Adverbialism, the many-property problem, and inference: reply to Grzankowski

Abstract

ABSTRACT A serious problem for adverbialism about intentionality is the many-property problem, one major aspect of which is the claim that natural inferences between thought contents are blocked if adverbialism is true. Kriegel (2007. “Intentional Inexistence and Phenomenal Intentionality.” Philosophical Perspectives 21: 307–340. doi: 10.1111/j.1520-8583.2007.00129.x., 2008. “The Dispensability of (Merely) Intentional Objects.” Philosophical Studies 141: 79–95. doi: 10.1007/s11098-008-9264-7., 2011. The Sources of Intentionality. New York: Oxford UP) argues that the determinable-determinate relation can be pressed into service by adverbialists to respond to this problem. Grzankowski (2018. “The determinable-determinate relation can’t save adverbialism.” Analysis 78: 45–52. doi: 10.1093/analys/anx068) argues that this doesn’t work because when applied to intentional properties absurd results follow and thus the victory is pyrrhic. In this paper, I examine how we must understand the inferences at the heart of the many-property problem if we are to avoid attributing unwanted assumptions to adverbialists. With this understanding in place, there is a reply to Grzankowski on behalf of the adverbialist that holds that the determinable-determinate relation can be used as one tool among others for assessing the thought content of others. So, Grzankowski’s objection to Kriegel can be met. In the end, however, this entire dialectic is a dead end because it treats the ascriptions of intentional states as fused adverbs forming compound adverbial modifiers, and these fused adverbs lack compositionality and are syntactically simple. As such, interpreters cannot decompose the linguistic content of adverbialist ascriptions, which is nearly always a necessary step in assessing the thought content of others. So, the determinable-determinate reply actually fails because we do need these ascriptions to be subject to compositionality. In the end, adverbialists must opt for a structural approach to the many-property problem, as recently seen in the work of Banick (2021. “How to be an adverbialist about phenomenal intentionality.” Synthese 198: 661–686. doi: 10.1007/s11229-018-02053-0) and D'Ambrosio (2021. “The many-property problem is your problem, too.” Philosophical Studies 178: 811–832. doi:10.1007/s11098-020-01459-2).