Phenomenology 2005

Volume 5, Issue Part 2, 2007

Selected Essays from North America Part 2

For Lack of Intentionality

Much of contemporary Philosophy of Language has attempted to explain the relationship between language and the objects referred to by it without recourse to the intentionality of acts of consciousness, as Husserl and other Phenomenologists have understood it. This essay takes one author from the “Analytic” tradition, David Wiggins, and points out the inadequacies in his recent attempt to explain how “natural kind terms” connect up with the objects to which they apply. It traces the failure to build an intelligible bridge between the terms and their extension to failure to incorporate intentionality into the analysis of meaning.