David Armstrong makes a similar remark near the beginning of his A Materialist Theory of the Mind, that e.g., poison is in a way intentional, since it ‘points toward’ death.

Take the following scenario. Let’s say I have a computer program that randomly assembles words together in a series. Every day I walk into my favorite coffee shop and post a product of this computer program on the bulletin board. It’s usually nonsense: “cat mortage glisten,” or ” porky might friend,” etc. But let’s say that one day my computer spits out the phrase “charity never fails.” I go post that in the coffee shop; and then some new costomers come in, read that sentence posted on the bulletin board—and it fills them with hope and gladness. “Charity never fails!” How true! The phrase is clearly meaningful to these people, and it changes their lives. It strikes them as a very profound and meaningful truth.

Now: are we going to say that they’re wrong? That the phrase is actually “meaningless” simply because there was no “intention” that produced the sentence? It is clearly ridiculous to say that the exact same sentence suddenly does have significance if we change the scenario to say that I wrote the phrase myself and then posted it on the bulletin board.

Clearly, meaning or significance only exists as an effect of iteration. It is pointless to worry about some pre-iterative “intent” when you’re studying how language works for exactly the same reason that it is pointless to worry about whether the universe was created by a supernatural God when you’re studying how nature works.

Although… I understand that some might be interested in “intent” beyond the question of how language works… but it’s difficult to know how to go about that project when, it seems to me, even those interested in pure “cognition” frequently track “intent” by measuring it against some utterance that would verify its existence… and I wrong about this..?

You may want to check U.T. Place’s ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Dispositional’, Dialectica 50 (1996), pp. 91-120, and his debate with Mumford in The Philosophical Quarterly 195 (1999).

And for lots of infinite sets of this kind, you have to either assert the set’s existence despite the fact that you can neither set out a membership criterion nor enumerate the members, or get along without the Axiom of Choice.

I don’t think so. The identity-condition of sets is usually thought to be extensional, not intensional: same members, same set. You can specify which set you’re interested in by picking out its members through some description, but the same set can be picked out via multiple descriptions, and for many sets, you’d just have to ennumerate its members.

So I’d say you might have a case to make for the relationship between the number two and the predicate ‘is an even number,’ but not for the relationship between the number two and the set that contains [2, 4, 6… etc.]

Meyer was familiar with Wittgenstein so presumably his work is in some way a response to Wittgenstein in that respect. I know that Wittgenstein rejected propositionalism in ethics, but W’s ethical thinking seems to have been a lurid mass of intense confusion.

Meyer is neither a “COntinental” nor and “analytic” philosopher (neither a Harlem Globetrotter nor a Washington General), so no one reads him. It’s so bad that I am the internet’s chied Michel Meyer resource, which is a darn shame because my reading of him is pretty tendentious.

I am pretty sure that this train of thought is going to lead you into some very specific and controversial positions in philosophy of mathematics.

I think maybe I shouldn’t have picked the set example. It was maybe a bit too extreme. But I was toying with Searle’s criterion of intentionality – ‘satisfaction’. There are directions of fit, and fitting relations. (Isn’t that right?) This seems to fit the case of sets, plausibly. The number 2 satisfies the conditions of fitting into the set of all even numbers. (Not that we need to take Searle’s word for it about ‘fitting’/’satisfaction’ being the right terms for getting at the relation. But my point was that possible terms you might pick could open up a surprisingly broad field – broader than you might have, er, intended.)

As to your examples, I think other cases have much more intuitive pull. I just don’t think sets are “about” their members—they simply have members. (Aside: I can understand a set of entities that don’t exist as a set of possible objects or a set of fictional objects. Still no problem for intentionality. And I’m not quite sure how the axiom of choice bears on this; membership is a primitive, even if there’s no criterion for membership). Same for gold. Nonetheless, I do find it more compelling that sentences, paintings, and so on all have intentionality, but then again, those probably aren’t the kinds of cases you’re really looking for. See also Putnam’s ant making (?) a representation of Churchill.

Wasn’t that kind of the point of Holbo’s question?

‘Aboutness’ seems too vague to me.