| In my dissertation I argue that core aspects of the problem of intentionality---the problem of how it is that words and thoughts can be about something---can be solved by taking a purely cognitive scientific approach to the study of the mind. Cognitive science, and in particular cognitive neuroscience rightly attribute intentional states a fundamental theoretical role in the explanation of cognitive function---indeed, the very processes they study, perception, movement, decision making, language comprehension, memory, and so on, are thoroughly intentional. Many philosophers---'Denotationalists'---hold that notions like reference, truth-conditions, or content must play a crucial explanatory role in cognitive theories; that is, that they either must be explained by a cognitive theory or that they serve some ineliminable explanatory function themselves. Yet, mainstream cognitive science includes virtually no discussion of or appeal to such denotational properties.; I claim that, indeed, explanatory success in cognitive science does not require any appeal to denotational notions. I go on to claim that a completed cognitive science will nonetheless be able to account for facts which involve denotational properties and relations, and in so doing will plausibly give them as much of an explanation as we can hope to get. I also claim that the widespread appeal to semantic values in contemporary formal semantics and philosophy of language has hampered the integration of theories of linguistic comprehension with psychological theories other intentional processes such as decision making. In the positive component of the dissertation, in addition to accounting for denotational facts I also develop an alternative, non-Denotationalist framework for doing formal semantics as well as a theory which integrates a non-Denotationalist semantics for intentational state ascription with a psychological account of mentalizing (the process of attributing intentional states to others).; So, my project has deep commitments in the philosophies of mind, psychology, and language. My project could be characterized as endorsing both a reductionist Syntactic Theory of Mind without the Eliminativism, and a cognitive scientific, Deflationist, revival of Intention-Based Semantics. These components provide the philosophical foundation for the empirical, linguistic/psychological account of intentional state ascriptions I offer in the last chapter. |
