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Anscombe, Sensation and Intentional Objects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Douglas Odegard
Douglas Odegard
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

Let us use ‘sensation’ such that we can talk about ‘visual sensation’ and ‘auditory sensation’, and such that ‘sensation’ cannot readily be pluralized (cf. ‘intelligence’, ‘imagination’). It then makes sense to talk about the “objects” involved in sensation. For example, if someone sees red, where his seeing red is a case of sensation, then there is an “object” involved in the situation in the sense that we can talk about “what” he sees. One of the enduring problems in philosophy is to try to determine the status of such objects.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 69 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1972

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References

1 For instance, see Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (London, 1949)Google Scholar; Austin, J. L., Sense and Sensibilia (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Chisholm, R., Perceiving (Ithaca, 1957)Google Scholar; Locke, D., Perception and Our Knowledge of the External World (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Armstrong, D., A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London, 1968)Google Scholar; and Aune, B., Knowledge, Mind and Nature (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

2 In “The Intentionality of Sensation: a Grammatical Feature,” Analytical Philosophy, 2nd ser. (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar

3 In this same connection, note how she fails to draw an explicit distinction between ‘In this case the use of “sees” introduces both an intentional object and a material object’ and ‘In this case someone both sees something in an intentional sense and sees something in a material sense’, when she says: “While there must be an intentional object of seeing, there need not always be a material object. That is to say ‘X saw A’ where ‘saw’ is used materially, implies some proposition ‘X saw—’ where ‘saw’ is used intentionally; but the converse does not hold.” (p. 176)

4 See “Perception and Intentionality,” Mind, LXXIX (1970), 115–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar