ABSTRACT
Philosophers from Franz Brentano to Roderick Chisholm and Donald Davidson have argued plausibly that the intensional idiom is mostly not translatable into the physicalistic. As Davidson has argued, the irreducibility of the intensional idiom hinges on the distinction between particular and general. As for mentalistic talk of purpose, much of it exceeds the scope of all possible physicalistic discourse, either behavioral or neurological. Such is the way in general of mentalistic idioms of the so-called intensional kind. Some of the intensional idioms under consideration are thus of a piece with the mechanism by which language itself survives. Quite apart from the handing down of language, moreover, mentalistic language in the intensional mold is clearly indispensable to daily intercourse. An aptitude for intensional idioms of the sentence-embedding type must therefore be very nearly as old as language itself.
