Is Seeing Intentional? A Response to Travis

Walter Hopp

in: Laurent Cesalli, Claudio Majolino (eds), Dire et vouloir dire, Methodos 14, 2014.

Abstract

This is a response to Charles Travis's article "Is Seeing Intentional?" In it, I argue that while seeing differs from other intentional states in a variety of ways, seeing is indeed intentional, at least in the philosophically central sense of "intentional" introduced to us by Brentano and Husserl. Seeing is, quite often at least, the consciousness of something. I spend the majority of the paper discussing Travis's arguments that it is not, and providing reasons for thinking they are inconclusive. That seeings do not harbor ambitions and that "sees (NP)" is not an intensional context do not entail that seeings are not intentional. Furthermore, I argue that Travis's contention that states of seeing are relational is inconclusive, and also argue that even if that is so, the proper conclusion to draw is not that seeing is not intentional, but that some intentional states are relational.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Brentano Franz