Abstract
The connections between intensionality and emotive content as expressed in natural language will be traced to determine how patterns in the relation between intensionality and emotive expressions reveal something about the way emotion as an independent component of the human mind interacts with the cognitive domain of language. Intensionality cannot be characterized without the notion of intentionality in that intensionality has something to do with non-specificity or opacity, and this opacity has partly to do with the underdetermination or underspecification of aboutness or directedness toward objects or entities, which characterizes the essence of intentionality. Such non-specificity or opacity has parallels in both language and structures of emotive content in the sense that intensional elements in quantificational contexts show a systematic semantic variability in the way non-specificity or opacity is expressed, and contents of (emotional) affect reveal similar patterns. Another reason why two distinct but otherwise related phenomena—intensionality and intentionality—are co-defined in association with each other is that intentionality appears to be a much more primitive form of biological feature (and maybe it was also present in earlier life-forms) from which language—especially linguistic meaning—has evolved (Searle 1983). And intensionality constitutes a significant and, at the same time, baffling aspect of linguistic meaning.
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Notes
- 1.
The word ‘domain’ has been used here with a minimum of presuppositions with respect to any commitment to claims about modularity or non-modularity. Suffice it to say, the current use of the word ‘domain’ is neutral on issues of modularity; it has been used throughout the book in its trivial sense, which warrants an ontologically different organization of mental structures formed around emotive content, which requires at least a kind of interconnectedness of configurations structured around emotive contents in the mind, however loose it may be. Further clarifications on this issue will appear in Chapter 4.
- 2.
Here one may wonder if emotion should be incorporated into the grand systematization of mental faculties that constitute the ‘core’ of cognition. Emotion differs from the rest of cognition to the extent that emotions have characteristics not fully reducible to the features of the rest of cognition, though admittedly the demarcation is not that tight. Insofar as the linguistic diagnostics to be employed in this work serve well by being good enough, we may consider it appropriate to contend that emotion is not co-extensive with cognition. Even if there are various meanings different authors attach to these terms, nobody would deny that emotion is not co-extensive with cognition. But the crucial question is: if emotion is not co-extensive with cognition, how and in what ways are they divergent and, for that matter, even plausibly convergent? This cannot be adequately answered either by analyzing emotions or by probing into cognitions, for neither emotion nor cognition has a univocal import in its substantive nature. If the emotive and the cognitive were merged into a single ontological category, many psychological generalizations about emotive phenomena would be missed, or many psychological generalizations about cognitive phenomena would be rendered coarse-grained. And, on the other hand, if they are treated separately, it stands to reason that they must be different in certain ways that are specified in such a manner as to allow for reasoned generalizations about the properties of cognition and emotion in independent terms. The burden of proof is heavier if the former possibility is chosen, while it is a bit lighter if the latter possibility is picked up, but any similarities encountered between the emotive and the cognitive may turn out to be harder to reconcile with the postulated divergence between the emotive and the cognitive. As we proceed to the subsequent chapters of this book, it will be clearer that the present study picks up both possibilities in a way that reveals the two sides of the relation between the emotive and the cognitive in a nuanced fashion. The evidence comes from linguistic expressions which constitute a completely different ontological domain for the instantiation of the two sides of the relation between the emotive and the cognitive, with the advantage that we do not directly penetrate into the emotive or the cognitive and yet get valuable insights into the differences between emotion and cognition in substantive terms.
- 3.
A caveat needs to be mentioned here. No distinction between feelings and emotion has been maintained in the selection of emotive predicates since the affect (or rather neutral affect lacking a valence) incorporated in some of the predicates, such as ‘desire’ and ‘need’, may involve feelings (for details, see Davis 1986). And this will help relate the broadest possible range of classes of emotive predicates to intensionality with significant ramifications to follow in later sections and chapters.
- 4.
As pointed out by Ezra Keshet (p.c.), the sentences in (1–4) can have a third reading besides the traditional de re and de dicto readings. This third reading is, according to him, in between the two others. Thus sentence (1), for example, can have a reading in which Peter has one real-life coat in mind but does not know it is inexpensive.
- 5.
A more precise formulation of the notion of cognitive structures of emotive expressions is furnished in Chapter 3, where a precise characterization of intensional types is also provided.
- 6.
Following Moltmann (2008), a set of intensional predicates has been specified, and in the chapters that follow the same notion will be used for the identification of intensional predicates.
- 7.
In this context, one important warning issued by Forbes (2004) has to be kept in mind. Non specific/de dicto/notional reading is different from generic reading in cases such as ‘He loves a/his drink as much as the next man’, ‘He loves a beer and a joke with the blokes at the iconic Trundle Pub’, ‘He loves a beer after a long day at work’, where the object quantificational noun phrases marked in bold have a generic reading which is true of dispositions. That is why it appears difficult to get a non-generic but notional reading either from ‘He loves a/his drink as much as the next man, but no particular one’ or from ‘He loves a beer after a long day at work, but no particular one’. This is not, however, true of the examples in (1–4). If, for example, Peter wants to put on an inexpensive coat but no particular one, it is perfectly sensible to get a non-generic but notional reading, and there is no generic reading available.
- 8.
The verbs ‘intend’ and ‘aspire’ are listed on the grounds that the meaning of these verbs, like those in (1–4), incorporates a neutral affect, although they appear to be otherwise marginal instances of predicates of affect. Moreover, their behavior is also linguistically different from other groups of predicates of affect, as (18) shows. This will have significant ramifications for their semantic representations sketched out in Chapter 3.
- 9.
Note that (18’) may allow for a marginal de dicto/non-specific reading, as reported by a native English speaker. This is expected given the points made in footnote 5. However, this does not affect the general character of the predicates in this category.
- 10.
What I mean to say here is that such predicates do not satisfy the three criteria of intensionality under general linguistic conditions. However, they can behave differently in fictive contexts. Thus we can say, ‘I understand Mr Hyde’, which is valid when located within the context of fiction. This appears to indicate that such a case can support the fulfillment of the criterion of lack of existential import, given that any combination of the three criteria of intensionality is sufficient, and hence make such predicates somewhat intensional. But this argument misses the mark, for any extensional predicate can so be said to fulfill the criterion of lack of existential import in fictive worlds. For instance, sentences such as ‘I met Mr Hyde’ and ‘Ray has kicked Superman’ are perfectly valid in such worlds (see Seuren [2009] for a discussion on intensionality in fictive worlds). Besides, the criterion of substitution failure does not also fare well with such predicates; for example, if one says, ‘I forgot my grandfather as I grew up’, does not the person also mean to say that he/she forgot his/her grandmother’s husband, irrespective of whether he/she recognizes this fact or not? He/she may not recognize this, especially when he/she could not have seen the grandmother during childhood, but this does not undercut his/her having forgotten his/her grandmother’s husband precisely because he/she may have formed certain beliefs about his/her (dead) grandmother in virtue of standing in a relation to his/her (dead) grandmother. Most importantly, the meanings of these verbs of cognition do not guarantee a high degree of sensitivity to the mental content of the experiencers. Thus, if I understand Shakespeare, I understand the Bard of Avon, regardless of whether or not I recognize that the terms ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘the Bard of Avon’ are co-referential. The same thing holds true for the verb ‘sense’, the meaning of which specifies a perceptual action that does not warrant much of conceptual content.
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Mondal, P. (2016). Introduction: Intensionality and Emotive Expressions. In: Language and Cognitive Structures of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33690-9_1
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