Abstract

Thoughts have content; for instance, the content of the thought that Plato is a great philosopher is that a certain person, Plato, has a certain property, the property of being a great philosopher. In thinking this thought, I become related in a certain manner to this person, Plato, and to the property of being a great philosopher. In this dissertation, I begin to develop a theory of how such relations come to obtain. ;In chapter 1, I examine and ultimately reject the two approaches to intentionality most popular today: eliminativism and reductionistic physicalism. In chapter 2, I begin to present my own theory of intentionality, the starting point of which is the familiar idea that experience is a necessary condition for thought. In motivating this familiar idea, I explain the sense in which experience can be said to have a qualitative character, and I describe those specific aspects of qualitative character that figure in my subsequent account of how we succeed in forming concepts of material objects. Finally, I end the chapter by presenting the principal challenge for my theory: given that experience is a necessary condition for concept formation, how do we succeed in forming concepts of things other than our experiences? ;In chapter 3 I begin to meet this challenge. I oppose empiricism by arguing that the content of our concepts derives from two sources: experience, and the syntactic features of our thought. In chapter 4 I explain how by referring to phenomenal features with two-place rather than one-place predicates, we can form concepts of objects that exist independently of experience . In chapter 5 I defend naive realism. The account of demonstrative thought I present in chapter 4 presupposes a kind of naive realist theory of perception, and in chapter 5 I defend this theory against such familiar arguments as the argument from hallucination, the causal argument, and the time-gap argument