Yair Levy
Affiliation: Tel Aviv University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Intention, Representational formats, Non-propositional attitudes
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:30
Location: Gen. Henryk Dąbrowski Hall (006)
View the full session: Format & Vehicle
Intending is almost universally assumed to be one among various other propositional attitudes, including believing, desiring, hoping, etc. In this paper, I argue against this commonly held view and defend a novel alternative conception of the content of intention, which I claim should be preferred to the propositional conception. According to this alternative, the format of intention is cartographic. My case for this proposal works essentially by contrasting the expressive power and expressive limitations of intentions construed propositionally vs. cartographically. I suggest that only by representing the content of intention in cartographic terms (or as ‘blueprints’, as I call them) can we capture the kinds of content that can and those that cannot figure in our intentions.I start by briefly spelling out the method of individuating representational formats by appealing to differences in their expressive powers, as discussed most extensively in debates about the border between perception and cognition (e.g. Burge 2010; Block 2023; Crane 2009). Block (2023, ch. 4), for example, argues that while propositional content supports the full range of standard logical connectives, iconically formatted content disallows at least negation, disjunction, and if-then, as well as quantification (thus, we do not see something as ⌜not-green⌝, or as ⌜if red, then green⌝, etc). And in a series of important works, Elizabeth Camp (2007, 2009, 2018) argues that the cartographic is a sui generis representational format, irreducible to the propositional, in large part by showing that the content of maps, charts, and diagrams is much more constrained than propositions are. A map, for example, cannot represent the content encoded by the proposition that someone, somewhere is wearing a beret, or that all the Fs are Gs. In a similar vein, it is very cumbersome to express in maps disjunctive and ‘if-then’ content, at least when the content in question straddles spatially discontinuous regions which cannot be syntactically related without doing violence to the holistic mode of cartographic representation. Propositional content displays noparallel limitations on expressive generality. 2 Building on such insights from Camp, Block, and others, my argument mines the debate about the expressive power of representational formats for markers of non-propositionality that may be used to determine the proper format of intention. I point out that while propositional thought takes many different functional forms – including judgment, imagination, conjecture, inference, intuition, etc. – intention is tailored much more narrowly to the specific function of guiding actions. It is this functional subordinance of intention to the role of guiding action, I claim, that shapes and constrains its expressive power.Thus for instance, some disjunctive intentions, e.g. to visit Paris or Rome, may make perfect sense; but if we attempt to disjoin widely divergent courses of action within one and the same intention – as in ⌜S intends to have this salad for lunch or become an Anglican priest⌝ – the result is intuitively bizarre. But as I explain, the propositional conception makes it hard to see why such intentions should be bizarre. On my blueprint conception, in contrast, the oddity it entirely predictable. Much like the awkwardness of representing disjunctive routes across discontinuous regions, blueprints, which are made for the efficient representation of action plans, are unserviceable for representing plans whose parts fit badly together. Negation is another case in point. Generally speaking, having a negative intention always involves having a corresponding positive intention (Clarke 2014); an intention to not go to the party is more than just an absence of an intention to go. While this datum is not strictly incompatible with propositionalism about intention, it is not explained by it, either – unlike the blueprint conception. As I explain, predicating ‘not going to the party’ to S in the propositional formulation ⌜S intends that she not to go to the party⌝ does not predicate anything “positive” to S. But the – e.g., staying at home. A final example here (with more to follow in the talk, time permitting) comes from considering bare existential quantification. It is impossible, again as with cartographic representation more – e.g., staying at home. A final example here (with more to follow in the talk, time permitting) comes from considering bare existential quantification. It is impossible, again as with cartographic representation more – e.g., staying at home. A final example here (with more to follow in the talk, time permitting) comes from considering bare existential quantification. It is impossible, again as with cartographic representation more – e.g., staying at home. A final example here (with more to follow in the talk, time permitting) comes from considering bare existential quantification. It is impossible, again as with cartographic representation more generally, to have an intention to go somewhere at 5pm or to do something, sometime next week (though importantly, in contrast, such things can figure as the content of one’s wish, desire, or hope). However, there seems to be no reason why this should be impossible – at least, no reason that is reflected in the representational format of intention – if the content of intention is propositional. But a blueprint, which represents specific steps of the action in execution, cannot represent content as vague as this.