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Intension: ''Not to be confused with the homophone intention; or the related concept of intentionality. For the song "Intension" by Tool, see ''10,000 Days|10,000 Days''.''
Intension refers to the ''possible'' things a word or phrase ''could'' describe. It stands in contradistinction to extension (semantics)|extension (or ''denotation''), which refers to the ''actual'' things the word or phrase ''does'' describe. For example, the intension of the word "car" is the all-inclusive concept of a car, including, for example, mile-length|long cars made of chocolate that may not actually exist, while the extension of "car" is all actual instances of cars (past, present, and future), which will amount to millions or 1000000000 (number)|billions of cars, but probably does not include any mile-long cars made of chocolate.
In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other field of study|fields, an '''intension''' is any property (philosophy)|property or quality connoted by a word, phrase or other symbol. In the case of a word, it is often implied by the word's definition. The term may also refer to all such intensions collectively, although the term ''comprehension (logic)|comprehension'' is technically more correct for this.
The meaning of a word can be thought of as the bond between ''the idea or thing the word refers to'' and ''the word itself''. Switzerland|Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure contrasts three concepts:
- the ''signified'' — the concept or idea that a sign evokes.
- the ''signifier'' — the "sound image" or string of Letter (alphabet)|letters on a page that one recognition|recognizes as a sign.
- the ''referent'' — the actual Object (philosophy)|thing or set of things a sign refers to. See ''Sign (semiotics)#Dyadic signs|Dyadic signs'' and ''Reference#Semantics|Reference (semantics)''.
Intension is analogy|analogous to the signified, extension to the referent. The intension thus links the signifier to the sign's extension. Without intension of some sort, words can have no meaning.
In philosophical arguments about dualism versus monism, it is noted that thoughts have intensionality and physical objects do not (S.E. Palmer, 1999)
Intension and ''intensionality'' (the state of having intension) should not be confused with ''intention'' and ''intentionality'', which are pronunciation|pronounced the same and occasionally arise in the same philosophy|philosophical context. Where this happens, the letter 's' or 't' is sometimes Italic type|italicized to emphasis|emphasize the distinction.
See also
- Comprehension (logic)|Comprehension
- Description Logic
- Intensional definition
- Intensional statement
- Intensional logic
References
- Ferdinand De Saussure: ''Course in General Linguistics''. Open Court Classics, July 1986. ISBN 0-812-69023-0
- S. E. Palmer, Vision Science: From Photons to Phenomenology, 1999. MIT Press, ISBN 78-0262161831
External links
- Rapaport, William J. sionality">v. Intentionality".
Category:Logic
Category:Semantics
Category:Philosophical terminology
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