Chisholm's Legacy

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CHISHOLMS LEGACY ON INTENTIONALITY

JAEGWON KIM

Abstract: The problem of intentionality, or how mind and language can takethings in the world as intentional objects, engaged Chisholm throughout hisphilosophical career. This essay reviews and discusses his seminal contributionson this problem, from his early work in Sentences about Believing andPerceiving during the 1950s to his last and most mature account in The FirstPerson, published in 1981. Chisholms final view was that de se reference, or asubjects directly taking himself as an intentional object, is fundamental andprimitive, and that all other forms of intentional reference, such as de re andde dicto, can be understood on the basis ofde se intentionality. The essay ends witha discussion of the worry that this account might lead to what may be calledintentional solipsism, the proposition that the self is the only genuine object ofintentional reference.

Keywords: Chisholm, reference, intentionality, de dicto, de re, de se, intentional

solipsism.

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Roderick Chisholm produced philosophical works of immense distinc-tion and lasting influence on a wide range of issues across manyphilosophical fields.1 Among these are his classic defense of epistemo-logical internalism and foundationalism, his searching critiques of

phenomenalism and logical behaviorism, his deeply insightful work onthe persistence of persons and things, his innovative approaches to actionand free agency, and his important, though less widely known, ethicalwork on the nature of obligation and the concept of intrinsic good. Formany of us, though, I would wager that, from among his manymemorable contributions, it is his groundbreaking work on intentionalitythat stands out most prominently and vividly.

I am not saying that this work on intentionality represents the mostimportant contribution that Chisholm made through his long and

1

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Chisholm memorial symposium atthe Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, April 2000, andthe meeting of the Rhode Island Philosophical Society in honor of Chisholm, October 2001.

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illustrious career. His work on the foundations of human knowledge andthe nature of epistemic justification, which he sharpened and refinedthrough many decades till the last years of his life, is an achievement that

is at least equal, in its depth and philosophical importance, to hiscontributions on the problem of intentionality. Still, we must rememberthat it was Chisholms seminal work in the 1950s and 1960s thatintroduced the Problematik of intentionality into analytic philosophy,making it a central area of research in philosophy of mind and language.In philosophy of mind and psychology today it is impossible to avoidexpressions like intentional state, intentional property, intentionalexplanation, and intentional psychology, not to mention terms likeintentional object, intentional relation, and intentional sentencefamiliar in metaphysics and philosophy of language. Our current use of

intentional and intentionality derives from, and is continuous with,Chisholms early work on the special character of intentional andpsychological phenomena.

Chisholms interest in intentionality is also notable in that, like hisinterest in the foundations of knowledge, it essentially spanned his entirephilosophical career, which lasted a full half-century, beginning in thelate 1940s and ending with his death in early 1999. Chisholms firstsubstantial publication on intentionality was his widely discussed 1956paper Sentences About Believing, which became the basis of thechapter Intentional Inexistence in his much admired 1957 book

Perceiving. His work on intentionality culminated in his 1981 book TheFirst Person, which arguably was the last major book-length work heproduced. In this book he broke with his approaches in all of his earlierwork, adopting a strikingly new strategy that placed the self at the centerof our cognitive map of the world. The crux of Chisholms new approachwas the radical proposal that a cognizer or agents reference to himself orherself, or de se intentionality as we may call it (following David Lewis),is the fundamental intentional relation that is presupposed by all otherforms of intentional reference. But, Chisholm being Chisholm, he wasnever fully content with the particular execution of the de se approach inThe First Person. He continued to tinker with it, making small correctionsand additionsFfor example, in his Self-Profile included in RaduBogdans Roderick M. Chisholm (1986)Fbut it seems that he remainedsatisfied with the essential soundness and viability of the de se approachto intentionality.

In his autobiographical chapter, My Philosophical Development, inthe Chisholm volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, he refers tohis 1979 lectures presented to the Royal Institute of Philosophy inLondon, writing as follows:

I attempt to deal philosophically with the ancient question: How is objectivereference possible? How is it possible for one thing to direct its thoughts upon


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another thing? Wittgenstein summarized the question by asking: What makesmy idea of him an idea of him?

The book that resulted was The First Person: An Essay on Reference andIntentionality (1981). But The First Person is not at all as clear as it might be.I shall provide a much better statement and defense of its principal thesesbelow. (1997, 16)

Unfortunately, we do not find any discussion of intentionality in the restof Chisholms autobiography. The autobiographical chapter in the Hahnvolume is dated October 23, 1995. By that time, Chisholm was in aweakened condition on account of his illnesses; in particular, his eyesighthad been seriously impaired, which greatly reduced his capacity forproductive work. In consequence, his replies to the critical essays in theHahn volume are often quite brief and sketchy, and not worked out in a

manner that we had come to expect from him. In fact, several papers inthe Hahn volume are not accompanied by any replies from Chisholm,and it is perfectly understandable that the promised refinements on histheory in The First Person had to remain undelivered. This is a seriousloss to philosophy; I, for one, would have very much liked to seeChisholms further elaboration of the approach centered on de se, as wellas his corrections and replies to some of the objections that had beenraised.

So The First Person stands as Chisholms final statement on theproblem of intentionality. What I would like to do here is, first, brieflyreview the development of Chisholms thoughts on intentionality throughhis career and then explore some of consequences of his final account ofintentionality.

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In chapter 11 of his Perceiving, Chisholm introduces the problem ofintentionality with the by now familiar quotation from Brentano:

Psychological phenomena, according to Brentano, are characterized by what

the scholastics of the Middle Ages referred to as the intentional (also themental) inexistence of the object, and what we, although with not quiteunambiguous expressions, would call relation to a content, direction uponan object (which is not here to be understood as a reality), or immanentobjectivity. (1957, 168)

As Chisholm says, Brentano made the further claim that this feature ofintentionality, namely, that of being directed upon, referring to, or beingabout, an object, is the exclusive characteristic of mental phenomena, andthat it is not manifested in anything material. Chisholm goes on to say

that he wants to state Brentanos thesis in a more precise form and thenevaluate it. And the way Chisholm chooses for doing so is to turnBrentanos thesis into a linguistic thesis, a claim about sentences that we


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use, or can use, to describe certain types of phenomena. Recall thatChisholm first defines the notion of an intentional sentence by statingthree criteria the satisfaction of any one of which would qualify a given

sentence as intentional. Intuitively, an intentional sentence is one thatdescribes an intentionalFthat is, psychological or mentalFphenome-non. If, therefore, true intentional sentences exist, it follows that there aremental phenomena. But nothing that has so far been said precludesmaterialism or physicalism; that is, the fact that some intentionalsentences are true does not by itself entail mind-body dualism. Forphenomena described by intentional sentences, namely, mental pheno-mena, might turn out in the end to be also describable by nonintentionalsentences.

But, like Brentano, Chisholm goes further. Clearly, Brentano was a

dualist; he said, we recall, that no physical phenomena manifest inten-tionality, whereas all mental phenomena are marked by intentionality. Itfollows, then, that the world is divided into two nonoverlapping domains,one of them comprising phenomena manifesting intentionality and theother comprising phenomena without intentionality. The way Chisholmcaptures this form of dualism is to say that, first, nonpsychologicalphenomena can be described by sentences that are not intentional, and,second, that the description of any mental phenomenon requires the useof an intentional sentence. Thus, the world again divides into twomutually exclusive domains, the first consisting of phenomena that can

be described by the use of nonintentional sentences and the second consis-ting of phenomena whose description requires intentional sentences.

The linguistic turn that Chisholm gave to Brentanos thesis was verymuch in tune with the general philosophical tenor of the era which wasdominated by logical positivism, conceptual analysis, Wittgenstein,and Oxford ordinary-language philosophy. Of course Chisholm was notsympathetic to any of these approaches, each with a tendentious anddoctrinaire metaphilosophical agenda, but it seems to me that his earlywork on intentionality, at least in its methodology, was influenced bythe heavy emphasis on language that was then current. In any case, theradical nature of Chisholms linguistic turn can be appreciated if wetake a closer look at the three marks of intentionality he offers, that is,the three criteria by which he defines the class of intentional sentences.According to the first criterion, a sentence is intentional if it contains asubstantival term, or a noun phrase, such that neither the sentence nor itsnegation implies whether there exists anything in the world that answersto that term. So this makes the sentences Schliemann sought the site ofTroy and Diogenes looked for an honest man intentional. Accordingto the second criterion, a sentence that contains a subordinate sentential

clause is intentional if neither the sentence nor its negation implies eitherthat the contained clause is true or that it is false. On this criterion,sentences like Galileo believed that there were six planets and


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President Bush hopes that the Republicans will retain the Senate in2004 turn out to be intentional. The third criterion is in terms of thefailure of the substitutivity of coreferential terms, or, in Quines familiar

term, referential opacity. The idea is that terms that designate the samething may not be substituted one for the other salva veritate in certainpsychological sentencesFtypically within the scopes governed bypropositional-attitude verbs like believe, know, and doubt.

In retrospect, we cannot but be impressed by the ambitiousness ofChisholms project. For its implicit assumption is that the concept ofmentality, what it is to be a mental phenomenon, is at bottom a logico-grammatical concept. This is evident in the fact that his three marks ofintentionality are all stated in purely logico-grammatical terms likesentence, noun, substitution, truth, implication, and ex-

istence. This means that if Chisholms project is successfully carried out,its main result would be a logico-grammatical characterization of what itis to be a mental phenomenon. To repeat: a mental phenomenon is onethat can be described only by the use of an intentional sentence, and asentence is intentional just in case it satisfies one of Chisholms threecriteria of intentionality, where the criteria are stated in purely logical andlinguistic terms. Compare this with the standard ways in whichphilosophers have attempted to demarcate the mental; for example, inepistemic terms (privileged access, privacy, incorrigible knowledge), inmetaphysical terms (the mental as subjective, as nonspatial, as

teleological, and so on), or in evaluative terms (the mental as rational,as normative, and so on). These all make use of substantive propertiesand relations that materially distinguish and classify objects andproperties. But the characterization of mentality that Chisholms earlyproject promises us is entirely formal and wholly topic-neutral(to appropriate a term J. J. C. Smart used for a somewhat differentpurpose).

To see Chisholms project in this light is not only to see itsaudaciousness but also to appreciate its inherent difficulty. For whatchance is there that the mental-physical difference will turn out to benothing but a logical and grammatical difference? That the mind-bodydistinction can be captured in terms of purely logical and linguisticdifferences? We cannot help feeling skeptical about the prospects ofsuccess for a project like Chisholms, especially when we take note of suchfacts as that there are many diverse kinds of mental phenomena (thecognitive, the sensory, the affective, the volitional, and so forth), thatnatural languages have a richness and complexity that is not easilymanaged logically and formally, and that we have many other types ofdiscourse to contend with beyond the physical and psychological (such as

the normative, the fictional, and the modal). Moreover, even if we were tosucceed in characterizing the mental-physical distinction in logico-linguisticterms, we would surely want an explanation of thisFwhy psychological




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sentences and physical sentences exhibit these differencesFon the basisof more fundamental and intuitive conceptions of the mental and thephysical.

It is no wonder, then, that Chisholms initial proposal was met withnumerous counterexamples, examples of sentences that are intentional onChisholms criterion but which cannot be thought of as describingpsychological phenomena. (There was less emphasis placed on producingcounterexamples of the opposite sort, sentences that are prima faciepsychological but are not intentional by Chisholms criteria.) I was atBrown during the early 1960s as a junior colleague of Chisholms, and,with Ernest Sosa and Herbert Heidelberger, I diligently attendedChisholms graduate seminars. At the time, only five years after thepublication of Perceiving, Chisholms linguistic project was still going

forward with great vigor. He had by then abandoned the definition hehad offered in Sentences About Believing and Perceiving, but not theproject of finding a logico-grammatical definition of intentionalsentence and hence of the psychological. At every session of hisseminar, he would present a new and improved definition of intentionalsentence and challenge members of the seminar to refute it. I believe wewere for the most part able to oblige. But it was amazing to see howphilosophically resourceful Chisholm was; he was often able to makerepairs on the spot and put up a new definition on the blackboard, notjust in an ad hoc way but in ways that were philosophically motivated

and illuminating. Sometimes he had to admit, in the end, that he wouldhave to try all over again the following week, and he always kept hispromise by returning with other definitions, sometimes definitions thattook a surprisingly new turn. He was always eager to listen to objectionsand criticisms, ready not only to make repairs and minor modificationsbut also to strike out in wholly new and unexpected directions. He alwayskept himself one or two steps ahead of everyone else. In this process, hisimpressive philosophical powers were on display, as were his intellectualhonesty and single-minded dedication to getting things right, not justdefeating his opponents or impressing others with quick and cleverripostes.

Chisholms efforts during this period in the mid-1960s resulted in anew definition of intentionality, offered in his entry on Intentionality inPaul Edwardss Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy published in 1967.Here he conceived of his task as that of characterizing psychologicalsentence prefixes, for example, Jones believes that and Jones regretsthat, from nonpsychological sentence prefixes, for example, It isnecessary that, It is obligatory that, and It is probable that.Chisholms proposal was simplicity itself: he says that a sentence prefix M

is intentional or psychological just in case for any sentence p, the result ofprefixing M to p, namely, M(p), results in a contingent sentence.Thus, for any sentence p, Jones believes that p is contingentFeither


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contingently true or contingently falseFwhereas this is not true for, say,modal prefixes and deontic prefixes. For example, It is possible that1115 2 is necessarily true, and It is obligatory that you turn to the left

and also that you turn to the right at the same time is necessarily false.This was an ingenious idea; I believe Chisholm was trying to exploit theintuitive idea that any proposition is a possible object of belief and otherpropositional attitudes. But, as you would expect, from induction ifnothing else, it does not succeed. (I myself dont think that Jonesbelieves that p and not-p can be a contingent sentence; I think it isnecessarily false.)

So I far as I know, that was the last major effort Chisholm made tocarry out his linguistic project. I believe that toward the end of the 1960sor early 1970s Chisholm abandoned, or lost interest in, attempts to

formulate a logico-grammatical criterion of the mental and began tothink about the problem of intentionality in more direct, nonlinguisticterms: how to explicate the idea of our thought and speech being aboutor directed upon an object. Here we come to the traditional form of theproblem of intentionality: How do our thoughts and other mentalattitudes get hooked up with things and events in the world outside us?How do our names and sentences manage to refer to and be aboutextralinguistic objects and facts? Evidently, such linkages between mindand world, or between language and world, are required if our ideas andwords are to have meaning and our thoughts and sentences are to be true

or false.

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It took Chisholm a while to develop his mature theory of intentionalitypresented in The First Person, published in 1981. His main publishedwork during the 1970s was his book Person and Object, originallydelivered as the Carus Lectures to the American Philosophical Associa-tion in 1967 and published nine years later, in 1976. There is no explicitdiscussion of intentionality in this book, although the book obviouslyoffered him opportunities for that. But Person and Object contains animportant foreshadowing of his mature theory that was yet to come.This is the chapter entitled The Direct Awareness of the Self, in whichhe presents an extended discussion of the question How do weindividuate things around us? But what does Chisholm mean byindividuation?

Chisholms text indicates that he had no definite preanalytic notion inmind; it seems that, to Chisholm, individuating a thing meant picking it

out, or singling it out, from other things around it, to know somethingthat is true only of the thing (which will help us to pick it out), being ableto identify it, and so on. The notion clearly was partly epistemic and




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partly intentional and referential. Against his thesis that one is directlyaware of oneself, Chisholm considers an objection. He writes:

One may object: You cannot be directly aware of yourself unless you have anindividual concept of yourself. But you can have an individual concept of athing only if you have a way of individuating that thing. And you canindividuate a thing only if you know something that is true of that thing and ofnothing else. Hence you must be able to pick the thing out from among allother things. But this means that before you can individuate yourself you mustbe able to locate yourself. . . . It would seem that, if we can individuateanything, if we can pick out anything, then it is not the case that the only waywe have of individuating things is by relating them uniquely to still otherthings. And it may well be, in fact, that the only way we have, ultimately, ofindividuating anything is to relate it uniquely to ourselves. (1976, 31)

Whenever something is individuated, it is individuated in relation toanother thing that has already been individuated, or else it is individuatedin itself, not on the basis of another thing that has been individuated.Chisholm calls the latter individuation per se. The distinction is ratherlike that between derived or inferential knowledge and basic orfoundational knowledge. And Chisholm gives an argument for theexistence of individuation per se (that something must be individuatedper se if anything is individuated at all) that is structurally identical to thestandard foundational argument for the existence of epistemically basic

knowledge (namely, that if there is knowledge, there must be knowledgenot grounded in other things we know). Now we come to a crucialquestion: What things are individuated per se? Chisholms answer: Theonly things we individuate per se are ourselves. One can individuateoneself per se, and that is the only thing one can individuate per se. Allother things are individuated in relation to ourselves, via a relation thatthese things bear uniquely to us. I individuate this lectern as the brownwooden thing here, you as the person sitting in the chair over there, andso on. I am the only thing I can identify or pick out without identifying orpicking out anything else. I am the original point of reference with respectto which everything else gets located in my cognitive map of the world.I am the absolute zero point of my notional world.

There seems no question that individuation comes pretty close toreference even if it isnt identical with it. It seems to me that if I canindividuate something in the sense Chisholm appears to have had inmind, then I can surely refer to it, pick it out from among other thingsaround it, and say something about it or try to do something to it. It isperhaps less clear that if I refer to something, I must also individuate it.Individuation seems like a stronger relation than reference, but it surely

entails reference. In any case, that is the way I read Chisholm. If this isright, Chisholms theory of individuation in Person and Object brings himvery close to the account he develops more fully in The First Person,


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the view that reference de se, that is, reference to oneself in a special first-person way, is the basic form of intentionality, and that it is thefoundation upon which rest all other referential relations, including the

de re and the de dicto.

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But how do we in fact manage to individuate ourselves? What is it that Ido when I individuate myself and pick out myself as myself? In Personand Object, Chisholm was still in the grip of the idea that if we individuateanything, we do so by having a uniquely identifying concept of the thing,that is, a concept that applies to it and only to it. What, then, is auniquely identifying concept that I use to individuate me? Chisholms

answer: my haecceityF

that is, a concept that necessarily applies to meand only to me. Well, what kind of concept is that? What are someexamples of concepts that give me my haecceity, concepts by the use ofwhich I can pick out myself per se from other things around me? Theconcept of being the only person standing in this room will not do.Because to individuate me by the use of this concept would be notindividuation per se but relational individuation, or individuation peralio. The reason is that I would be required to individuate myself by firstindividuating, or picking out, this room. My individuation of me woulddepend on my prior individuation of this room. Considerations like this

drove Chisholm to conclude that my haecceity is a demonstrativeproperty, the property of being identical with me, or me-ness, which isaccessible only to me. Each of us has our haecceity, our me-ness, to whichonly we have access.

If this account sounds a bit strange and difficult to understand, not tomention difficult to embrace, it didnt take long for Chisholm to see thathimself. In The First Person, his final work on intentionality, he makestwo crucial departures from the account he defended in Person andObject. First, we do not individuate, or refer to, ourselves by having aconcept of any sort, or through any sort of representation, sensory orconceptual, of ourselves. No representational vehicle is involved in self-reference. It is an ultimate and primitive fact about ourselves as cognizersthat we have the capacity to take ourselves as intentional objects, directlyand without intervention of anything else. Second, believing or judging isnot a matter of standing in a certain relation to, or acting in regard to, aproposition; rather, the basic form of judgment or believing is thatof attributing a property to oneself. Thus, believing is not a matter ofaccepting or asserting or affirming a proposition; rather, it is a matterof attributing to myself a certain property. For example, when I believe

that I exist, it is not the case that I accept the proposition that I exist. Forwhat is this proposition that I exist? Suppose you believe you exist. Then,on the proposition theory, you must accept a proposition that you would




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express with the words I exist. How does your I-proposition differfrom my I-proposition? The proposition theory, especially in the case ofindexical content sentences, leads to puzzles and mysteries. The property-

attribution theory is much simpler: When I believe that I exist, I attributeto myself the property of existence; when you believe that you exist, youdo the same, that is, self-attribute the property of existence. As Chisholmwould have said, what can be simpler?

If we include the principle that Chisholm defended throughout his life,in opposition to Wilfrid Sellars and others, to the effect that theintentionality of the mental is primary and more basic than theintentionality of language, a principle that Chisholm called the primacyof the intentional, we can give a succinct statement of Chisholms maturetheory of intentionality in three principles:

(i) The primacy of psychological intentionality: The intentionality ofthoughts and beliefs is basic and primary, and the intentionality oflanguage is derivative from, and is explainable in terms of, theintentionality of the mind.

(ii) The primacy ofde se intentionality: Each one of us has a primitiveintellectual capacity for taking oneself as an intentional object anddirectly attributing a property to oneself. References to objects orpropositions, that is, all de re and de dicto intentional relations,depend on, and are explicable in terms of, this fundamental self-

reference.(iii) The primacy of properties: So-called propositional attitudes, in

particular judgment and belief, are matters of the believerattributing a property to himself or herself. They do notconsist in the believer standing in a certain relation to proposi-tions.

These are the main foundational stones on which Chisholms finalaccount of intentionality rests. In spite of some deep difficulties, I believeit is an elegant and unified theory, with considerable explanatory power.The fact that around the time Chisholm was building his theory, David

Lewis was independently developing a de seoriented property-attribu-tion theory of belief that bears a striking resemblance to Chisholms doesnot detract from either the beauty or originality of ChisholmscontributionFor, for that matter, Lewiss contribution.2 On thecontrary, the fact that an essentially identical approach to belief andintentionality was developed by two such exceptionally creative andresourceful philosophers, independently of each other and about thesame time, lends prima facie credibility to the general approach andtestifies to its philosophical importance.3

2

David Lewis, Attitudes De Dicto and De Se, Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 51343.3 I give a detailed critical discussion of Chisholms direct attribution theory in

Chisholm on Intentionality: De Se, De Re, and De Dicto, in Hahn 1997, 36183.


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5

I would like to conclude this essay by briefly exploring two, perhapssomewhat surprising, consequences of Chisholms final theory ofintentionality. The first concerns mind-body supervenience. I would liketo show how Chisholms property-attribution theory elegantly helps usneutralize an objection, a potential counterexample, to mind-bodysupervenience. Of course, mind-body supervenience may not hold, andI believe that Chisholm would probably have rejected it. I myself believethat qualitative states of consciousness, or qualia, do not supervene onphysical and biological states. But the kind of objection againstsupervenience that arises under the proposition theory of belief is,intuitively, not the sort of case that should defeat mind-body super-

venience.Lets turn to this possible trouble for mind-body supervenience.Consider yourself and your molecule-for-molecule indiscernible physicalreplica. You and your replica are in an identical physical state. Youbelieve that you exist. What does your replica believe, if mind-bodysupervenience holds? Obviously, he or she believes that he or she exists.But the proposition you believe and the proposition your replica believeare different; for their truth conditions are different. Your belief is true ifand only if you exist, and your replicas belief is true if and only if yourreplica exists. In fact, the contents of the two beliefs are logically

independent. Now, beliefs carrying different contents must be different; ifit is possible for one belief to be true and another to be false, they cannotbe the same belief. This means that mind-body supervenience fails afterall, since you and your physical replica are indiscernible in all physicalrespects but not so in mental respects.

I hope you will agree that this purported counterexample should notdefeat mind-body supervenience; it seems to me that if your replica thinksthat he or she exists when you think you exist, that should be judged asbeing in accordance with mind-body supervenience, not a violation of it.But how do we defuse this example? The simplest and most perspica-

cious way that I know is to reject the proposition theory of belief andadopt the property-attribution theory. Instead of saying that you believethe proposition that you exist and your replica believes the propositionthat he or she exists, we say, as Chisholm recommends, that you directlyself-attribute the property of existing and that, similarly, your replicadirectly self-attributes the property of existing. This means that you andyour replica are performing the same mental act, that of self-attributingexistence, and this is perfectly in accord with mind-body supervenience.It is difficult to think that there could be a simpler or more naturalsolution. The problem arises because of indexical propositions (in

conjunction with a standard principle of belief individuation); Chisholm




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rejects such propositionsFindeed, he rejects all singular propositions asimpure universals.4

Let us now move to a second, somewhat unexpected, consequence of

Chisholms theory. Consider his thesis of the primacy of de se, which Istate again:

The primacy of de se intentionality: Each one of us has a primitiveintellectual capacity for taking oneself as an intentional object anddirectly attributing a property to oneself. References to objects or pro-positions, that is, all de re and de dicto intentional relations, dependon, and are explicable in terms of, this fundamental self-reference.

We have to ask: In what sense are de re intentional relations dependenton, or explicable in terms, of de se intentionality? I believe there are atleast two ways of understanding this thesis:

I. [De se as a necessary condition of intentionality] Every de reintentional relation presupposes, or implies, a de se referentialrelation. That is, in every case in which you make a de re referenceto an object, you must also make a de se reference to yourself.Without de se intentionality, there can be no intentionality.

II. [The reducibility thesis] De re referential relations are reducible to

de se referential relations; in particular, de re beliefs are reducibleto de se beliefs. In fact, there are no intentional relations other thande se intentionality.

It should be clear that I is weaker than II, and that II entails I. I is weakersince even if de se is necessary for de re, that doesnt mean that de seintentionality is all the intentionality that there is; both types ofintentional relations may exist, without either one being reducible tothe other. But I believe Chisholms project in The First Person stronglypoints to the stronger reductionist thesis, II. Let me quote two para-graphs in support of this interpretation:

4 For a complete solution of this problem Chisholms theory must be developed further.I hope that I shall be well tomorrow, and my twin hopes that he will be well tomorrow.Chisholms idea that in having a belief, we attribute a property to ourselves, is plausibleenough. But when I hope I shall be well tomorrow, I cannot be self- attributing any property,certainly not the property of being well tomorrow. What is it that you do with the propertyof being F when you hope, wonder, or doubt that you are F? Obviously each of thesepropositional attitudes gives rise to the same kind of objection to mind-body super-venienceFand to the problem of he himself to which Chisholms direct-attributiontheory is intended as a solution. So the Chisholm/Lewis style of approach must be

broadened to include other propositional attitudes if it is to yield a complete solution to theproblem. Of course, this has to be done in any case if the theory is to be a general theory ofcontent-bearing mental states.


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So, instead of trying to understand the he himself locution as a special caseof the ordinary de re locution, we shall try to understand the ordinary de relocution as a special case of the he himself locution . . . we should havegiven [the de se statement] the ordinary quantification notation, and we shouldhave exhibited [the de re statement] as something that is obviously derivablefrom [the de se statement]. (1981, 25)

If, as I shall argue, all belief is reducible to direct attribution, there will be asense in which we can say that the believing subject is the primary object of allbelief, and analogously for the other intentional attitudes. (1981, 37)

Now, here is my worry. Let us call intentional solipsism the doctrinethat the sole object that a thinker or speaker can think about or speakabout, the only object he or she can refer to, is the thinker or speaker

himself or herself. There is an obvious analogy between intentionalsolipsism and epistemological solipsism: just as epistemological solipsismclaims that the only mind you can know is your own mind, intentionalsolipsism says that the only thing you can refer to is yourself. My worry isthat Chisholms final theory of intentionality might well be a form ofintentional solipsism. That is, the believer is not only the primary objectof all belief, as Chisholm says; he or she may turn out to be the onlyobject of all belief.

As I said, there are strong textual indications that Chisholm thoughtof himself as pursuing a reductionist project in The First Person, and a

successful execution of the project would result in the elimination of allde re intentional relations in favor of de se intentional relations. Thereis the familiar question whether a successful reduction gets rid ofwhatever it is that has been reduced or preserves what is reduced as partof the reduction base. Whatever might be the fate of that general dispute,consider this: If Chisholm is right, all statements of de re reference turnout to be statements of de se reference, and there is no de re referenceover and above de se reference. Further, consider the particularreduction of de re that Chisholm advocates. I am the only object that Ican pick out as an intentional object, directly and without theintervention of any concept or description. The de re relation I maybear to any object other than myself is mediated by conceptsand descriptions: the de re relation I bear to object x is via thedescription the only thing that is F and bears relation R to myself,where F and R are completely general and qualitative, without anyreferential terms within them. If another thing y were to replace x so thaty is the only F thing that bears R to me, then my thoughts would bedirected upon y rather than x. The main thing to notice is that thedescription the only F thing that bears R to me contains no further

referential relation than the de se relation to myself. It does not pick outany particular thing; it picks out anything that meets a certain generaldescriptive condition.




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This makes me uncomfortable. It seems clear that intentional solipsismis at least as undesirable as epistemological solipsism, and probably a lotworse. It would be bad enough if my mind is the only mind that I can

know anything about; I would be in a far worse predicament if I am theonly thing I can think about or speak about. Intentional solipsismarguably entails epistemological solipsism. I can think of various thingsthat might be said in defense of Chisholm, to argue that even if hisreductionist project goes through, that doesnt mean that Chisholm iscommitted to intentional solipsism. I am prepared to believe that theissue is open, and that more could probably be said on both sides. But fornow I must leave the matter here.

Department of Philosophy

Brown UniversityProvidence, RI 02912USA

References

Chisholm, Roderick M. 1956. Sentences About Believing. Proceedingsof the Aristotelian Society 56 (195556): 12548.

FFF. 1957. Perceiving. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

FFF. 1976. Person and Object. Chicago: Open Court.

FFF. 1981. The First Person: An Essay on Reference and Intentionality.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

FFF. 1997. My Philosophical Development. In Hahn 1997, 341.Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. 1997. The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm.

Chicago: Open Court.


JAEGWON KIM662

Chisholm's Legacy

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