There are good reasons for wanting to adopt an intentionalist account of experiences generally, an account according to which having an experience is a matter of representing the world as being some way or other according to which, that is, such mental episodes have intrinsic, conceptual, representational content. Such an approach promises, for example, to provide a satisfying conception of experiences' subjectivity, their phenomenal character, and their crucial role in constituting reasons for our judgements about the world. It promises this, moreover, without incurring the difficulties that face the adverbialist and the friends of such items as qualia and "private objects". Still, even many of those who have been persuaded of that much are inclined to make an exception of the bodily sensations, since pains and the rest have traditionally been taken to be peculiarly "blank" instances of brute, non-conceptual feeling. In this study, I reject that tradition and argue that sensation experiences are indeed representational, and hence not in that respect exceptional. The idea that they are nevertheless distinctive in other ways vis-à-vis ordinary perceptual experiences has led intentionalists such as John McDowell to adopt an account of their content that is both mentalist and radically subjectivist: an account, in other words, that takes the items represented by such experiences to be mental and constitutively dependent on their being represented. To my mind, such subjectivism is both viciously circular like the parallel view of colours and at odds with the admirably intentionalist aspirations of these views. Hence I turn to consider objectivist versions of intentionalism, views that assimilate sensations to somatosensory perceptual experiences such as those that inform us of, for example, the position of our own limbs. Admittedly, these views not only risk losing the "interiority" of sensations, but I argue that they also cannot be combined with mentalism and that this generates considerable difficulties difficulties that have either been ignored or underestimated by those working with less demanding conceptions of content. Nonetheless, I make a number of preliminary moves to show how such difficulties might be dealt with, and how the objectivist can register even the distinctively "inner" character of sensations by, amongst other things, focussing on the peculiarities of somatosensory content. So the prospects for intentionalism about sensations are, I argue, good.

published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This thesis deals primarily with metaphysical issues concerning human sensory/ perceptual experiences, and with questions about the formal representation of these experiences. In this respect it is similar to N. Goodman's The Structure of Appearance, which is discussed at some length. I establish a way of des- cribing and formally representing certain structures which must occur in sensory/ perceptual experiences, regardless of how the features of these experiences are categorized in terms of being physical or being mental. A special ("ontological- ly neutral") conceptual scheme which reflects the neutrality with respect to these categorizations, and which is particularistic in the sense of admitting sensory/per- ceptual individuals (sensations), is introduced for this purpose. The choice of a particularistic conceptual scheme in this context is supported by an argument which shows that the so-called adverbial approach is insufficient for describing sensory/perceptual experiences. To achieve the desired formal representation, I introduce an original generalization of the standard formalism for semantic 1st -order predicate theories which involves incomplete models, and a type of structured primitive predicates. Based on a Kantian view of the function of concepts in experience, I then give an account of experiential colour-predicates (like x looks red) in ontologi- cally neutral terms. This account, involving a special class of sensory/perceptual individuals (colour-tokens), has the particular advantage of avoiding the short- comings of both sense-datum theories and the views held by C. Peacocke in Sense and Content. This is followed by an account of experiential intentionality (in ontologically neutral terms) which shows how intentionality, as occurring in the context of sensory/perceptual experiences, can have a relational nature, des- pite the well-known problems of substitutivity and intentional inexistence which are traditionally associated with intentional relations.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf [115]-117).

This essay deals with certain problems in the theory of singular reference. The following question is taken as central: What role is to be assigned to nonempty and syntactically simple singular terms in fixing the semantic contents of utterances of declarative sentences in which they may occur? I focus on those aspects of the current dispute between Millian and neo-Fregean approaches to singular reference which are related to issues about the cognitive significance of language use; the following two issues are singled out as crucial: the issue about (alleged) potential differences in informativeness between sentences constructed out of co-referential singular terms; and the issue about (alleged) failures of substitutivity salva veritate of co-referential singular terms in propositional-attitude contexts. The general direction of my arguments is as follows. On the one hand, I argue that "notational variance" claims recently advanced on both sides of the dispute should be deemed unsound; and hence that one is really confronted with separate accounts of singular content. On the other, I argue that Milllanism does not provide us with a satisfactory solution to the problems about cognitive significance; and hence that a framework of singular senses is Indispensable to deal with such problems in an adequate way. I also discuss the problem of Cognitive Dynamics, i.e. the issue of attitude-retention and persistence of mental content, in connection with the individuation of indexical thought. I argue that the standard Intuitive Criterion of Difference for thoughts might be reasonably extended to the diachronic case, allowing thus the possibility of discriminating between thoughts entertained by a thinker at different times.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Sydney, 2005. / Title from title screen (viewed 28 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy to the Dept. of Indian Sub-Continental Studies, Faculty of Arts. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [62]-66).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 322-330). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [62]-66).