Meinong on Intending

Abstract

In this paper I want to examine Meinong’s account of what it is to think about a particular object in the context of issues that have preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy of language. The central interpretive task is to determine what Meinong might have said about cases of intending where the object is referred to by means of a (logically) proper name. The two theoretical notions at the heart of Meinong’s account of intending, intending by way of being (Seinsmeinen) and intending by way of being-so (Soseinsmeinen), are a species of singling an object out by means of an associated description. Since Kripke’s landmark discussion (1980), it is widely denied that descriptive accounts furnish an adequate account of intending. I will consider whether Meinong’s account has the resources to provide reassurance on this matter and whether the descriptive nature of his account raises other difficulties.

Keywords:

• Meinong
• proper names
• descriptivism
• modal moment
• Kripke

Notes

1 For instance, Meinong apparently qualifies the Intentionality Principle in On Emotional Presentation. There might not be objects corresponding to certain defective contents, like ‘a thought about a thought not about itself’, which is supposed to display a liar-like paradoxical self-reference (See On Emotional Presentation, pp. 10 ff.). The characterisation postulate is in effect qualified in Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit, para. 37, where Meinong discusses Russell’s example of the existent round square. Contemporary reconstructions of Meinong’s theory, such as Parsons (1980) and Routley (1980), certainly do restrict the characterisation postulate.

2 The auxiliary object presented in finite detail in thought has all and only the properties that the contents of one’s thought present it to have, if the content is adequate. It is therefore a closed object. But lurking in the wings is another more radically incomplete object, with the same finite determinations but open to further determination: an open incomplete object. I ignore this distinction in the present paper. Note that Meinong thought a content is ‘adequate’ to the extent that it presented the object as it is (On Assumptions, p. 189) – that is, it is fully adequate if it presents the object in all its detail (all its properties), and more adequate to the extent that it presents the object’s properties.

3 For reasons among which I presume is primarily the desire to be faithful to phenomenological investigation, Meinong holds that an incomplete object can be presented as complete. It doesn’t seem as though one is apprehending an incomplete object when one looks at a photograph. To respect this, Meinong claims that we imagine it as complete (i.e. ascribe to it the property of being complete, in addition to the properties it already has). This is a transparently absurd suggestion. Completeness belongs with existence and simplicity, and other logical properties that do not characterise the nature of objects but whose possession or not is necessitated or precluded by how things are with their characterising properties (the nuclear/extranuclear property distinction). It is simply not possible to imagine an incomplete object as complete. In the terminology of Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit, the completeness we could imagine an incomplete object to have could only ever be completeness from which the modal moment is lacking.

4 Meinong’s intentionality principle commits him to saying that there is an object corresponding to the descriptive content ‘the assassin of FDR’.