Turning Aboutness About

Abstract

There are two families of influential and stubborn puzzles that many theories of aboutness (intentionality) face: underdetermination puzzles and puzzles concerning representations that appear to be about things that do not exist. I propose an approach that elegantly avoids both kinds of puzzle. The central idea is to explain aboutness (the relation supposed to stand between thoughts and terms and their objects) in terms of relations of co-aboutness (the relation of being about the same thing that stands between the thoughts and terms themselves).

Anxious to Perform: Compositional Effects of Negative Task-Related Emotions in Teams

“…Task-related emotions can be construed as short-lived affective states that are specific to the team tasks. Unlike moods, emotions are specific to an object or stimulus (Frijda, 1986(Frijda, , 2009Gordon, 1974;Parrott, 2001). Although emotions are relatively short-lived, this object-specificity of emotions makes them less fleeting, and more stable over time compared to moods, at least while the underlying cognitive appraisals of the object (here, the task) remain stable (Lazarus, 1991).…”

Cross-Cultural Calibration of Words and Emotions: Referential, Constructionist, and Pragmatic Perspectives

“…Again, this makes it more difficult to determine whether they denote emotions that really are different from those denoted by words with less obvious (or more generic) contextual connotations. Of course, formulating emotions as intentional states that are always about something (e.g., Gordon, 1974) means that any "emotion" word carries some implications about the likely situation in which the represented state occurs, but how do we tell which contextual (and appraisal-related) implications are intrinsic to the denoted emotion and which are extrinsic? For instance, there is no obvious way of finding out whether "Schadenfreude" refers to a specific affective state or simply describes pleasure that happens to be experienced in a particular set of circumstances, specifically when a disliked person suffers (see also Russell, 1978).…”

Thought and Talk in a Generous World

“…In what follows, I examine some familiar strategies for answering these questions, and defend what I take to be an underappreciated route. The two main contributions are i) parts of the negative discussion in which I raise novel problems for familiar approaches to the problem of the many and ii) the use of considerations based on the problem of the many to motivate and elaborate an approach to aboutness, recently outlined in my 'Turning Aboutness About' (Sandgren 2022). I will answer many questions left open in that paper and propose an account of how aboutness relates to questions about quantification over intentional objects, truth, and counting.…”

“…I argued that although supervaluationist tools provide a useful replacement for truth, they don't thereby provide an adequate account of aboutness. In what follows, I build on a different approach, expanding on some of my recent work (Sandgren 2022) particularly the rejection of target-first approaches to aboutness and the conception of aboutness as being explanatorily prior to intentional objects. One contribution is that here I will analyse how my approach connects to and sheds light on the intentional problem of the many (something that I only briefly touch on in earlier work) and how the intentional problem of the many informs how my overall framework should be fleshed out.…”