The Road to <i>ideelle Verähnlichung</i>. Anton Marty’s Conception of Intentionality in the Light of its Brentanian Background

Cesalli, Laurent; Taïeb, Hamid

doi:10.1484/j.quaestio.1.103615

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Ultimately, they might be features of mental acts specifying what they are about without being themselves the "target" of the act, this target being rather the extension. The fact that the target is the extension, not the "content", seems confirmed by Marty's claim that that to which conceptual presentations have a relation of "ideal similarity" (his name for intentionality) is a "possibly unlimited multiplicity of individual objects" (1908: 451; on intentionality in Marty, see Cesalli & Taieb 2013). The idea would thus be the following: my conceptual presentations of human being and of horse have in common that they are presentations, but differ in their directedness, as one is directed towards human beings, the other towards horses; the feature in each act which is responsible for these different directions is the "content".…”

Section: Marty: Vagueness Via Concept Structure and Typicalitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Ordinary language semantics: the contribution of Brentano and Marty

Taïeb

2019

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

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This paper examines the account of ordinary language semantics developed by Franz Brentano and his pupil Anton Marty. Long before the interest in ordinary language in the analytic tradition, Brentanian philosophers were exploring our everyday use of words, as opposed to the scientific use of language. Brentano and Marty were especially interested in the semantics of (common) names in ordinary language. They claimed that these names are vague, and that this is due to the structure of the concepts that constitute their meaning: concepts expressed by such names are themselves vague, based on typicality, and have more or less similar items within their extension. After presenting the views of Brentano and Marty, this paper compares them to later accounts of meaning and concepts, notably Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances and the prototype theory of concepts, and emphasizes the originality of the Brentanian position. this project, developed by Ryle and P.F. Strawson, is standardly labelled "ordinary language philosophy"; the theoretical study of ordinary language, however, is independent of being an "ordinary language philosopher", as shown by Grice, who at first followed this program, but later abandoned it, while maintaining his research agenda in pragmatics (on this "loosely connected set of subtraditions", see Beaney 2012).The sympathy for ordinary language, as it appears in Wittgenstein, is sometimes described as a break from earlier authors, Frege in particular. It is true that Frege complains about the defects of ordinary language -vagueness, to begin with -and its inability to attain the precision required for scientific investigation. However, one finds him also saying that our vague everyday linguistic devices are enough to allow for mutual understanding (1976: 183 [letter to Peano, 29.9.1896]; Puryear 2013). He even holds that ordinary language has some advantages over scientific language, namely, its broad applicability and its adaptability to circumstances; in contrast, scientific language is useful for sharp distinctions, but is unsuitable for other tasks (1993: xi). Apparently, then, Frege is not unsympathetic to ordinary language as such, but only to its use in science (on the narrative "Wittgenstein vs. Frege", see, e.g., Williamson 1994). In any case, whether there was a break or not, what is sure is that Wittgenstein, and later Austin and Grice, initiated much research on ordinary language in recent philosophy.At the turn of the twentieth century, however, there was a parallel philosophical tradition interested in ordinary language, although it is entirely neglected in the standard narrative.Ordinary language was also explored theoretically in the School of Brentano. Interestingly, Brentano, as well as his most faithful pupil Marty, decided to describe both the semantic and pragmatic properties of ordinary language, and to compare it to scientific language. However, this did not lead them to become "ordinary language philosophers", even though Marty was tracking philosophically misleadi...

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Section: Marty: Vagueness Via Concept Structure and Typicalitymentioning

confidence: 98%

Ordinary language semantics: the contribution of Brentano and Marty

Taïeb

2019

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

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“…In the following excerpt taken from his recent response to Cesalli-Taieb (2012), Antonelli raises objections against the attribution to Brentano's philosophy of mind of something like an intentional content, endowed with the function of mediator in the relation of mental states to their intentional objects. This correlate, however, did not have a particular function or role in the context of Brentano's theory of intentionality.…”

Section: The Theory Of Primary and Secondary Objects And The Relation...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Brentano on Presenting Something as an Intentional Object

Fisette

2022

Logic, Argumentation &Amp; Reasoning

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Brentano's use of "something" (aliquid, etwas, quelque chose) takes on its full meaning in the context of his investigations regarding the nature of mental phenomena. This is confirmed in this excerpt from a 1908 manuscript on ontology:The entire theory of the proper meaning and the diverse improper meanings of "something" or of "thing" or of "what-is" is clarified only through the study of the psychical activities and of the expression that our thinking finds in language. All our psychical activities have objects and have as objects what a something in proper sense is. (Brentano, 2020, §63)

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“…Mulligan (1990, 18-19); on Marty's view, cf. Cesalli and Taieb (2012), Cesalli (2017). It is perhaps no accident that what is perhaps the first brief sketch of the history of uses of isomorphism to understand representation is given by a member of Marty's Prague group, Bergmann (1936).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%