124. Amir Horowitz | Intentionality Deconstructed

Can anything be genuinely about the world, or is intentionality just a useful way of organizing our thoughts and talk?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestAmir Horowitz is head of the PPE program and professor at the Open University of Israel. His work covers a range of topics, but especially the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language.Check out his recent book, "Intentionality Deconstructed: An Anti-Realist Theory"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intentionality-deconstructed-9780198896432https://www.amazon.com/dp/01988964332. Book SummaryHorowitz’s Intentionality Deconstructed argues for intentional anti-realism: the view that intentionality (aboutness, reference, “think-about,” etc.) is not merely absent from the world, but cannot be instantiated because the very concept is “inherently flawed,” making the thesis a necessary, conceptual, a priori one rather than an empirical eliminativist proposal. He begins by focusing on how we could ever settle questions of reference/content in the first place, using disputes surrounding the Gödel–Schmidt case in experimental philosophical semantics to motivate the claim that neither armchair intuitions nor theoretical “constraints” can genuinely determine reference. The core idea is that you can’t extract an intentional “function” from a representation itself (anything “encoded” would still require interpretation), and the concept of reference is too neutral to privilege one candidate relation over others.The middle of the book is largely negative: it targets prominent ways of securing intentionality. Against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (roughly, that phenomenology alone constitutes intentional directedness), Horowitz argues that no intrinsic mental property—including phenomenal character—can do the grounding work required, and that “intrinsic intentionality” makes explicit a tension (intrinsicness vs transcendence) that cannot be resolved. He then attacks naturalistic reduction strategies: even if minds/languages stand in many causal/informational relations to the world, the reductive naturalist must explain what makes one of them the semantic/intentional relation, and Horowitz argues that the needed justification is unavailable—mere stipulation (“identify R with aboutness”) won’t get realism off the ground.Having cleared the ground, Horowitz develops intentional anti-realism in detail. The negative thesis is that content ascriptions “in themselves” lack truth conditions, but he pairs this with a practice-dependence account: relative to a scheme/practice of content ascription, such ascriptions can be true/false—e.g., “Gödel” can “refer” to Gödel under a causal-historical practice or to Schmidt under a descriptivist practice, while outside any practice the right answer is “to no one.” He then explains why content talk can still be useful and often successful: content ascriptions carry logico-syntactic messages (structural commitments) that can be true/adequate even if their semantic “aboutness” message is not, and the predictive/explanatory payoff of folk psychology can be attributed to these structural patterns rather than to real intentional properties. Finally, he addresses objections like the “success” argument and the “cognitive suicide” worry by treating “claim that/believe that” talk as rhetorical/“quoted” within a radical revisionary framework, and he closes with an Ockham-style moral: since intentional properties are dispensable and unsupported, we should reject their instantiation altogether.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:39 - Overview03:48 - Irrealism and anti-realism04:57 - Concrete and abstract07:31 - What is intentionality?14:15 - Primitivism19:00 - Relations23:54 - Phenomenal intentionality28:20 - Representationalism31:23 - Introspection and intuition37:46 - Too skeptical?47:40 - Empirical research57:23 - Arguments against intentionality1:04:09 - Another option?1:15:58 - Truth1:19:35 - Success of intentional theories1:23:33 - Challenges1:31:12 - Value of philosophy1:33:38 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe