Abstract
The notion of intentional object, or object of consciousness, remains notoriously ambiguous despite extensive contemporary studies devoted to the topic of intentionality. On the one hand, the intentional object can be conceived of as a real object to which an act of consciousness is directed. When I see a black cat it is just this cat that is the intentional object of my act of seeing. On the other hand, however, intentional objects can be mere objects of thought, dream, imagination, desire, etc. When I am thinking about (dreaming, imagining,...) the monster of Loch Ness, a golden mountain, Sherlock Holmes, the seven dwarfs, these objects of my thought do not exist in the usual sense of the word.
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Notes
Such a theoretical approach to intentional objects may be classified as epistemological ontology, see Rapaport [1985].
Cf. Parsons [1980], Routley [1980], Castaiieda [1974], [1977], Rapaport [1978], Zalta [1983], [1988], Jacquette [1996c], Pasniczek [ 1988 ].
Russell held that “whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one,I call a term”. Cf. Russell [1903]; see also Parsons [1989].
It is a truism that set-theory is a very powerful formal tool. Recently there has appeared the so-called theory of non-well-founded sets (hypersets) which may be considered as a stronger version of classical set theory. See for instance: Aczel [1988], Barwise, Etchemendy [1987], Barwise, Moss [1991],[1996].
In the case of ‘strong extensionality’, possible worlds, apart from individuals, are ontologically primitive entities.
The theory of generalised quantifier which attracts today so much attention of logicians, linguists, and philosophers can be considered as an extensional theory. See Barwise, Cooper [1971], Westerstâhl [1989], Chierchia, McConnell-Ginet [ 1990 ].
This book is partly based on Pasniczek [1988] and is its continuation. Only very small parts of original Polish monograph entered this book.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Paśniczek, J. (1998). Introduction. In: The Logic of Intentional Objects. Synthese Library, vol 269. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8996-3_1
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