I make no claims about aboutness. Rather, I understand how the pebble-and-bucket system works. If you want to claim that there is a thing called “aboutness” which remains unresolved, it’s up to you to define it.
Then, to call this an “account of aboutness”, you should explain what it is about the human mind that makes it feel as though there is this thing called “aboutness” that feels so mysterious to so many. As you put so well here: “Your homework assignment is to write a stack trace of the internal algorithms of the human mind as they produce the intuitions that power the whole damn philosophical argument.”
If you did this in your essay, it was too dispersed for me to see it as I skimmed. What I saw was a caricature of the rationalizations people use to justify their beliefs. I didn’t see the origin of the intuitions standing behind their beliefs.
Then, to call this an “account of aboutness”, you should explain what it is about the human mind that makes it feel as though there is this thing called “aboutness” that feels so mysterious to so many. As you put so well here: “Your homework assignment is to write a stack trace of the internal algorithms of the human mind as they produce the intuitions that power the whole damn philosophical argument.”
If you did this in your essay, it was too dispersed for me to see it as I skimmed. What I saw was a caricature of the rationalizations people use to justify their beliefs. I didn’t see the origin of the intuitions standing behind their beliefs.