PPIG: Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group

Presenter: Cecilea Mun (University of Nevada)

Title: The Problem of Intentionality and Bridging Interdisciplinary Divides

Abstract: In the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) René Descartes argued for the distinction between the mind and the body in order to provide a lasting foundation for the sciences. Descartes’s dualistic framework led to at least two consequences for the science of the mind: 1) it provided the impetus to treat the science of the mind as distinct from the science of the body, reinforcing what is now known as the mind-body problem, and 2) it led to the problem of intentionality, which can be understood in at least three ways: 1) in terms of how information about the world gets into the content of any mental phenomenon (a version of the problem of the explanatory gap), 2) the problem of explaining how linguistic propositions or words come to have the meanings that they do (the problem of intension), and 3) the problem of providing a naturalistic (scientific) theory of intentionality (the problem of naturalizing intentionality). Franz Brentano (1874) proposed to unify the discipline of psychology under his framework of psychology from an empirical standpoint, which included Brentano’s thesis of intentional in-existence as a solution to the problem of naturalizing intentionality. I argue that Brentano’s solution proves to be an inadequate solution to the problem of intentionality, and I conclude by drawing out the implications of this conclusion.