A Critical Analysis of Brentano’s Intentionality in Relation to Meinong’s Object Theory

Our thoughts are certainly about things(objects), however, what kind of things(object) are our thoughts directed at? What is the relationship between mental objects and external world object? What is the nature and character of mental and extra mental objects? An attempt at answering these meta-epistemological questions, brought to light the ideas of Franz Brentano on ‘Intentionality’ and Alexius Meinong’s Theory of object. Through proper method of philosophical analysis, it was discovered that both philosophers agreed that intentionality is a unique character exhibited by the human mind. However, Meinong went further to develop a more comprehensive object theory which attempts at clarifying some of the ontological difficulties associated with Brentano’s notion on intentionality. The research concluded that, though, both philosophers had areas of divergence and convergence in their respective epistemological thoughts, but insisted that the influence of Brentano’s ideas on Meinong cannot be overemphasized, which is to say, Meinong’s object theory, could be said to be a reaction towards the problem of referential opacity present in Brentano’s account of Intentionality.

ON TYPE-THEORETICAL FORMALIZATION OF SITUATION SEMANTICS

Situation semantics is an effective instrument for analysing semantical aspects of natural languages with explicit dependence on contexts, like referential opacity of belief contexts etc. Making use of type-theoretical approaches not only makes its formalism more practical in many ways, but also facilitates its migration to computer systems, specifically, the formalization in functional programming languages. The article deals with a prototype of the type theoretical language of situation semantics, implemented on the basis of the language Racket. It decribes principal approaches, methods of solving some problems of formal semantics as well as issues that need to be addressed.

The Vagueness of Religious Beliefs

My paper characterizes religious beliefs in terms of vagueness. I introduce my topic by providing a general overview of my main claims. In the subsequent section, I develop basic distinctions and terminology for handling the notion of religious tradition and capturing (religious) vagueness. In the following sections, I make the case for my claim that religious beliefs are vague by developing a general argument from the interconnection between the referential opacity of religious belief content and the long-term communitarian history of the precisification of what such content means. I start from describing an empirical example in the third section, and then I move to settle the matter in a conceptually argumentative frame in the fourth one. My conclusions in the final section address a few of consequences relevant to debates about religious epistemology and religious diversity.

The Situational Structure of Primate Beliefs

This paper develops the situational model of primate beliefs from the Prior-Lurz line of thought. There is a strong skepticism concerning primate beliefs in the analytic tradition which holds that beliefs have to be propositional and non-human animals do not have them (e.g., Davidson 1975, 1982). The response offered in this paper is twofold. First, two arguments against the propositional model as applied to other animals are put forward: an a priori argument from referential opacity and an empirical argument from varieties of working memory. Second, the Prior-Lurz situational model based on state of affairs as opposed to propositions is introduced and defended with two significant modifications. With this model of primate beliefs we can make progress in understanding how other primates can have certain mindreading capacity.

Attributiveness and Referential Opacity

Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1976), pp. 117-123