Preintentional states

I wrote this fairly quickly, and I thought it up really recently, so I hope it’s not too abbreviated or hard to understand:

In my last post I argued that the contents of an intentional state need not be individuated by the conceptual repertoire of the person who is subject to that state. In fact, I think this is the case for the object of any intentional state that has for an object something which is not individuated by concepts just by its very nature (i.e. de dicto propositions, and, trivially, concepts themselves). The main counterexamples to this position are intentional states which have supposedly nonexistent entities as objects, such as fictional characters, impossible geometric constructions, and Hellenic gods. The basic idea is this: intentional state ascriptions having Homer Simpson, the square circle, and Apollo as objects cannot be subject to existential generalization on those objects; so, those terms are need not be subject to indefinite substitution; only those substitutions of coextensive terms which are in accord with the conceptual scheme of the subject of that state will be assented to by the subject; so, these states and their objects appear to be individuated by the concepts had by the subject.

One problem for this train of thought is the question of just what the object term refers to. In order for these expressions to make much sense we have to posit nonexistent intentional objects. But I think we can avoid a lot of resulting metaphysical weirdness by just explaining away these states. Specifically, I think the state of someone who likes Homer, tries to picture a square circle, or worships Apollo is not an intentional state at all. These are pre-intentional states: qualitatively identical to intentional states for the subject, but having only “narrow” content. The subject of a pre-intentional state could be in such a state while being the only thing in the universe. This is not true for intentional states, for which there must always be something to which the subject is related (with the exception of intentional states relating the subject to him-, her-, or itself).

Pre-intentional states just don’t have objects. So, it is less appropriate to talk about “worshipping Apollo” than it is to talk about “Apollo-worshipping”, or “worshipping in an Apollo-y way”. And when I say I’m trying to picture a square circle, I’m really saying something false. We have adopted the convention of attributing pre-intentional states to people in the same way we attribute intentional states for the reasons that they are qualitatively identical to the subject, and because until relatively recently it was taken as common knowledge that the subject of an intentional state had authoritative knowledge of his or her mental states. But we ought to reject the second of those premises if it means finding a simpler, more coherent philosophy of mind.