Practical Cognition, Motor Intentionality, and the Idea of the Good

Abstract

This essay uses an examination of Sellars's account of practical rationality – and, in particular, of the relationship between deontic judgment and shared intentionality – as a basis for framing a view of linguistic meaning (and by analogy human cognition) that includes distinct semantic mechanisms accounting for the representational intentionality of description, the motor intentionality of agency, and the intralinguistic intentionality of reflexive cognition. The semantic resources of model theory are used to account for the two world-regarding varieties of meaning, and those of proof theory are used to account for reflexive intralinguistic meaning. Model theory and proof theory thereby afford a framework for reconstructing the pre-Carnapian notions of denotation and connotation as two compatible dimensions of linguistic meaning, permuted through an understanding of cognition as involving representational, agentive, and reflexive moments – analogous to the three moments of the reflex arc of neural activity, and the transcendental ideas of the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. In the process of articulating the view, and based on recent work by Stefanie Dach, Stovall gives a proof-theoretic characterization of Wilfrid Sellars's theory of moral judgments. The result is a view on which our rational responsiveness to the idea of the Good can be accounted for without supposing that we represent the Good in the way we represent the environment and our places in it.