meaning which can be thought of as the conjunction of two claims: (1) facts about what expressions mean are to be explained, or analyzed, in terms of facts about what speakers mean by utterances of them, and (2) facts about what speakers mean by their utterances can be explained in terms of their intentions.
Propositional theories of meaning fail precisely because they have a great deal of trouble accounting for situations where our words don’t match our intentions.
It’s not good enough to just be a consequentialist rather than a virtue ethicist. You have to be a conequentialist for the right reasons or it doesn’t count.
Intentions are physical facts about brains. If you care about those particular physical facts, then you can be a consequentialist who cares about intentions.
Often, some of the physical facts that determine whether a certain word applies to a certain situation happen to be physical facts that fall under the heading of “intentions”.
It’s just… if “intention always matters” when choosing which word to use to describe someone else’s actions, you spend an inordinate amount of time not knowing how to describe something while you gather data on the other agent’s intentions, data which may not ever be definitive. That seems to rather miss the point of language.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/#GriPro
Propositional theories of meaning fail precisely because they have a great deal of trouble accounting for situations where our words don’t match our intentions.
Intention always matters.
What does it say about me that my first instinctive response was “I’m a consequentialist, not a virtue ethicist.”
It’s not good enough to just be a consequentialist rather than a virtue ethicist. You have to be a conequentialist for the right reasons or it doesn’t count.
Intentions are physical facts about brains. If you care about those particular physical facts, then you can be a consequentialist who cares about intentions.
Often, some of the physical facts that determine whether a certain word applies to a certain situation happen to be physical facts that fall under the heading of “intentions”.
It’s just… if “intention always matters” when choosing which word to use to describe someone else’s actions, you spend an inordinate amount of time not knowing how to describe something while you gather data on the other agent’s intentions, data which may not ever be definitive. That seems to rather miss the point of language.