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Degrees and dimensions of intentionality

Jaakko Hintikka

pp. 183-204

In the title essay of my book, The Intentions of Intentionality,1 I proposed a touchstone for the intentionality of a concept in Brentano's and Husserl's sense of the term. According to this suggestion, a concept is intentional if and only if we have to consider several possible situations or courses of events in their relation to each other in spelling out the semantics of the concept. I dubbed this claim the thesis of intentionality as intensionality. By way of an intuitive explanation, the thesis says that the hallmark of intentional, that is, conscious and conceptualizable mental life is that it is transacted against the backdrop of a range of unrealized possibilities.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2647-9_12

Full citation:

Hintikka, J. (1989). Degrees and dimensions of intentionality, in The logic of epistemology and the epistemology of logic, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 183-204.

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