Category: Mind

Feser Defends Hylomorphic Dualism Against My Criticism

I want to thank Edward Feser for responding to my recent post, A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist.  And while you are at Ed's site, please read his outstanding entry, So you think you understand the cosmological argument?, an entry with which I agree entirely.

Ed writes,

Naturally, since I am a hylemorphic dualist, I completely disagree with Bill here. Let’s start with the last charge — that hylemorphic dualism “make[s] an exception in the case of the human soul [that] is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.” That the view is not “unmotivated and ad hoc” is easily shown. Bill himself would surely acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for hylemorphism, even if he doesn’t accept that view himself. He would also acknowledge that there are serious philosophical arguments for dualism, a view he is sympathetic with. But then he should also acknowledge that someone could find both sorts of arguments convincing. And in that case he should acknowledge that someone could have good philosophical reasons for thinking that there must be some way to combine hylemorphism and dualism.

I agree that there are serious arguments for hylomorphism, and I especially agree that there are strong arguments for dualism.  And I agree that someone who finds both hylomorphism and dualism persuasive will have a motivation to try to combine them by showing how the special-metaphysical thesis of dualism can be accommodated within the general-metaphysical scheme of hylomorphism. 

But if one has good arguments for position A and good arguments for position B, it doesn't follow that one has good arguments for the combined position A + B.  For there may be a good reason why the two positions cannot be combined.  And so it is in the present case.  The case for hylomorphism and the case for dualism do not add up to a case for  hylomorphic dualism.  So while I agree with Ed that one who has good reason to be a hylomorphist and good reason to be a dualist will be powerfully motivated to combine the two positions, I do not agree that the reasons for hylomorphism and dualism, respectively, add up to reasons for the hylomorphic dualism.  A psychological motivation is not the same as a justificatory reason. 

Ed continues:

Nor, contrary to what Bill implies, is Aquinas somehow departing radically from Aristotle. For Aristotle too was committed both to hylemorphism and to the view that the intellect is immaterial — indeed, to the view that the active intellect is immortal. To be sure, that does not by itself show that Aristotle’s views are identical to or entail Aquinas’s; the Averroists took Aristotle’s position in a very different direction, and contemporary commentators often find it simply puzzling. But the reason they do — namely, that it seems odd to say both that the soul is the form of the body and that one of its capacities is somehow separable from the body — is similar to the reason Bill finds Aquinas’s position puzzling. Needless to say, Aristotle had no Christian theological ax to grind; he was simply following the philosophical arguments where they led. There is no reason to accuse Aquinas of doing anything different, and it is hardly unreasonable to suggest that the way to harmonize the various aspects of Aristotle’s position is the way Aquinas does. That does not mean that one might not still question whether Aquinas’s position is ultimately coherent (as Bill does), or criticize it on other grounds. But the charge that it is “wholly unmotivated and ad hoc” — a piece of Christian apologetics with no independent philosophical rationale — is, I think, completely unwarranted. 

Clearly, Aristotle had no Christian axe to grind.  And so if the active intellect (nous poietikos) mentioned in De Anima III, v (430a) is a subsistent element of the human soul, capable of existence independent of matter, then Aquinas' position on the human soul would have been anticipated by Aristotle, and what I said, or rather suspected, about Aquinas implanting Christian  notions in the foreign soil of Aristotelianism would be insupportable.  But the interpretation of De Anima III, v is a vexed and vexing matter as the material in the hyperlink Ed provided makes clear.  If, as some commentators maintain, Aristotle is discussing the divine mind and not the human mind, then it cannot be maintained that Aristotle was anticipating Aquinas.

The important question, of course, is whether the human soul, or any part theoreof, can be coherently conceived as a subsistent form, whether this is maintained by Aristotle or Aquinas or both.  Ed now addresses my puzzle head on:

The soul is, for Aquinas, the form of the body. So how could it possibly exist apart from the body? Bill asks why things should be any different with human beings than they are with Fido. But Aquinas is quite clear about the answer to that question: The difference is that the human soul carries out immaterial operations (i.e. intellectual ones) while a dog’s soul does not. And if it operates apart from matter and agere sequitur esse, then it must subsist apart from matter.

I grant that the human soul, unlike the canine, carries out immaterial operations.  The argument is this:

a.  The human soul engages in immaterial operations
b.  Agere sequitur esse: whatever operates I-ly must be (exist) I-ly.
Therefore
c.  The human soul, qua executing immaterial operations, exists immaterially.

But how is this relevant to the issue I am raising?  Let's assume that the above argument is sound.  What it shows is that the human soul enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  But it does not show that a form of an animal body enjoys an immaterial mode of being.  It is one thing to establish that the human soul, or an element thereof, exists immaterially; quite another to show that this immaterial element is a form.  I hesitate to say that Ed is conflating these two questions.  What he might be doing is begging the question against me: he may be just assuming what I am questioning, namely, that the human soul is a form, and then taking an argument for the immateriality of the soul to be an argument for the immaterial existence of a form of the human body.  Quoting further from Feser:

Necessarily, a form is a form of that of which it is the form. But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form. These propositions cannot both be true.
That they can both be true can be seen when we keep in mind how Aristotelians understand concepts like necessity, possibility, essence, and the like. Suppose we say that it follows from the nature or essence of a dog that it has four legs. Does that mean every single dog necessarily has four legs? No, because a given dog might have lost a leg in an accident, or failed to develop all four legs due to some genetic defect, or (if only recently conceived and still in the womb) may simply not yet have developed all four legs. What it does mean is rather that a mature dog in its normal state will necessarily have four legs. As Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot have emphasized, “Aristotelian categoricals” of the form S’s are F convey a norm and are not accurately represented as either existential or universal statements of the sort familiar to modern logicians. “Dogs have four legs” is not saying “There is at least one dog, and it has four legs” and neither is it saying “For everything that is a dog, it is four legged.” It is saying that the typical dog, the normal (mature) dog, has four legs.

I of course agree with the bit about the dog and his nature.  But I question its relevance to my point.  I grant that from the fact that it is the nature of a dog to have four legs it does not follow that every dog has four legs.  In parallel with this, Ed seems to be suggesting that while it is the nature of a form to be a form of something, it does not follow that every form is a form of something. I deny the parallel.  The claims are on different levels.  The 'canine' claim is about a particular nature (essence), dog-nature.  My claim is about the principles (in the scholastic sense) deployed by hylomorphic ontologists  in their ontological assays.  A form is a 'principle' not capable of independent existence in the manner of a primary substance.

How form and matter operate in the analysis of material substances becomes clearer if we examine a criticism the distinguished Aristotelian Henry Veatch lodges against Gustav Bergmann. (See here for the rest of the post from which the following blue section is excerpted and for bibliographical data.)

Veatch Contra Bergmann

Veatch now lodges a reasonable complaint against Bergmann. How could "matter or bare particulars [be] among the ultimates that one arrives at in a process of analysis. . ."? "For how could anything which in itself is wholly indeterminate and characterless ever qualify as a 'thing' or 'existent' at all?" (81) On Bergmann's assay, an ordinary particular has more basic entities as its ontological constituents. But if one of these constituents is an intrinsically indeterminate and intrinsically characterless entity, how could said entity exist at all, let alone be a building block out of which an ordinary particular is constructed?

For Veatch, form and matter are not ontological atoms in the way bare particulars and simple universals are ontological atoms for Bergmann. "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (80) 'Principle' is one of those words Scholastics like to use. Principles in this usage are not propositions. They are ontological factors invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own. Let me try to make Veatch's criticism as clear as I can.

An ordinary particular is a this-such. The thisness in a this-such is the determinable element while the suchness is the determination or set of determinations. Veatch's point against Bergmann is not that ordinary particulars are not composites, this-suches, or that the thisness in a this- such is not indeterminate yet determinable; his point is that the determinable element cannot be an ontological atom, an entity more basic than the composite into which it enters as ontological building block. The determinable element cannot be a basic existent; it must be a principle of a basic existent, where the basic existent is the this-such. This implies, contra Bergmann, that what is ontologically primary is the individual substance, the this-such, which entails that matter and form in an individual substance cannot exist apart from each other. They are in some sense 'abstractions' from the individual substance. The form in a material this-such is not merely tied to matter in general, in the way that Bergmannian first-order universals are tied to bare particulars in general; the form is tied to the very matter of the this-such in question. And the same goes for the matter: the designated matter (materia signata) of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates' substantial form.

Veatch says that Bergmann cannot have it both ways: "His bare particulars cannot at one and the same time be utterly bare and characterless in the manner of Aristotelian prime matter and yet also be 'things' and 'existents' in the manner of Aristotelian substances." (82-83)

 The point I want to underscore is that, as Veatch puts it,  "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being."  Ed continues,

Similarly, to say “Human souls are associated with bodies” is to say that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body, just like the human hand in its normal state is associated with its body. But it doesn’t follow that it cannot exist apart from the body, any more than it follows that the hand (at least while its tissues are still alive) can exist apart from the body. And again, the reason this is possible with the human soul and not with Fido’s soul is that the human soul, unlike Fido’s soul, carries out immaterial operations even when it is associated with the body.

Here again I think Ed is failing to engage the problem I raised.  I do not question that the human soul in its normal state is associated with its body.  And I do not question that it can exist apart from its body.  What I am questioning is the conceptualization of the human soul as a form.  And so, while Ed has said many things with which I agree, he has not given me a reason to retract my criticism.  To put it another way, he has not given me a reason why I should accept argument A below over argument B:

Argument A:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; the human soul is the form of the human body; therefore, there are forms that can exist apart from the matter they inform.

Argument B:  The human soul can exist apart from its body; no form can exist apart from the matter it informs; therefore, the human soul is not the form of the human body.

I have another argument that Ed may recall from our discussions at my old Powerblogs site, namely, an argument based on the premise that a form cannot be a subject of experience, which is what a soul must be.  But that's a separate post.

Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence. 

Preliminaries

For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.)  And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.)  So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms.  Consciousness, by its very nature, is consciousness of something, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Continue reading “Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism”

A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist

A position in the philosophy of mind that is currently under-represented and under-discussed is Thomistic or hylomorphic dualism.  Whereas the tendency of the substance dualist is to identify the person with his soul or mind, the hylomorphic approach identifies the person with a soul-body composite in which soul stands to body as form (morphe) stands to matter (hyle). In a slogan: anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. To be a bit more precise, the soul is the substantial form of the body, a form that makes of the matter it informs a human substance. 

 

Self-Reference and Individual Concepts

The following can happen.  You see yourself but without self-recognition.  You see yourself, but not as  yourself.  Suppose you walk into a room which unbeknownst to you has a mirror covering the far wall.  You are slightly alarmed to see a wild-haired man with his fly open approaching you.  You are looking at yourself but you don't know it.  (The lighting is bad, you've had a few drinks . . . .) You think to yourself

1. That man has his fly open!
but not
2. I have my fly open!

Now these propositions — assuming they are propositions — are obviously different.  For one thing, they have different behavioral consequences.  I can believe the first without taking action with respect to my fly, or any fly.  (I'm certainly not going to go near the other guy's fly.)  But if I believe the second I will most assuredly button my fly, or pull up my zipper.

So it seems clear that (1) and (2) are different propositions.  I can believe one without believing the other.  But how can this be given the plain fact that 'that man' and 'I' refer to the same man?  Both propositions predicate the same property of the same subject.  So what makes them distinct propositions?

I know what your knee-jerk response will be.  You will say that, while 'I' and 'that man' have the same referent, they differ in sense just like 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus.'  Just as one can believe that Hesperus is F without believing that Phosphorus is F despite the identity of the two, one can believe that (1) without believing that (2) despite the fact that the subject terms are coreferential.

The trouble with this response is that it requires  special 'I'-senses, and indeed a different one for each user of the first-person singular pronoun.  These go together with special 'I'-propositions which are a species of indexical proposition.  When I believe that I am F, I refer to myself via a special Fregean sense which has the following property: it is necessarily a mode of presentation of me alone.  We can also think of this 'I'-sense as an individual concept or haecceity-concept.  It is a concept such that, if it is instantiated, it is instantiated (i) by me, (ii) by nothing distinct from me, (iii) and by the same person in every possible world in which it is instantiated.

But what on earth (or on Twin Earth) could this concept be, and how could I grasp it?  The concept has to 'pin me down' in every possible world in which I exist.  It has to capture my very thisness, or, in Latin, my haecceitas.  But a better Latin word is ipseitas, ipseity, selfhood, my being a self, this one and no other.    In plain old Anglo-Saxon it is the concept of me-ness, the concept of being me.

The theory, then, is that my awareness that

3. I am that man!

consists in my awareness that the concept expressed by 'I' and the concept expressed by 'that man' are instantiated by one and the same individual.  But this theory is no good because, even if my use of 'I' expresses an haecceity-concept, that is not a concept I can grasp or understand.  Maybe God can grasp my haecceity, but I surely can't.  Individuum ineffabile est said the Scholastics, echoing Aristotle. No finite mind can 'eff' the ineffable.  The individual in his individuality, in his very haecceity and ipseity, is ineffable.

Self-reference is not routed though sense, however things may stand with respect to other-reference.  When I refer to myself using the first-person singular pronoun, I do not refer to myself via a Fregean sense.

So here is the problem expressed as an aporetic pentad:

a. (1) and (2) express different Fregean propositions.
b. If two Fregean propositions are different, then they must differ in a constituent.
c. The difference can only reside in a difference in subject constituents.
d. The subject constituent of (2) is ineffable.
e. No sense (mode of presentation) or humanly-graspable concept can be ineffable.

This pentad is inconsistent:  (a)-(d), taken together, entail the negation of (e).  The only limb that has a chance of being false is (a).  One could say that (1) and (2), though clearly different, are not different by expressing different Fregean propositions.  But then what would our positive theory have to be?

 

How Could I Be Wrong?

I say that there are beliefs.  An eliminativist contradicts me, insisting that there are no beliefs.  He cannot, consistently with what he maintains, hold that I have a false belief.  For if there are no beliefs, then there are no false beliefs.  But he must hold that I am wrong.  For if there are no beliefs, as he maintains, and I maintain that there are, then I am wrong. 

But if my being wrong does not consist in my holding a false belief, what does it consist in?  The eliminativist might say that my being wrong in this instance is my uttering or otherwise tokening of the sentence type 'There are beliefs' or  being disposed to utter or otherwise token the sentence-type 'There are beliefs.'  But a parrot could do that and you wouldn't say that a parrot is wrong about the philosophy of mind.

Utterances, inscriptions and the like, if they are to mean anything must have mind behind them.  See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.

Eliminativism is absurd.  If that's too quick for you, see the posts in the Eliminative Materialism category. 

The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers

IMG_0303 You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes. Your confidence increases as further cairns come into view. On what does this confidence rest?

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as other than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art.

Of course, the rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but nomologically possible. But please note that if you believe that the cairns originated in that way, then you could not take them as embodying information about the direction of the trail. It would be irrational in excelsis to hold both that (i) these rock piles came about randomly; and that (ii) these rock piles inform us of the trail's direction.

So if you take the rock piles as trail markers, then you take them as other than merely natural formations caused to exist by natural causes. You take the stacking and the placement as expressive of the purposes of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer, an intelligent being who had it in mind to convey information to himself and others concerning the direction of the trail. This shows that any intentionality embodied in the cairns is derivative rather than intrinsic. The rock piles in and of themselves do not inform us of the trail's direction. They provide us this information only if we take them as embodying the purposes of an intelligent being. Of course, my taking of rock piles as embodying the purposes of an intelligent being does not entail that they do in fact embody the purposes of an intelligent being. But in most cases my ascription of a purpose corresponds to a purpose: I ascribe a purpose and the rock piles do in fact embody a purpose.

Thus there are two streams of intrinsic intentionality converging on the same object, one emanating from me, the other from the trail-maintainer.  The latter's embodying of his purpose in the cairn construction is a case of intrinsic intentionality.  And when I take the rock piles as embodying the trail-maintainer's purpose thereby ascribing to the rock piles a purpose, that too is a case of intrinsic intentionality.

The ascribing of a purpose and the embodying of a purpose are usually 'in sync.' There are rock piles that have no meaning and rock piles that have meaning. But no rock pile has intrinsic meaning. And the same goes for any material item or configuration of material items no matter how complex. No such system has intrinsic meaning; any meaning it has is derived. The meaning is derived either from an intelligent being who ascribes meaning to the material system, or from an intelligent being whose purposes are embodied in the material system, or both.

Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will, original mean-ers. We are all of us Sinn-ers, every man Jack of us, original Sinn-ers,  but our Sinn-ing is not mortal but vital.  Intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.

I am rejecting the view that any sort of isomorphism, no matter how abstract, could make the rock piles mean or represent the trail's direction. No doubt there is an isomorphism: the trail goes where the cairns go. No one cairn resembles the trail to any appreciable extent; but the cairns taken collectively do resemble the trail. Unfortunately, the trail also resembles the cairns. But the trail does not represent the cairns.

Representation is most of the time asymmetrical; but resemblance is always symmetrical. I conclude that resemblance cannot constitute representation. Note also that the cairns might resemble things other than the trail. Thus the cairns taken collectively might resemble the path of a subterranean gopher tunnel directly below the trail and following it exactly. But obviously, the cairns do not mark this gopher tunnel. Note also that isomorphism is not sensitive to the difference between rocks whose stacking is artificial, i.e., an artifact of a purposive agent, and rocks whose stacking came about via random purely natural processes. But it is only if the stacking is artificial that the stacks would mean anything. And if the stacking is artificial/artifactual, then there is a purposive agent possessing intrinsic intentionality.

Mind is king.  Naturalists need to wise up.

BonJour on Intentionality and Materialism

Questions about intentionality can be divided into two groups. In logically first place there are questions about what it is, how it is possible, and what ontological resources are required to render it intelligible. And then there are more specific questions about what implications intentionality has for the mind-body problem.  Does it, for example, rule out materialism?  In What is it Like to be  Human (Instead of a Bat)?  Laurence BonJour mounts an argument from intentionality against materialism. I will quote just the bare bones of his argument, leaving aside many of the supporting considerations:

      Suppose then that on a particular occasion I am thinking about a
     certain species of animal, say dogs  — not some specific dog, just
     dogs in general (but I mean domestic dogs, specifically, not dogs
     in the generic sense that includes wolves and coyotes). The Martian
     scientist is present and has his usual complete knowledge of my
     neurophysiological state. Can he tell on that basis alone what I am
     thinking about? Can he tell that I am thinking about dogs rather
     than about cats or radishes or typewriters or free will or nothing
     at all? It is surely far from obvious how he might do this. My
     suggestion is that he cannot, that no knowledge of the complexities
     of my neurophysiological state will enable him to pick out that
     specific content in the logically tight way required, and hence
     that physicalism is once again clearly shown to be false.

     [. . .]

     Suppose then, as seems undeniable, that when I am thinking about
     dogs, my state of mind has a definite internal or intrinsic albeit
     somewhat indeterminate content, perhaps roughly the idea of a
     medium-sized hairy animal of a distinctive shape, behaving in
     characteristic ways. Is there any plausible way in which, contrary
     to my earlier suggestion, the Martian scientist might come to know
     this content on the basis of his neurophysiological knowledge of
     me? As with the earlier instance of the argument, we may set aside
     issues that are here irrelevant (though they may well have an
     independent significance of their own) by supposing that the
     Martian scientist has an independent grasp of a conception of dogs
     that is essentially the same as mine, so that he is able to
     formulate to himself, as one possibility among many, that I am
     thinking about dogs, thus conceived. We may also suppose that he
     has isolated the particular neurophysiological state that either is
     or is correlated with my thought about dogs. Is there any way that
     he can get further than this?

     The problem is essentially the same as before. The Martian will
     know a lot of structural facts about the state in question,
     together with causal and structural facts about its relations to
     other such states. But it is clear that the various ingredients of
     my conception of dogs (such as the ideas of hairiness, of barking,
     and so on) will not be explicitly present in the neurophysiological
     account, and extremely implausible to think that they will be
     definable on the basis of neurophysiological concepts. Thus, it
     would seem, there is no way that the neurophysiological account can
     logically compel the conclusion that I am thinking about dogs to
     the exclusion of other alternatives.

     [. . .]

     Thus the idea that the Martian scientist would be able to determine
     the intrinsic or internal contents of my thought on the basis of
     the structural relations between my neurophysiological states is
     extremely implausible, and I can think of no other approach to this
     issue that does any better. The indicated conclusion, once again,
     is that the physical account leaves out a fundamental aspect of our
< span style="font-family: georgia,palatino;">     mental lives, and hence that physicalism is false.

I will now sum up BonJour's reasoning in my own way.

BonJour is thinking about dogs. He needn't be thinking about any particular dog; he might just be thinking about getting a dog, which of course does  not entail that there is some particular dog, Kramer say, that he is thinking about getting.   Indeed, one can think about getting a dog that is distinct from every dog presently in existence!  How?  By thinking about having a dog breeder do his thing.  If a woman tells her husband that she wants a baby, more likely than not, she is not telling him that she wants to kidnap or adopt some existing baby, but that she wants the two of them it engage in the sorts of conjugal activities that can be expected to cause a baby to exist.

BonJour's thinking has intentional content. It exhibits that aboutness or of-ness that recent posts have been hammering away at.  The question is whether the Martian scientist can determine what that   content is by monitoring BonJour's neural states during the period of time he is thinking about dogs. The content before BonJour's mind has various subcontents: hairy critter, mammal, barking animal, man's best  friend . . . . But none of this content will be discernible to the neuroscientist on the basis of complete knowledge of  the neural states, their relations to each other and to sensory input and behavioral output. Therefore, there is more to the mind than what can be known by even a completed neuroscience. Physicalism (materialism)  is false.

I of course agree. 

The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic

Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is.  Very simply, (mental) intentionality  is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states.  (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the eistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment.) 

Suppose a neighbor asks me about Max Black, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks.    The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery.  The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else.  Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max?  How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible?

Why should there be a problem about this?  Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life.  But a cat is not.  No cat is a content of consciousness.  Cats ain't in the head or in the mind.  Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my mind, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind:  it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking,  if me and my mind cease to exist.  He needs my thinking of him to exist as little as my thinking needs to be about him.  Cats are physical things out there in the physical world.  And yet my thinking  of Max  'reaches'  beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat.  How is this possible?  What must our ontology include for it to be possible?

To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him.  (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness.  But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain.  So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object.  But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?

Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.  This thesis consists of the following subtheses:

1. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic,  or intentional character.  There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red.  After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German.  It doesn't mean anything to  a speaker of German qua speaker of German.  In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning.  Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on screen, etc. have  no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature.  It s a matter of conventional that they mean what they mean.  And that brings minds into the picture.

2.  So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic:  whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional.  Mind is the source of all intelligibility.  Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible.

3.  There can be mind without language, but no language without mind.  Laird Addis puts it like this:

Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language.  Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states.  The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)

An Argument of Russell Against Mental Acts

Bertrand Russell's (1872-1970) The Analysis of Mind first appeared in 1921.  Lecture I contains a discussion of Brentano, Meinong, and mental acts.  He quotes the famous Brentano passage from the 1874 Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, and then confesses that until very lately he believed "that mental phenomena have essential reference to objects . . .'" but that he no longer believes this. (p. 5)  One of Russell's arguments against acts is contained in the following passage:

. . . the act seems unnecessary and fictious. [. . .] Empirically, I cannot discover anything corresponding to the supposed act; and theoretically I cannot see that that it is indispensable.  We say: "I think so-and-so," and this word "I" suggests that thinking is the act of a person.  Meinong's "act" is the ghost of the subject, or what once was the full-blooded soul.  It is supposed that thoughts cannot just come and go, but need a person to think them. (p. 6)

Russell is making three claims.  The first is phenomenological: acts are not given to introspection.  The second is dialectical:  there are no arguments or considerations that make plausible the positing of acts.  The third is genetic:  the reason some believe that there are acts is because they have been bamboozled by the surface grammar of sentences like 'I want a unicorn' or 'I see at tree' into the view that when thinking takes place there is an agent who performs an act upon an object. 

The Phenomenology of the Situation

What is involved in the awareness of the lamp on my desk?  Phenomenologically, as it seems to me, there is awareness of (i) the lamp and of (ii) being aware of the lamp.  At a bare minimum, then,  we need to distinguish between the object of awareness and the awareness of the object.  Both items are phenomenologically accessible.  There is straightforward awareness of the lamp if it is seen or imagined or remembered, whereas the awareness of the lamp is given to introspection.  Of course, the awareness does not appear alongside the lamp as a separate object.  Being aware of the awareness of a lamp is not like being aware of a lamp being next to a clock.  And yet, phenomenologically, there is awareness of the lamp and awareness of the awareness of the lamp. Notice that I didn't smuggle in any ego or subject of awareness in my description.  So far, then, we are on solid phenomenological ground: there are objects of awareness, there is awareness of objects, and there is awareness that the two are different.  This is the phenomenological bare minimum.

But of course this does not show that there are mental acts.  For the bit of phenomenology that I have just done is consistent with the subjectlessness of awareness. If awareness is subjectless, as Sartre et al. have maintained against Husserl et al., then it cannot be articulated into individual acts of awareness  unless some individuating/differentiating factor can be specified.  But there seems to be no phenomenological evidence of such a factor. 

Well, let's see.  There is awareness of the lamp; there is awareness of the clock; there is awareness of the books piled up on the desk, etc.  But awareness appears 'diaphanous,' to borrow a word from G. E. Moore's 1903 "The Refutation of Idealism."  The diaphanousness of awareness is a phenomenological feature of it.  This being so, there is no phenomenological evidence of any act-articulation on the side of awareness.  All the articulation and differentiation appear on the side of the object.  But aren't there differences among seeing a lamp, imagining a lamp, and remembering a lamp?  No doubt, but why must they be act-differences?  It is consistent with the phenomenology of the situation that these differences too fall on the side of the object.  Instead of saying that there are acts of imagination and acts of memory, one could say that there are imaginal objects and memorative objects.

The point, then, is that phenomenology alone cannot justify the positing of mental acts. So Russell does have a point with respect to his first claim.   Phenomenology needs dialectical supplementation.

The Dialectics of the Situation

Being aware of a centaur and being aware of a mermaid are of course different.  This difference is phenomenologically evident.  But what differentiates them if there are no mental acts?  Not the objects, since they don't exist, and not the awarenesses since they are one and not two on the assumption that there are no mental acts.  And if there are no mental acts, then there are no subjects of mental acts.  And yet there must be something that accounts for the difference between awareness of a centaur and awareness of a unicorn.  The denier of acts seems at this point forced to embrace a Meinongian theory of beingless items.  He could say that the centaur-awareness and the mermaid-awareness are numerically different in virtue of the fact that a centaur and a mermaid are distinct denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein.

To this I respond that there are no beingless items.  The realm of Aussersein is empty.  (The arguments cannot be trotted out here.)  Hence there is no Meinongian way out.  I conclude that we are justified in positing mental acts to account for the difference.  I gave this argument already in more detail in my recent reconstruction  of an argument from Laird Addis for mental acts.

I conclude that Russell is wrong in his second claim.  If the argument I gave is sound, then acts are theoretically indispensable. 

Russell's Genetic Claim

This is fairly weak inasmuch as Russell seems not to appreciate the distinction between a mental act and a mental action.  An action is the action of an agent  who performs the action.  But a mental act is merely an occurrent episode of intentional awareness.  As such, it needn't be anchored in a substantial self.  One could reject substance ontologies as Bergmann does while admitting mental acts.  There is nothing in the notion of a mental act that requires that the subject of the act be a substance that exists self-same over time. 

An Argument for Mental Acts

An earlier post explains the distinction between mental acts and mental actions.  But a logically prior question is whether there are any mental acts in the first place.  Suppose I hear the characteristic rumble of a Harley-Davidson engine and then suddenly think of Peter.  One cannot move straightaway from such a commonplace observation recorded in ordinary English to talk of mental acts of perceiving and of remembering.  This is because 'mental act' is a terminus technicus embedded within a theory.  It is a term that drags behind it a load of theoretical baggage that one may not want to take on board.  Every mental act is a mental state, a state of a mind.  (A state is necessarily a state of something; a mental state is necessarily a state of a mental something.)  So talk of mental acts seems to commit one to talk of minds or mental subjects.  But their existence is denied by those (Sartre, Butchvarov, et al.) who maintain that consciousness is subjectless.  That theoretical denial, however, is consistent with the commonplace that we sometimes hear and remember.  On the other hand, talk of mental acts commits one to an act-object distinction, a distinction that adverbialists deny.  So although it is obvious that we sometimes hear and remember, it is not obvious that there are mental acts.  So we need an argument.  Here is one.  It is my reconstruction of what I think Laird Addis is saying on p. 71 et passim of Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality (Temple University Press, 1989).

1. Consider two states of affairs, S1 and S2.  In S1 I am imagining a unicorn (and nothing else) at time t, while in S2 I am imagining  a mermaid (and nothing else) at t.  S1 and S2 are individually possible, though not jointly compossible.

2. S1 and S2 are numerically different, and this difference requires a ground, a 'difference-maker.'

3. One cannot locate the difference-maker on the side of the object, because there are no unicorns and there are no mermaids.  (For an analogy, compare two mathematical sets, one whose sole member is a unicorn, the other whose sole member is a mermaid. These sets are the same  set, the null set, inasmuch as there is nothing that could ground their difference.)

4. Since both S1 and S2 involve the same type of mental directedness, namely, imagination, the difference between S1 and S2 cannot be ascribed to a difference in type of mental directedness.

5. Since one and the same subject is the imaginer in both cases, the difference between S1 and S2 is not on the side of the subject.  Therefore:

6. There must be something that grounds the difference between S1 and S2, and this all men call 'mental act.' 

Cuteness and quinque viae parody aside, there must be something that grounds the difference between S1 and S2 assuming the Difference-Maker Principle: No difference without a difference-maker.  This principle strikes me as well-nigh self-evident: how on Earth (or on Twin Earth for that matter) could two different complexes just differ?  S1 and S2 are complexes not simples: their numerical difference requires an ontological ground.  Suppose someone insisted that the unordered set {Bill, Peter} is just different — barely different — from the unordered set {Peter, Bill}.  You would show him the door, right?  I can swallow a bare difference of simples but not of complexes. 

The difference between S1 and S2, then, traces back to a difference between two mental acts.  If you ask me what makes these two mental acts different, my answer will be that they differ in their object-directedness: one has unicorn-directedness, the other mermaid-directedness.  Perhaps this could be explained further by saying that a mental act is a mental state, where a mental state is a mind's exemplification of an intentional property.  So in S1 my mind exemplifies the intentional property unicorn-directedness while in S2 my mind exemplifies the intentional property mermaid-directedness.  These property-exemplifications just are the mental acts.

This is pretty close to a Bergmann-Addis assay of the act.  If it could be made to work in all details, then we could avoid Meinongianism, Adverbialism, and Sartreanism (Sartvarovianism?).  But being an aporetician, I am not sanguine.

 

Mental Acts Versus Mental Actions: Sellars and Bergmann

I have been assuming that there are mental acts and that there are mental actions and that they must not be confused.  It's high time for a bit of exfoliation.  Suppose I note that the front door of an elderly neighbor's house has been left ajar.  That noting is a mental act, but it is not an action.  I didn't do anything to bring about that mental state; I didn't decide to put myself in the state in question; I just happened to see that the door has been left ajar.  There is nothing active or spontaneous about the noting; it is by contrast passive and receptive.  But now suppose I deliberate about whether I should walk onto the man's property and either shut the door or inform him that it is ajar. Suppose he is a cranky old S.O.B.  with an equally irascible old dog.   I might decide that it's better to mind my own business and "let sleeping dogs lie."   The deliberating is a mental action.  So, assuming that there are mental acts and assuming that there are mental actions, it seems as clear as anything that they are different.

Why then are mental acts called acts if they are not actions?  It is because they are occurrent rather than dispositional.  Not everything mental is occurrent.  For example, you believe that every number has a successor even when you are dead drunk or dreamlessly asleep. This is not an occurrent believing.   Indeed, you have beliefs that have never occurred to you.  Surely you believe that no coyote has ever communicated with a bobcat by cellphone, although I will lay money on the proposition that you have never thought of this before.  You believe the proposition expressed by the italicized clause in that you are disposed to assent to it if the question comes up.  So in that sense you do believe that no coyote, etc. 

Mental acts are so-called, therefore, because they are actual or occurrent as opposed to potential or dispositional.  My noting that the old man's door has been left ajar is an occurrent perceptual taking that is not in the control of my will. As Wilfrid Sellars points out,

It is nonsense to speak of taking something to be the case 'on purpose.'  Taking is an act in the Aristotelian sense of 'actuality' rather than in the specialized practical sense which refers to conduct.  A taking may be, on occasion, an element of a scrutinizing — which latter is indeed an action in the practical sense.  To take another example, one may decide to do a certain action, but it is logical nonsense to speak of deciding to will to do it; yet volitions, of course, are mental acts.  (Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, Humanities Press, 1968, p. 74.)

Another example Sellars cites is drawing a conclusion from premises.  That is a mental action, but there are mental acts involved in this will-driven thinking process.  One is the 'seeing' that the conclusion follows from the premises.  It cannot be said that I decide to accept a conclusion that I 'see' follows from certain other propositions.  The will is not involved.  The 'seeing' is a mental act, but not a mental action.

Gustav Bergmann says essentially the same thing. "An act is not an activity and an activity is not an act." (Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, p. 153.)  He says that this was crystal clear to Brentano and Meinong, but that in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition 'act' carries an implication of activity.  "In the Aristotlelian-Thomistic account . . . an act of perceiving is the 'abstracting' of a substantial form; and an 'abstracting' is an activity." (Ibid.) 

Very interesting.  It sounds right to me, though I wonder if all Thomists would agree. Not being a Thomist, I incline to the later view.  So as I use 'mental act' a mental act is not a mental action or activity.  This is of course consistent, as already indicated, with its being  the issue of certain mental actions.

A deeper and more important question is whether there are mental acts at all.  Their existence is not obvious — or is it?  Wittgenstein appears to have denied the existence of mental acts.  Bergmann believes he did, while Geach believes he did not.  There is also the related but distinct question whether mental acts require a subject distinct from the act which remains numerically the same over time.  But is even a momentary subject needed?  Why couldn't awareness be totally subjectless, a "wind blowing towards objects" in the Sartrean image?  Butchvarov takes a line similar to Sartre's. 

Clearly, there has to be some distinction between conscious intentionality and its objects.  That's a rock-bottom datum upon which "our spade is turned" to borrow a phrase from old Ludwig.  But why must consciousness be articulated into discrete acts?  Why believe in acts at all?  What are the phenomenological and dialectical considerations that speak in their favor?

Future posts will tackle all these questions as we plunge deeper into the aporetics of mind and bang into one impasse after another.  It should prove to be a humbling experience.

The Aporetics of the Intentional Object, Part I

Here is a puzzle that may be thought to motivate a distinction between intentional and real objects, a distinction that turns out to be problematic indeed.

Puzzle.  One cannot think without thinking of something, but if one is thinking of something, it does not follow that  something is such that one is thinking of it.

Example.  Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth.  So he is thinking of something. But there is no fountain of youth.  So from the fact that Tom  is thinking of the fountain of youth, it does not follow that something is such that Tom is thinking of it.

The puzzle expressed as an aporetic dyad:

1. One cannot think without thinking of something.
2. If one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.

Both limbs make a strong claim on our acceptance.  The first is utterly datanic.  The second, though exceedingly plausible, and indeed true as far as I can see, is not datanic.  It is reasonably denied by Meinong and the Meinongians.  For if some items have no being at all, and if the fountain of youth counts as a beingless item (as it does for Meinong & Co.), and if Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth, then it does follow that something is such that Tom is thinking of it.  This shows that our puzzle rests on a presupposition  which ought to be added to our dyad so as to sire the following aporetic triad or antilogism:

1. One cannot think without thinking of something.
2. If one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.
3. There are no beingless items.

Though the limbs are individually plausible, they appear collectively inconsistent.  If they really are inconsistent, then we face a genuine aporia, an intellectual impasse: we have three propositions each of which we have excellent reason to think is true, but which cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction.

There is at least the appearance of contradiction.  For if Tom is thinking of a mermaid, and there are no mermaids, then Tom is both thinking of something and not thinking of something.  Tom's thought has an object and it does not have an object.  It has an object because no one can think without thinking of something.  It does not have an object because there are no mermaids.  So we have at least an apparent contradiction.

To dispel the appearance of contradiction, one could make a distinction.  So let us distinguish the intentional object from the real object and see what happens.  Every intentional state is a directedness to an object, and the intentional object is simply that to which the intentional state is directed precisely as it is intended in the mental act with all and only the properties it is intended as having. So when Tom thinks of a mermaid, a mermaid is his intentional object.  For it is that to which his thought is directed. But there is no 'corresponding' real object because there are no mermaids in reality.  Accordingly, 'Tom's thought has an object and it does not have an object' is only apparently a contradiction since what it boils down to is 'Tom's thought has an intentional object but it does not have a real object' — which is not a contradiction.

Unfortunately, this solution brings with it its own difficulties.  In this post I will mention just one.

The putative solution says that if I am thinking about Pegasus or Atlantis or the fountain of youth, my thinking has an intentional object, but that there is no corresponding real object.  But what if I am thinking of Peter, who exists?  In this case the theory will have to maintain that there is a real object corresponding to the intentional object.  It will have to maintain this because every intentional state has an intentional object.  The theory, then, says that when we intend the nonexistent, there is only an intentional object.  But when we intend the existent, there is both an intentional object and a corresponding real object.  There is a decisive objection to this theory.

Clearly, if I am thinking about Peter, I am thinking about him and not about some surrogate intentional object, immanent to the mental act,  which somehow mediates between the act and Peter himself.  The mental act terminates at Peter and not at an intentional object.  Intentionality, after all, is that feature of mental states whereby they refer beyond themselves to items that are neither parts of the mental act nor existentially dependent on the mental act.  Clearly, it is intrinsic to the intentionality of my thinking of Peter that my thinking intends something that exists whether or not I am thinking of it. 

This objection puts paid to the notion that intentionality relates a mind (or a state of a mind) to a merely intentional object which functions as an epistemic intermediary or epistemic surrogate. This scheme fails to accommodate the fact that intentionality by its very nature involves a transcending of the mind and its contents towards the transcendent.  Suppose I am thinking about a mountain.  Whether it exists or not, what I intend is (i) something whose nature is physical and not mental; and (ii) something that exists whether or not I am thinking about it.

The point I just made is that when I think of Peter, it is Peter himself that my thought reaches: my thought does not terminate at a merely intentional object, immanent to the act, which merely stands for or goes proxy for or represents Peter.  This  point is well-nigh datanic.  If you don't understand it, you don't understand intentionality.  One will be tempted to accommodate this point by saying that when one thinks of what exists, the IO = the RO.  But this can't be right either.  For the intentional object is always an incomplete object, a fact that reflects the finitude of the human mind.  But Peter in reality is a complete object.  Now identity is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals which states, roughly, that if x = y, then x and y share all properties.  But the IO and the RO do not share all properties:  The IO is indeterminate with respect to some properties while the RO is wholly determinate.  Therefore, the IO is never identical to the RO.

So the point I made cannot be accommodated by saying that the IO = the RO in the case when one thinks of the existent.

Where does this leave us?   I argued that our initial puzzle codified first as a dyad and then as a triad motivates a distinction between intentional and real objects.  The distinction was introduced in alleviation of inconsistency.  But then we noted a serious difficulty with the distinction.  But if the distinction cannot be upheld, how do we solve the aporetic triad?  It looks as if the distinction is one we need to make, but cannot make.

Aquinas on Intentionality: Towards a Critique

Yesterday I quoted Peter Geach in exposition of Aquinas' theory of intentionality.  I will now quote Anthony Kenny in exposition of the same doctrine:

The form is individuated when existing with esse naturale in an actual example of a species; it is also individuated, in quite a different way, when it exists with esse intentionale in the mind of a thinker.  Suppose that I think of a crocodile.  There seem to be two things that make this thought the thought that it is: first, that it is a thought of a crocodile and not, say, of an elephant; second, that it is my thought and not yours or President Bush's.  Other things may be true of thoughts — e.g. that they are interesting,  obsessive, vague — but these seem to be the two things essential to any thoughts: that they should be someone's thoughts, and that they should be thoughts of something.  The theory of intentionality is meant to set out both  these features.  The form of crocodile when existing in nature is individuated by the matter it informs; when existing intentionally, it is individuated by the person in whose mind it exists. (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 169)

Anthony kenny The idea, then, is that one and the same form is both in the thing outside the mind (the crocodile in Kenny's example) and in the mind of the person who is thinking about the crocodile.  It is this self-same form that makes the thought a thought of a crocodile as opposed to a thought of something else.  But the form exists in mind and in thing in two different ways.  It exists in the mind with esse intentionale (intentional be-ing), but exists in the thing with esse naturale (natural be-ing).  (My use of 'be-ing' to translate esse is not for the sake of being cute but to underscore the crucial distinction between the infinitive esse (to be) and the present participle ens, both of which can be translated with 'being.')

The distinction between the two modes of be-ing is needed in order to avoid the consequence that a mind thinking about a crocodile either has a crocodile in it or is itself a crocodile.  A thought of a red sunset is not a red thought, and a thought of a crocodile does not have the properties characteristic of a crocodile.

I now pass over to critique.  Let's first note a distinction that I fudged yesterday for the sake of brevity, brevity being the soul of blog.  Reverting to yesterday's example, it is the distinction between thinking of  a cat (some cat or other) and thinking of a particular cat such as Max Black.  It is one thing to explain how my thought of a cat is a thought of a cat (as opposed to a dog or a kangaroo), and quite another to explain how my thought of Max the cat is a thought of Max. The Thomist theory may well be up to the first task.  But I'm not sure it is up to the second.

Matter is the principium individuationis.  What makes  a cat an individual cat numerically distinct from other cats is its signate or designated matter (materia signata).  In extramental reality, then, Max's individuality is bound up with his signate matter.   But when Max's form exists in my mind with esse intentionale, it is exists in an immaterial way.  What then individuates Max's form as it exists in my mind with esse intentionale?  And if nothing individuates it, then what makes my thought of Max the cat a thought of Max (as opposed to a thought of some cat or other)?

I hope to expatiate further on this tomorrow.

Two Puzzles Anent Brentano’s 1874 Locus Classicus on Intentionality

All contemporary discussion of intentionality traces back to an oft-quoted passage from Franz Brentano's Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint.  First published in 1874 in German, this influential book  had to wait 99 years until it saw the light of day in the Anglosphere.  And in the Anglosphere to go untranslated is to go unread.  Here is the passage: 

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, although they do not all do so in the same way.  In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Humanities Press, 1973, ed. McAlister, p. 88)

This passage is not only puzzling in itself, but also puzzling in that it is not clear what it has to do with the discussions of intentionality that it spawned.  I think most philosophers nowadays would agree that something like the following is the thesis of intentionality:

Thesis of Intentionality.  It is characteristic of certain mental states (the intentional states) to refer beyond themselves to items (i) that are not part of the state and (ii) may or may not exist.

Example.  If I am in a state of desire, then a complete description of this mental state must include a specification of what it is that I desire.  One cannot simply desire, or just desire.   At a bare minimum we need to distinguish between the desiring and that which is desired.  As Brentano says above, in desire something is desired. 

Brentano Unfortunately, the word 'something' will cause some people to stumble including some esteemed members of the Commenter Corps.  They will get it into their heads that a concrete episode of desire cannot exist unless there also exists, independently of the desire, something that is desired.  But this cannot be what is meant.  For if Poindexter desires a perpetuum mobile, he is just as much in a state of desire as his pal Percy who desires Poindexter's sloop, despite the fact that there is and can be no perpetuum mobile, while there is Poindexter's sloop.  And as for wanting a sloop, it could be that Percy wants a sloop without wanting any sloop that (presently) exists: he wants a sloop that satisfies a description that no sloop in existence satisfies.  Or a woman wants a baby.  She doesn't want to adopt or kidnap an existing baby; she wants to 'bring a baby into the world.'  Obviously, her longing is for something that does not presently exist, and indeed for something that does not exist at all if what does not yet exist does not exist.

In  cases like these , the states of desire refer beyond themselves to items that are (i) not part of the states and that (ii) do not exist.  After all, someone who wants a sloop does not want a mental state, or any part of a mental state, or anything immanent to a mental state, or anything whose existence depends on the existence of a mental state.  Wanting a sloop, by its very intentional structure, intends something which, if it exists, exists independently of any mental state.  And note that from the fact that there is nothing that satisfies the sloop-desire it does not follow that the desire is directed to an immanent object.

It is also important to realize that the reference beyond itself of mental acts is an intrinsic (nonrelational) feature of these acts: what makes my thought of Las Vegas precisely a thought of Las Vegas is not the obtaining of a relation between me (or my mental state) and the city of Las Vegas.  For suppose I am thinking of Las Vegas, and while I am thinking of it God does to it what he is said to have done to Sodom and Gomorrah.  Would my thinking of Las Vegas be in any way affected as to its own inner nature?  No.  The act of thinking and its content are what they are whether or not the external object exists.

Part of the thesis of intentionality , then, is that certain mental states are intrinsically such as to point beyond themselves to items that may or may not exist.  Intrinsically, because the object-directedness is not parasitic upon the actual existence of the external object.  But can one find the thesis of intentionality as I have spelled it out  in the above passage? 

No, and that is our first puzzle. It is puzzling that the 1874 'charter' has little to do with what subsequently flew under the flag 'intentionality.'  Two points:

a. Although Brentano speaks of "reference to an object,"  he makes it clear that this object is an immanent object, one contained in the mental phenomenon or act.  As such, the object is indistinguishable from a mental content.  And then there is the talk of "the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object."  'Inexistence' does not mean nonexistence but existence-in (inesse).  The idea is that the object exists in the act and not independently of the act.  But then the object is a mere content, and the notion of a reference beyond the mental state to something transcendent of it is lost.

b. It is also striking that in the 1874 passage  there is no mention of the crucial feature of intentionality that is always mentioned in later discussions of it, namely, that the items to which intentional states refer  may or may not exist, or may or may not obtain (in the case of states of affairs).  For example, if Loughner believes that the earth is flat, then his mental state is directed toward a state of affairs which, if it obtains, is a state of affairs involving the earth and nothing mental.  But neither the obtaining nor the nonobtaining of this state of affairs follows from Loughner's being in the belief-state.

It seems as if for the Brentano of 1874 intentionality is something wholly internal to the mental phenomenon, a relation that connects the act with its content, but does not point beyond the content to the external world.  "If every mental phenomenon includes as object something within itself," then every intentional object exists in the mode: existence-in.  I am therefore inclined to agree with Tim Crane:  "Brentano’s original 1874 doctrine of intentional inexistence has nothing to do with the problem of how we can think about things that do not exist."

Of course, in the later Brentano intentionality is tied to the latter problem.  On Crane's analysis, Brentano simply changed his  mind after 1874.  I see it slightly differently:  the later view is implicit in the 1874 passage but cannot emerge clearly because of Brentano's adherence to Scholastic conceptuality.  But this is a contested exegetical point.

The second puzzle concerns an apparent misunderstanding by Brentano of the Scholastic doctrine of esse intentionale.  This is puzzling because Brentano was steeped in Aristotle and the Scholastics due to his priestly formation, not to mention his doctoral work under Trendelenburg.

In the passage quoted Brentano identifies intentional inexistence with mental inexistence, which implies that below the level of mind there is no esse intentionale.  But this is not Scholastic doctrine.  For an explanation of this, see Gyula Klima.  We will come back to this.