Category: Intentionality

How Should We Use ‘Intentional Object’? Is the IO the Thing Itself?

Dr. Buckner comments,

. . . we still need to agree on a clear definition of ‘Intentional Object’. Here are two other definitions I found.

Tim Crane: what an intentional state is about.
Merriam Webster: something whether actually existing or not that the mind thinks about.

These are both very clear, and I suggest we adopt them. That is, if BV is thinking about (or ‘of’) the Washington Monument, then the Intentional Object of his thinking is the Washington Monument itself. If the Washington Monument is then blown into a billion pieces by high explosive and the remains scattered to the four points of the US, and it no longer exists, and if we agree that BV is still thinking about the WM, then the Intentional Object is still the WM.

Do you agree? 

No.

If we adopt both of  the definitions cited, Crane and Webster, then the intentional object (IO) of a mental act or intentional state is the item to which the act is directed, an item which may or may not exist without prejudice to the existence and specific directedness of the act. That is: the specific directedness of the act (which is phenomenologically accessible to the subject of the act via reflection*) is what it is whether or not the IO exists. So Buckner is telling us that if I am thinking of or about the WM over an interval of time during which, unbeknownst to me, the WM goes from existing to not existing, then the  WM itself is the IO both when it exists and after it ceases to exist.

But this implies that my thinking becomes objectless when the WM ceases to exist. And that contradicts the thesis of intentionality according to which, necessarily, to think is to think of something.  In the form of a reductio ad absurdum:

a) The intentional object = the thing itself, not some epistemic deputy or intermediary in the mind or between mind and thing.  In our example the IO = the WM , a massive marble obelisk that exists extramentally if it exists at all. (Bucknerian assumption for reductio)

b) No mental act exists without an intentional object. (Thesis of Intentionality)

Therefore

c) No mental act exists if the thing itself to which the act is directed does not exist.  (From (a) and (b))

Therefore

d) My mental act of thinking of the WM does not exist if the WM does not exist. (From (c))

But

e) My mental act of thinking  of the WM continues to exist after the WM ceases to exist. (Phenomenological datum)

Therefore

f) (d) contradicts (e).

Therefore

g) (a) is false: the IO is not identical to the thing itself. (By reductio ad absurdum)

_____________

*In other words, I know, with certainty, both that I am thinking about something when I am thinking about something, and what I am thinking about when I think about it.  Husserl's phenomenology is committed to this thesis (cf. Ideas I, sec. 36) but it is notoriously denied by Ruth Garrett Millikan whose theory of intentionality is radically externalist. Cf. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, p. 92 ff.

Guest Post: On the Fallacy of Intentionalism

ON THE FALLACY OF INTENTIONALISM

D.E. Buckner, July 2021

Bill Vallicella critiques a short passage in my recent book (Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? Rowman and Littlefield, 2020, p. 195) and he levels the following four charges.

1. Buckner has wrongly characterised intentionality as object-dependence.

2. Buckner has wrongly interpreted intentionality along the lines of an externalist model.

3. Buckner has wrongly claimed that the intentional nexus is unmediated or direct.

4. Buckner has wrongly characterised intentionality as a relation.

Here is the case for the defence.

Preliminaries

Some preliminaries. I shall distinguish Intentionality, properly so-called, from Intentionalism. Intentionality is a mental phenomenon which we cannot report without using some relational expression – an intentional verb phrase. For example “Jake is thinking about Zeus”, which predicates the mental state ‘thinking about Zeus’ of Jake using the intentional verb phrase ‘is thinking about’.

Intentionalism, by contrast, I call the philosophical doctrine about intentionality which involves the implicit assumption that statements using intentional verb phrases imply statements which use non-intentional verb phrases. For example, Brentano gets his classic (but false) statement “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself”, using the non-intentional verb ‘includes’ (enthält), from the perfectly true claim that “In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on”, which involves intentional verbs like ‘love’ and ‘desire’.

As I argue in Reference and Identity (chapter 7) that there is no such implication. It is illicit to infer statements using non-intentional (I call these ‘logically transitive’) verbs from statements using intentional (or ‘logically intransitive’) verbs. A verb phrase R is intentional if “a R b” is consistent with there being no such thing as b, otherwise it is non-intentional. An intentional verb phrase Ri takes a grammatical accusative, but no logical accusative, that is, there doesn’t have to be an object corresponding to the accusative. Thus, if Ri is intentional and Rt is non-intentional, “a Ri b” does not imply “a Rt b,” since the former is consistent with there being no such thing as b, whereas the latter is not, that is, the former can be true when the latter is not. For example, “Tobit refers to Asmodeus” does not imply “Tobit is related to Asmodeus,” for ‘refers to’ is intentional whereas “is related to” is not. (R&I p.124)

There are two forms of the Fallacy. The first is the move from a construction which is intentional to one which is non-intentional. The second form is the move to a subject-predicate construction where the subject corresponds to the grammatical accusative of the intentional construction.

As an example of the first form of the fallacy, we have Brentano’s move from “Jake desires something”, “Jake loves something” and so on, to “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself”. But “Jake desires a happy life” is an intentional construction, from which we cannot validly infer the statements “Jake’s mental state (of desire) includes something”, or “Jake’s mental state is directed at something”, for these statements use non-intentional verbs. If A includes or contains B, it follows that something, namely B, is included or contained in A. But no such thing follows from “Jake desires a happy life”. Nothing has to be included or contained or directed at in Jake’s mental state on account of his desiring a happy life. Such a life may be beyond him for now.

Other examples of the first form are:

“Mental states and events are directed at objects” (Searle).

If A is directed at or points at B, there is something that is pointed at.

“Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist” (Vallicella, link).

“Refer beyond … to” is a non-intentional construction, implying that there is something that is referred to.

“… my thinking of Max ‘reaches’ beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat.” (Vallicella, link).

“the [mental] act has an intentional object” (Vallicella, link).

‘Targets’ is non-intentional, as is ‘has’.

The second form of the fallacy is the move from a non-intentional construction to a subject-predicate sentence where the subject is a noun phrase signifying the Intentional Object, and the predicate a noun phrase qualifying the ‘Object’ in some way. Examples:

“Jupiter is before my mind as the intentional object of my act.”

“Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof.”

“If an I[ntentional]O[bject] is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.”

“The intentional object is Jupiter himself”

“Jupiter is the intentional object of my act.”

Pretty much any paragraph by Vallicella will contain at least one instance of the Fallacy. He will likely complain that my point is a nicety of language, and not a genuine metaphysical one. I reply, my point is a logical one, not merely linguistic, and concerns the statements that we can validly derive from ascriptions of mental states like “Jake is thinking of a unicorn”. Whether we can validly derive one statement from another, even if it is a ‘metaphysical’ statement, is a question of logic, not linguistic usage, and Continental philosophers should pay more attention to logic.

In summary, to move from “Jake is thinking of Lucifer” to “Jake’s mental state includes (or contains, or is directed to or targeted at) something” is to commit the fallacy of Intentionalism.

In the next post, I shall reply to the four ‘charges’ above.

Some Questions about Thinking, Relations, and Relational Expressions

Bill, you said by email earlier that the sentence “Jake is thinking of Zeus” would be true if Jake was indeed thinking of Zeus.

BV: That's what I said, although I would put 'is' where you have 'was.' Is what I said  a shocking thing to say?

I have questions for you about the terms ‘obtains’ and ‘satisfies’.

(1) If “Jake is thinking of Zeus” is true, and assuming there is no such thing as Zeus, then does the relation “– is thinking of –” obtain? According to what you said earlier, a relation cannot obtain if any its relata do not exist. But we normally think of a relation obtaining precisely in the case where the sentence which asserts the relation is true. What do you think?

BV: We cannot assume that thinking-of  is a relation if every relation is such that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata.   For in the case of Jake and Zeus only one of the relata exists, and it's not Zeus. And yet it is true that Jake is thinking of Zeus. I conclude that the sentence 'Jake is thinking of Zeus,' although grammatically relational, does not express a relational proposition.  The sentence needs a truth-preserving analysis that does not commit one to the existence of nonexistent things.  

Here are two different candidate analysantia. 'Jake is thinking Zeus-ly.' 'Jake is a Zeus-entertainer.' Neither of these sentences is grammatically relational, and both seem to preserve the truth of the analysandum without commitment to nonexistent things. I do not endorse either analysans.

(2) Is the relational expression “– is thinking of –” satisfied when “Jake is thinking of Zeus” is true? For example, is it satisfied by the two things Jake and Zeus respectively? If not, why not?

BV: No. Why not? Because Zeus does not exist. 

Object-Directedness and Object-Dependence

Intentionality cannot be identified with object-dependence. Here is why.

Suppose that  I begin thinking about some faraway thing such as the Washington Monument (WM) and  that I think of it without interruption through some short interval of time.  Half-way through the interval, unbeknownst to me, the monument is destroyed and ceases to exist.  Question: does my thinking become objectless half-way through the interval? Or does my thinking have an object and the same object throughout the interval?

The answer depends on what is meant by 'object.'  'Object' could mean the infinitely-propertied thing intended in the act of thinking, or it could mean that which is before my mind precisely as such with all and only the properties I think of the thing intended as having.  Either could be called the intentional object, which goes to show that 'intentional object' is ambiguous.  On the first alternative the intentional object = the real object; on the second, the intentional object is some sort of incomplete item that either plays an intermediary role, or else is a proper part of the thing intended.  (Husserl aficionados will gather that I am alluding to the difference between West Coast and  East Coast interpretations of the status and function of the noema .)  To avoid the ambiguity of 'intentional object,' I will distinguish the thing intended from the noema, leaving open how exactly the noema is to be understood. 

One answer to the above question is that, during the entire interval, my thinking has one and the same object, but this object is not the thing intended but the noema.   The noema is the thing-AS- intended in certain ways (under certain incomplete descrioptions) appropriate to finite minds such as we possess, for example, the x such that x is made of marble and honors George Washington. This distinction between noema and thing intended needs  explanation, of course, and it raises some difficult if not insoluble questions, but it fits the phenomenological facts.  When the WM ceases to exist, nothing changes phenomenologically. If the intentional object were the real, extra-mental, physical thing, then, when the WM ceases to exist, my conscious state would become objectless — which is not what happens.  So we need the distinction, and we must not conflate object-directedness with object-dependence.  

DEP: The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-dependent =df S's having objective reference entails the (extra-mental)  existence of the thing intended by S.

DIR:  The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-directed =df  S's having objective reference is logically consistent both with the (extra-mental) existence and (extra-mental) nonexistence of the thing intended by S.

If we understand aboutness in terms of (DIR), then the answer to my question is that nothing changes phenomenologically throughout the interval: my thinking has an object and the very same object throughout the interval despite the WM's ceasing to exist half-way though the interval.

(DEP) codifies an externalist understanding  of  'objective reference' whereas (DIR) codifies an internalist understanding.  On (DEP), it is the existence in the external world of the thing intended that grounds S's objective reference or aboutness; without this external ground S would lack aboutness, and S would be objectless.  On (DEP), then, the aboutness of a mental state is a relational property of the state as opposed to an intrinsic property thereof.  On (DIR), intrinsic features of the subject and his acts suffice to ground S's objective reference or aboutness.  This implies a strict act-object correlation: necessarily, every act has an object, and every object is the object of an act.

You will have noticed that 'object' has different senses in the above definitions. In (DEP), 'object' refers to a entity that exists in itself, and thus independently of the existence of minds and their acts. In (DIR), 'object' refers to an intentional correlate which cannot exist apart from minds and their acts.

I'll say a bit more by way of elaboration.

The thing intended is the monument itself, the infinitely-propertied physical thing. Surely that is what my thinking intends when I think about the WM and ask: How tall is it? What is its shape? What is it composed of? I am not asking about any content of my consciousness. So I am not asking about the occurrent episode of thinking itself, the act, or any other contents such as felt sensory data (Husserl's hyletic data).  Contents are immanent to consciousness and nothing immanent to my consciousness is 550 feet tall, made of marble, monolithic, or in the shape of an obelisk.  

Nor am I asking about the noema.  Noemata are akin to Fregean senses.  Like the latter, noemata cannot be made of marble or 550 feet tall. (This is the 'California' or 'West Coast' interpretation sired by Dagfinn Follesdal.) Like Fregean senses, they are not contents of consciousness that the subject experiences or lives through. Senses and noemata are more like objects than like contents, except that they are abstract or ideal objects that serve a mediating function.  The senses of 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' mediate my linguistic reference to that massive chunk of physical reality, the plant Venus. They are neither mental nor physical; they are 'third world' entities albeit more Platonic than Popperian.   Noemata are similar: they mediate thinking reference but are neither mental in the manner of a content of consciousness nor physical.  

But there is an important difference. Fregean senses exist whether or not minds and their contents exist.  They also exist whether or not physical items exist including marks on paper or acoustic disturbances in the air.   But noemata exist only as the correlates of acts or intentional experiencings. They have a curious in-between status. They are not contents of consciousness, but they are also not entities in their own right inasmuch as they exist only as correlates of acts.

Because noemata are ideal or abstract intermediaries, they do not have physical  properties and dispositions.  A tree is disposed to catch on fire if struck by lightning, say.  But no tree-noema can catch on fire. (See Husserl, Ideas I, sec. 89) 

 

Demarcation and Directedness: Notes on Brentano

Here again is the famous passage from Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874):

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself…(Brentano PES, 68)

Jedes psychische Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker des Mittelalters die intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl mit nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen ist), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden. Jedes enthält etwas als Objekt in sich… (Brentano, PES 124f)

1) For Brentano, intentionality is the mark of the mental: it is what distinguishes the mental from the physical. All and only mental phenomena are intentional.  Call this the Brentano Thesis (BT). It presupposes that there are mental items, and that there are physical items.  It implies that there is no intentionality below the level of conscious mind and no intentionality above the level of conscious mind.  BT both restricts and demarcates. It restricts intentionality to conscious mind  and marks off the mental from the physical.

2) BT does the demarcation job tolerably well. Conscious states possess content; non-conscious states do not. My marvelling at the Moon is a contentful state; the Moon's being cratered is not. Going beyond Brentano, I say that there are two ways for a conscious state to have content. One way is for there to be something it is like to be in that state.  Thus there is something it  like to feel tired, bored, depressed, elated, anxious, etc.  even when there is no specifiable object that one feels tired about, bored at, depressed over, elated about, anxious of, etc.  

Call such conscious contents non-directed. They do not refer beyond one's mental state to a transcendent object.  Other contents are object-directed. Suppose I am anxious over an encroaching forest fire that threatens to engulf my property. The felt anxiety has an object and this object is no part of my conscious state.  The content, which is immanent to my mental state, 'points' to a state of affairs that is transcendent of my mental state.  In short, there are two types of mental content, object-directed and non-object-directed.

3) 'Every consciousness is a consciousness of something' can then be taken to mean that every conscious state has content.  Read in this way, the dictum is immune to such counter examples as pain.  That pain is non-directed does not show that pain is not a content of consciousness.

4) Brentano conflates content and object, Inhalt and Gegenstand. The conflation is evident from the above quotation. As a consequence he does not distinguish directed and non-directed contents. This fact renders his theory of intentionality indefensible.

Suppose I am thirsting for a beer.  I am in a conscious mental state. This state has a qualitative side: there is something it is like to be in this state.  But the state is also directed to a transcendent state of affairs, my downing a bottle of beer, a state of affairs that does not yet exist, but is no less transcendent for that.  If Brentano were right, then my thirsting for a bottle of beer would be a process immanent in my conscious life — which is precisely what it is not.

5) To sum this up. Brentano succeeds with the demarcation project, but fails to explain the directedness of some mental contents, their reference beyond the mind to extramental items.   This failure is due to his failure to distinguish content and object, a distinction that first clearly emerges with his student Twardowski.

Brentano was immersed in Aristotle and the scholastics by his philosophical training and his priestly formation. Perhaps this explains his inability to get beyond the notion of intentionality as intentionale Inexistenz (inesse).

Brentano-c-470x260

 

 

Relations and Nonexistents

 Consider the following two sentences: 

a) Lions are smaller than dragons.
b) Mice are smaller than elephants.

From this datanic base a puzzle emerges. 

1) The data sentences are both true.
2) 'Smaller than' has the same sense in both (a) and (b).
3) In both (a) and (b), 'smaller than' has the same reference: it refers to a dyadic relation.
4) No relation holds or obtains unless all its relata exist.

What we have here is an aporetic tetrad. The four propositions just listed are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. What we have, then, is a philosophical problem in what I call canonical form. Any three  of the above four, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one.  Which limb of the tetrad should we reject?

One might reject (4) while upholding (1), (2), and (3).  Accordingly, some relations connect existents to non-existents.  It is true that lions are smaller than dragons despite it being the case that dragons do not exist.  The sense of 'smaller than' is the same in both (a) and (b).  And 'smaller than' picks out one and the same dyadic relation in both (a) and (b).

The idea here is that there is nothing in the nature of a relation to require that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata.  Contrast thinking about the Trevi Fountain in Rome and thinking about the Fountain of Youth. Some will say that in both cases the intentional nexus is a genuine relation since there is nothing in the nature of a relation (to be precise: a specific relatedness) to require that all of its relata exist.  It is the same relation, the intentional relation, whether I think of an existing item or think of a non-existent item.

If you don't like this solution you might try rejecting (2) while upholding the remaining limbs: 'smaller than' does not have the same sense in our data sentences. Accordingly, 'are smaller than' in (b) picks out a relation that actually connects mice and elephants.  But in (a), 'are smaller than' does not pick out that relation.  In (a), 'is smaller than' has the sense  'would be smaller than.'  We are thus to understand (a) as having the sense of 'Lions would be smaller than dragons if there were any.'

(2)-rejection arguably falls afoul of Grice's Razor, to wit: one ought not multiply senses beyond necessity. Here is what Grice himself says:

[O]ne should not suppose what a speaker would mean when he used a word in a certain range of cases to count as a special sense of the word, if it should be predictable, independently of any supposition that there is such a sense, that he would use the word (or the sentence containing it) with just that meaning. (Grice, 1989, pp. 47-48, Quoted from Andrea Marchesi, "A radical relationist solution to intentional inexistence," Synthese, 2021.)

Pick your poison.

 

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.

Lukáš Novák on Reference to What is Not

BV with Novotny (my right) and Novak (my left)What follows is a re-do of an entry that first saw the light of the blogosphere on the 4th of July, 2014. The draft Lukáš Novák (on my left in the photo) sent me back then for my comments has since appeared in print in Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics  (Volume 12: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics) eds.  Gyula Klima and Alexander W. Hall, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 155-188.  I note that our old sparring partner Edward Buckner has an article in this volume, "On the Authenticity of Scotus's Logical Works," pp. 55-84.

………………………………………

Our Czech friend Lukáš Novák sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:

(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.

In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view that he seems to be endorsing.

I. Novak's Scotistic View

Novak writes,

Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.

[. . .]

It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced.

[. . .]

In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.

[. . .]

And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:

[. . .]

In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (p. 181, emphases added)

II. Some Questions and Comments

As a matter of Moorean fact we do at least seem to refer both in thought and in speech to nonexistent objects and to say things about them, true and false.   The celebrated goldner Berg discussed by Bernard Bolzano, Kasimir Twardowski, Alexius von Meinong et al. is a stock  example. Suppose that I am thinking about the golden mountain (GM). Since I cannot think without thinking of something, when I am thinking of or about the GM, I am thinking of something.  But thinking is not like eating. Necessarily, if I eat something, that thing exists.   I cannot eat a nonexistent comestible. Eating takes an existing object; thinking, however, needn't take an existing object. But it must take an object. So it is quite natural to say that in the case before us, the act of thinking is directed to a nonexistent object.

That some objects do not exist (or have any mode of being at all) would seem to following directly from the intentionality or object-directedness of consciousness.  My act of thinking about the GM (or about Frodo, to use Novak's example), being intentional is directed to, intends, an object that is not part of the act, but transcendent of it.  It follows straightaway that some objects of thinking and linguistic reference have no being. So far, it seems that Dr. Novak is right: we must reject (P) according to which it is impossible to refer to that which is not.

But of course this is puzzling. An object that has no being is nothing. How then can I be thinking about something that is nothing? And if what I am thinking about is nothing at all, then how is my thinking of Frodo different from my thinking of the GM?  Acts are individuated by their objects; if the objects are nothing, then they do not differ and cannot serve to individuate the acts trained upon them. What's more, if the GM is nothing at all, then it has no properties; but it does have properties, ergo, etc.  So we have an aporetic dyad that needs solving:

a) The GM is something (because every thinking is a thinking of something, and I am thinking of the GM.)

b) The GM is nothing (because there are no mountains of gold in reality outside my mind, nor, for that matter, inside my mind).

 

If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy:

D1. Metaphysical possibilism is to be avoided.  We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being.  (Novak distinguishes metaphysical possibilism and actualism from semantic possibilism and actualism. Cf. p. 185) 

D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided.  We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceity properties  that stand in for mere possibilia.

D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational and not quasi-relational (etwas Relativliches) as in Brentano is to be respected and somehow accommodated.  No adverbial theories!

D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided.  Intentionality is real!

D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided.  When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!  

Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him.  He can tell me if my imputation is unjust.  In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands.  Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?

Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge.  If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a philosophical jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite.  But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God. See p. 185. And see my substantial post on deus-ex-machina objections in philosophy, here.  Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God.  Then he can be put to work.  Or, as my esteemed and fondly remembered teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."

So how does Novak's solution work? 

It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain.  But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being.  Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being.  In themselves, they have no being at all.  God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind. The intelligibility is not projected onto items external to the divine intellect.   And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility.  It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.

This is the theory, assuming I have understood it.  And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata (D1)-(D5) with the possible exception of (D3).  But here is one concern. We are being told that the intelligibility of the GM, for example, is due to a  wholly immanent operation on God's part. That is: no act of divine intellection is directed outward toward a transcendent object even if said object is beingless. But if the divine production of the intelligibility of the GM, say, is wholly immanent then this can only mean that the production proceeds by God's conceiving-GM-ly.  But this amounts to adverbialism and a denial of the relationality of intentionality, which Novak is otherwise committed to. Cf. the "pre-philosophical datum" mentioned on p. 186 according to which "we all know that we can refer to non-existing things" such as Frodo Baggins, and yet "we all know that they are not there."  Frodo, after all, is purely fictional item "made up" by Tolkien.   Talk of reference whether it be thinking reference or reference expressed verbally implies relationality: I am related to what I refer to.  But talk of wholly immanent operations of cognition and conception sits none too well with the relational talk of reference.

So my question for Novak is: Did Scotus anticipate the adverbialism of Roderick Chisholm, et al.? Is Scotus an adverbialist?

Here is a second concern of mine.  We are told that:

. . . it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to.

This implies that both divine and creaturely cognition and conceiving are wholly immanent operations. So what is going on when I think of, or refer to, the GM? It seem that I too would have to be conceiving-GM-ly. But then the objections to adverbialism would kick in.

Here is a third concern not unrelated to the second. The Scotistic-Novakian theory seems to imply that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect.  But that is not what I seem to be thinking about.  (And how would I gain access to God's mind?) It falls afoul of the phenomenology of intentionality. What I seem to be thinking about has  very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect.  An intentional object that does not exist has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.

Connected with this third concern is the suspicion that on Novak's Scotistic theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach.  He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own.  So he identifies them with divine conceivings.  But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski.  

My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind.  But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw.  Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.

My point could be put like this.  The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act.  But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc.  Novak's theory appears to fall into 'divine psychologism.'   

F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain

This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.

……………………………………

I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.   I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.

How do I know that Bradley is right?  By doing a little phenomenology.  Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation.  At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree.  Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself — pick your favorite phraseology.  The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not.  No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.'  At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.'  And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments?  Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.

ADDENDA (11 December 2020)

1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore  every mental state is object-directed.  I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?

That depends. It depends on what 'world' means.

Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page:

[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. ( Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144

This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.

Ad [1]. I basically agree. I'm an old Husserl man. But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche  Einstellung, it doesn't follow that they cannot be understood "at all" from within the natural attitude or outlook. So I would strike the "at all." I will return to this issue at the end.

Ad [2].  Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction. And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness. 

But note the equivocation on 'world.' It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us.  Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place.  To say that would be to embrace an intolerable form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not idealism. Very good!  But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness.  The equivocation on 'world' persists.  There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the 'space' within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed.  These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.

Ad [4] To be precise, the world as the 'space of disclosure' is inconceivable without consciousness. But this is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness.  If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

Ad [5] In the final sentence, 'world' clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. As OF the world — genitivus objectivus — consciousness is not IN the world.  But the world in this sense IS conceivable apart from consciousness. 

And so the confusion remains.  The world in the specifically pheomenological sense, the world as the 'space' within which things are disclosed — compare Heidegger's Lichtung or clearing — is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of idealism.

So I'd say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the 'Continental Shuffle' as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses  of 'world.'  Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic.  I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic.  But the brave attempt does not succeed.  A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears.  To speak like a Continental, the purport is 'inscribed in the very essence of the act."  But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional.  Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?

I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden's critique of Husserl's idealism.  I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.

To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically.  But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them.  A sartisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

 

Husserl consistency

Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl

My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in which we read:

What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl’s phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return “to the things themselves” sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind. This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a “new scholasticism.” By pointing “beyond” modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path “back” to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas. Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism.

The article is annoyingly superficial, and the last sentence quoted is just silly. Do I need to explain why? At the very most, Husserl's doctrine of intentionality prior to the publication in 1913 of Ideas I could be interpreted as supportive of realism, and was so interpreted by many of his early acolytes, among them, the members of the Goettingen and Munich circles.    And so in some very vague sense, Husserlian intentionality could be taken as pointing back to medieval thought and to Thomas Aquinas in particular, assuming one didn't know much about Thomas or Husserl. But the claim that "Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism" is risible. Roman Catholicism consists of extremely specific  theological doctrines. No one could reasonably hold that a realistically  interpreted Husserl could soften secular philosophers up for Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, etc.  The most that could be said is that the (arguably merely apparent) realism of the early Husserl was welcomed by Catholic thinkers.

But now let's  get down to brass tacks with a little help from Peter Geach. I will sketch the intentionality doctrine of Thomas. It will then be apparent, if you know your Husserl, that there is nothing like the Thomistic doctrine in Husserl.

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.' How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max?  Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am seeing him.  What makes my seeing a seeing of him?

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X — it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)

But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain.

The main point here is that of-ness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature — felinity — which occurs physically in Max. Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind. It is his form that is in my mind. But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat? Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form — felinity — exists in two different modes. Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.

GeachBecause my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence in my mind of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. There is no gap between mind and world. One could call this an identity theory of intentionality, or perhaps an 'isomorphic' theory.  The knower is not enclosed within the circle of his ideas. There is a logically antecedent community of nature between mind and world that underwrites the latter's intelligibility. 

What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him? My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before. The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it supplies a reason for the real distinction of essence and existence. For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul, pp. 62-64.)

I don't have time to explain in detail how Husserl's approach to the possibility of knowledge differs from the above. But if you consult his The Idea of Phenomenology, which consists of five lectures given in 1907, just a few years after the publication of the Logical Investigations in 1900 which so inspired his early followers, you will soon appreciate how absurd is the notion that Husserl's phenomenology is a "new scholasticism."

The Commonweal article under critique is here. 

 

Phil. Gesellschaft Goettingen 1912

Philosophische Gesellschaft Göttingen (1912)

Front Row (from Ieft to right): Adolf Reinach, Alexandre Koyre, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Max Scheler, Theodor Conrad.
Back Row: Jean Hering, Heinrich Rickert jr., Ernst Rothschild, Siegfried Hamburger, Fritz Frankfurter, Rudolf Clemens, Hans Lipps, Gustav Hübener, Herbert Leyendecker, Friedrich Neumann.

Intrinsic Intentionality and Merely Possible Thoughts

I claimed earlier that there are no intrinsically intentional items that lack consciousness.  The claim was made in the context of an attempted refutation of the notion that abstract entities, Fregean senses being one subspecies thereof, could be intrinsically intentional or object-directed. One argument I gave was that (i) No abstract entity is conscious; (ii) Only conscious entities are intrinsically intentional; ergo, (iii) No abstract entity is intrinsically intentional. 

David Gudeman demurs, targeting premise (ii):

I may have a counter-example for you, a class of items that 1. Are intrinsically intentional, 2. Are not conscious. The class of things I have in mind is possible thoughts. For example, right now I am thinking about thoughts, but if I had bought that cherry pie earlier today, I would probably be thinking about the cherry pie. My thought of the cherry pie is possible but not actual, so it is not conscious, but it is about the cherry pie, and therefore intrinsically intentional. Also, if there were no actual objects in the universe there would still be possible minds with possible thoughts–intentional objects that exist in a universe without minds.

I take Dave to be arguing as follows:

1) Every thought (thinking) is intrinsically object-directed.

Therefore

2) Every merely possible thought (thinking) is intrinsically object-directed.

3) Some merely possible thoughts (thinkings) are not conscious.

Therefore

4) Some intrinsically object-directed items are not conscious.

A delightfully seductive argument!

I question the inference from (1) to (2) on the ground that there are no merely possible thoughts.  (1) is true, but (2) is false if there are no merely possible thoughts. 

It is of course possible that I think about cherry pie.  But it doesn't follow that there is a possible thought about cherry pie which somehow subsists on its own.   Possibilities are grounded in actual items. I actually exist and have various powers. Among them are powers to think about this or that.  So, from 'Possibly, I am thinking about x' it does not follow that there is a possible thought about x. 

I believe I have said enough to show that Dave's argument, as I have reconstructed it, is not rationally compelling.

Intentionality for Third-World Entities?

Commenter John and I are having a very productive discussion about intentionality.  I thank him for helping me clarify my thoughts about this fascinating topic.  I begin with some points on which (I think) John and I agree.

a) There is a 'third world' or third realm and it is the realm of abstracta.   (I promise: no jokes about Frege's Third Reich. But I can't promise not to speak of Original Sinn and Original Sinn-ers.) Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are abstracta, but not all abstracta are reference-mediating senses. John and I are operating with a provisional tripartite or tri-categorial ontology comprising the mental, the physical, and the abstract.

b) There are instances of intrinsic intentionality. Neither of us is an eliminativist about intentionality in the manner, say, of Alexander Rosenberg. (See Could Intentionality be an Illusion?)

c) There is no intentionality without intrinsic or original intentionality: it cannot be that all intentionality is derivative or a matter of ascription, pace Daniel Dennett.  (See Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses.)

d) Nothing physical qua physical is intrinsically intentional, although some physical items are derivatively intentional.  (Combine this true proposition with the false proposition that all mental states are physical, and you have an unsound but valid argument for the eliminativist conclusion that there is no intrinsic intentionality.)

Agreement on the foregoing points leaves open the question whether there could be intrinsically intentional abstract items.  I tend to think that there are no intrinsically intentional abstract items.  John's position, assuming I understand it, is that some abstract items are intrinsically intentional, and that some  intrinsically intentional items are not abstract, mental states being examples of the latter.

The bare bones of the debate between John and I may be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1) Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items. 

2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.

3) Fregean senses are not conscious. 

It is easy to see that this threesome is not logically consistent: the propositions cannot all be true. John and I assume that the Law of Non-Contradiction holds across the board: we are not dialetheists.  So something has to give. Which limb of the triad should we reject?  (3) is not in dispute and presumably will be accepted by all: no abstract item is conscious, and senses are abstract.  'Abstract' was defined in earlier entries, and John and I agree on its meaning. The dispute concerns (1) and (2). I reject (1) while accepting the other two propositions; John rejects (2) while accepting the other two propositions.

I argue from the conjunction of (2) and (3) to the negation of (1), while John argues from the conjunction of (1) and (3) to the negation of (2).

My rejection of (1) entails that there are no Fregean senses (Sinne).  This is because Fregean senses, by definition, are intrinsically intentional. It follows that they are essentially intrinsically intentional. So if they can't be intrinsically intentional, then they can't exist. Why are senses essentially intrinsically intentional?  Well, as platonica, senses are necessarily existent: they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds. It follows that they exist in worlds in which there are no finite minds.* Now a sense, by definition, is a mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise) of its object.  It mediates between minds and things.  Reference, whether thinking reference or linguistic reference, is routed though sense. The (re)presentational power of a sense is essential to it, and it has this power even in worlds in which there are no words to express the sense, no things to be presented by  the sense, and no minds to refer to things via senses.  For example, consider a possible world W in which there are no languages, no minds, and no planet Venus. In W the sense that 'Phosphorus' — 'Morning Star,' Morgenstern — expresses in our world exists (because it exists in every world) and has its (re)presentational power there in W. Thus its intentionality is intrinsic to it and does not depend on any relations to words or to things or to minds.  It (re)presents non-linguistically and non-mentally and without the need for physical embodiment.

I think it follows that there is no distinction in reality — although there is one notionally — between the power of a Fregean sense to represent and its exercise of this power.  There is, in other words, no distinction in reality between the power of a sense to represent and its actually representing.  I say this because the existence of what an intrinsically intentional item is of or about has no effect whatsoever on the aboutness of the item.  Suppose I am thinking about the Washington monument, but that while I am thinking about it, it ceases to exist. That change in objective reality in no way affects the aboutness of the intentional state.  Thus the power of an intrinsically intentional item to represent does not need an external, objectively real, 'trigger' to actualize the power.  The extramental existence of the Washington monument is not  a necessary condition of the aboutness of my thinking about it.  The content and aboutness of my thinking is exactly the same whether or not the monument exists 'outside the mind.' The same goes for senses. The sense of 'Phosphorus' presents Venus whether or not Venus exists. And the content of the sense is exactly the same whether or not Venus exists.

There is an important difference, however, between an intrinsically intentional mental state and a Fregean sense.   The occurrent mental state or 'act' — in the terminology of Twardowksi, Husserl, et al. — is the state of a mind. It is the act of a subject, the cogitatio of an ego, where the last three occurrences of 'of' all express the genitivus subjectivus.  This is essentially, not accidentally, the case.  There has to be an ego behind the cogitatio for the cogitatio to be a cogitatio of a cogitatum.  But there needn't be an ego 'behind' the sense for the sense to be a sense of or about a thing. If a Fregean sense mediates a reference between a mind and a thing, it is not essential to the mediation that there be a mind 'behind' the sense.

Here then is an argument against Fregean senses:

4) Every instance of intrinsic intentionality has both a subject and an object.
5) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense do not have both a subject and an object.
Therefore
6) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense are not instances of intrinsic intentionality.

When I reject the proposition that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items, I thereby reject the very existence of Fregean senses. I am not maintaining that Fregean senses exist but are derivatively intentional items.  I do hold, however, that there are derivatively intentional items, maps for example.  Maps get their meaning and aboutness from us original Sinn-ers. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater.

So some things derive their referential and semantic properties from other things.  That is also true of language. Words and phrases don't mean anything in and of themselves. Mind is king: no minds, no meaning. I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. 

John and I agree that Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are explanatory posits.  They are not 'datanic' as I like to say. Thus it is a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical datum that the sentences 'The sky is blue' and Der Himmel ist blau 'say the same thing' or can by used to say the same thing. But that this same thing is a Fregean proposition goes beyond the given and enters the explanatory realm.  One forsakes phenomenology for dialectics. Now what am I claiming exactly? That there is no need for these posits, that to posit senses is to 'multiply entities beyond necessity in violation of Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem?  Or am I saying something stronger, namely, that there cannot be any such items as Fregean senses? I believe my view is the latter, and not merely the former.  If senses cannot exist, then they cannot be reasonably posited either.  

John's view, I take it, is that both Fregean senses and some conscious items are intrinsically intentional or object-directed. He is not maintaining that only third-world entities (abstracta) are intrinsically intentional. By contrast, I maintain that only second-world entities (mental items, both minds and some of their occurrent states) are intrinsically intentional.

I assume that John intends 'intrinsically intentional' to be taken univocally and not analogically.  Thus he is not saying that Fregean senses are of or about first-world items in a manner that is analogous to the way second-world items are of or about first-world items.    

Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional, necessarily existent, abstract entities.  By its very nature a sense presents or represents something apart from itself, something that may or may not exist. It is a natural, not conventional, sign.  

Do I have a compelling argument against Fregean senses?  Above I mentioned the following argument:

2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.

3) Fregean senses are not conscious. Therefore:

1) It is not the case that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional.

But this argument appears to beg the question at (2).  Why can't there be intrinsically intentional items that are not conscious?  If there can be intentionality below the level of conscious mind in the form of dispositionality — see Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality — why con't there be intentionality above the level of conscious mind in platonica?

Nevertheless, there seems to me something incoherent about Fregean senses. They actually represent even in worlds in which there is nothing to represent and no one to whom to represent.  Consider again the sense of 'Phosphorus.'  It exists in every world including worlds in which Venus does not exist and no mind exists. In those worlds, the sense in question actually represents but does not represent anything to anyone.  It is therefore a non-representing representation, and thus an impossibility.

_____________________

*A finite mind is the kind of mind that needs such intermediary items as Fregean senses or Husserlian noemata to mediate its reference (both thinking reference and linguistic reference) to things that it cannot get completely before its mind in all their parts, properties, and relations. An archetypal intellect such as the divine mind can get at the whole of the thing 'in one blow.'  As an infinite mind it has an infinite grasp of the infinitely-propertied thing.  An infinite mind has no need of senses. The existence of senses therefore reflects the finitude of our minds.  That the reflections of this finitude should be installed in Plato's heavenly place (topos ouranos) seems strange.  It looks to be an illict hypostatization. But this thought needs a further post for its adequate deployment.

‘Platonic’ Propositions: A Consideration Contra. The Argument from Intrinsic Intentionality

Commenter John put the following question to me:

Which Platonist theories of propositions did you have in mind in your original post, and what are the problems involved in accepting such views?

I had in mind a roughly Fregean theory.  One problem with such a view is that it seems to require that propositions possess intrinsic intentionality.  Let me explain.

Propositions: A Broadly Fregean Theory Briefly Sketched

On one approach, propositions are abstract items. I am not suggesting that propositions are products of abstraction.  I am using 'abstract' in the (misconceived) Quinean way to cover items that are not in space, or in time, and are not causally active or passive.  We should add  that no mind is an abstract item.  Abstracta, then, are neither bodies nor minds. They comprise a third category of entity. Besides propositions, numbers and (mathematical) sets are often given as candidate members of this category. But our topic is propositions.

For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely psychologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.  Like its German counterpart, the English 'thought' is ambiguous. It could refer to an act of thinking, a mental act, or it it could refer to the intentional object or accusative of such an act.  Some use the word 'content,' but it has the disadvantage of suggesting something contained in the act of thinking.  But when I think of the river Charles, said river is not literally contained in my act of thinking.  A fortiori for Boston's Scollay Square which I am now thinking about: it no longer exists and so cannot be contained in anything.  The same is true when I think that the Charles is polluted or that Scollay Square was a magnet for sailors on shore leave. Those propositions are not  psychological realities really contained in my or anyone's acts of thinking.  And of course they are not literally in the head.  You could say that they are in the mind, but only if you mean that they are before the mind.

A proposition for Frege is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

1. The sea is blue.
2. The sea is blue.
3. Die See ist blau.
4. Deniz mavidir.

(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That 'same thing' is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by (assertively) uttering them or otherwise encoding them.  The proposition is one to their many.  (I have just sounded a Platonic theme.) And unlike the sentence-tokens, the proposition is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Herewith, a second Platonic theme. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.  

So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content or sense can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages.  We also need to account for the fact that the same thought can be expressed by the same person at different times in the same or different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. It is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.  Similarly with judgments and beliefs: they are derivatively true if true.   For Frege, propositions are the primary truth bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.  

There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. Therefore, a string of marks cannot be either true or false.  It is the office of minds to mean. Matter means nothing. 

One could agree that a string of marks  or a sequence of noises cannot, as such, attract a truth-value, but balk at the inference that therefore propositional meanings (senses) are self-subsistent, mind-independent abstract items.  One might plump for what could be called an 'Aristotelian' theory of propositions according to which a sentence has all the meaning it needs to attract a truth-value in virtue of its being thoughtfully uttered or otherwise tokened by someone with the intention of making a claim about the world.  The propositional sense would then be a one-IN-many and not a Platonic one-OVER-many.  The propositional sense would be a unitary sense but not a sense that could exist on its own apart from minds or mean anything apart from minds.

But how would the Aristotelian account for necessary truths, including the truths of logic, which are true in worlds in which there are no minds?  Here the Platonist has an opportunity for rejoinder.  Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there are no minds and/or nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that necessarily true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds. The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.

Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One cannot just believe. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition or dictum. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the occurrent belief state is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

A Consideration Contra

Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. There are all of these entities that there could have been.  Each necessarily exists although only some are necessarily true.  As necessarily existent and indeed necessarily existent in themselves and from themselves, they have no need of minds to 'support' them.  Hence they are not mere accusatives of mental acts.  They are apt to become accusatives but they are not essentially accusatives. They can exist without being accusatives of any mind. To borrow a phrase from Bernard Bolzano, they are Saetze an sich.  They are made for the mind, and transparent to mind, but they don't depend for their existence on any mind, finite or infinite.

Even more salient for present purposes is that these Platonic propositions are not only existent in themselves but also meaningful in themselves: they do not derive their meaning from minds.  It follows that they possess intrinsic intentionality.  At this juncture an aporetic tetrad obtrudes itself.

A. Fregean propositions are non-mental representations: they are intrinsically representative of state of affairs in the world.

B. Fregean propositions are abstract items.

C. No abstract item possesses intrinsic representational power.

D. Fregean propositions exist.

The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true.  One can therefore reasonably argue from the conjunction of the first three to the negation of the fourth.