Draft:Brian Loar

• Comment: Bold text may be a sign of LLM, though I could be wrong. LLM's like Gemini will put words in bold, specifically text that you include in the prompt. Not only this, but nearly all of the text was added in a single edit. This may be normal, but it seems suspicious. WXchaser (talk) 15:02, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Brian Loar
Born	(1939-11-17)November 17, 1939 Brooklyn, New York City, U.S.
Died	March 31, 2014(2014-03-31) (aged 74)
Education
Education	University of Oxford (D.Phil.)
Philosophical work
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Institutions	University of Calgary, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, Rutgers University
Main interests	Philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, consciousness, intentionality, semantics
Notable ideas	Phenomenal concept strategy, psychological content, subjective intentionality, phenomenal intentionality

Brian F. Loar (November 17, 1939 – March 31, 2014) was an American philosopher who worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His work addressed semantics, reference, mental representation, propositional attitudes, mental content, consciousness, intentionality, and the relationship between subjective experience and the physical world.

Loar's work on phenomenal concepts became influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. His paper "Phenomenal States", first published in 1990, is associated with the development of what subsequently became known as the phenomenal concept strategy, an approach to reconciling physicalism with the apparent epistemic and explanatory gap between conscious experience and physical descriptions. His work on subjective and phenomenal intentionality also contributed to the development of contemporary theories on which phenomenal consciousness plays a fundamental role in intentionality.

Life and career

Loar was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 17, 1939. He studied philosophy at the University of Oxford. He received a B.Phil. in 1965 and subsequently completed a D.Phil. dissertation, Sentence meaning, at Magdalen College in 1972. His B.Phil. supervisor was A. J. Ayer, while his doctoral work developed partly out of discussions with Paul Grice and Stephen Schiffer.

After Oxford, Loar taught briefly at the University of Calgary and the University of Michigan, before moving to the University of Southern California in 1976. In 1983 he received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for a project entitled "Realism's foundations in the theory of meaning and in epistemology". He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in philosophy in 1983.

In 1994, Loar joined the philosophy department at Rutgers University. He taught there until his retirement in 2007. He died on March 31, 2014.

Philosophy

Philosophy of language and mental content

Loar's early work concerned the relationship between linguistic meaning and mental representation. His work engaged with the Gricean program of explaining linguistic representation in terms of the intentions and psychological states of language users.

In "The Semantics of Singular Terms" (1976), Loar addressed the semantics and reference of names and other singular terms and defended a version of the descriptivist theory of names in response to arguments associated with Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity.

His book Mind and Meaning, published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, developed an account of the relationships between linguistic meaning, belief, and psychological states. His work during this period addressed propositional attitudes, theories of meaning, reference, names in thought, functionalism, realism, verification, and the relationship between semantic and psychological explanation.

An important theme in Loar's work was the distinction between what he called social content and psychological content. In "Social Content and Psychological Content" (1988), Loar characterized social content as externally and socially determined and tied to language and communication, while psychological content concerns how a subject privately conceives things and is relevant to psychological explanation.

Loar argued that psychological content is narrow: it is determined by properties intrinsic to the subject rather than by the subject's social or physical environment. His arguments engaged with forms of externalism associated with Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, using cases derived from Putnam's Twin Earth, Burge's arthritis example, and Kripke's Pierre case.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses Loar's work as a motivation for narrow content based on introspective access. The difference in externally determined content between internally alike subjects, such as an individual and a Twin Earth counterpart, may not correspond to a difference accessible from the subject's own perspective.

Loar developed his defence of narrow content further in "Subjective Intentionality" (1987). He considered objections to narrow content, including the claim that narrow content could not genuinely be content because it lacked ordinary truth conditions, and developed what he called subjective intentionality as an account of intentional content from the subject's point of view.

Phenomenal concepts

Loar's best-known work on consciousness is "Phenomenal States", first published in 1990. The paper addresses arguments against physicalism that move from an epistemic or conceptual gap between phenomenal and physical descriptions to a metaphysical distinction between phenomenal and physical properties.

Loar accepted that there is a distinctive conceptual gap between phenomenal and physical descriptions but denied that such a gap establishes a corresponding metaphysical gap. He proposed that phenomenal concepts are a distinctive kind of recognitional concept. A person can recognize and think about a kind of conscious experience directly on the basis of undergoing it without thereby conceiving of the experience in physical or functional terms.

On Loar's account, a phenomenal concept and a physical or functional concept can therefore be conceptually independent while nevertheless referring to the same property. The apparent epistemic or explanatory gap between phenomenal consciousness and the physical need not imply the existence of non-physical phenomenal properties.

This approach became associated with the phenomenal concept strategy, a family of physicalist responses to arguments concerning the apparent explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical. Versions of the strategy have subsequently formed part of debates over the knowledge argument, conceivability arguments, and the explanatory gap.

Phenomenal intentionality

Loar's later work increasingly examined the relationship between intentionality and conscious experience. Building on his earlier account of subjective intentionality, he developed the idea that thought can possess a narrow kind of content in addition to referential content determined by relationships between a subject and the external world.

In "Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content" (2003), Loar argued that in addition to referential content, thought possesses a narrow and non-referential content whose origins lie in phenomenal features of perceptual experience.

Loar characterized this narrow content in terms of the directedness or purporting to refer of perceptions and thoughts. Because purporting to refer does not require successful reference to an external object, internally identical subjects can share this kind of intentionality even when their external environments differ. Loar nevertheless allowed actual reference and truth conditions to depend upon relations between subjects and their environments.

This view became part of the contemporary research program on phenomenal intentionality, according to which phenomenal consciousness plays a fundamental role in accounting for at least some forms of intentionality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies Loar's 2003 argument as one argument from internalism to phenomenal intentionality and classifies Loar among proponents of a moderate form of phenomenal intentionality theory, on which non-phenomenal intentional states may derive their intentionality through their relationships to phenomenal intentional states.

The connection between this later view and Loar's earlier defence of narrow content is also discussed in the literature on narrow mental content. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies Loar's 2003 work as one source of an argument for narrow content from phenomenal intentionality.

Reception and influence

Loar's work has been discussed in the literatures on mental content, consciousness, and intentionality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses his 1988 account in connection with arguments for narrow content and his 2003 work in its account of the argument from phenomenal intentionality. Its entry on phenomenal intentionality also identifies Loar as an early proponent of views close to what is now called moderate phenomenal intentionality theory.

Robert Stalnaker responded to Loar's account of psychological content in his work on narrow content. Stalnaker argued that the cases discussed by Loar did not require psychologically explanatory content itself to be narrow, and later suggested that aspects of Loar's account could be interpreted in terms of diagonal propositions.

Loar's account of phenomenal concepts in "Phenomenal States" became a prominent version of the phenomenal concept strategy and has been discussed in subsequent debates over physicalism, phenomenal knowledge, and the explanatory gap.

A posthumous collection of Loar's papers, Consciousness and Meaning: Selected Essays, edited by Katalin Balog and Stephanie Beardman, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The collection divides his work into philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In a review of the collection, philosopher Joseph Levine noted the continuity between Loar's work in the two areas and discussed his contributions to debates over narrow content, physicalism, phenomenal concepts, and consciousness.

In 2020, Routledge published Sensations, Thoughts, Language: Essays in Honour of Brian Loar, edited by Arthur Sullivan. The collection contains essays addressing Loar's work on semantics, reference, functionalism, externalism, intentionality, consciousness, and the phenomenal concept strategy.

Selected publications

Books

• Mind and Meaning. Cambridge University Press, 1981.
• Consciousness and Meaning: Selected Essays. Edited by Katalin Balog and Stephanie Beardman. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Selected articles and chapters

• "The Semantics of Singular Terms". Philosophical Studies 30 (1976): 353–377. doi:10.1007/BF00372537
• "Subjective Intentionality". Philosophical Topics 15 (1) (1987): 89–124. doi:10.5840/philtopics198715113
• "Social Content and Psychological Content". In Robert H. Grimm and Daniel D. Merrill (eds.), Contents of Thought. University of Arizona Press, 1988.
• "Phenomenal States". Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990): 81–108. doi:10.2307/2214188
• "Reference from the First-Person Perspective". Philosophical Issues 6 (1995): 53–72.
• "Qualia, Properties, Modality". Philosophical Issues 13 (1) (2003): 113–129. doi:10.1111/1533-6077.00008
• "Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content". In Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge. MIT Press, 2003. Reprinted in Consciousness and Meaning: Selected Essays, pp. 291–318. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199673353.003.0017

See also

• Philosophy of mind
• Philosophy of language
• Internalism and externalism
• Physicalism
• Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
• Phenomenal consciousness
• Qualia
• Explanatory gap
• Knowledge argument
• Twin Earth thought experiment

Further reading

• Alter, Torin; Walter, Sven, eds. (2007). Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195171655.
• Sullivan, Arthur, ed. (2020). Sensations, Thoughts, Language: Essays in Honour of Brian Loar. Routledge. ISBN 9781032337906.

External links

• Brian Loar at the Rutgers University Department of Philosophy