Intentional Attitudes Research Articles

The Evental Conception of Love

AbstractThis article proposes a critical presentation and development of Alain Badiou's theory of romantic love, at the center of which is an understanding of the phenomenon in terms of a truth‐generating event. I discuss this notion against the more familiar ontological modes of theorizing love: as the subject's intentional attitude and as an activity of internal value. Arguing that the evental conception of love poses a preferable alternative to the former mode, my analysis focuses on its complementary relations with the latter, of which I take Stanley Cavell's theory of marriage as a representative. My further argument is concerned with the place of sexuality in the evental conception of love, compensating for what I argue to be the shortcomings of Badiou's treatment of the topic by turning to Roger Scruton's account of the immanent significance of the sexual.

Facing Up to the Problem of Affect

When examined closely, our experience of affect presents a special challenge: it seems that there is no common quality that marks the pleasantness of conscious states and feelings. The implications of this finding have been debated by philosophers and psychologists for more than a century, and yet the peculiar phenomenology of affect is rarely discussed within consciousness studies. The purpose of this article is to call attention to the problem of affect and to examine the most likely reasons for its neglect. These include the assumption that affect is a special quality, the externalist view of affect as an intentional attitude and, perhaps most importantly, the assumption that pleasures and pains can be circumscribed as a special class of feelings. If none of these reasons hold up to scrutiny, facing up to the problem of affect may require that we revise our concept of consciousness.

Дискурс государственного антисемитизма в СССР (на материале документов 1946-1953 годов)

The aim of the study is to describe the features of the discourse of state anti-Semitism in the USSR during the period of late Stalinism. The paper characterises the commonality of institutional anti-Semitic texts as a means of protecting the Soviet ideological ideal from the harmful effects of Jews. The Soviet ideological ideal is an axiological category that opposes everything false, vicious and therefore hostile. The hostile nature of Soviet documents towards Jews is realised through the strategy of accusing Jews of professing the ideology of national struggle against the “Soviet”. The discourse of state anti-Semitism in the USSR is presented in the form of an accusation ritual consisting of requests addressed to the highest state authorities and indirect reactions to such requests aimed at endowing Jews with a state of guilt. Scientific novelty lies in the fact that the anti-Semitic discourse as a part of the USSR totalitarian discourse is highlighted as a separate object of study. As a result, the specifics of the expression of the Soviet ideological ideal have been determined, the discursive scheme and techniques for achieving a common intentional attitude of anti-Semitic documents have been described.

Michael L. Raposa Plays with Peirce, Love, and Signs: Review Essay on Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

Michael L. Raposa Plays with Peirce, Love, and Signs: Review Essay on <i>Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning</i>

La perception est-elle intentionnelle ?

In this article, Claude Romano challenges one of the more widespread assumptions in the phenomenological school, and especially in Husserl and his disciples, that of the intentional character of perception. Not denying that perception could have some aspects that are intentional (it is linked to attention, it encapsulates sometimes beliefs that are intentional attitudes), he claims that perception is not an intentional relation to the world. Indeed, intentionality is a basic feature of mind that remains connected to a form of representationalism. Now, as Heidegger has suggested with his concept of In-der-Welt-sein, and as Erwin Straus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty also emphasized, perception is rather an innerently bodily relation to world itself, that is, to the world as it exists independently of the mind and beyond all representations. Only such an approach can do justice to our ordinary and philosophical intuitions about the perceived world, and lead us to a genuine variety of phenomenological realism.

The Work Gratitude Scale: Development and Evaluation of a Multidimensional Measure.

This study explores gratitude as a multidimensional and work-specific construct. Utilizing a sample of 625 employees from a variety of positions in a medium-sized school district in the United States, we developed and evaluated a new measure, namely the Work Gratitude Scale (WGS), which encompasses recognized conative (intentional), cognitive, affective, and social aspects of gratitude. A systematic, six-phased approach through structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to explore and confirm the factorial structure, internal consistency, measurement invariance, concurrent, convergent, and discriminant validity of the WGS. The results supported a 10-item measure with three dimensions: “grateful appraisals” (three items), “gratitude toward others” (four items), and “intentional attitude of gratitude” (three items). Thereafter, first-order, second-order, and bifactor confirmatory models were estimated and compared. Work gratitude was found to be best described by a second-order construct with three underlying first-order dimensions. Measurement invariance was supported in relation to gender. Concurrent validity was supported in relation to two existing dispositional gratitude scales, namely the Gratitude Questionnaire and the Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Scale (GRAT). Convergent validity was supported in relation to the Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) and the Psychological Capital Questionnaire. Discriminant validity was supported in relation to various demographic factors such as age, gender, occupation, and tenure. The findings support the WGS as a multidimensional measure that can be used in practice to measure overall work-related gratitude and to track the effectiveness of gratitude-related workplace interventions.

IMPACT OF INTENTION TO USE REUSED WASTEWATER FOR COMMUNITY SATISFACTION IN VIETNAM

The paper aims to evaluate factors according to the planned behavioral theory of the community’s intentional attitude towards wastewater reuse. A huge amount of domestic wastewater will deplete water resources if not treated and reused. The survey results from more than 1000 households in the three major cities of Vietnam (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, and Da Nang) show that the community’s intention is good and all have a positive impact on the people’s satisfaction and water cycle management performance. All five factors: emotion, fairness, health risk, subjective norm, trust, have a positive impact on intention to use reused wastewater. Different from other studies, this research assesses the impact of intention to reuse wastewater on community satisfaction. Previous research showed that health risk negatively influenced intention; this study showed that health risk positively influenced intention and community satisfaction.

Objective / subjective information strategies in electronic German media

The article is devoted to the research of linguistic implementation of objective / subjective information strategies in the complex of electronic texts (article + comments) from modern German media. The material of the research was the primary texts of messages on topical issues from the newspaper ZEIT ONLINE and the magazine Focus Online as well as secondary texts of messages in the form of comments from the general reader. According to the analysis it is obvious that the strategic program in the studied discursive space is a complex multicomponent system due to both the intentional attitudes of the sender of the message and the special conditions of interaction in the Internet space. The topicality of the research is determined by consideration of verbal organization and implementation of the information strategies chosen for analysis and sorted on the objectivity subjectivity scale. The author emphasizes the use of means of different levels of the German language in the process of overlapping and intentional change of strategies. The emphasis is made on the fact that the strategic program of the message sender in the electronic environment can be guessed by the recipient, but there is no further continuation in the comments. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the fact that in electronic German media a commentator, choosing suitable strategies of his own can turn the polemics based on what he read in the article into a new direction. In the course of the language analysis, it is noticed that for an electronic article, strategies of objective information are the most typically ones (detail strategy, information and interpretation strategy, logical persuasion strategy and evasion of the truth strategy), and for an electronic comment, it is more common the choice of subjective information strategy (control over the topic strategy, feelings appeal strategies and evaluation strategies).

Emerging Sociolinguistic Teaching Trends of English as a First Language in Nigeria

This paper seeks to examine the emerging sociolinguistic trends in Nigeria with the view to ascertaining the use of English as a first language among its speakers particular in Calabar, Nigeria. The study adopts Vygotsky’s (1978) Social Interactionist Theory. The theory is relevant because it accounts for the intentional and changing linguistic attitudes of children believed to be influenced by their early exposure to English as the language spoken by adults and peers within their immediate environment. Data for the study were generated through primary sources, particularly by means of participant observation and administration of questionnaire. Using random sampling technique, 468 questionnaires were distributed to children within the school age bracket of 06 - 13 in 10 selected Private Primary and Junior Secondary Schools in Calabar. With the aid of 20 trained research assistants who are bi/multilinguals in some Nigerian indigenous languages and English, 400 questionnaires filled under supervision were retrieved from the respondents from where the data were extracted and collated for analysis. Findings indicate that 37 percent of the pupils/students are monolinguals who speak only English as their ‘first and native language’. Similarly, 32.5 percent of the target population understand their mother tongue(s) while 30.8 percent of affirm that they speak the indigenous language(s) fluently. Also, it is observed that a total of 63 percent are bi/multilinguals in their mother tongue(s) and English language and could switch or mix codes. The reasons for the increasing preference towards English language, the researchers have observed, range from the persuasive influence from parents, teachers and peers, and the consequences of globalization in addition to the multiple domains of use of English language. This trending communication practice would continue to increase the growing population of English speakers in Nigeria while the indigenous are further endangered.

On Content Uniformity for Beliefs and Desires

The view that dominates the literature on intentional attitudes holds that beliefs and desires both have propositional content. A commitment to what I call “content uniformity” underlies this view. According to content uniformity, beliefs and desires are but different psychological modes having a uniform kind of content. Prima facie, the modes don’t place any constraint on the kinds of content the attitude can have. I challenge this consensus by pointing out an asymmetry between belief contents and desire contents which shows content uniformity to be mistaken. I do this by revisiting the arguments of Richard (Philosophical Studies, 39(1): 1–13, 1981), and show that arguments which purport to show the temporal specificity of belief contents yield the opposite results for desire contents. I defend this preliminary conclusion from various strategies to neutralize the asymmetry claim. My defense provides occasions to respond to objections by Brogaard (2012) and Recanati (2007) to the Richard argument, and to get clearer on the role of temporal adjuncts in desire ascriptions. Finally, I consider whether the construal of attitude content as centered propositions (as in Lewis Philosophical Review, 88(4): 513–543, 1979) can be invoked to vindicate content uniformity. My conclusion is that while the framework itself doesn’t vindicate content uniformity, it could, but only if it availed itself of a further, substantive thesis about desire, which itself is in need of defense.

Social identity, group speech, and negotiated meaning

Certain approaches to the meaning of utterances primarily characterize speakers' communicative intentions as the only source of meaning of a speaker's utterance. I show that a strict version of this position is difficult to maintain because the meaning of an utterance is partially due to the intentional attitudes of the audience to an utterance, including their reaction to the social identity of a speaker. This can result in a negotiation over meaning that can take place if the speaker and audience do not agree on the significance of the utterance. The view is motivated if one takes an ameliorative approach to meaning which acknowledges that theories of meaning are constrained by normative concerns related to meaning and communication.

The Attitudinal Opacity of Emotional Experience

AbstractAccording to some philosophers, when introspectively attending to experience, we seem to see right through it to the (apparent) objects outside, including their properties. This is called the transparency of experience. This paper examines whether, and in what sense, emotions are transparent. It argues that emotional experiences are opaque in a distinctive way: introspective attention to them does not principally reveal non-intentional somatic qualia but rather felt valenced intentional attitudes. As such, emotional experience is attitudinally opaque.

Legislative Intent, Collective Intentionality and Fictionalism

It is commonly taken for granted that legislatures form intentions and act on them. When a legislature passes a law, it comes naturally to think that this is the law that the legislature intended to make. Furthermore, legal officials often claim that they interpret statutes according to the legislature’s intention, or on the basis of the ends that the legislature intended to pursue. Now the question is: can institutional entities such as legislatures have intentional attitudes? According to some writers, the answer is negative. Legislatures are not capable of forming genuine intentions. Legislative intentions can obviously be attributed to the members of a legislative body but individual intentions do not matter with regard to the statutory contents. This standpoint is puzzling, however. As a matter of political theory, it seems meaningless to give a legislative body law-making power unless the law that the members of this body make is the law they intended to make. Furthermore, any conception of judging rooted in the principle of legislative supremacy appears unintelligible without a conception of legislative intent. This is the reasons why a number of legal scholars defend the common view that legislatures do have intentions and act on them. To vindicate this view, however, one is to show that intentional attitudes can be attributed to legislative bodies and that such intentions can be known. An obvious way to address these issues is to rely on collective intentionality. The general idea is that legislative intent is something that individual legislators join together, that allows them to act in a coordinative and cooperative fashion and to achieve collective goals. Based on all this, I will defend four claims in this paper: (1) Individual legislators necessarily share a collective participatory intention when they legislate. A legislature is able to legislate only if individual legislators intend that the legislature enacts a statute. (2) However, participatory intentions do not determine statutory contents, nor individual legislators necessarily share any form of communicative intention when they participate in the legislative activity. (3) When legal officials resort to legislative intent in legal interpretation, they actually make reference to a fictional entity within a collective game of make-believe. (4) Yet, legislative intent qua fictional entity serves important functions in current legal systems. It is the cornerstone of a set of argumentative frameworks that provide guidance to judicial interpretation, contribute to align individual expectations with regard to statutory contents, put constraints on how litigants and courts pursue their goals, help identifying the interpretive practice legal officials are engaged in. In short, legislative intent is a coordination tool for practice of legal officials. Furthermore, fictionalism calls attention to the fact that when judges interpret statuses according to legislative intent, they actually employ various interpretative frameworks that are grounded on concurrent principles and values. Choosing one doctrine of legislative intent over the others ultimately depends on the normative claim that this choice will make legal interpretation better.

Linguaconflictological Research of Internet Appeal

The present research features the genre of internet appeal as a dialogic conflict process. The paper focuses on the internet appeal as an element of conflict communication and a form of open dialogue between the state and society. The linguaconflictological approach was determined by communication strategies and intentional attitudes of the sender and recipient of the internet appeal. The authors proved that the internet appeal is a special sub-genre of the complaint and explained how conflict manifests itself in this genre. The analysis of strategies and tactics revealed conceptual ideas of internet users who applied for help to officials institutions. The empirical basis of research was obtained from the internet page of the Governor of Kemerovo region. The analysis showed the effect of various factors on speech strategies and tactics and revealed communicative intentions. The internet appeal is characterized by a set of specific strategies and tactics of conflict communication, determined by the gap between the intentional attitudes of the sender and the recipient.

Attitudinal Pleasure in Plato’s Philebus

AbstractThis paper addresses two interpretive puzzles in Plato’s Philebus. The first concerns the claim, endorsed by both interlocutors, that the most godlike of lives is a pleasureless life of pure thinking. This appears to run afoul of the verdict of the earlier so-called ‘Choice of Lives’ argument that a mixed life is superior to either of its ‘pure’ rivals. A second concerns Socrates’ discussion of false pleasure, in which he appears to be guilty of rank equivocation. I argue that we can solve both puzzles by attributing to Plato an account of pleasure as a species of intentional attitude.

Emotional Intentionality and the Attitude‐content Distinction

AbstractTypical emotions share important features with paradigmatic intentional states and therefore might admit of distinctions made in theory of intentionality. One such distinction is between attitude and content, where we can specify the content of an intentional state separately from its attitude, and therefore, the same content can be taken up by different intentional attitudes. According to some philosophers, emotions do not admit of this distinction, although there has been no sustained argument for this claim. In this article, I argue that the way values figure in emotional experience qualifies the content of emotional experience such that the attitude‐content distinction cannot be applied.

On the non-conceptual content of affective-evaluative experience

Arguments for attributing non-conceptual content to experience have predominantly been motivated by aspects of the visual perception of empirical properties. In this article, I pursue a different strategy, arguing that a specific class of affective-evaluative experiences have non-conceptual content. The examples drawn on are affective-evaluative experiences of first exposure, in which the subject has a felt valenced intentional attitude towards evaluative properties of the object of their experience, but lacks any powers of conceptual discrimination regarding those evaluative properties. I also show that by accepting this thesis we can explain relevant features of evaluative understanding.

Puzzling Pierre and Intentional Identity

This paper concerns Kripke’s puzzle about belief. I have two goals in this paper. The first is to argue that two leading approaches to Kripke’s puzzle, those of Lewis and Chalmers, are inadequate as they stand. Both approaches require the world to supply an object that the relevant intentional attitudes pick out. The problem is that there are cases which, I argue, exhibit the very same puzzling phenomenon in which the world does not supply an object in the required way. The second goal is to draw out a more general lesson about Kripke’s puzzle. I argue that Kripke’s puzzle should be understood as intimately related to a phenomenon known as ‘intentional identity’, and that an adequate account of Kripke’s puzzle should be extensible to cases in which the relevant attitudes are empty (not, prima facie, about anything that exists).

Vedanā, Ethics and Character: A Prolegomena

I this paper I am concerned with how our ethical worlds are built on circular reactive patterns fuelled by vedanā. These are ‘circular,’ it will be claimed, in the sense of being what could be referred to as both ‘feedback loops’ and ‘self reinforcing,’ - with all the ambiguity implied by the latter phrase. These are behavioral patterns that are observable in physical action, speech and intentional attitudes. It is how these give rise to and form intentional and dispositional attitudes, what we refer to as ‘character’ and how that character is formed through unexamined reactivity, that is of interest to us in relation to vedanā as the fundamental motivating dynamic behind this process. Nevertheless, the idea that the freedom that the Buddha directs us to is a freedom from enthrallment to reactive patterns based on vedanā and the development of a ‘skills’ base that allows for the development of character in a more positive and potentially more ethical direction. It is to the significance of ethics as the foremost and central task that the Buddha’s analysis and understanding of vedanā, it will be claimed, is directed.

Agency, Desire, and Changing Organizational Routines

Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000) describes the striving mechanism as a mode of routine change driven by successful organizational routines. Striving describes a process by which organization members gain a better understanding of the ideals undergirding their actions. In turn, this insight drives changes within routines. In this paper, I argue that the rational actor model, especially as articulated in Donald Davidson’s (1963) theory of action, is unable to account for the striving mechanism of endogenous routine change identified by Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000). Drawing upon Brewer’s (2011) criticisms of propositional theories of desire, the account of meta-language intentional attitudes developed by List and Pettit (2011), and MacIntyre’s (2007) theory of social practices, I introduce an expanded framework for conceptualizing agency at the individual level, and aggregation at the organization level, that better accounts for the striving mechanism as a process of endogenous routine change.