Alberto Voltolini

There are Intentionalia of Which it is True that Such Objects Do Not Exist

Abstract According to Crane’s schematicity thesis (ST) about intentional objects, intentionalia have no particular metaphysical nature qua thought-of entities; moreover, the real metaphysical nature of intentionalia is various, insofar as it is settled independently of the fact that intentionalia are targets of one’s thought. As I will point out, ST has the ontological consequence that the intentionalia that really belong to the general inventory of what there is, the overall domain, are those that fall under a good metaphysical kind, i.e., a kind such that its members figure (for independent reasons) in such an inventory. Negatively put, if there are no things of a certain metaphysical kind, thoughts about things of that kind are not really committed to such things. Pace Crane, however, this does not mean that the intentionalia that are really there are only those that exist. For existence, qua first-order property, is no metaphysical kind. Thus, there may really be intentionalia that do not exist, provided that they belong to good metaphysical kinds.

To Think Is to Literally Have Something in One’s Thought

In this paper, we first want to defend the idea that reference intentionality is the relation of constitution holding between an intentional state, a thought, and the object it is about, its intentional object. As such, reference intentionality is for a thought an essential property, whose predication to that thought is true in virtue of the nature of such a thought. We will take this to be one of the main lessons of serious externalism, according to which the intentional object occurs in the individuation conditions of the thought about it. Moreover, we want to draw some consequences of this idea. First, in conformity with serious externalism we will claim that an objectual thought is nothing but its intentional object in a cogitative modality, which is nothing but a certain motivational role for that object to play with respect to a subject. Second, we will claim that one such thought, both as a type and as a token, is an abstract particular, respectively a kind and a relational trope.

How Demonstrative Complex Pictorial Reference Grounds Contextualism

By resuming ideas originally developed in my Voltolini (2009), I will try to show again that demonstrative reference as to pictorial matters provides good examples in favor of contextualism, the position holding that wide context, the concrete situation of discourse, may have the semantic role of fixing truthconditions for an utterance, i.e., a sentence in that context. This time I will focus on complex cases of pictorial reference, those that cases of complex pictorial experiences such as collapsed seeing-in and nested seeing-in exhibit.

Why Frege cases do involve cognitive phenomenology but only indirectly

In this paper, I want to hold, first, that a treatment of Frege cases in terms of a difference in cognitive phenomenology of the involved experiential mental states is not viable. Second, I will put forward another treatment of such cases that appeals to a difference in intentional objects metaphysically conceived not as exotica, but as schematic objects, that is, as objects that have no metaphysical nature qua objects of thought. This allows their (possibly various) nature to be settled independently of their being thought of, in particular as concrete entities in the sense of entities that may be spatiotemporal occupiers. Yet third, as to Frege cases, cognitive phenomenology may return from the back door. For the realization that, if correct, solves any such case cannot but have a proprietary, though neither distinctive nor individuative, phenomenology. In my account, this is the realization that the different schematic intentional objects involved are none other than the same entity.

Depictions aka Pictures, i.e., Pictorial Representations

This book mainly deals with depictions or pictures, i.e. the figurative images which result from the combination of a typically material object, the picture’s vehicle, with what provides a picture with its representational content, the picture’s subject. In claiming that the vehicle is typically a material object, I not only welcome the possibility that the vehicle is an optical effect generated via light refraction, as in the case of stereoscopes whose lenses generate a single image out of two physically separate images that respectively depict left-eye and right-eye views of the same scene, but I also want to allow for cases in which the vehicle is the outcome of hitting a certain reflecting surface with light rays, as in the case of mirrors, or of spotting a certain area with some light, as in the case of holograms. By the ‘picture’s subject’ I mean the picture’s representational content, which comes in two varieties: (i) either a singular content yielding what that picture is a picture of, a particular subject — what makes a picture the picture of a given individual, as in the case of portraits or snapshots;1 or (ii) a general content providing the picture with a generic subject — what makes a picture the picture of some F or other, as with genre pictures or stick figures.

The Syncretistic Theory: A General Survey

Our survey of all former theories of depiction has finally come to an end. It is now time to collect all of the positive results I have gathered along the way from such theories and to articulate them within a new theory, that is the syncretistic theory of depiction.

Resemblance Theories of Depiction

Objective resemblance theories of depiction revolve around the idea that figurativity consists in the fact that the picture’s vehicle resembles the picture’s subject. A pictorial representation is pictorial for, unlike other representations (verbal signs above all), it resembles its subject. This idea lies behind naive evaluative judgements of pictures. The more beautiful a picture is, the more similar to its subject it is. Since the resemblance in question is typically a perceptually relevant resemblance — that the vehicle and the subject are alike is a perceptually graspable fact — such theories naturally belong to the perceptualist paradigm.1

Applications, Consequences and Integrations of the Theory

In dealing with pictures or any items endowed with figurative value, I have hitherto spoken mostly of two-dimensional (2D) items that are seen three-dimensionally, that is as three-dimensional (3D) items, or better yet, as scenes constituted by items of that kind. Yet, at this time, a question naturally arises: what about 3D items like manikins, puppets and statues? Can they really have a figurative value just as the above 2D items do? Or, to take the question as directly involving 3D representations: can sculptures be pictures, that is representations in a figurative mode?

Defending the Syncretistic Theory

I ended the previous chapter by providing the final formulation of the syncretistic theory, summarized as SSSC. Roughly speaking, the theory first provides two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of figurativity: perceiving-in and similarity in grouping properties between the picture’s vehicle and what is perceived in it (with respect to the relevant perspective(s)). Second, once they are put together, these conditions turn out to be one necessary condition of depiction that, along with another necessary condition (concerning the intentionality of a picture), provide the two jointly sufficient conditions of depiction. A picture depicts something iff that very something not only is perceived in it and roughly shares the same grouping properties with it (with respect to the relevant perspective(s)), but also stands in the right causal/intentional relation with it. Put in this way, the syncretistic account turns out to be, as I have repeatedly said, a loosely minimalist approach to depiction, according to which the representational content of a picture — its subject — is a pictorial content, that is a content that is selected from its figurative content — what is perceived in it.

Seeing-in, Seeing-as, Recognition and Make-Believe Theories of Depiction

As has already come out in the foregoing chapters, we associate figurativity with the fact that we discern something in another thing we face. In the case of pictures, it is common to say that we see something in something else; the second something is the picture’s vehicle, while the first something constitutes the picture’s figurative content.