Month: July 2021

Analysis of a Passage from Husserl’s Logical Investigations

Ed sends this:

Just found this very odd quote from Logical Investigations:

If I have an idea of the god Jupiter, this god is my presented object, he is ‘immanently present’ in my act, he has ‘mental inexistence’ in the latter, or whatever expression we may use to disguise our true meaning. I have an idea of the god Jupiter: This means that I have a certain presentative experience, the presentation-of-the-god-Jupiter is realized in my consciousness. This intentional experience may be dismembered as one chooses in descriptive analysis, but the god Jupiter naturally will not be found in it. The ‘immanent’, ‘mental object’ is not therefore part of the descriptive or real makeup (deskriptiven reellen Bestand) of the experience, it is in truth not really immanent or mental. But it also does not exist extramentally, it does not exist at all. This does not prevent our-idea-of-the-god-Jupiter from being actual, a particular sort of experience or particular mode of mindedness (Zumutesein), such that he who experiences it may rightly say that the mythical king of the gods is present to him, concerning whom there are such and such stories. If, however, the intended object exists, nothing becomes phenomenologically different. It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or it is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of a regular thousand-faced solid.

This relates to my earlier question. What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?

1) Note first that 'inexistence' does not mean non-existence. This is a very common mistake made by most analytic philosophers.  When I am thinking about the god Jupiter, with or without imagery, Jupiter is the intentional object of my act. An act is an intentional (lived) experience, ein intentionales Erlebnis.  It is a mental item I live through, a psychic content if you will, "realized in my consciousness."  But every act has an intentional object (IO), just as every such object is the object of an act.    In the Jupiter case, the intentional object does not exist in reality.  So we say that it is a merely intentional object (MIO).  To say that this IO is inexistent in the act is just to say that the act has an intentional object which may or may not exist (in reality) without prejudice either to the directedness of the act or to the identity of the act.  (The identity of an act token is determined by its IO; equivalently, act tokens are individuated by their IOs.) So don't confuse 'inexistent' with 'non-existent.' Every intentional object is inexistent, but only some are non-existent. If an IO is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.

2) Mental acts, not to be confused with mental (or physical) actions,  are occurrent episodes of object-directed experiencing.  Acts exist in reality. Obviously, Jupiter is not a real part or constituent of my act when I think of Jupiter.  Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof. (The same goes for the PLANET  Jupiter. I have a big head, and a broad mind, but not that big of a head or that broad of a mind.)   But neither does the god Jupiter exist in reality, extramentally.  As H. says, "it does not exist at all."  This much is clear. Jupiter is not in my head, nor in my mind as a real constituent of the mental events and processes that occur when I am thinking about Jupiter. It is also not an extramental existent.  Jupiter is before my mind as the intentional object of my act.  This object is what it is whether or not it exists in reality.  Suppose we are all wrong, and the god Jupiter does exist in reality. Nothing would change phenomenologically, as H. says.

3) Ed asks, "What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?"  

It is not the idea-of-Jupiter because that is the act — the occurrent episode of object-directed experiencing — I live through when I think of Jupiter.  We cannot say that because Jupiter does not exist in reality, it must exist in my head or in my mind. That is nonsense as Twardowski made clear.   

The intentional object is also not a really existent extramental thing.

The intentional object is Jupiter himself, a transcendent non-existent item.  The above passage seems headed in a Meinongian direction.  How this comports with the strict correlativity of act and intentional object is surely a problem.

Buckner on Intentionality

I decided to insert a brief critique of London Ed into one of the intentionality chapters of my book in progress. Here it is:

One mistake to avoid is the conflation of object-directedness with object-dependence. D. E. Buckner speaks of an “. . . illusion that has captured the imagination of philosophers for at least a hundred years: intentionality, sometimes called object-dependence, a supposed unmediated relationship between thought and reality . . . .” (Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? Rowman and Littlefield, 2020, p. 195) Apart from his eliminativism about intentionality, Buckner is doubly mistaken in his characterization of it. No one except Buckner has, to my knowledge, characterized intentionality in general from Brentano on down as object-dependence, but it is standard, especially among analytic philosophers, to characterize it in terms of object-directedness. As George Molnar puts it,

The fundamental feature of an intentional state or property is that it is directed to something beyond itself . . . All mental states and processes have an internal reference to an object. The identity of the intentional state is defined in terms of this intentional object. . . . Since intentionality constitutes the identity of mental phenomena, it follows that the nexus between the mental state or process in question and its intentional object is non-contingent. (Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 62, second and third emphases added.)

Molnar goes on to make the usual points that the intentional object may or may not exist and that intentional objects are property-indeterminate (Ibid.) Given this intentionality 'boilerplate,' it should be clear that object-directedness and object-dependence are distinct notions that pull in opposite directions. Given that the nexus of act and intentional object is non-contingent, the identity of the act and its directedness does not depend on an external object. An object-directed thought need not be object-dependent in the sense of requiring an external thing for its identity. If I am thinking of Lucifer, I have a definite object in mind, an object to which my thought is directed. But of course, having an object in mind is no guarantee of its existence 'outside' the mind. The Lucifer-thought is what it is whether or not its intentional object is real. The thought does not depend on a real object for its identity or its directedness. The directedness of the thought is intrinsic to it and not supplied by a relation to a thing in the external world. This is why Brentano denies that intentionality is a relation, strictly speaking, but only something relation-like. Relations, standardly understood, require for their obtaining the real existence of all of their relata; many of our acts of thinking, however, are directed at objects that do not exist, and this without prejudice to the identity of these acts. This is not to deny that there may be some object-dependent thoughts, where an object is a real thing in nature. Perhaps it is the case that (some) meanings “ain't in the head” (H. Putnam) but are in the external world in roughly the way the meaning of the demonstrative 'this' is exhausted by the real thing to which it refers on a particular occasion of its use; intentionality theory, however, in both the phenomenological and analytic traditions has had from the outset a decidedly internalist bias, where internalism is the view that the individuation of mental items depends entirely on factors internal to the subject and not on any factors external to the subject as on externalism. This should come as no surprise since phenomenology is philosophy from the first-person point of view.

Buckner's first mistake is to interpret intentionality along the lines of an externalist model when this model makes hash of what the main thinkers have maintained, including Brentano, Husserl and Chisholm. His second mistake is his claim that the intentional nexus is unmediated or direct, a conceit belied by Husserl's doctrine of the noema.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some California Tunes from a Happier Time

Sir Douglas Quartet, Mendocino, 1969. This one goes out to Mendocino Joe.

Eric Burdon and the Animals, Monterey. This one goes out to Monterey Tom. 

Eagles, Hotel California.  Some of finest guitar-slinging of the '70s.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lodi

GG Kettel, San Francisco Bay Blues. Ferrara, Italy, 2007

Scott Mackenzie, San Francisco

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln. San Pedro, Grapevine Hill. 

Doors, L. A. Woman

Beach Boys, California Girls

Mamas and Papas, California Dreamin'

Dave Bagwill comments (4 July):

Bill, listening to that Beach Boys tune tonight brought back a vivid memory.
 
Back when I lived in the Bay Area, and the Oakland A's were winning lots of ball games – Catfish Hunter, Sal Bando, Reggie Jackson (who made a throw from deep right field, at the fence, on a line to third base -on the base, in fact – catching a runner who had tagged at second base), Rick Monday et. al. – I attended a Saturday afternoon double-header with a friend from the bank.
 
It was a perfect day for baseball, and the stands were sold out; it felt great, until the first music pumped out of that stupendous sound system – and then it felt even better. 'California Girls' started playing, and just the first two or three beats was enough to electrify the crowd into a spontaneous rising and a thunderous roar of happiness.
 
It was just great to be an American, and that song was a huge part of the 'gestalt' = weather, a ball game, hot dogs, friendship, the flag, a sense of security and fellowship. And Sal Bando hit two home runs in the first game.

The Sense in which I am Australian

John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View, Oxford 2003, pp. vii-viii:

. . . the paradigmatic Australian trait: ontological seriousness. You are ontologically serious if you are guided by the thought that the ontological implications of philosophical claims are paramount. The attitude most naturally expresses itself in an allegiance to a truth-maker principle: when an assertion about the world is true, something about the world makes it true.

Such an attitude could be contrasted to the idea that, in pursuing philosophical questions, we must start with language and work our way outwards. My belief is that this attitude is responsible for the sterile nature of much contemporary analytical philosophy. If you start with language and try to work your way outwards, you will never get outside language. In that case, descriptions of the world, or 'stories', go proxy for the world. Perhaps there is something about the Australian continent that discourages this kind of 'hands-off' philosophizing. 

The above partially explains why Edward Buckner, my main sparring partner for many years, and I are ever at loggerheads. I am ontologically serious in Heil's sense, and Buckner is not. It regularly seems to me that he is pushing some sort of linguistic idealism. I have never been able to get him to understand the truth-maker principle.  Perhaps there is something about the British Isles . . . . 

And then there is David Brightly, also an Englishman. On Possibility, a discussion with Mr. Brightly,  brings out some of the differences in approach of dwellers in fog and desert dwellers.