Evaluation of the Responses Made by Dretske as Pertains to Chisholms Assignment

Evaluation of the Responses Made by Dretske as Pertains to Chisholms Claims - Assignment Example It was the philosopher Fred Dretske who took to investigating the various claim that was made by the late Roderick Chisholm who postulated that intentional states could only possibly be mental states. In making this claim, Chisholm was seen to derive the claim mainly based on the thesis proposed by Franz Brentano the nineteenth-century philosopher in his book â€Å"Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint†. Chisholm’s Claim that Intentionality cannot be naturalized and Dretske’s Response to the Claim A key feature of various mental states is their actual content. An example is that in the event that I essentially believe it will snow, my actual belief as at the moment can be seen to represent a state of the weather and when I chance to see a dog, I become perpetually aware of that cat. My innate belief that it is eventually going to rain may be seen to be inaccurate or accurate, my perception as to the existence of the cat may be imprecise or precise and my desire to be loved my eventually be satisfied or unsatisfied. Brentano postulated that intentional states were essentially solely mental states and thus distinguished mental states from the physical states because they are objects of awareness and non-spatial in nature. Brentano further contends that this perceived ‘intentional inexistence’ is generally exclusive to psychical phenomena and that there are no physical phenomena that can essentially be said to have it (Feldman & Feldman 2008). The Intentionality of thought can basically be accounted through mental expectations, semantics, and language. All these factors serve to actively demonstrate psychological intention and therefore cannot be explained in non-intentional or non-psychological terms. For Chisholm intentionality cannot essentially be naturalized because it is impossible to identify any such psychological fact with a physical fact. For Chisholm, the use of various intentional sentences essentially means that all our currently existing beliefs about various psychological phenomena an essentially be sufficiently expressed through them although it is impossible to do so for physical phenomena (Feldman & Feldman 2008). A good example of this is the sentence ‘Diogenes searching for an actual honest man†, this sentence can be perceived to be an intentional statement because it is seen not to rely on the relative veracity of there necessarily being an honest man or not.  Ã‚