Re: [ontolog-forum] Intentionality Best Practices

[rrovetto@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Well said Dr.Sowa.

Robert

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 3:30 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 5/22/2014 9:40 AM, John Bottoms wrote:
> I have come across some views that intentionality is difficult or
> impossible to implement.

It's difficult or impossible for those philosophers who try to
eliminate anything that is "unscientific" or "anthropomorphic".
Since intentionality, by definition, depends on somebody's intention,
it is, by definition, anthropomorphic -- or at least zoomorphic.

But without recognizing the importance of intentionality, it's
impossible to define anything that depends on goals or purpose.
That includes business, law, government, economics, and life.

> There appear to be a number of candidate reasons including lack of
> consensus, issues with dualism, ambiguity of language or implementation
> using FOL.

The lack of consensus is the result of the half century of behaviorism
in the early part of the 20th c.  In the late 19th c, there were many
enlightened philosophers such as Peirce, Brentano, and their followers
who understood the issues.  Husserl was a student of Brentano's, and
he did his best to reconcile intentionality with the onslaught of
behaviorism.

Some of Husserl's students, such as Heidegger, went off the deep end
with those methods.  The net result is that most analytic philosophers
were scared of mentioning anything that might trigger a criticism that
they were being "unscientific".  Fortunately, scientists like Einstein
had no fear of being unscientific.  Einstein criticized philosophers
like Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell for their "Angst" about such
issues.

More recently, philosophers like John Searle have been getting back to
intentionality.  But many are still too timid about being criticized
by the so-called "mainstream" of analytic philosophy (i.e, the people
who control tenure and promotion). For some discussion and references,
see http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/rolelog.pdf

I discuss some issues about Searle, Carnap, and others in
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/worlds.pdf

John

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