Background Ideas

David Woodruff Smith

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139165327.009

5 - Background Ideas

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

David Woodruff Smith

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David Woodruff Smith: Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine

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Summary

Abstract. Here we study the background of intentionality and what I call background ideas. This chapter shows how everyday experiences depend for their intentional force on ideas extant in one's background culture. These ideas are abstract meaning entities (as in the classical Husserlian model of intentionality), but they arise only in particular historical cultures (they do not exist in a Fregean or Platonic heaven of ideas). And they could not mean what they do without that cultural background. Accordingly, the content of one's thinking, perceiving, willing, and so forth depends ontologically on one's background culture.

Segue. In “Consciousness in Action” we showed that our experience is not isolated within a solitary subject or disembodied mind: our conscious bodily actions are carried out in a physical and indeed social context, and that is part of their intentional content, their volitional meaning. But there is a further, logical reason why consciousness itself normally implicates the social world in which we live. For, as we see in the present chapter, the contents of our intentional experiences are themselves typically composed of concepts and rules of practice that are drawn from and depend on a rich background of ideas that form part of the cultural context in which we live. Normally, then, consciousness is not only embodied but en-cultured. This aspect of consciousness requires a sensitive basic ontology, as we shall explore in later chapters.

The world is so you have something to stand on.

Krauss and Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig

Type: Chapter
Information: Mind World
Essays in Phenomenology and Ontology
, pp. 147 - 175

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165327.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2004

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