CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Jitareanu, Monica |
|---|---|
| Title | Being About the World - An Analysis of the Intentionality of Perceptual Experience |
| Summary | The aim of this dissertation is to clarify a general question: ‘What does it mean to say that perceptual experience is intentional?’ and to check whether a certain suspicion is correct: that a major shift has occurred in the views about the intentionality of experience and the strategies of arguing for it. Intentionality is the property of a mental state to be directed at external objects/states of affairs. No theory of perception denies that perceptual experiences put us in contact with the world; the debate is over what makes experience have this feature. There are theories that claim that perceptual experience is essentially of external things and there are theories that argue that perceptual experience becomes of external things. Therefore, there are two ways of saying that experience is intentional: as a claim directed against a certain structure of experience (relational), and as a phenomenological thesis – the phenomenal character of experience is essentially representational. In this dissertation, I analyze how these two claims relate to each other. It is clear that they cannot be equivalent since the phenomenal thesis is directed not only against the sense-data theory but also against the qualia view, which is not a relational view. I argue that a major shift has occurred in the strategy of arguing for the intentionality of experience. From using one claim – the structure of experience is non-relational – to the other – all phenomenal features are essentially directed – the emphasis has been changed from one characteristic of intentionality – the possible non-existence of the object of experience – to the other one – directedness towards object. |
| Supervisor | Farkas, Katalin |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/jitareanumo.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University