Alberto Voltolini

In this paper, we want to tackle the Molyneux question thoroughly, by addressing it in terms of both ordinary perception and pictorial perception: if a congenitally blind person recovered sight, could she recognize visually the 3D shapes she already recognized tactilely, both when such shapes are given to her directly and when they are given to her pictorially, i.e., as depicted shapes? We want to claim that empirical evidence suggests that the question can be positively answered in both cases. For in the first case, such evidence shows that perception of 3D shapes is supramodal; namely, it can be equivalently achieved in different sense modalities, notably touch and vision, independently of the sensory input such shapes are accessed. While in the second case, such evidence shows that one can satisfy both in vision and in touch the condition for depicted shapes, which are typically not where the perceiver is, to be grasped by that perceiver in a picture’s subject, i.e., what the picture presents. This condition states that the picture’s vehicle, i.e., the typically 2D physical basis of a picture, is enriched by adding to its properties the 3D grouping properties that allow for a figure/ground segmentation to be performed in that vehicle’s elements.

Any good metaphysics of fictional entities should be able to accommodate the following data: 1) fictional entities don’t exist; 2) fictional entities are causally inefficacious; 3) fictional entities are often incomplete; 4) fictional entities are created; 5) fictional entities actually possess narrated properties; 6) predication of such properties to fictional entities is unrevisable; 7) fictional entities possess such properties necessarily. Possibilist metaphysics uncontroversially accommodate 1) and 2); Meinongian metaphysics accommodate 1), 2), 3), 5), 6), and 7); artefactualist metaphysics uncontroversially accommodate 1), 2), and 4). This chapter suggests an alternative metaphysics that straightforwardly accommodates all of the above data. It claims that a syncretist metaphysics that combines Meinongianism with artefactualism achieves this purpose. According to syncretism, _ficta_ are hybrid entities individuated in terms of both a certain make-believe narrative process and the properties that one such narration mobilizes. In the final section, criticisms to this approach are faced and discussed.

As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of cashing out the claim that intentionality is ultimately phenomenal: (i) an indirect one, according to which the intentional content of an experiential intentional mental state is determined by the phenomenal character that state already possesses, so that intentionality is so determined only indirectly; (ii) a direct one, which centers on the very property of intentionality itself and can further be construed in two manners: either that very property is determined by the above phenomenal character, or it is a sui generis phenomenal property, thereby giving its own contribution to the overall phenomenal character of that state. Yet neither way sounds ultimately satisfying. For the indirect way may work only under the assumption that intentionality is monadic. Since the direct way explicitly endorses this assumption, the indirect way must give pride of place to it. Yet the direct way seems to be unsuccessful, in any of its forms. Thus, the phenomenal intentionality research program ought to give way to another research program concerning intentionality.

Jerry Fodor now holds (1990) that the content of mental state types opaquely taxonomized (de dicto content: DDC) is determined by the ’orthographical’ syntax + the computational/functional role of such states. Mental states whose tokens are both orthographically and truth-conditionally identical may be different with regard to the computational/functional role played by their respective representational cores. This make them tantamount to different contentful states, i.e. states with different DDCs, insofar as they are opaquely taxonomized. Indeed they cannot both be truthfully ascribed to a single subject at the same time. Some years ago (1987), Fodor postulated a notion of mental content which also went beyond that of a mental state’s truth-conditions. States whose tokens differ in their truth-conditions, or broad content, might, he claimed, still share a narrow content (NC), which was causally responsible for the shared behavior of the subjects of these states. For instance, two molecularly identical individuals, living in environments in all respects the same, except for the chemical substance of the phenomenically indistinguishable liquids filling their respective lakes and rivers, would behave similarly when having truth-conditionally different thoughts regarding those liquids. According to Fodor, this sameness of behavior was causally dependent on the sameness of the NC of the two individuals’ truth-conditionally different thoughts. Now, this way of individuating mental states is still of interest for semantics. Indeed, NC allows one contextually to fix the broad content of a mental state token. Echoing Kaplan’s notion of character,1 Fodor explained NC as a function that mapped contexts (of thought) onto broad contents. NC was thus invoked by Fodor mainly in order to account for sameness of intentional behavior. But DDC also plays a role in explaining intentional behavior, precisely by explaining why a subject whose thought-tokens have identical truthconditions may behave differently.

In this paper, we want to maintain that the puzzle of imaginative resistance is basically a pragmatic issue due to the failure of participative imagination, as involving a pre-semantic level relating to a wide context (the overall situation of discourse). Since the linguistic meanings of the relevant fiction-involving sentences violate some of our basic norms, what such sentences (fictionally) say cannot be participatively imagined. That failure leads one to refrain from ascribing such sentences the fictional truth-conditions they would have in narrow fictional contexts (sets of fixed parameters) as determined by those meanings in those contexts. Yet one could still make that ascription, for one can cognitively imagine what such sentences would say in those contexts. As is proved by the fact that if one either adopts an alternative view on such norms or, for some reason, brackets them, one can again perform that ascription.

This book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting. The author's main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for an intentional mental state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational, but also that is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content. Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science.

In this paper, against a new imagination-based account defended by Anna Ichino in some recent works, I defend the intuitive and traditional idea that so-called religious beliefs are indeed those doxastic attitudes that they are traditionally taken to be, i.e., bona fide beliefs. Yet I take that the objects of such beliefs amount to be different from what religious believers consciously take them to be; namely, they are mythological characters, a species of fictional characters – namely, fictional characters not consciously recognized as such – instead of being concrete individuals possibly endowed with supernatural powers. Yet religious believers also unconsciously recognize the fictional nature of religious objects of belief as mythological characters, as their behavior ultimately shows. This account indeed allows me to give a different yet still doxastic explanation of the two main reasons that Ichino advocates in favor of her account; namely, the incompatibility of so-called religious beliefs with other beliefs and their imperviousness to evidence, especially of a negative kind.

Our lives are commonly involved with fictionality, an activity that adults share with children. After providing a brief reconstruction of the most important cognitive theories on pretence, we will argue that pretence has to do with metarepresentations, albeit in a rather weakened sense. In our view, pretending entails being aware that a certain representation does not fit in the very same representational model as another representation. This is a minimal metarepresentationalism, for normally metarepresentationalism on pretense claims that pretending is or entails representing a representation qua representation, i.e. as conceptualised as a representation, in its very content. In the final section we will try to draw some consequences of our view as to the debate in cognitive science on mindreading. Given this minimal metarepresentationalism, the two main positions on mindreading, the ‘theory theory’ and the ‘simulation theory’, turn out to be closer than one would have originally supposed

In this paper we claim, first, that there are high-level visual experiences of grouping properties, i.e., properties that an array of elements we see can have to be organised in a certain way. Second, we argue that there are auditory experiences of groupings that share certain important properties with visual experiences of groupings, thereby being perceptual and high-level as well. Third, these results enable us to understand the nature and structure of our meaning experiences. We claim that, although meaning experiences depend on the auditory experiences we discuss, they are not perceptual, for they lack one of the features that make those auditory experiences perceptual; namely, being holistically attended to.

In this paper, I want to claim that, in conformity with overall intuitions, there are some aesthetic properties that are perceivable. For they are high-level properties that are not only grasped immediately, but also attended to holistically—just like the grouping properties they depend on and that are responsible for the Gestalt effects or switches through which they are grasped. Yet, unlike such grouping properties, they are holistically attended to in a disinterested modality, where objects and their properties are regarded for their own sake.

In his Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta, Recanati maintains two main theses regarding meta-representational sentences embedding allegedly empty proper names. The first thesis concerns both belief sentences embedding allegedly empty names and (internal) meta-fictional sentences (i.e., sentences of the form “in the story S, p”) embedding fictional, hence again allegedly empty, names. It says that such sentences primarily have fictive truth-conditions: that is, conditions for their fictional truth. The second thesis is that a fictive ascription of a singular belief, assigning to a certain metarepresentational sentence fictive truth-conditions, amounts to the factive ascription of a pseudo-singular belief, assigning to that very sentence factual truth-conditions as well. In what follows, I will first try to show that the first thesis is definitely correct only for a rather limited range of cases, i.e. cases of meta-representational sentences embedding absolutely empty proper names. Second, I will claim not only that that the notion of a pseudo-singular belief is not so clear as it may seem, but also that, for those cases for which the first thesis is correct, we do not really need the sentences involved to also have factive truth-conditions.

In this paper, we present some experimental findings whose best explanation, first of all, provides a positive answer to a philosophical question in ontology as to whether, in the overall domain of beings, there are fictional characters (_ficta_) over and above concrete individuals. Moreover, since such findings arise out of different comparisons between fictional characters and concrete individuals on the one hand and fictional characters again and non-items that do not belong at all to such an overall domain on the other hand, they also suggest that _ficta_ are allowed as inhabiting a particular subrealm of that domain distinct from the one inhabited by concrete individuals, as previous findings in cognitive psychology had suggested.

There are some complex experiences, such as the experiences that allow us to understand linguistic expressions and pictures respectively, which seem to be very similar. For they are stratified experiences in which, on top of grasping certain low-level properties, one also grasps some high-level semantic-like properties. Yet first of all, those similarities notwithstanding, a phenomenologically-based reflection shows that such experiences are different. For a meaning experience has a high-level fold, in which one grasps the relevant expression’s meaning, which is not perceptual, but is only based on a low-level perceptual fold that merely grasps that expression in its acoustically relevant properties. While a pictorial experience, a seeing-in experience, has two folds, the configurational and the recognitional fold, in which one respectively grasps the physical basis of a picture, its vehicle, and what the picture presents, its subject, that are both perceptual, insofar as they are intimately connected. For unlike a meaning experience, in a seeing-in experience one can perceptually read off the picture’s subject from the picture’s vehicle. Moreover, this phenomenological difference is neurologically implemented. For not only the cerebral areas that respectively implement such experiences are different, at least as far as the access to those experiences’ respective high-level content is concerned. As is shown by the fact that one can selectively be impaired in the area respectively implementing the meaning vs. the seeing-in experience without losing one’s pictorial vs. semantic competence respectively. But also, unlike meaning experiences, the area implementing the seeing-in experiential folds is perceptual as a whole. For not only a picture’s subject can be accessed earlier than an expression’s meaning, but also the neural underpinnings of such folds are located in the perceptual areas of the brain.

In this article I shall first and foremost attempt to show that the semantic requirements of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus intend the objects of the Tractatus to be conceived of as possibilia in the Russellian sense of 1903, i.e., as objects that may exist or may not exist; secondly, that the general ontology of the Tractatus suggests integrating this onto-semantic conception with a conception of these objects not properly as qualia but as sensibilia in the Russellian sense of 1914, i.e., as sense-data that may exist or may not exist.

In this essay, I defend a Wollheimian account of a twofold picture perception. While I agree with Wollheim’s objectors that a picture involves three layers that qualify a picture in its complexity – its vehicle, what is seen in it, and its subject –, I argue that the third layer does not involve perception, even indirectly: what is seen in a picture constrains its subject to be a subject of a certain kind, yet it does not force the latter to be pictorially perceived, not even indirectly. So, even if a picture is three-layered, pictorial experience remains a twofold experience, as Wollheim claimed. Neither the proponents of threefoldness nor Wollheim himself, however, have convincingly explained how the experience really is a perceptual experience. My Wollheimian account thus aims to reconceive the pictorial experience in properly perceptual terms.

In the old days of descriptivism, fictional reference and non-fictional reference with proper names were treated on a par. Descriptivism was not an intuitive theory, but it meritoriously provided a unitary semantic account of names, whether referentially full or empty. Then the revolution of the new theory of reference occurred. This new theory is definitely more intuitive than descriptivism, yet it comes with a drawback: the referentially full use and the referentially empty use, notably the fictional use, of names are semantically no longer on the same footing. How the use of names from fiction is referentially empty has even been seen as a symptom of its not being a use at all. In this paper, I ask the following question: can one keep the merits of the new theory of reference and still provide a unitary account of both fictional and non-fictional reference with names? My answer is positive, provided that one conceives proper names as a special kind of indexicals.

Tim Crane has put forward a theory of intentional objects (intentionalia), which has taken up again and expanded by Casey Woodling. Crane’s theory is articulated in three main theses: a) every intentional state, or thought, is about an intentional object; b) taken as such, whether or not it exists, an intentional object is a schematic object; c) taken as such, whether or not it exists, an intentional object is a phenomenological object. In this paper, I will try to show that theses b) and c) can hardly be defended together, unless, in order to redirect and strengthen Crane’s theory two further claims are simultaneously defended. First, certain intentionalia may be the same as other such objects without being identical with them, and second, from a metaphysical point of view outside phenomenology, the particular intentionalia involved by this sui generis sameness relation of appearing as an aspectual alter-ego of weaker than identity are concrete objects.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seems to appeal to the idea that thoughts manage to explain how sentences, primarily elementary sentences, can be such that their subsentential elements refer to objects. In this respect, he seems indeed to appeal to the claim that thoughts, qua endowed with not only original, but also intrinsic, intentionality, lend this intentionality to names, by transforming them into ‘names-of’, i.e., symbols endowed with intrinsic intentionality as well. Such a claim, however, entails that there must be necessary superfacts. Since according to the Tractatus’ ontology there cannot be necessary facts in the world, but at most only in its logical scaffolding, the most likely chance is that such facts are facts for the limit of the world, i.e., the transcendental subject. Curiously enough, in his later critique, in the Investigations, of mentalist semantics, Wittgenstein fails to appeal to this claim, which can block the infinite regress that he there changes the mentalist position with. Since in the Investigations necessary facts seem to be allowed, this failure is even more striking.

As many people have underlined, as regards pictures there are at least two different layers of content. In Voltolini, these layers are: i) the figurative content of a picture, i.e., what one can see in it viz. what the picture presents; ii) the pictorial content of a picture, i.e., what the picture represents, as constrained by its figurative content. As regards ii), there undoubtedly ispictorial misrepresentation. Having the possibility of misrepresenting things is a standard condition in order for a picture to be a representation. Yet as regards i), things are more problematic. First, if one intends that a picture is seen in a way that is impossible for the picture to be seen, there definitely is intentional failure, but there is no figurative mispresentation. Second, alleged cases in which one literally sees in a picture something that does not match what the picture presents are not cases of figurative presentational failure either.