Abstract
According to an idea which is widespread among philosophers, linguistic entities derive their intentionality from the intentionality of mental entities by virtue of some relation between them. Typically, it is some kind of intention on the speaker’s part – e.g., an intention to produce in the hearer a belief with a certain content – that is supposed to endow words with content. This paper argues that the concept of the derivation of content from one entity to another, if understood realistically, is flawed: derived intentionality, I will argue, is merely ascribed intentionality, not a real property of its possessor (one which is independent of any stance or interpretation). Irrealistic-ascriptivist senses are suggested for the ideas of content derivation, of original intentionality, and of the mind as the source of linguistic (and other forms of non-mental) intentionality. Thus, endorsing the idea that mental intentionality is the source of non-mental intentionality need not tempt one to intentional realism. In an intentional irrealistic framework, what forms of intentionality are original and what are derived is a deeply contingent matter, determined by our practice(s) of content ascription. But while intentional irrealism accommodates all those ideas, this paper defends “content-derivation irrealism” but not thoroughgoing intentional irrealism – the idea that there is real original (that is, un-derived) intentionality is not ruled out. Still, assuming that some entities possess real intentionality, what can make them endow intentionality upon other entities is also our practice of content ascription.
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Notes
It is common to speak of the intentionality and content of mental states and, respectively, of the reference and meaning of linguistic entities. In the context of this paper I find it more suitable to use “intentionality” and “content” in the case of language too. As to these latter terms, I will sometimes use the former and sometimes the latter, as will seem more suitable in each context.
A prominent proponent of the two-stage story is John Searle (1983, 1992), who ardently advances the idea that the intentionality of the (conscious) mind is intrinsic. Most of the supporters of the thesis of phenomenal intentionality also advance the idea of intrinsic intentionality – see, e.g., Horgan and Tienson (2002), Loar (2003), and some of the contributors to Kriegel 2013. Kriegel (2011) advocates a theory of phenomenal intentionality as the source of all intentionality but he does not take it to be intrinsic. For a naturalistic-reductionist approaches that give priority to the intentionality of the mind see, e.g., Dretske 1988, Fodor 1981 and Fodor 1987. The most detailed program regarding the way the mind endows language with meaning is Grice’s Intention Based Semantics (in e.g. Grice 1957). See also Lewis (1969), and Schiffer (1972) (Schiffer 1987 argues against Intention Based Semantics). On this approach, it is speaker’s meaning that is supposed to be directly derived from mental intentionality, and the relevant passages in this paper should be understood to concern it.
Since “endowing” may appear to have a causal connotation, I wish to emphasize that I use it in a constitutive sense. This will be better understood later, when I will clarify that the idea of derivation concerns the constitution of the possession of content by entities.
Adams and Aizawa use the expression “derived content” in a way that is similar (though not identical) to the way I use “merely ascribed content”: “derived content arises from the way in which items are handled or treated by intentional agents” (Aizawa and Adams 2005, p. 662). (The two ways are not identical since agents can treat items in ways other than by ascribing contents to them.)
Some philosophers (e.g., Bourget 2010) take content to be derived also in cases in which its possession by an entity is determined by the possession of contents (in the plural) by these entities’ components. Such a “composite derivation” is not derivation of content in my use of this expression. Similarly, a conceptual role theory of meaning cannot be or involve a theory of content derivation in the sense that is given to “content derivation” in this paper. Thus, accounts of the contents of non-experiential intentional states in terms of their causal or inferential connections with experiential intentional states and other mental states (such as Loar 1995, Horgan and Tienson 2002, and Horgan and Graham 2009; see Kriegel 2011 for a critical discussion) and any conceptual-role account of meaning are not accounts of content derivation in my use. It is essential to content derivation in my use that one entity inherits the content of another. It is this notion of derivation that is relevant to the issue of the source of intentionality.
The idea of content being ascribed to an entity according to an interpretative scheme does not presuppose that the content is in fact ascribed by someone (who possesses an intentional state, or performs a speech act, with this content). We may perhaps speak in this context of the content as ascribable to the entity according to the principles of the interpretative scheme.
I could equally construe that characterization realistically and then conclude that there cannot be content derivation, but I think (and we shall see this in part III) that there is theoretical gain in construing the idea of content derivation and dependence as ontologically neutral.
The fact that the argument I propose in support of this claim does not merely involve linguistic analysis of these notions, and that in this sense this claim is substantive, does not mean that the argument is empirically-based. There can be a priori considerations that are not conceptual or analytic in the narrow sense of being based on analyses of meanings.
Among proponents of the mind-language priority thesis are Grice (1957), Chisholm (in Chisholm and Sellars 1958), Searle (1983, 1989 and 1992), and Fodor Jerry (1987). Among proponents of the language-mind priority thesis are Sellars (in Chisholm and Sellars1958) and Davidson (1975). Among those who treat mind and language on a par are Block (1986) and Millikan (1984).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for raising this objection.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for raising this suggestion.
A reviewer for this journal suggested that the notion of derivation (or inheritance) that is employed in this reasoning is not the ordinary notion, as can be learned from the following example. A person A has blue eyes because of A’s genome. A’s daughter, B, has blue eyes because of B’s genome. Even though B’s having blue eyes can be said to be independent of A’s having blue eyes, B inherited her blue eyes from A. (For simplicity, it is assumed that the case is a haploid case.) Similarly, the fact that the linguistic act in the isomorphism example has its content due to isomorphism with a segment of reality and so independently (in the conceptual sense) of the content of the mental state does not exclude this case from being a case of content derivation or inheritance. I agree that the biological case is standardly described as a case of inheritance, but this case and this fact are irrelevant to my claim concerning this independence of content. There are a few differences between the cases. For example, what enables us to speak of inheritance in that biological case is that both steps that are involved in the process – the genome transmission and the formation of B’s blue eyes – are causal. So, due to the transitivity of causation, A’s genome is causally responsible for B’s having blue eyes, and we may speak here of inheritance. (I would say that the blue eyes are inherited in a loose sense only, for B could have had both that genome and blue eyes eve if, for some reason, A’s genome would not have brought A to have blue eyes. Strictly speaking, it’s the genome that is inherited. But let’s leave this point aside.) No transitivity operates and can similarly account for content inheritance in the isomorphism case. More importantly, this biological inheritance is inheritance in the causal sense. This is significant since the employment of such a notion of inheritance in the case of content cannot yield an answer to the question of how the relevant content is constituted, that is, to the relevant instance of the question of intentionality. Again, in the isomorphism example it is appealing to the isomorphism, rather than to its causal source, that provides an answer to this question. (Whether this answer is satisfactory is of course a different matter.) It seems to me that the concern of the classical derivationists was precisely to reply to this question; that they did not take themselves to be simply searching for the causal mechanism responsible for producing utterances, whose contents are explained otherwise. (I do not know of any other explanation for the constitution of the content of linguistic acts suggested by them.) At any rate, my concern in this paper is with the constitutive notion of content derivation or inheritance.
Note that the issue is the relevance of stipulating the semantic relevance of correlations to derived intentionality. Nothing that is written here is meant to oppose the idea that correlations between mental events and objects can base non-derived intentionality in the way suggested by naturalistic-reductivist accounts.
Perhaps any analytic derivation is stipulative derivation, but we need not decide on this matter for our present purposes. In the next part I will discuss the issue of “ascriptivist content derivation”, which is analytic and irrealistic and is not among the options the ruling out of which is necessary for the case against real content derivation.
According to Kriegel (2011) some non-experiential states have their intentionality in virtue of sharing the underlying nature of experiential intentional states, which are the “anchoring instances” of the concept of intentionality. This too is not an option the ruling out of which is necessary for the case against real content derivation, since it is not derivation in the sense under discussion or in any related sense. As I view the matter, the having of a certain content by a non-experiential state that shares the nature of an intentional experiential state on this option does not (metaphysically) depend on the having of the same (or any) content of the intentional experiential state. It is their having that nature that is responsible for their having their content, and it is only a linguistic convention that takes experiential intentional states to be paradigmatic intentional states. At any rate, we certainly cannot account in this way for all those states that we take to have intentionality that is not original, and so another notion of derivation is required. Kriegel himself advocates an interpretivist approach to intentional non-experiential states that do not share the underlying nature of experiential intentional states.
Consider the following objection (presented to me by an anonymous referee for this journal): “We could make a game where we treat ‘dog’ as though it meant cat, but beyond the game we don’t merely treat it so. ‘Dog’ really means dog and it does so via the conventions of the language that are also real and involve the establishment of real relations between speakers and hearers.” The approach presented on these pages can account for the difference between “game meaning” and “standard meaning” that is presented by this objection. ‘Dog’ standardly means dog, on this approach, not in the sense that it really has the property of having this meaning, but in the sense that we standardly ascribe this meaning to it, and when we play the game (a non-standard situation) in question we ascribe to it the cat meaning. In both cases the meaning is merely ascribed to the word, and the difference lies in the different practices of ascription that we employ.
Prominent ascriptivists are Dennett (1978 and 1987a) and Davidson (1984). For a thorough defense of ascriptivism as a view concerning mentality (not only its intentional aspect) see Mölder 2010. Ascrptivist approaches (notably Davidson’s approach) are sometimes referred to as “interpretivist”. Interpretivism is a version of ascriptivim that specifies criteria of a specific kind for appropriate ascriptions.
One might think that intentional irrealism and ascriptivism are identical, but in the spirit of what was written above about the short step leading from the claim that derived content isn’t real and the claim that it is merely ascribed, I think that there is a slight difference between the two views. This point is not essential to the concerns of this paper and so I will not dwell on it.
Such an approach is not committed to any specific interpretivist approach to meaning, such as Davidson’s 1984.
I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for pressing me to handle this issue.
That is true, of course, only if there can be real content at all.
One might think that original intentionality cannot be merely derived intentionality since an entity’s having intentionality originally is independent of the having of this intentionality by any other entity while ascribed intentionality involves the having of the same intentionality by the ascriber. But derived intentionality (at least as this expression is used in this paper) is ascribed “by” a practice of content ascription (i.e., according to a scheme of interpretation) and not necessarily by someone (who has an intentional state with the same content) (see note 5 above).
For reductivist-naturalistic approaches that account straightforwardly (but in ways that are quite different from each other) for the intentionality of language see Sellars (1963), Stampe (1977) and Millikan (1984). Perhaps direct reference approaches can also be classified as falling under this category, but they might also be interpreted differently (see Kriegel 2011, p. 212).
I thank two reviewers for Philosophia for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Horowitz, A. On the Very Idea of (Real) Content Derivation. Philosophia 49, 271–287 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00257-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00257-8