ABSTRACT
In several of his papers, Brian Loar insisted on the primacy of the subjective in a theory of intentionality. Although he had very subtle ideas about the topic, I will argue that this primacy is mis-placed, motivated by a premature pessimism about a reduction of intentional to non-intentional terms, and an uncritical Cartesianism regarding our access to intentionality. Intentional states have a crucial role to play in an entirely objective psychological theory of human and animal processes, quite apart from issues of reduction and subjectivity. Insofar as reduction is needed, the states might well be implicitly defined by an ultimate Ramsification of that theory along lines of Brian’s (1981) treatment; and, pace his qualms there and elsewhere, I see no reason not to include the specifications of the content of those states in such a Ramsification. But such a theory is an empirical one, one far more complex than I think Brian and other philosophers have anticipated, and so it is not likely to be spelt out soon, much less integrated with the other sciences. So insistence on such a reduction to those other sciences is seriously premature. But even if it turns out there are problems with such a reduction, appeals to subjectivity are unlikely to solve them. Introspective knowledge particularly of intentionality is either insufficiently substantive or insufficiently reliable to play the needed role.
