Wolfgang Barz

Many contemporary philosophers find intentionality challenging because of its apparent resistance to integration into a naturalistic worldview. Consequently, they strive to make intentionality intelligible as part of the natural world. The central thesis of this book is that such an approach does not do justice to the philosophical significance of the problem. The problem of intentionality lies at a different level, namely the challenge to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. Addressing this challenge goes beyond the scope of naturalizing intentionality; instead, it requires logical and semantic considerations to refute it. A promising avenue from this perspective is Frege’s claim that intentional states are relations to propositions. The author elucidates the subtleties of this approach in contrast to alternative positions, defends it against classical counterarguments, and demonstrates its compatibility with directly referentialist views. The objection that speaking of relations to propositions remains unsatisfactory in the absence of any naturalistic comment is refuted after a detailed discussion of Dretske's information-theoretic approach.

This essay develops the thesis that Frege’s notion of grasping does not refer to some special psychological relation between a subject and a proposition. Instead, the verb “to grasp” is a contextually defined technical term that, taken by itself, has no meaning. If that is right, then not only Frege’s resentment to the idea of grasping singular propositions is unfounded. The view that intentionality without representations is possible, championed by some advocates of the New Theory of Reference, is groundless as well.

In recent literature, there is a strong tendency to endorse the following argument: There are particular judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences that are infallible; if there are particular judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences that are infallible, then the infallibility of those judgments is due to the relation of acquaintance; therefore, acquaintance explains why those particular judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences are infallible. The aim of this paper is to examine critically both the first and the second premise of this argument. It will emerge that there might be a small class of judgments about one's current phenomenal experiences that are infallible, namely judgments involving direct phenomenal concepts. However, as I will try to show, the infallibility of such judgments, if existent at all, is not due to the relation of acquaintance.