intentionality without intensionality: reply to lithown and marras

Intentionality without Intensionality: Reply to Lithown and MarrasAuthor(s): Harold MorickSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Aug., 1975), pp. 143-146Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4318970 .

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HAROLD MORICK

INTENTIONALITY WITHOUT INTENSIONALITY:

REPLY TO LITHOWN AND MARRAS

(Received 9 July, 1974)

Since Robert Lithown and Ausonio Marras have cast serious doubt upon the coherence of my attempt to show that intentionality is conceptually distinct from intensionality, I shall try to obviate the doubt by speaking more clearly than I formerly have about the nature of these properties and their relationship to one another.1

First, a familiar, standard definition. A simple sentence is intensional if and only if it contains a referentially opaque part. (An occurrence of a word or phrase is referentially opaque if and only if (i) it refers to something, and (ii) one cannot in general supplant it with another word or phrase which refers to the same thing while preserving the truth value of the containing sentence. A sentence is simple if and only if it does not contain any other sentence as a part. For example, 'I believe that Arthur sought the Holy Grail' is not simple for it contains within itself the sentence 'Arthur sought the Holy Grail', whereas the latter sentence is simple, insofar as it has no sentence which is a part of itself.)2

Second, a criterion of (a sufficient condition for) intentionality. A 'basic' sentence is intentional if it isn't a truth condition for either the sentence or its negation that the object of the verb succeed of reference or that it fail of reference.3 (In this usage, a simple declarative sentence is a basic sentence if and only if it is of the grammatical form subject-verb- object, its verb is an indicative-mood, active-voice occurrence verb, and its subject and object are proper nouns or definite descriptive phrases. The psychological sentence 'King Arthur sought the Holy Grail' is an example of an intentional basic sentence, while the physical sentences 'The asteroid struck the moon' and 'The gas defoliated the valley' are examples of non-intentional basic sentences.)

Although legion is the number of sentences which are intentional but not intensional, I need only to adduce one such sentence in order to show that intentionality is conceptually distinct from intensionality. Let us

Philosophical Studies 28 (1975) 143-146. All Rights Reserved Copyright ? 1975 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland



144 HAROLD MORICK

consider

(1) King Arthur sought the Holy Grail.

Obviously, (1) is intentional since it isn't a truth condition for either (1) or its negation that the object-expression (viz., 'the Holy Grail') succeed of reference or that it fail of reference.

Less obviously but no less truly, (1) isn't intensional. All that is needed to demonstrate the non-intensionality of (1) is to demonstrate that the occurrences of both the subject-expression and the object-expression of (1) fail to satisfy at least one of the two conditions necessary for being a referentially opaque occurrence.

First, consider the subject position of (1) vis-a-vis the sentence

(2) Guinevere's husband sought the Holy Grail.

Whether or not there actually was a King Arthur and whether or not he was Guinevere's husband is historically still up in the air. In the event that there was a King Arthur, we cannot possibly alter truth value by supplanting 'King Arthur' in (1) with another word or phrase which refers to the same man. For instance, if Arthur was in fact Guinevere's husband, then (2) will have whatever is the truth value of (1). Thus, if these turn out to be the historical facts of the matter (viz., that Arthur did exist and he was Guinevere's husband), then the first condition necessary for opacity is satisfied but the second is not.

And in the event that there wasn't actually a King Arthur, then the first condition for opacity fails to be satisfied, and consequently the second condition also fails to be satisfied: For if there actually wasn't a King Arthur, then the words 'King Arthur' wouldn't refer to anything whatsoever; and if 'King Arthur' refers to nothing whatsoever, the question of whether or not 'Arthur' refers to the same person as that referred to by 'Guinevere's husband' simply would not arise. Thus the occurrence of 'King Arthur' in (1) fails of opacity. For, regardless of whether or not there actually was a King Arthur, the occurrence of 'King Arthur' in (1) fails to satisfy at least one of the conditions necessary for being an opaque occurrence.

The same conclusion must be drawn for 'the Holy Grail', the object- expression in (1). That is, briefly: Either (a) there actually was a Holy Grail or (b) there wasn't. If (a), then the second condition necessary for



INTENTIONALITY WITHOUT INTENSIONALITY 145

opaque occurrence fails to be satisfied, since any co-refeiential expression (e.g., perhaps, 'the cup from which Judas, as well as Jesus, drank at the Last Supper') may supplant, salva veritate, 'the Holy Grail' in (1): were the Holy Grail identical with the cup from which Judas, as well as Jesus, drank, we could say truly that, whether or not Arthur knew it, in looking for the Holy Grail he was in fact looking for the cup from which Judas drank at the Last Supper. If (b), both conditions for an opaque occurrence fail to be satisfied, for if there never was a Holy Grail, the phrase 'the Holy Grail' fails of reference and, a fortiori, fails of co-reference. Thus does the occurrence of 'the Holy Grail' in (1) fail of opacity.

In my earlier paper, I made the point about the (a) disjunct of the previous paragraph with respect to 'the site of Troy' as it occurs in

(3) Schliemann looked for the site of Troy.

Reportedly, David Kaplan believes that I was mistaken in claiming the 'the site of Troy' has a non-opaque occurrence in (3), on the grounds that supplanting 'the site of Troy' with the (let us suppose) co-referential phrase 'the site of the worst airplane crash of 1974' will produce a sentence which is false, viz.

(4) Schliemann looked for the site of the worst airplane crash of 1974.

The answer to this is that, on the contrary, (4) is true if (3) is: What this example (whether or not it is in fact Kaplan's) actually directs attention to is an oddity due to a certain temporal asymmetry which is endemic in general to historical narrative sentences, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of substitutivity salva veritate. For instance, a biography of Nixon might open with

(5) The 37th President of the United States was born in Yorba Linda, California in 1913.

As Arthur Danto has pointed out in his Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965), there is a sense here in which the future adds to the past: something that happened in 1968, Nixon's victory, adds a dimension to something that happened in 1913. If Aristotle is right about the Sea Battle Tomorrow, not even God could have known in 1913 that (5) is true; nor, for the same reason, could he have known then, before the plane crash, that (4) is true; but, for all that, (4) and (5) are true.



146 HAROLD MORICK

To summarize this rejoinder to Lithown and Marras: They claim that it is incoherent of me to maintain that a basic sentence can be both intentional and non-intensional because, as I define 'intentional' and 'non- intensional' (1) is non-intensional only if it is one of its truth conditions that 'the Holy Grail' succeed of reference; and (1) is intentional only if it isn't one of its truth conditions that 'the Holy Grail' succeed of reference. While I think that certain passages of my original paper produce this misimpression that I define these terms as contraries, this rejoinder should obviate that misimpression. Furthermore, I needed, in this rejoinder, only to adduce one sentence which is intentional but not intensional in order to substantiate the claim, made in my previous paper, that intentionality is conceptually distinct from intensionality. To this purpose, I adduced the intentional sentence 'King Arthur sought the Holy Grail', which, since it contains no word or phrase having an opaque occurrence, is non-intensional.

SUNY at Albany NOTES

1 Robert Lithown and Ausonio Marras, 'Intentionality Without Extensionality', Philosophical Studies 25 (1974) 403-410; Harold Morick, Intentionality, Intensionality and the Psychological, Analysis, XXXII (1971), 39-44. 2 Cf., e.g., 'Glossary of Logical Terms', in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, 1972, Vol. 5, pp. 67, 73-74; and J. H. Coin nan, 'Intentionality and Intensionality', Philosophical Quarterly (1962), p. 46. 3 Actually my Analysis criterion attaches 'intentional' to certain verbs and only derivatively to sentences. For our purposes here, however, we can ignore this for the sake of simplicity.



intentionality without intensionality: reply to lithown and marras

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