According to George Molnar,
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 is right: the directedness beyond itself to an object is an internal feature of the intentional state. Consider an act (intentional state) of seeing a particular green paloverde tree. What makes the mental act a consciousness of that very object? Some will be tempted to say that the tree in reality, outside the mind, causes the mental state both to be directed and to be directed to the very object to which it is directed. But then the object-directedness would not be an internal feature of the intentional state. The curious thing about the nexus of intentionality is that mental acts are intrinsically directed to their objects. They refer beyond themselves by their very nature. So it is not in virtue of an external relation to an external thing that a mental state is object-directed. As I argued earlier, object-directedness is not to be confused with object-dependence. One should not allow the prevalence of various forms of externalism over the last 35 years or so to blind one to the predominance of internalism in intentionality theory from Brentano on. (This is not to say that there are no object-directed states whose identity does not require the existence of an external referent.)
If one were to suppose that the object-directedness of every act requires the existence of external things, then (i) there would no object-directedness in the case of acts directed to nonexistent objects such as the merely possible golden mountain and the impossible round square, and (ii) an intentional state would lose its intentionality should the external thing to which it is directed cease to exist. In the case of (i), what either does not or cannot exist cannot do any causing, and in the case of (ii), what no longer exists cannot do any causing either.
Consider again my Washington Monument (WM) example. If, unbeknownst to me, it ceases to exist while I am merely thinking about it, but not sense-perceiving it either directly by ordinary vision or indirectly via television, the directedness (intentionality) of my thinking is in no way affected by the WM's ceasing to exist: my conscious state remains directed, and it remains directed to the very object to which it was directed, and indeed in exactly the same way, say, under the incomplete description 'monolithic marble obelisk.' But what object is that? Which object is the intentional object? Is it the transcendent WM itself? Or is it an immanent object? There is a puzzle here that cannot be solved by stipulative definition of 'intentional object.' Two possibilities.
P1. One possibility is that the intentional object (IO) is the WM itself. There is good phenomenological reason to maintain this. After all, when I think of the Washington Monument, my thinking is directed beyond itself to something other than itself: I am not thinking about some intermediary item or epistemic deputy or surrogate such as a sense datum, idea, image, way of being appeared to, representation, guise, noema, or whatnot. My thinking goes straight to the transcendent thing itself; it does not stop short at some immanent item that plays a mediating role. It seems we ought to say that the IO is the transcendent thing itself.
If so, the WM is my act's IO both while the WM exists and after it ceases to exist. Don't forget that it is a phenomenological datum that the IO remains self-same over the interval despite the fact that during that interval the WM ceases to exist. Now the WM is in no way immanent to consciousness; it is neither a real content thereof in Husserl's sense of reeller Inhalt, nor is it immanent in the manner of an Husserlian noema. No wholly determinate 550-foot-tall marble obelisk resides in my head or in my mind. It cannot be in or before my mind because my mind, and yours too, is finite: it cannot 'wrap itself around' the entirety of the massive monolith. Only a tiny fraction of the WM's parts, properties, and relations are before my mind when I think of it. That would also be the case were I standing in front of the monument looking at it.
So on (P1), the WM is the IO of my act, and the WM, both before and after it ceases to exist, is one and the same transcendent item. After it ceases to exist, however, it is a nonexistent transcendent item without ceasing to be the IO of my act of thinking. That is to say: my ongoing thinking of the WM has available to it an IO over the entire interval, an IO that has and then loses the property of existence. Note the difference between 'My thinking has no object' and 'My thinking has an object that lacks existence.'
(P1) thus lands us in the Meinongian predicament of having to affirm that some items are both transcendent of consciousness and thus in no way mind-dependent, and without existence. (I am assuming the untenability of any distinction between being and existence; hence there is no escape by this route.) I will say that an item that has neither existence nor being of any sort is 'beingless.' It is a pure 'what,' a pure Sosein bereft of Sein. It is ausserseiend.
I myself find the notion that some items are beingless unintelligible although I do understand how the notion is arrived at. Some will dismiss my finding of unintelligibility as a merely autobiographical remark, but by my lights it is more than that. It just makes no sense to say that there are, in an ontically unloaded or non-committal sense of 'there are,' definite items actually possessing properties and thus numerically different from one another that are both transcendent of consciousness and jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing."
Therefore, while there is good phenomenological reason to maintain that the intentional nexus puts us in touch with the thing itself and thus that the intentional object of an act is the thing itself, this plausible view entangles us in seemingly insuperable Meinongian difficulties. My thinking of the WM does not become objectless half-way through the interval. That is phenomenologically obvious. Therefore, if the WM is the IO of my act, then the WM becomes a nonexistent object by the end of the interval. As I noted earlier, Husserl in the 'Jupiter' passage in the Logical Investigations seems headed in a Meinongian direction.
We face a serious problem if Meinongianism is to be avoided. We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries. We want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.' But the problem of nonexistence (not inexistence! pace so many historically ignorant analytic philosophers) throws a spanner in the works. One could say, and it has been said, that when the IO exists, the act gets at it directly; when the IO doesn't exist, the act terminates at a representation in a mind. This is an option that needs discussing in a separate post. For now I am assuming that in every case, the IO is either a transcendent item or an immanent item. I have argued that on the first alternative the upshot is Meinongianism, an upshot that by my lights is unacceptable.
P2. The other possibility (theoretical option) given the assumption just stated is that the IO of my ongoing act of thinking of the WM during an interval in which it passes from existence to nonexistence is not a transcendent item, but an immanent item. Two sub-possibilities (theoretical sub-options) suggest themselves.
P2a. On the first sub-option, the IO is a representation R in the mind. To say that the IO exists is to say that R represents something in the external world. To say that the IO does not exist is to say that R does not represent anything in the external world. So when I am thinking about the WM, during the entire time I am thinking about it, what I have before my mind is a representation Rwm which at first represents something and then ceases to represent anything but without prejudice to its being one and the same representation during the entire interval. This suggestion accommodates the fact that, phenomenologically, nothing changes during the interval. But it succumbs to other objections. Husserl fulminates against representationalism and its notion that consciousness is like a box with pictures in it of things outside the box. See Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness.If an intentional state is directed to what is beyond itself, as Molnar rightly states above, then it is not representations to which consciousness is directed, but the things themselves.
P2b. On the second sub-option, the IO is an immanent item, but not a representation. It is an ontological 'part' of the thing itself. Suppose the tree I see is a synthetic unity of noemata. The transcendence of the tree is constituted in the potential infinity of the series of noemata, but each noema is inseparable from a noesis. This leads to idealism which is arguably untenable. But I cannot say more about this now.
The intentional nexus as non-contingent
Molnar tells us above that the link between act and object is non-contingent. The reason is that acts are individuated by their objects: every act has an object, and what makes an act the act it is is its object. Since an act cannot be without an object, an object that makes it the very act it is, the nexus between act and object is non-contingent.
But if in every case an act cannot exist and be the very act it is without an object, then, if the external thing does not exist, as in the case of the Roman god Jupiter, the object must be a Meinongian nonexistent object.
The intentional object may or may not exist
"The intentional object can be existent or non-existent." (Molnar, 62) He infers from this that the intentional relation cannot be a genuine relation given that a genuine relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist.
But we should note an ambiguity in Molnar's formulation. The formulation uses the modal word 'can.' But is the point non-modal or modal? Are we being told that some IOs exist and some do not? Or that every IO is such that, if existent, then possibly nonexistent, and if nonexistent, the possibly existent? I should address this in a separate post.
We should also note the following. If the intentional nexus is not a relation (because some IOs exist and some do not), and the act-object nexus is non-contingent such that, necessarily, every act has an intentional object, then in the cases where the IO does not exist, and Meinongianism is false, the IO must be an immanent object. So at least some IOs are immanent objects given the internality and non-contingency criteria cited by Molnar. But if some IOs are immanent, then the pressure is on to say that they all are, which leads us either to representationalism or to transcendental idealism, both of which are deeply problematic.
The indeterminacy of intentional objects
Finally, among the non-linguistic criteria of intentionality, Molnar mentions the fuzziness or indeterminacy of intentional objects (p. 62). It is clear that some intentional objects are, as Molnar says, "seriously indeterminate." Suppose that I am expecting a phone call soon. To expect is to expect something. The object expected, the phone call, is indeterminate with respect to the exact time of its arrival. It is indeterminate with respect to other properties as well. But is every intentional object indeterminate? The WM exists, and whatever exists is wholly determinate. But when I think of it or remember it or expect to see it or perceive it, what is before my mind is not the WM with all of its parts, properties, and relations. Given the finitude of our minds, it would be impossible to have the whole of it before my mind. The WM, precisely as presented, cannot be the WM itself. The former is indeterminate in many but not all respects whereas this is not true of the latter. What this suggests, given the internality and non-contingency criteria is that the intentional object is not the thing itself, but an immanent object.
Aporetic conclusion
We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries. It is a phenomenological feature of intentional states that they purport to reveal things that do not depend for their existence on consciousness. My visual perception of the tree in my backyard purports to make manifest a thing in nature that exists and has many of the properties it has whether or I or anyone ever perceives it. That purport is built into the phenomenology of the situation. We therefore want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.' But then we bang up against the problem of intentional nonexistence.
We seem to face a dilemma. Either the IO is the thing itself or it is not. To hold to the identity of the IO and the thing itself, we must enter Meinong's jungle. We have to embrace the unintelligible notion that there are transcendent nonexistent items in those cases in which the IO does not exist. On the other hand, if we hold that the IO is an immanent item, then the problem of its relation to the thing itself arises. Is the IO a representation of the thing itself? Or is it an ontological part of the thing itself? Either way there is trouble.
Your grasp of the issue is excellent, Bill. “[T]he 'semirealism' is more epistemological/referential than ontological” seems to me right; this is why it is semirealism, not realism. But it is logical semirealism: “Logical semirealism differs from both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both antirealism and realism regarding
“other minds” (page 166).
The reason facts are only “semireal” in my view is that they have a logical structure. As you say in your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated, “facts could be truth-making only if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that can mirror the structure of a proposition.” The structure of a proposition is its logical structure. In Part Two of Anthropocentrism in Philosophy I argue against realism regarding logical structure, but I also reject the simplistic antirealism regarding logical structure that says “there is only language.” Surely there are no ands, ors, or iffs in the world. It’s not just that logical objects and structures cannot be perceived or even “said.” Surely words like “and,” “or,” and “if” do not stand for anything physical, mental, or other-worldly. Yet no less surely they are not merely words.
Since facts necessarily, indeed essentially, possess a logical structure, my argument against logical realism applies also to realism regarding facts but, again, I reject the simplistic antirealism regarding facts that says “there is only language.” I wrote: “[T]here is a third way of understanding facts, which is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper. There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider here, its propriety” (pages 178-9).
I would share your discomfort if a philosopher said “There are facts and there are no facts”( I can’t find the sentence in Anthropocentrism in Philosophy). But I would understand it, just as I understand Frege’s “The concept horse is not a concept,” Meinong’s “there are things of which it is true that there are no such things,” and Wittgenstein’s “some things cannot be said but show themselves.” All four are puzzling. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with truths that puzzle us, make us wonder. But philosophy begins in wonder. We could, of course, invent new terms, perhaps saying that while facts do not exist they subsist, but I doubt that this would lead to better understanding.
Butch