Reading Day 1
IntentionalityEO #essay, #teaching, #intentionality, #visualisation
‘Teaching isn’t teaching unless the teacher intends to teach at any particular moment’. James Elkins (Why 93) Intentionality, as used by James Elkins, is explained as follows in the Oxford English dictionary: The fact of being deliberate or purposive.’ But, in this text I will be exploring intentionality more broadly as it is used in philosophy, described like this in the Oxford English dictionary: “The quality of mental states (for example thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) which consists in their being directed towards some object or state of affairs”. Let’s take a look at this intentionality. John Searle explains that you can direct your mind to Paris just as easily as you can direct it to New York, or to a chair just as easily as to a plane. It enables us to represent the world (Youtube). In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the idea behind intentionality is explained as the mind being constructed as a mental bow whose arrows could be aimed at different targets. That target could be to teach art, and with that there is the intention to teach. Searl distinguishes two modes of represen ting the world: “The mind to world direction of fit in which your perceptions tell you how the world really is. And the world to mind direction of fit in which your desires and intentions don’t fit how the world is but how we would like it to be or change it to be” (Youtube). So, for example, if I intend to open a door and I reach with my hand to open it, the world is changed in order to fit my intention.
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