Consciousness and Intentionality of Action Essay -- Philosophy Philoso

Consciousness and Intentionality of Action ABSTRACT: One much discussed issue in contemporary philosophy is the relation between consciousness and intentionality. Philosophers debate whether consciousness and intentionality are somehow ‘connected’; whether we have reason to be more optimistic about an ‘objective,’ ‘scientific’ or ‘third person’ ‘account’ of intentionality than about an analogous account of consciousness. This paper is intended as a limited contribution to that debate. I shall be concerned only with the intentionality of action. Not everything which is true of intentionality of action is true of intentionality of other phenomena, such as beliefs. I shall discuss the question, ‘What is the intentionality of action?’ More specifically, I shall discuss one partial answer to this question: that a necessary condition of an agent performing a certain intentional action is that the agent is conscious of performing that action. This answer i s fairly unpopular in contemporary philosophy. In this paper, I shall try to say something about the ground for the rather wide-spread philosophical resistance to the answer, and I shall also outline the kind of considerations that I think are required to judge whether a wedge can or cannot be driven between consciousness and intentionality of action. One much discussed issue in contemporary philosophy is the relation between consciousness and intentionality. Philosophers debate whether consciousness and intentionality are somehow "connected" (see Searle, chap. 7); whether the one or the other is the "theoretically fundamental" one (see Dennett); and whether we have reason to be more optimistic about an "objective" or "scientific," or "third-person" "account" of intentionality ... ...6) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford UP. Dennett, Daniel C. (1994) "Dennett, Daniel C" in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Samuel Guttenplan, ed., Oxford, Blackwell. Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Kripke, Saul A. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP. Lycan, William G. (1996) Consciousness and Experience, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. McGinn, Colin (1996) The Character of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed., Oxford UP. McGinn, Colin (1991) The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford, Blackwell. Searle, John R. (1992) The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed, Oxford, Blackwell.