Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prolegomena: The Terroir of Consciousness and the World
- Origins of the Essays
- Overview: A Story Line
- The Picture
- 1 Three Facets of Consciousness
- 2 The Cogito circa a.d. 2000
- 3 Return to Consciousness
- 4 Consciousness in Action
- 5 Background Ideas
- 6 Intentionality Naturalized?
- 7 Consciousness and Actuality
- 8 Basic Categories
- Coda: The Beetle in the Box
- Appendix: Background Conceptions of Ontology, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Mind, and Historical Philosophy
- Index
- References
5 - Background Ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prolegomena: The Terroir of Consciousness and the World
- Origins of the Essays
- Overview: A Story Line
- The Picture
- 1 Three Facets of Consciousness
- 2 The Cogito circa a.d. 2000
- 3 Return to Consciousness
- 4 Consciousness in Action
- 5 Background Ideas
- 6 Intentionality Naturalized?
- 7 Consciousness and Actuality
- 8 Basic Categories
- Coda: The Beetle in the Box
- Appendix: Background Conceptions of Ontology, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Mind, and Historical Philosophy
- Index
- References
Summary
Abstract. Here we study the background of intentionality and what I call background ideas. This chapter shows how everyday experiences depend for their intentional force on ideas extant in one's background culture. These ideas are abstract meaning entities (as in the classical Husserlian model of intentionality), but they arise only in particular historical cultures (they do not exist in a Fregean or Platonic heaven of ideas). And they could not mean what they do without that cultural background. Accordingly, the content of one's thinking, perceiving, willing, and so forth depends ontologically on one's background culture.
Segue. In “Consciousness in Action” we showed that our experience is not isolated within a solitary subject or disembodied mind: our conscious bodily actions are carried out in a physical and indeed social context, and that is part of their intentional content, their volitional meaning. But there is a further, logical reason why consciousness itself normally implicates the social world in which we live. For, as we see in the present chapter, the contents of our intentional experiences are themselves typically composed of concepts and rules of practice that are drawn from and depend on a rich background of ideas that form part of the cultural context in which we live. Normally, then, consciousness is not only embodied but en-cultured. This aspect of consciousness requires a sensitive basic ontology, as we shall explore in later chapters.
The world is so you have something to stand on.
Krauss and Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mind WorldEssays in Phenomenology and Ontology, pp. 147 - 175Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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