INTENTIONALISM, INTENTIONALITY, AND REPORTING BELIEFS

Author: MITROVIĆ, BRANKO

Source: History and Theory, Volume 48, Number 3, October 2009 , pp. 180-198(19)

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Abstract:

The dominant view of twentieth-century analytic philosophy has been that all thinking is always in a language, that languages are vehicles of thought. The same view has been widespread in continental philosophy as well. In recent decades, however, the opposite view—that languages serve merely to express language-independent thought-contents or propositions—has been more widely accepted. The debate has a direct equivalent in the philosophy of history: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences or propositions that these historical figures believed to be true or false? In this paper I argue in favor of the latter, intentionalist, view. My arguments center mostly on the problems with translation that are likely to arise when a historian reports the beliefs of historical figures who expressed them in a language other than the one in which the historian is writing. In discussing these problems the paper presents an application of John Searle's theory of intentionality to the philosophy of history.

Keywords: intentionalism; intentionality; translation; reporting beliefs; Searle; thinking without words; Skinner; Bevir; Danto

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00503.x

Affiliations: 1: UNITEC Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Publication date: 2009-10-01