Abstract
In the title essay of my book, The Intentions of Intentionality,1 I proposed a touchstone for the intentionality of a concept in Brentano’s and Husserl’s sense of the term. According to this suggestion, a concept is intentional if and only if we have to consider several possible situations or courses of events in their relation to each other in spelling out the semantics of the concept. I dubbed this claim the thesis of intentionality as intensionality. By way of an intuitive explanation, the thesis says that the hallmark of intentional, that is, conscious and conceptualizable mental life is that it is transacted against the backdrop of a range of unrealized possibilities.
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Notes
Jaakko Hintikka: 1975, The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 192–222.
John Dewey: 1960, The Quest for Certainty, Dover, New York, p. 224.
William Kneale: 1968, ‘Intentionality and Intensionality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 42, 73–90.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, sec. 124.
Barbara Hall Partee: 1980, ‘Semantics-Mathematics or Psychology?’, in Bauerly, Egli and von Stechow (eds.), Semantics from Different Points of View, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1–14.
Jaakko Hintikka: 1975, ‘Impossible Possible Worlds Vindicated’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 4, 475–84.
Cf. Barbara hall Partee: 1977, ‘Possible Worlds Semantics and Linguistic Theory’, The Monist 60, 303–26.
See, e.g., the work collected in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984.
Veikko Rantala: 1977, Aspects of Definability (Acta Philosophica Fennica 28, no. 4 ), Societas Philosophica Fennica, Helsinki.
Roderick M. Chisholm: 1967, ‘Intentionality’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan, New York.
See, e.g., Jaakko Hintikka: 1974, Logic, Language-Games, and Information Clarendon Press, Oxford
See, e.g., Jaakko Hintikka 1974, ‘Knowledge, Belief, and Logical Consequence’, in J.M.E. Moravcsik (ed.), Logic and Philosophy for Linguistic, Mouton, The Hague, 165–176.
Veikko Rantala: 1975, ‘Urn Models: ANew Kind of Nonstandard Model for First-Order Logic’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 4, 455–74.
See Jaakko Hintikka, ‘Impossible Possible Worlds Vindicated’ (note 6 above).
See L.J. Savage: 1967, ‘Difficulties in the Theory of Personal Probability’, Philosophy of Science 34, 305–10.
Some material in the early parts of this essay has previously appeared in my papers, ‘Intentionality and Physical Modalities’, in: Ilkka Niiniluoto et. al.(eds.): 1977, Studia Excellentia: Essays in Honour of Oiva Ketonen (Reports from the Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, no. 3), Helsinki, 1–5, and ‘Degrees and Dimensions of Intentionality’, in: Umberto Eco (ed.): 1978, Semiotica testuale: mondi possibili e narrativita (= Versus, Vols. 19–20), Milano.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Hintikka, J., Hintikka, M.B. (1989). Degrees and Dimensions of Intentionality. In: The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic. Synthese Library, vol 200. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2647-9_12
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