INTENTIONALITY: A STUDY OF THE VIEWS OF CHISHOLM AND SELLARS

David M. Rosenthal

A DISSERTATION
PRESENTED TO THE
FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE
OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE
DEPARTMENT OF
PHILOSOPHY

January, 1968


Edited in hypertext by Andrew Chrucky. Reprinted with the permission of Professor David Rosenthal.
Editor's Note: Due to the limitation of current hypertext, the following conventions have been used. In general, if an expression has some mark over it, that mark is placed as a prefix to the expression. All Greek characters (except phi) are rendered by their names. Subscripts are placed in parentheses as concatenated suffixes: thus, e.g., H(2)O is the chemical formula for water. Sellars' dot quotes are expressed by bold periods.

Logical connectors and quantifiers are all expressed by bold characters as follows:

--> = material implication
<--> = material equivalence
& = conjunction
~ = negation
v = disjunction
(x) = universal quantifier
(Ex) = particular ('existential') quantifier

TABLE OF CONTENTS


PREFACE

I. CHISHOLM'S VIEWS (1)
II. CHISHOLM'S VIEWS (2)
III. SELLARS' VIEWS
IV. THE CHISHOLM-SELLARS CORRESPONDENCE
V. BEHAVIORISM, PHYSICALISM, AND THE IDENTITY THESIS
I. Logical Behaviorism (1): Chisholm's Views
II. Logical Behaviorism (2): Sellars' Views
III. Formulating a Viable Thesis of Physicalism
IV. The Identity Thesis (1): Vis-a-vis Intentionality
V. The Identity Thesis (2): The "Categorial" Objection
VI. The Identity Thesis (3): Further Objections
VII. The Thesis of Physicalism (1)
VIII. The Thesis of Physicalism (2)
IX. Summary
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABSTRACT

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PREFACE

References are given so as to be coordinated with entries as they appear in the bibliography. They are given in bracketed form, with either two or three items enclosed within a pair of brackets. The first item is in each case a reference to an author, and if more than one work by a given author is listed in the bibliography, then the author's name is followed by a parenthesized numeral indicating which of the several works by that author is in question. The final item in each bracketed reference indicates the page or pages to which reference is being made, or a footnote on some page to which reference is being made. Thus, for example, a reference of the form '[Sellars (5) 179]' indicates Sellars' article "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," page 179, as it appears in Sellars' collection Science, Perception and Reality.

I owe my greatest debt in connection with the preparation of this dissertation to my advisor, Professor Richard M. Rorty. Without his persistent and sympathetic criticism, and his constant encouragement, my attempt to deal with the issues discussed in this thesis would have been far less satisfactory.

I have been fortunate in having had a number of discussions with, and an exchange of letters with, Professor Wilfrid Sellars, and also the benefit of his reading of an earlier draft of Chapter III. For these reasons, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Sellars for the many ways in which I have profited from his help in the course of preparing this dissertation. I would like also to express my gratitude to Professor Roderick M. Chisholm for his reading of an earlier draft of Chapter I, and for several letters in which he has helped me better to understand the nature of the issues discussed in Chapter II. I have gained much from discussions with a number of friends, especially Professor Boruch A. Brody, Professor Richard E. Grandy and Mr. Alan J. Schiffmann. I would like, finally, to express my special gratitude to Mrs. Richard Bell, who has prepared the typescript of this thesis, for her thoughtful work in that connection.


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