About vs Concerns

Daniel Morgan defends a ‘naïve’ idea about intentionality: a judgment is about an object if, and only if, that object figures in its truth-conditions. Some authors have suggested that a child’s judgment that it is 4pm, for example, is about the time of day, while it merely concerns the time zone she inhabits. Yet Morgan argues that any such about/concerns distinction must be linked to a variety of phenomena in order to be explanatory of any: after all, the hypothesis of a dormitive power is of no theoretical use; it does not explain the production of sleep, but only labels its occurrence. One might think that some objects figuring in the truth-conditions of a judgment are contributed by its content, and others by the act itself: but this would not explain why only some of the commitments we incur in judging are immune to error - assuming the idea of such ‘innocent commitments’ to be intelligible; nor is it plausible to suggest that ‘parochial’ elements of truth-conditions which the subject cannot vary in her judgments are contributed by the act - only a gerrymandered taxonomy of the mental could yield this result. Better to stick with the naïve view and recognize that judgment types are individuated by their truth-conditions.