Are there Edenic Grounds of Perceptual Intentionality?

Extract

The essays in The Character of Consciousness¹ sketch a comprehensive theory of intentionality, aimed at explaining how linguistic items and mental states get their contents. The framework of two-dimensional semantics includes the thesis that sentences, beliefs and experiences each have two sets of contents, and an explanation of the underlying dispositions that ground those contents. The contents take the form of two intensions. Primary intensions correspond to the cognitive significance of the utterance, belief or experience, while secondary intensions correspond to environmental aspects of their meaning.

In the case of experience, the two-dimensional framework is supplemented with a story about the role of phenomenal character in grounding the contents of experience. Every phenomenal aspect of experience finds expression in the framework of representation, in the form of a satisfaction condition. Experiences of objects have one type of satisfaction condition, experiences of properties have another, and, when combined, they produce conditions on veridicality of experiences – not just visual experiences, but experiences in all sensory modalities, including bodily sensations. The phenomenal character of experiences is thus deeply connected to representation. ‘Intentional content appears to be part of phenomenology: part of the essential nature of phenomenology is that it is directed outward at a world (371).’ In fact, according to Chalmers, phenomenology is systematically connected to intentional content twice over. And here Chalmers’s discussion of the phenomenal grounds of representation contains two independently motivated ideas.