Intentionality

“The Veil of Abstracta.” Philosophical Issues 21 (2011).

I argue that just as the sense-datum theory erected a veil of appearances over the external world, so currently popular accounts of perception in terms of relation to properties erect a veil of abstracta over the concrete world. 

“Intentionality and Normativity.” Philosophical Issues 20 (2010): 185-208.

I argue that Davidsonian claims about the normativity of intentionality work well for non-phenomenal intentionality but not for phenomenal intentionality. 

(With Terry Horgan.) “The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program.” In T. Horgan and U. Kriegel (eds.), Phenomenal Intentionality. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

(This is an early draft.) We review some of the work already done around the notion of phenomenal intentionality and propose a way of turning this body of work into a self-conscious research program for understanding intentionality.

“Cognitive Phenomenology as the Basis of Unconscious Content.” Forthcoming in T. Bayne and M. Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford UP.

I develop a Dennett-style interpretivist account of unconscious intentionality and argue that it follows from this that unconscious intentionality is ultimately grounded in a certain kind of cognitive phenomenology, namely, the phenomenology of conscious interpretive thoughts.

“Interpretation: Its Scope and Limits.” In A. Hazlett (ed.), New Waves in Metaphysics. London: Plagrave, 2010.

After elucidating the kind of interpretivist approach to intentionality that one finds in Dennett and Davidson, I present a regress-or-circularity argument against it.

“The Dispensability of (Merely) Intentional Objects.” Philosophical Studies 141 (2008): 79-95.

The ontology of (merely) intentional objects is a can of worms. If we can avoid ontological commitment to such entities, we should. In this paper, I offer a strategy for accomplishing that. This is to reject the traditional act-object account of intentionality in favor of an adverbial account. According to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of being related thought-wise to dragons but of engaging in the activity of thinking dragon-wise.

(With Terry Horgan.) “Phenomenal Intentionality Meets the Extended Mind.” The Monist 91 (2008): 347-373.

We argue that the letter of the Extended Mind hypothesis can be accommodated by a strongly internalist, broadly Cartesian conception of mind. The argument turns centrally on an unusual but (we argue) highly plausible view on the mark of the mental.

“Real Narrow Content.” Mind & Language 23 (2008): 304-328.

This paper develops a positive account of narrow content designed to neutralize the charge that narrow content is not real content.

“Intentional Inexistence and Phenomenal Intentionality.” Philosophical Perspectives 21 (2007): 307-340.

The problem of intentional inexistence is posed by the fact that we can think of what doesn’t exist. I sketch a solution to this problem and argue that it’s viable.

“Is Intentionality Dependent upon Consciousness?” Philosophical Studies 116 (2003): 271-307.

I examine two arguments to the effect that there would be no intentionality if there was no consciousness, due one to Searle and one to McGinn, and defend the second. 

Discussion: Brandl;