Talk:Intension

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Must "intension" refer to a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, or can "intension" take more complex (and perhaps more psychologically plausible) forms, such as a fuzzy categories with "prototype effects"? In otherwords, can I use the word "intension" without comitting myself to classical categories?

Also, would it be misleading to add a comment that extension is somehow "in the world", while intension is somehow "in the mind". (The answer is yes.) Is there a better way to put this?

--Ryguasu 00:37 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

Uhh, I'm pretty sure these pages are a bit mixed up. What is described as Intension here should be on the Intention page. As in Intentionality. At least that is my understanding from reading.. (Page 58 onwards) "Why Humans Have Cultures" by Michael Carrithers, 1992, Opus / Oxford Uni. Press.

-- FeFiFoFum 22:43 Jan 8, 2004 (GMT)

[edit] Recent 'cleanup'

The recent anon edit that dealt with the 'cleanup' tag seems to have done so by removing most of the content of the page, which apart from some structuring issues, and the unfortunate example, seemed essentially sound to me. What we have in its place is terse, opaque, and is much reduced in scope. (You'd never guess from this it was a term in philosophy, maths, and computing science.) I'd propose to restore most of the deleted text, unless someone has specific objections... Alai 04:36, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with connotation article?

Or can anyone think of a worthy difference between these two words? Since Quine's "Two Dogmas...", they've been treated as synonyms. Lucidish 1 July 2005 19:33 (UTC)

No, I think they differ on some points. Intension is used in relation to semantic opacity in a way that connotation is not. For example, "John believes that . . ." creates an intensional context for a sentence, meaning that expression with the same semantic value can't be intersubstituted within it. You could stretch "connotation" to fit this, but to my knowledge it isn't done. The connotation/denotation pair, furthermore, has a casual (or historical?) use that doesn't line up with its technical use. In many contexts a word's connotations are its "suggested" meanings: Nigger, for example, has negative connotations that Black does not. We would not say they differ in intention. (Technically: intension seems to be wholly a matter of semantics. Connotation is also a matter of pragmatics.)

So intension and connotation overlap, but each have distinct meanings as well.

• JA: Distinguo. There is a rather vast literature on this issue that flows on before, around, and after Quine. And Quine had deliberately non-standard — if there ever was a standard — accounts of things like denotation, extension, function, relation, not to mention connotation, intension, intention, modality, and so on. Yes, it will take some triangulation work to stake out the exact transmission locations of the varied and sundried perspectives, but that work will not be served by slashing, burning, and mushing things together that the analytic philosophers of the 1900's were awonton to do. Jon Awbrey 13:24, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Excellent description

I usually avoid Wikipedia articles about mathematics or logic because they tend to overcomplicate otherwise simple concepts, so I'm pleased to say that this paragraph...

Intension is generally discussed with regard to extension (or denotation). Intension refers to the set of all possible things a word could describe, extension to the set of all actual things the word describes. For example, the intension of a car is the all-inclusive concept of a car, including, for example, mile-long cars made of chocolate that may not actually exist. But the extension of 'car' is all actual instances of cars (past, present, and future), which will amount to millions or billions of cars, but probably does not include any mile-long cars made of chocolate.

...is a great example of good writing. Less than a minute of reading and I understood a new concept. So congratulations to the author who realised complex formal definitions aren't the only way to get your point across! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.92.169.164 (talk) 12:58, 7 March 2007 (UTC).