Seeing: Internalist and Externalist Perspectives

This is a second entry in response to Hennessey.  The first is here.

Consider again this aporetic tetrad:

1. If S sees x, then x exists

2. Seeing is an intentional state

3. Every intentional state is such that  its intentional object is incomplete

4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent.  Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.

But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands.  At least one of the limbs is false, but which one?   I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection.  That leaves (1) or (2).

I incline toward the rejection of (1).  Seeing is an intentional state but it is not  existence-entailing.  My seeing of x does not entail the existence of x.  What one sees (logically) may or may not exist.  There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature.  The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.

The meat of Hennessey's response consists in rejecting (3) and runs as follows:

. . . it does not seem to me to be right that the object of an intentional state “is incomplete.” If he and I were both looking at the cat of which he makes mention, I of course from the left and he of course from the right, [of course!] neither of us would see the side of the cat which the other would see. The cat, however, would be complete, lacking neither side. And we would each be seeing the same complete cat, though I would be seeing it as or qua visible from the left and he would be seeing it as or qua visible from the right.

There is a scholastic distinction that should be brought to bear here, the distinction between the “material object” of an intentional act such as seeing and its “formal object.” My vision of the cat and Bill’s vision of the cat has the same material object, the cat. But they have distinct formal objects, the cat as or qua visible from the left and the cat as or qua visible from the right.

5. I conclude, then, that rather than adopting limbs (2), (3), and (4) as premises in an argument the conclusion of which is the negation of (1), we should adopt limbs (1), (2), and (4) as premises in an argument the conclusion of which is the negation of (3). Seeing is an existence-entailing intentional state. But I stand ready to be corrected.

Richard's response is a reasonable one, and of course I accept the distinction he couches in scholastic terminology, that between the material and the formal object of an act.  That is a distinction that needs to be made in any adequate account. If I rightly remember my Husserl, he speaks of the object as intended and the object intended. Both could be called the intentional object.

What I meant by 'intentional object' in (3) above is the object precisely as intended in the act, the cogitatum qua cogitatum, or intentum qua intentum, precisely as correlate of the intentio, the Husserlian noema precisely as correlate of the Husserlian noesis, having all and only the properties it appears to have.  It seems obvious that the formal object, the object-as-intended, must be incomplete.  Suppose I am looking at a wall.  I can see it only from one side at a time, not from all sides at once.  What's more, the side I see as material object is not identical to the formal object of my seeing.  For the side I am seeing (and that is presumably a part-cause of my seeing it) has properties that I don't see or are otherwise aware of.  For example, I might describe the formal object as 'beige wall'  even though the wall in reality (if there is one)  is a beige stucco wall: I am too far away to see if it has a stucco surface or not.  The wall in reality, if there is one, must of course be one or the other.  But the formal object is indeterminate with respect to the property of having a stucco surface.

Here is a further wrinkle.  Necessarily, if x is beige, then x is colored.  But if I see x as beige, it does not follow that I see it as colored.  So it would seem that formal objects are not closed under property entailment.

This is why I consider (3) to be unassailably true. Richard and I both accept (2) and (4).  But he rejects (3), while I reject (1).

So far, then, a stand-off.  But there is a lot more to say.

Related articles

More With Novak on the Real Distinction

On Seeing: Intentionality without Aspectuality?

The Epistemologically Primary Sense of 'See'

On Multiplying Modes of Existence

Merely Intentional Objects and the 'Existential Fallacy'

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

Phenomenon and Existence