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Reply to Lycan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Harold Morick
Harold Morick*
Affiliation:
S.U.N.Y., Albany
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Extract

My paper “On the Indispensability of Intentionality” is faulted on two counts by William Lycan:

  1. (i) I fail to show that there are any non-intentional psychological verbs

  2. (ii) my argument against eliminative materialism contains a false premiss.

I intend to deal swiftly with Lycan's indictment, as I believe it to be patently insubstantial. The aim, in my paper, of pointing out that there are non-intentional psychological verbs was to show that Lycan and others have been mistaken in believing that every psychological verb is intentional.

I shall respond first to (ii), to Lycan's charge that the fifth premiss of his reconstruction of my argument against eliminative materalism is false, or at least not obviously true. The premiss reads: “If language takes place, it takes place between persons.” The eliminative materialist can reasonably deny this premiss, Lycan maintains, since it “seems plausible” to predict that we will someday be able to explain, with no reference to people's mental states or activities, what language is and how it works. I believe that because this “prediction” is in fact self-contradictory, it casts no doubt whatsoever on the fifth premiss of my anti-materialist argument.

Type
Reply
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , June 1975 , pp. 701 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

1. Morick, Harold “On the Indispensability of Intentionality”, Canadian journal of Philosophy II (1972-3), pp. 127–133CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lycan, William G. “Reply to Morick on Intentionality,” Canadian journal of Philosophy IV (1974-5), pp. 697–9.Google Scholar

2. “Language: a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings.” From Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.,: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1966).

3. Lycan, p. 699.

4. Putnam, Hilary “Minds and Machines”, in Hook, Sidney ed., Dimensions of Mind (London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1969), p. 159.Google Scholar

5. A basic sentence, on my usage, is a simple declarative sentence of the grammatical form subject-verb-object, whose verb is an indicative-mood, active-voice occurrence verb, and whose subject and object are proper nouns or definite descriptive phrases.

6. From Webster's Third (italics within the word-entries are mine).

7. Lycan, W. G. “On ‘Intentionality’ and the Psychological”, in Marras, Ausonio ed., Intentionality, Mind, and Language (Urbana, III.; U. of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 99.Google Scholar

8. Anscombe, G. E. M. “The Intentionality of Sensation”, in Butler, R.J. ed., Analytical Philosophy: Second Series (Oxford: Blackwell's, 1965).Google Scholar