--- In
Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "J D" <wittrsamr@.
..> wrote:
>
> JRS,
>
> Thanks. I take no small pride in being able to present a reading as separate from a position on the content, so your feedback on that score is encouraging.
I was always taught that one should be able to do this, and I certainly respect it when I see it.
I occassionally try to do so myself, with mixed success.
It seems an old-fashioned behavior to even attempt these days, but that's an entirely different rant.
> Honestly, your questions do tempt me but I am reluctant to engage further on these topics. Some reasons are best left unspoken because they might be read as sniping and there's been more than enough of that. But I can say that such topics really aren't of great interest to me at the moment and there are several other topics I've intended to post about but have neglected in order to respond to topics already in play.
Understood.
> Concerning Hacker vis-a-vis Dennett, you ask
>
> > But I wonder if you'd be as pure in your own theory.
>
> I would deny having a theory, though I am sure you didn't mean that pejoratively.
Ouch, my head. No, I did not mean it pejoratively. I use the word "theory" quite freely, and loosely, often as an effective synonym for "grammar".
> But whether Hacker's remarks (some of which strike me as useful insights, others of which seem to verge into dogmatism) can be stigmatized as "theory" is a tricky question. I mention this not to engage in a debate about Hacker's writings, but to foreshadow a topic I've been working on, related to how we distinguish between grammatical investigations and theories and whether the "therapy" metaphor is essential to this question.
Distinguish between, hmm?
My own efforts are probably more towards unifying them.
> I'll also just make the observation that my concern would be less whether the concept of "intentionality" is being reified and more whether a lot of different ideas, grammatical and psychological, are being run together. And then what one needs is not a theory but a grammatical investigation.
>
> have you read "Orrery of Intentionality"
?
Had not, to my recollection, but thanks to Google I've now given it a quick scan:
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Orrery%20of%20intentionality.pdf
... and can see that it requires more time to absorb.
I daresay the concept of "cat" involves running together a lot of different ideas, grammatical, psychological, and ontological, so why not "intentionality"
?
In any case, my orrery is the Turing Machine, which has its own imperatives.
Josh
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