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. 

George Shearing Dead at 91

Kerouac aficionados will  recall the "Old God Shearing" passage in On the Road devoted to the late pianist George Shearing.  Here is a taste of his playing.  And another.

You will have noticed, astute reader that you are, that my opening sentence is ambiguous.  'The late pianist George Shearing' must be read de re for the sentence to be true, while my formulation suggests a de dicto reading.  Compare:

a. The late George Shearing is such that that there is a passage in OTR about him.

b. There is a passage in OTR about the late George Shearing.

(a) is plainly true and wholly unproblematic.  (b), however, is false in that there is no passage in OTR about George Shearing under the description 'late' or 'deceased.'  On the contrary, the passage in question depicts him as so exuberantly alive as to drive Dean Moriarty 'mad.'  But is (b) plainly false?

I suppose it depends on whether 'about' is ambiguous in (b).  Can a passage that depicts x as F be about x even if x is not F? Or must x be F if a passage that depicts x as F is correctly describable as about x? My tentative view is that there are both uses in ordinary English.  Consequently, (b) is not plainly false.

Is the definite description 'the man in the corner with champagne in his glass'  about a man in the corner even if he does not have champagne in his glass but sparkling water  instead?  If you say 'yes,' then you should agree that (b) is not plainly false, but ambiguous.

The Shame of Britain’s Muslim Schools

Here.

Why are Western societies allowing themselves to be infiltrated?  Does liberalism have a death wish?  Imagine a toleration so tolerant that it tolerates its own destruction.  Do you think that toleration just might have limits?  Does asking these questions make one an 'Islamophobe'? 

UPDATE.  An English correspondent comments:  It's true, what's going on in Britain's Muslim schools is shameful.  What's even more contemptible is the fact that while the authorities  wink at Muslim hatred and violence, they can prosecute any "Islamophobic" citizen who draws attention to it.

The Thing About Kierkegaard

He presupposes the truth of Christianity.  The question for him is not whether it is true  but how it is properly to be lived.  His concern is the existential appropriation of what is antecedently accepted as true.  This is reflected in his otherwise absurd dictum, "Truth is subjectivity."  So Heidegger was right when he called him, not a philosopher, but "a religious writer."

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)