2025/11/05 by Agostino Pinna Pintor · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Arts and Humanities · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Free Will and Agency #Philosophical Ethics and Theory
paper · doi:10.1080/09515089.2025.2583394
openalex publication_date 2025/11/05 · openalex created_date 2025/11/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Intentionality is typically taken to be the property of mental states to be about or represent things, properties, and states of affairs. Thus, it seems uncontroversial to claim that intentional properties are representational in kind. Some scholars, however, remain unpersuaded about it. According to them, intentional properties are not representational, for there can be Ur-intentional states without representational content. The goal of this paper is to challenge the idea that Ur-intentionality is a kind of contentless intentionality, and hold that this nonstandard notion of intentionality entails a number of undesirable consequences. As a result, intentionality is still to be taken as the capacity of the mind to represent, and thus any case of contentless intentional state seems a case of contentless representational state, pace Ur-intentionalism.