I take this to be rather obvious. But in the dissertation I trace a route between them that avoids their perils.;I make one fundamental methodological assumption: mental entities are defined by their role in folk psychology. As a consequence, in adjudicating between competing hypotheses related to the nature of mental entities I rely on their power to explain and systematize folk psychology.;My strategy is simple. I begin with a diagnosis of the problems that plague individualism. I argue that by committing to the intensionality of the mental, individualism makes the content of mental entities (or what they represent) accessory to their individuation, contrary to folk psychology. Then I weaken the individualist view just enough to avert this consequence without falling prey to the problems that plague externalism. The result is a view of mental entities as having individualist structure but externalist content. The objects immanent to the mental famously observed by Brentano emerge neither as neural symbols nor as external realities but rather as virtual objects, that is, as immanent to a characterization of brain states in terms of personal dispositions to interact with an environment.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Philosophy
