'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest.
It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.
Consider a perceptual illusion. I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake. I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion. (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)
What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another. No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act.
Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.' (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then, is object-directedness. One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not.
Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness may or may not exist. Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.' From 'S is conscious of an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.
In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root -- else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving. I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act.
If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.
Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain, and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased and that the patient is 'brain dead.' Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed. The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs. But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real. Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real, and this despite their being extremely vivid.
Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.
Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'? Yes it is. That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience. He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states.
But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's survival of one's bodily death.
For it could be -- it is epistemically possible that -- it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last experience, even if it turns out to be an experience as of heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.' ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.' Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in a separate post.)
If this epistemic possibility cannot be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.
Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.
Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs. There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.
Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”.
This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake.
But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to be a person occupying the space behind the mirror, thinking it to be a window. In that case there is also no Y (because no such person) but is there an X? That is, does “I take a mirror image to be a person” imply that there is some X such that X is a mirror image and I take X to be a person?
It is the ‘ontological’ (=referential) questions that interest me. I have never had any interest in epistemology. Is a mirror image a τόδε τι, a hoc aliquid, a this-something?
Over to you.
BV: I don't believe anyone who knows English would ever say, 'I take a tree root to be a snake' as opposed to 'I took a tree root to be a snake.' If you see something that you believe to be a tree root, then you cannot at the same time take it to be a snake. If, on the other hand, if you take something to be a snake, and further perception convinces you that it is a tree root, then you can say, 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'
Suppose we try to describe such a situation phenomenologically. I am hiking in twilight through rattlesnake country. I suddenly stop, and shout to my partner, "I see a snake!" People say things like this. What we have here is a legitimate ordinary language use of 'see.' Sometimes, when people say 'I see a snake,' there is/exists a snake that they see. Other times, when people say, 'I see a snake,' it is not the case that there is/exists a snake that they see. In both cases they see something. This use of 'see' is neutral on the question whether the seen exists or does not exist. Call this use the phenomenological use. It contrasts with the 'verb of success use' which is also a legitimate ordinary language use. On the success use, if subject S sees X, it follows that X exists. On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. On the phenomenological use, if S sees X, it does not follow that X exists. Mark the two senses as sees and seeprespectively.
I seep a snake. But as I look more closely the initial episode of seeing is not corroborated by further such episodes. The snake appearance of the first episode is cancelled. By 'appearance' I mean the intentional object of the mental act of seeingp. This appearance (apparent item) is shown to be a merely intentional object. How? By the ongoing process of visual experiencing. The initial snake appearance (apparent item) is cancelled because of its non-coherence with the intentional objects of the subsequent perceptual acts. The subsequent mental acts present intentional objects that have some of the properties of a tree root. As the perceptual process continues through a series of visual acts the intentional objects of which cohere, the perceiver comes to believe that he is veridically perceiving a tree root. He then says, "It wasn't a snake I saw after all; I took a tree root to be a snake!"
Clearly, I saw something, something that caused me to halt. If I had seen nothing, then I would not have halted. But the something I saw turned out not to exist.
So my answer to your concluding question is in the affirmative.
Finally, if you have no interest in epistemology, then you have no interest in the above question since it is an epistemological question concerning veridical and non-veridical knowledge of the external world via outer perception.
You are some kind of radical externalist. But how justify such an extreme position?
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem.
What follows is a warm-up for a discussion of the paper to which Chandler directs us. Galen Strawson is a brilliant philosopher with very interesting ideas. I am not sure I quite understand him. The entry below is a slightly emended version of a post from 2018. It is based on a much earlier paper by Strawson.
...........................
The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:
1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.
2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.
3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.
It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.
And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well. (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)
The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs. But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3). Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.
I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility. (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence. So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).
As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time. We live in a secular age. 'Surely' -- the secularist will assure us -- there is nothing concrete that is supernatural. God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real. Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism. If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.
Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3). But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature. Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.
What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move.
He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items.
(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)
Or a materialist mysterian can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature. Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.
If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type. Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material. Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson:
Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them. As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case). But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists. Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is. ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)
Strawson and I agree on two important points. One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.
I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so. At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.
This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.
An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The very notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.
As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'
If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed nonsense. We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.
Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.
Why is Strawson's mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism? Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose. This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory! The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter. But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.
Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69) Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature. This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret. Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.
But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry? It doesn't strike me as particularly intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental. It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.
And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.
Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.
Early on I commented on the following ‘Brentano’ inference, with the question of whether it is valid or not.
(1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object.
I think you said it was valid.
It is not a question easy to answer properly, and my impression is that Ed does not appreciate the depth of the issue or the complexity of its ramifications. You cannot just return a 'valid' or 'invalid' answer; the question has to be explicated. The explication may be expected to turn up points of disagreement. We might, however, be able to agree on some of the following. Perhaps only the first.
a) If Jake is thinking of something, it does not follow that there exists (in reality) something such that Jake is thinking of it. I am sure that we will agree on this most basic point.
b) If Jake is thinking of something, a distinction must be made between the occurrent episode of Jake's thinking (a datable event or process in Jake's mental life) and what the thinking purports to be of or about. Typically, this will be something of a non-mental nature. And given (a), what the episode purports to be of or about may or may not exist without prejudice to the episode's being the very episode it is.
c) That the episode is occurrent as opposed to dispositional Ed will surely grant. Jake may be disposed to think of London when he is not thinking of it, but if he is thinking of the city, then his thinking is a mental act -- 'act' connoting actuality, not activity -- and thus a particular occurrence.
d) Now if Jake is thinking about London, his act of thinking purports to be about London which, of course, cannot be internal to anyone's mind or mental state. London with all its buildings and monuments is and remains in the external world whether or not anyone thinks about it. 'Cannot be internal' means that London herself cannot be a constituent of anyone's thinking about London. It cannot be 'in Jake's head,' not even if that phrase is taken figuratively to mean: in Jake's mind. London cannot be a part of Jake's psychic state when he thinks about London. And yet Jake and the rest of us can think about London and many of our thoughts are veridical.
e) Although London is not a constituent of anyone's thinking about London, there must be some factor internal to the mental state, a factor epistemically accessible to the subject of the state, that somehow represents or perhaps presents London to the subject of the state. This factor is a feature of the mental state whether or not the external thing (the city of London in our example) exists. This internal factor does not depend on the existence of the external thing. If Jake in Arizona is thinking about London, and the city goes the the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, i.e., ceases to exist, and if this event occurs while Jake is thinking about the English city, nothing changes in Jake's mental state: the thinking remains and so does its particular outer-directedness, its directedness to London and to nothing else. In other words, if Jake is thinking about London and, unbeknownst to Jake, the city ceases to exist while he is thinking about it, Jake remains thinking and his thinking retains the same specific aboutness that it had before the city ceased to exist. Thus neither the thinking nor its aboutness, depend on the existence of London. This aboutness or outer-directedness to a particular external thing -- I am studiously avoiding for the moment the polyvalent term 'intentional object' -- is or is closely related to the internal factor I mentioned above. What should we call it? If the act is the noesis, the internal factor responsible for the particular outer-directedness can be called the noema.
f) Much more can be said, but enough has been said to answer Ed's question. He wants to know whether the inference encapsulated in the following sentence is valid or invalid:
(1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object.
The question cannot be answered as it stands. (1) needs disambiguation.
(1a) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, this thing, if it exists, is contained in Jake's thinking of it.
INVALID.
(1b) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, there is something internal to Jake's thinking in virtue of which his act of thinking has the precise directedness that it has, and this item -- the noema -- is 'contained in' in the sense of dependent upon Jake's act of thinking.
VALID.
Further questions arise at this point. How are we to understand the 'relation' of this noema to the external thing that it presents or represents? And what exactly is the status of the noema?
Herewith, some notes on R. M. Sainsbury, Intentionality without Exotica. (Exotica are those items that are "nonexistent, nonconcrete, or nonactual." (303) Examples include Superman and Arcadia.)
'Jack wants a sloop' could mean three different things. (a) There is a particular sloop Jack wants. In this case, Jack's desire is externally singular. Desire is an object-directed mental state, and in this case the object exists and is singular.
(b) There is no particular sloop Jack wants; what he wants is "relief from slooplessness" in Quine's phrase. In this case the desire, being "wholly non-specific," is not externally singular. In fact, it is not singular at all. Jack wants some sloop or other, but no particular sloop whether one that exists at present or one that is to be built.
(c) Jack wants a sloop of a certain description, one that, at the time of the initial desire, no external object satisfies. He contracts with a ship builder to build a sloop to his exact specifications, a sloop he dubs The Mary Jane. It turns out, however, that the sloop is never built. In this case, Sainsbury tells us, the desire is not externally singular as in case (a), but internally singular:
The concept The Mary Jane that features in the content of the desire is the kind of concept appropriate to external singularity, though that kind of singularity is absent, so the desire counts as internally singular. The kind of concept that makes for singularity in thought is one produced by a concept-producing mechanism whose functional role is to generate concepts fit for using to think about individual things. I call such a concept an ‘‘individual concept’’ (Sainsbury 2005: 217ff). Individual concepts are individuated by the event in which they are introduced. In typical cases, and when all goes well, an act of attention to an object accompanies, or perhaps is a constituent of, the introduction of an individual concept, which then has that object as its bearer. In cases in which all does not go well, for example in hallucination, an individual concept is used by the subject as if it had an object even though it does not; an act internally indistinguishable from an act of attending to an object occurs, and in that act an individual concept without a bearer comes into being. A concept so introduced can be used in thought; for example an individual concept C can be a component in wondering whether C is real or merely hallucinated. In less typical cases, it is known to the subject that the concept has no bearer. An example would be a case in which I know I am hallucinating.
External singularity is relational: a subject is related to an object. Internal singularity is not relational in this way. (301, bolding added.)
What interests me here is the notion of an individual concept (IC). We are told above that an IC is distinct from its bearer and can exist without a bearer. So the existence and identity of an IC does not depend on its having a bearer. We are also told that one and the same IC can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical (hallucinatory) experience, the seeing of a dagger, say. So it is not the bearer that individuates the IC. What individuates it is the mental event by which it is introduced.
To these two points I add a third: it is built into the sense of 'individual concept' that if an individual concept C has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer in the actual world, and the same bearer in every possible world in which it has a bearer. So if there is an individual concept SOCRATES, and it has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer, Socrates, and not possibly anything distinct from Socrates. This implies that individual concepts of externally singular items are as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts. This in turn implies that no individual concept of an externally singular item is general: no such concept is multiply instantiable or multiply 'bearable.'
I now add a fourth point: concepts are mental entities in the sense that they cannot exist apart from minds. Concepts are representations and therefore mental entities in the sense indicated. A fifth point is that our minds are finite and our powers of conceptualization correspondingly limited. One obvious limit on our power to conceptualize is that no concept of ours can capture or grasp the haecceity (thisness) of any externally singular item. We ectypal intellects cannot conceptually eff the ineffable, where what is ineffable is the individual in its individuality or singularity or haecceity, i.e., in that which makes it be this individual and no other actual or possible individual. God, the archetypal intellect, may be able to grasp the haecceity of an individual, but this is clearly beyond our 'pay grade.' If God can do it, this is presumably because he creates the individual ex nihilo.
It follows from the fourth and fifth points that all of our concepts are general. Suppose that the concept FASTEST MARATHONER (FM) applies to Jones. That concept is general despite the fact that at any given time t only one person can instantiate or bear it. For at times earlier and later than t, some other runners were and will be the FM. Therefore, FM does not capture Jones' haecceity. But even if Jones is the FM at every time in the actual world, there are possible worlds in which some other person is the FM at every time. What's more, at any time at which Jones is the FM, he might not have been the FM at that time.
Sainsbury's theory of individual concepts strikes me as incoherent. The following cannot all be true:
1) There are individual concepts.
2) Concepts are representations in finite minds, and our minds are finite.
3) Individual concepts of externally singular items must be as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts.
4) Every externally singular item exists. (There are no 'exotica.')
5) Every externally singular item is wholly determinate or complete where x is complete =df x satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).
6) No concept in a finite mind of an externally singular item is singular in content in the sense of encoding every property of the wholly determinate or complete thing of which it is the concept.
7) One and the same individual concept can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical (hallucinatory) experience.
Sainsbury is committed to each of these seven propositions, and yet they cannot all be true. The first five propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of (6). Or if (6) is true, then (1) is false. (6) and (7) cannot both be true.
I conclude that there are no individual concepts, and that the distinction between externally singular and internally singular object-directed mental states cannot be upheld.
Following A. N. Prior, Sainsbury sets up the problem of intentionality as follows:
We are faced with a paradox: some intentional states are relational and some are not. But all intentional states are the same kind of thing, and things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational. (Intentional Relations, 327)
Cast in the mold of an aporetic triad:
1) Some intentional states are relational and some are not.
2) All intentional states are the same kind of thing.
3) Things of the same kind are either all relational or all non-relational.
These propositions are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. Sainsbury solves the problem by rejecting (1). He maintains that all intentional states are relational. Whether I am thinking about Obama, who exists, or about Pegasus, who does not exist, a relation is involved. In both cases, the relation connects the subject or his mental state to a representation. The representation, in turn, either represents something that exists 'in the world' or it does not. In the first case, there is me, my intentional or object-directed mental state, the concept OBAMA, and the man himself in the external world. In the second case, there is me, my intentional or object-directed mental state, the concept PEGASUS, and that's it: there is nothing in reality that the Pegasus representation represents.
Sainsbury is not saying that when I think about Obama, I am thinking about a representation. Plainly, I am thinking about a man, and a man is not a representation in a mind. While Sainsbury advocates a representationalist theory of mind (RTM), he essays to steer clear of ". . . a disastrous turn that a representationalist view may take: instead of saying that the intentional states are about what their representations are about, the fatal temptation for British Empiricist thinkers (and others) is to regard the intentional states as about the representations (“ideas”) themselves." (330) On Sainsbury's RTM,
For representationalists, all intentional states, including perceptual states, are relational, but the representations are not the “objects” of the states in the sense of what the states are about. Rather, the representations are what bring represented objects “before the mind”. Analogously, we see by using our eyes, but we do not see our eyes. Using our eyes does not make our vision indirect. (330)
This implies that representations are not representatives or stand-ins or epistemic deputies or cognitive intermediaries interposed between mind and world. They are not like pictures. A picture of Obama is an object of vision just as Obama himself is. But Sainsburian representations "neither react appropriately with light nor emit odiferous molecules." (330) Pictures of Obama and Obama in the flesh do both. Representations are in the mind but not before the mind. They are "exercised" in intentional states without being the objects of such states:
Intentional states are not normally about the representations they exercise. The representation is not the state’s “object”, as that is often used. Rather, the state’s object is whatever, if anything, the representation refers to, or is about. The notion of “aboutness” needed to make this true is itself intensional: a representation may be about Pegasus, and a thought about Pegasus involves a representation about him. (338)
Sainsbury's solution to the problem codified in the above inconsistent triad involves two steps. The first is to reject (1) and hold that all intentional states are relational. They are genuine relations, not merely relation-like. The second step is to import relationality into the mind: every intentional state is a relational state that connects two intramental existing items, one being the intentional state itself, the other being the representation, whether it be a truth-evaluable representation, which S. calls a thought, or a non-truth-evaluable representation, which S. calls a concept.
It is easy to see that one could take the first step without taking the second. One could hold that all intentional states are relations but that these relations tie intentional states to mind-transcendent items, whether existent, like Obama, or nonexistent, like Pegasus. But this is the way of Meinong or quasi-Meinong, not the way of Sainsbury. He argues in the paper in question against Meinong for reasons I will not go into here.
In sum, intentional states are relations, but they are neither relations to mental objects nor are they relations to extramental objects. They are relations to representations which are neither. A mental object is (or can be) both in the mind and before the mind. And extramental object is (or can be) before the mind but not in the mind. A Sainsburian representation is in the mind but not before the mind (except in cases of reflection as when I reflect on the concept OBAMA as opposed to thinking about him directly).
The article ends as follows:
Metaphysical relationality is the fundamental feature of intentional states, the nature they all share. In the original puzzle, it was claimed that Raoul’s thinking about Pegasus is not relational, since there is no such thing as Pegasus, whereas his thinking about Obama is relational, since there is such a thing as Obama. But in both cases the claims are made true by Raoul being in a two-place relational state, involving a Pegasus-representation in one case and an Obama representation in the other. The metaphysical underpinning of thinking about Pegasus is just as relational as his thinking about Obama. For the Pegasus case, that is not because there really is such a nonexistent object as Pegasus, but because the truth-making state is a relational one, holding between Raoul and, in the typical case, the concept PEGASUS. For the Obama case, the state is relational in the relevant way not because there is such an object as Obama, but because the truth-making state is a relational one, holding between Raoul and, in the typical case, the concept OBAMA.
CRITIQUE
Does this solve our problem? I don't see that it does. First of all, we are left with the problem of the intentionality of representations. What makes an Obama representation about Obama? Sainsbury's solution to the Prior puzzle is to reject the first limb of the aporetic triad by maintaining that ALL intentional states are relational. But since these relations are all intramental we are left with the problem of external reference. We are left with no account of the of-ness or aboutness of representations. We need an account not only of noetic intentionality but of noematic intentionality as well, to press some Husserlian jargon into service.
Second, it is not clear from this article what exactly representations are. We are told that "representations are what bring represented objects 'before the mind'." How exactly? Talk of the "exercise" of representations suggests that they are dispositions. Is the concept OBAMA in Raoul his being disposed to identify exactly one thing as Obama? But how could an occurrent episode of thinking-of be accounted for dispositionally? Besides, the concept OBAMA would have to be a haecceity-concept and I have more than once pointed out the difficulties with such a posit.
Bill, newly arrived in Boston, believes falsely that Scollay Square exists and he wants to visit it. Bill asks Kathleen where it is. Kathleen tells him truly that it no longer exists, and Bill believes her. Both use 'Scollay Square' to refer to the same thing, a physical place, one that does not exist. To exist is to exist in reality. 'In reality' means outside the mind; it does not mean in the physical world.
So both Bill and Kathleen use 'Scollay Square' to refer to a physical place that does not exist. The two are not using (tokens of) 'Scollay Square' to refer to Fregean senses or to any similar abstract/ideal item.* Scollay Square is not such an item. It is concrete, i.e., causally active/passive. After all, it was demolished.
Now it could be that reference is routed through sense as Frege maintained. Perhaps there is no road to Bedeutung except through Sinn. Whether or not that is so, when Bill and Kathleen think and talk about Scollay Square, they are not thinking and talking about an abstract object that mediates reference, whether it be thinking reference or linguistic reference. They are thinking and talking about a concrete, physical thing that does not exist.
We also note that Bill and Kathleen are not thinking or talking about anything immanent to consciousness such as a mental content or a mental act. They are referring to a transcendent physical thing that does not exist. Scollay Square is not in the head or in the mind; if it were, it would exist! If memory serves, it was the illustrious Kasimir Twardowski who first made this point, leastways, the first in the post-Brentano discussion.
Therefore, some transcendent physical things do not exist. Copley Square is an example of a transcendent physical thing that does exist.
But you don't buy it do you? Explain why. (I don't buy it either.)
_______________
*Anglosophers use 'abstract'; Eurosophers sometimes use 'ideal.' Same difference (as a redneck student of mine used to say.)
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.
. . . we still need to agree on a clear definition of ‘Intentional Object’. Here are two other definitions I found.
Tim Crane: what an intentional state is about. Merriam Webster: something whether actually existing or not that the mind thinks about.
These are both very clear, and I suggest we adopt them. That is, if BV is thinking about (or ‘of’) the Washington Monument, then the Intentional Object of his thinking is the Washington Monument itself. If the Washington Monument is then blown into a billion pieces by high explosive and the remains scattered to the four points of the US, and it no longer exists, and if we agree that BV is still thinking about the WM, then the Intentional Object is still the WM.
Do you agree?
No.
If we adopt both of the definitions cited, Crane and Webster, then the intentional object (IO) of a mental act or intentional state is the item to which the act is directed, an item which may or may not exist without prejudice to the existence and specific directedness of the act. That is: the specific directedness of the act (which is phenomenologically accessible to the subject of the act via reflection*) is what it is whether or not the IO exists. So Buckner is telling us that if I am thinking of or about the WM over an interval of time during which, unbeknownst to me, the WM goes from existing to not existing, then the WM itself is the IO both when it exists and after it ceases to exist.
But this implies that my thinking becomes objectless when the WM ceases to exist. And that contradicts the thesis of intentionality according to which, necessarily, to think is to think of something. In the form of a reductio ad absurdum:
a) The intentional object = the thing itself, not some epistemic deputy or intermediary in the mind or between mind and thing. In our example the IO = the WM , a massive marble obelisk that exists extramentally if it exists at all. (Bucknerian assumption for reductio)
b) No mental act exists without an intentional object. (Thesis of Intentionality)
Therefore
c) No mental act exists if the thing itself to which the act is directed does not exist. (From (a) and (b))
Therefore
d) My mental act of thinking of the WM does not exist if the WM does not exist. (From (c))
But
e) My mental act of thinking of the WM continues to exist after the WM ceases to exist. (Phenomenological datum)
Therefore
f) (d) contradicts (e).
Therefore
g) (a) is false: the IO is not identical to the thing itself. (By reductio ad absurdum)
_____________
*In other words, I know, with certainty, both that I am thinking about something when I am thinking about something, and what I am thinking about when I think about it. Husserl's phenomenology is committed to this thesis (cf. Ideas I, sec. 36) but it is notoriously denied by Ruth Garrett Millikan whose theory of intentionality is radically externalist. Cf. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, p. 92 ff.
Bill Vallicella critiques a short passage in my recent book (Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? Rowman and Littlefield, 2020, p. 195) and he levels the following four charges.
1. Buckner has wrongly characterised intentionality as object-dependence.
2. Buckner has wrongly interpreted intentionality along the lines of an externalist model.
3. Buckner has wrongly claimed that the intentional nexus is unmediated or direct.
4. Buckner has wrongly characterised intentionality as a relation.
Here is the case for the defence.
Preliminaries
Some preliminaries. I shall distinguish Intentionality, properly so-called, from Intentionalism. Intentionality is a mental phenomenon which we cannot report without using some relational expression – an intentional verb phrase. For example “Jake is thinking about Zeus”, which predicates the mental state ‘thinking about Zeus’ of Jake using the intentional verb phrase ‘is thinking about’.
Intentionalism, by contrast, I call the philosophical doctrine about intentionality which involves the implicit assumption that statements using intentional verb phrases imply statements which use non-intentional verb phrases. For example, Brentano gets his classic (but false) statement “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself”, using the non-intentional verb ‘includes’ (enthält), from the perfectly true claim that “In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on”, which involves intentional verbs like ‘love’ and ‘desire’.
As I argue in Reference and Identity (chapter 7) that there is no such implication. It is illicit to infer statements using non-intentional (I call these ‘logically transitive’) verbs from statements using intentional (or ‘logically intransitive’) verbs. A verb phrase R is intentional if “a R b” is consistent with there being no such thing as b, otherwise it is non-intentional. An intentional verb phrase Ri takes a grammatical accusative, but no logical accusative, that is, there doesn’t have to be an object corresponding to the accusative. Thus, if Ri is intentional and Rt is non-intentional, “a Ri b” does not imply “a Rt b,” since the former is consistent with there being no such thing as b, whereas the latter is not, that is, the former can be true when the latter is not. For example, “Tobit refers to Asmodeus” does not imply “Tobit is related to Asmodeus,” for ‘refers to’ is intentional whereas “is related to” is not. (R&I p.124)
There are two forms of the Fallacy. The first is the move from a construction which is intentional to one which is non-intentional. The second form is the move to a subject-predicate construction where the subject corresponds to the grammatical accusative of the intentional construction.
As an example of the first form of the fallacy, we have Brentano’s move from “Jake desires something”, “Jake loves something” and so on, to “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself”. But “Jake desires a happy life” is an intentional construction, from which we cannot validly infer the statements “Jake’s mental state (of desire) includes something”, or “Jake’s mental state is directed at something”, for these statements use non-intentional verbs. If A includes or contains B, it follows that something, namely B, is included or contained in A. But no such thing follows from “Jake desires a happy life”. Nothing has to be included or contained or directed at in Jake’s mental state on account of his desiring a happy life. Such a life may be beyond him for now.
Other examples of the first form are:
“Mental states and events are directed at objects” (Searle).
If A is directed at or points at B, there is something that is pointed at.
“Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist” (Vallicella, link).
“Refer beyond … to” is a non-intentional construction, implying that there is something that is referred to.
“… my thinking of Max ‘reaches’ beyond my mind and targets -- not some cat or other, but a particular cat.” (Vallicella, link).
“the [mental] act has an intentional object” (Vallicella, link).
‘Targets’ is non-intentional, as is ‘has’.
The second form of the fallacy is the move from a non-intentional construction to a subject-predicate sentence where the subject is a noun phrase signifying the Intentional Object, and the predicate a noun phrase qualifying the ‘Object’ in some way. Examples:
“Jupiter isbefore my mind as the intentional object of my act.”
“Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof.”
“If an I[ntentional]O[bject] is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.”
“The intentional object is Jupiter himself”
“Jupiter is the intentional object of my act.”
Pretty much any paragraph by Vallicella will contain at least one instance of the Fallacy. He will likely complain that my point is a nicety of language, and not a genuine metaphysical one. I reply, my point is a logical one, not merely linguistic, and concerns the statements that we can validly derive from ascriptions of mental states like “Jake is thinking of a unicorn”. Whether we can validly derive one statement from another, even if it is a ‘metaphysical’ statement, is a question of logic, not linguistic usage, and Continental philosophers should pay more attention to logic.
In summary, to move from “Jake is thinking of Lucifer” to “Jake’s mental state includes (or contains, or is directed to or targeted at) something” is to commit the fallacy of Intentionalism.
In the next post, I shall reply to the four ‘charges’ above.
Bill, you said by email earlier that the sentence “Jake is thinking of Zeus” would be true if Jake was indeed thinking of Zeus.
BV: That's what I said, although I would put 'is' where you have 'was.' Is what I said a shocking thing to say?
I have questions for you about the terms ‘obtains’ and ‘satisfies’.
(1) If “Jake is thinking of Zeus” is true, and assuming there is no such thing as Zeus, then does the relation “– is thinking of –” obtain? According to what you said earlier, a relation cannot obtain if any its relata do not exist. But we normally think of a relation obtaining precisely in the case where the sentence which asserts the relation is true. What do you think?
BV: We cannot assume that thinking-of is a relation if every relation is such that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata. For in the case of Jake and Zeus only one of the relata exists, and it's not Zeus. And yet it is true that Jake is thinking of Zeus. I conclude that the sentence 'Jake is thinking of Zeus,' although grammatically relational, does not express a relational proposition. The sentence needs a truth-preserving analysis that does not commit one to the existence of nonexistent things.
Here are two different candidate analysantia. 'Jake is thinking Zeus-ly.' 'Jake is a Zeus-entertainer.' Neither of these sentences is grammatically relational, and both seem to preserve the truth of the analysandum without commitment to nonexistent things. I do not endorse either analysans.
(2) Is the relational expression “– is thinking of –” satisfied when “Jake is thinking of Zeus” is true? For example, is it satisfied by the two things Jake and Zeus respectively? If not, why not?
Intentionality cannot be identified with object-dependence. Here is why.
Suppose that I begin thinking about some faraway thing such as the Washington Monument (WM) and that I think of it without interruption through some short interval of time. Half-way through the interval, unbeknownst to me, the monument is destroyed and ceases to exist. Question: does my thinking become objectless half-way through the interval? Or does my thinking have an object and the same object throughout the interval?
The answer depends on what is meant by 'object.' 'Object' could mean the infinitely-propertied thing intended in the act of thinking, or it could mean that which is before my mind precisely as such with all and only the properties I think of the thing intended as having. Either could be called the intentional object, which goes to show that 'intentional object' is ambiguous. On the first alternative the intentional object = the real object; on the second, the intentional object is some sort of incomplete item that either plays an intermediary role, or else is a proper part of the thing intended. (Husserl aficionados will gather that I am alluding to the difference between West Coast and East Coast interpretations of the status and function of the noema .) To avoid the ambiguity of 'intentional object,' I will distinguish the thing intended from the noema, leaving open how exactly the noema is to be understood.
One answer to the above question is that, during the entire interval, my thinking has one and the same object, but this object is not the thing intended but the noema. The noema is the thing-AS- intended in certain ways (under certain incomplete descrioptions) appropriate to finite minds such as we possess, for example, the x such that x is made of marble and honors George Washington. This distinction between noema and thing intended needs explanation, of course, and it raises some difficult if not insoluble questions, but it fits the phenomenological facts. When the WM ceases to exist, nothing changes phenomenologically. If the intentional object were the real, extra-mental, physical thing, then, when the WM ceases to exist, my conscious state would become objectless -- which is not what happens. So we need the distinction, and we must not conflate object-directedness with object-dependence.
DEP: The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-dependent =df S's having objective reference entails the (extra-mental) existence of the thing intended by S.
DIR: The objective reference or aboutness of a mental state S is object-directed =df S's having objective reference is logically consistent both with the (extra-mental) existence and (extra-mental) nonexistence of the thing intended by S.
If we understand aboutness in terms of (DIR), then the answer to my question is that nothing changes phenomenologically throughout the interval: my thinking has an object and the very same object throughout the interval despite the WM's ceasing to exist half-way though the interval.
(DEP) codifies an externalist understanding of 'objective reference' whereas (DIR) codifies an internalist understanding. On (DEP), it is the existence in the external world of the thing intended that grounds S's objective reference or aboutness; without this external ground S would lack aboutness, and S would be objectless. On (DEP), then, the aboutness of a mental state is a relational property of the state as opposed to an intrinsic property thereof. On (DIR), intrinsic features of the subject and his acts suffice to ground S's objective reference or aboutness. This implies a strict act-object correlation: necessarily, every act has an object, and every object is the object of an act.
You will have noticed that 'object' has different senses in the above definitions. In (DEP), 'object' refers to a entity that exists in itself, and thus independently of the existence of minds and their acts. In (DIR), 'object' refers to an intentional correlate which cannot exist apart from minds and their acts.
I'll say a bit more by way of elaboration.
The thing intended is the monument itself, the infinitely-propertied physical thing. Surely that is what my thinking intends when I think about the WM and ask: How tall is it? What is its shape? What is it composed of? I am not asking about any content of my consciousness. So I am not asking about the occurrent episode of thinking itself, the act, or any other contents such as felt sensory data (Husserl's hyletic data). Contents are immanent to consciousness and nothing immanent to my consciousness is 550 feet tall, made of marble, monolithic, or in the shape of an obelisk.
Nor am I asking about the noema. Noemata are akin to Fregean senses. Like the latter, noemata cannot be made of marble or 550 feet tall. (This is the 'California' or 'West Coast' interpretation sired by Dagfinn Follesdal.) Like Fregean senses, they are not contents of consciousness that the subject experiences or lives through. Senses and noemata are more like objects than like contents, except that they are abstract or ideal objects that serve a mediating function. The senses of 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' mediate my linguistic reference to that massive chunk of physical reality, the plant Venus. They are neither mental nor physical; they are 'third world' entities albeit more Platonic than Popperian. Noemata are similar: they mediate thinking reference but are neither mental in the manner of a content of consciousness nor physical.
But there is an important difference. Fregean senses exist whether or not minds and their contents exist. They also exist whether or not physical items exist including marks on paper or acoustic disturbances in the air. But noemata exist only as the correlates of acts or intentional experiencings. They have a curious in-between status. They are not contents of consciousness, but they are also not entities in their own right inasmuch as they exist only as correlates of acts.
Because noemata are ideal or abstract intermediaries, they do not have physical properties and dispositions. A tree is disposed to catch on fire if struck by lightning, say. But no tree-noema can catch on fire. (See Husserl, Ideas I, sec. 89)
Here again is the famous passage from Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874):
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself...(Brentano PES, 68)
Jedes psychische Phänomen ist durch das charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker des Mittelalters die intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt haben, und was wir, obwohl mit nicht ganz unzweideutigen Ausdrücken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realität zu verstehen ist), oder die immanente Gegenständlichkeit nennen würden. Jedes enthält etwas als Objekt in sich… (Brentano, PES 124f)
1) For Brentano, intentionality is the mark of the mental: it is what distinguishes the mental from the physical. All and only mental phenomena are intentional. Call this the Brentano Thesis (BT). It presupposes that there are mental items, and that there are physical items. It implies that there is no intentionality below the level of conscious mind and no intentionality above the level of conscious mind. BT both restricts and demarcates. It restricts intentionality to conscious mind and marks off the mental from the physical.
2) BT does the demarcation job tolerably well. Conscious states possess content; non-conscious states do not. My marvelling at the Moon is a contentful state; the Moon's being cratered is not. Going beyond Brentano, I say that there are two ways for a conscious state to have content. One way is for there to be something it is like to be in that state. Thus there is something it like to feel tired, bored, depressed, elated, anxious, etc. even when there is no specifiable object that one feels tired about, bored at, depressed over, elated about, anxious of, etc.
Call such conscious contents non-directed. They do not refer beyond one's mental state to a transcendent object. Other contents are object-directed. Suppose I am anxious over an encroaching forest fire that threatens to engulf my property. The felt anxiety has an object and this object is no part of my conscious state. The content, which is immanent to my mental state, 'points' to a state of affairs that is transcendent of my mental state. In short, there are two types of mental content, object-directed and non-object-directed.
3) 'Every consciousness is a consciousness of something' can then be taken to mean that every conscious state has content. Read in this way, the dictum is immune to such counter examples as pain. That pain is non-directed does not show that pain is not a content of consciousness.
4) Brentano conflates content and object, Inhalt and Gegenstand. The conflation is evident from the above quotation. As a consequence he does not distinguish directed and non-directed contents. This fact renders his theory of intentionality indefensible.
Suppose I am thirsting for a beer. I am in a conscious mental state. This state has a qualitative side: there is something it is like to be in this state. But the state is also directed to a transcendent state of affairs, my downing a bottle of beer, a state of affairs that does not yet exist, but is no less transcendent for that. If Brentano were right, then my thirsting for a bottle of beer would be a process immanent in my conscious life -- which is precisely what it is not.
5) To sum this up. Brentano succeeds with the demarcation project, but fails to explain the directedness of some mental contents, their reference beyond the mind to extramental items. This failure is due to his failure to distinguish content and object, a distinction that first clearly emerges with his student Twardowski.
Brentano was immersed in Aristotle and the scholastics by his philosophical training and his priestly formation. Perhaps this explains his inability to get beyond the notion of intentionality as intentionale Inexistenz (inesse).
a) Lions are smaller than dragons. b) Mice are smaller than elephants.
From this datanic base a puzzle emerges.
1) The data sentences are both true. 2) 'Smaller than' has the same sense in both (a) and (b). 3) In both (a) and (b), 'smaller than' has the same reference: it refers to a dyadic relation. 4) No relation holds or obtains unless all its relata exist.
What we have here is an aporetic tetrad. The four propositions just listed are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. What we have, then, is a philosophical problem in what I call canonical form. Any three of the above four, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one. Which limb of the tetrad should we reject?
One might reject (4) while upholding (1), (2), and (3). Accordingly, some relations connect existents to non-existents. It is true that lions are smaller than dragons despite it being the case that dragons do not exist. The sense of 'smaller than' is the same in both (a) and (b). And 'smaller than' picks out one and the same dyadic relation in both (a) and (b).
The idea here is that there is nothing in the nature of a relation to require that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata. Contrast thinking about the Trevi Fountain in Rome and thinking about the Fountain of Youth. Some will say that in both cases the intentional nexus is a genuine relation since there is nothing in the nature of a relation (to be precise: a specific relatedness) to require that all of its relata exist. It is the same relation, the intentional relation, whether I think of an existing item or think of a non-existent item.
If you don't like this solution you might try rejecting (2) while upholding the remaining limbs: 'smaller than' does not have the same sense in our data sentences. Accordingly, 'are smaller than' in (b) picks out a relation that actually connects mice and elephants. But in (a), 'are smaller than' does not pick out that relation. In (a), 'is smaller than' has the sense 'would be smaller than.' We are thus to understand (a) as having the sense of 'Lions would be smaller than dragons if there were any.'
(2)-rejection arguably falls afoul of Grice's Razor, to wit: one ought not multiply senses beyond necessity. Here is what Grice himself says:
[O]ne should not suppose what a speaker would mean when he used a word in a certain range of cases to count as a special sense of the word, if it should be predictable, independently of any supposition that there is such a sense, that he would use the word (or the sentence containing it) with just that meaning. (Grice, 1989, pp. 47-48, Quoted from Andrea Marchesi, "A radical relationist solution to intentional inexistence," Synthese, 2021.)
Just found this very odd quote from Logical Investigations:
If I have an idea of the god Jupiter, this god is my presented object, he is ‘immanently present’ in my act, he has ‘mental inexistence’ in the latter, or whatever expression we may use to disguise our true meaning. I have an idea of the god Jupiter: This means that I have a certain presentative experience, the presentation-of-the-god-Jupiter is realized in my consciousness. This intentional experience may be dismembered as one chooses in descriptive analysis, but the god Jupiter naturally will not be found in it. The ‘immanent’, ‘mental object’ is not therefore part of the descriptive or real makeup (deskriptiven reellen Bestand) of the experience, it is in truth not really immanent or mental. But it also does not exist extramentally, it does not exist at all. This does not prevent our-idea-of-the-god-Jupiter from being actual, a particular sort of experience or particular mode of mindedness (Zumutesein), such that he who experiences it may rightly say that the mythical king of the gods is present to him, concerning whom there are such and such stories. If, however, the intended object exists, nothing becomes phenomenologically different. It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or it is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of a regular thousand-faced solid.
This relates to my earlier question. What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?
1) Note first that 'inexistence' does not mean non-existence. This is a very common mistake made by most analytic philosophers. When I am thinking about the god Jupiter, with or without imagery, Jupiter is the intentional object of my act. An act is an intentional (lived) experience, ein intentionales Erlebnis. It is a mental item I live through, a psychic content if you will, "realized in my consciousness." But every act has an intentional object (IO), just as every such object is the object of an act. In the Jupiter case, the intentional object does not exist in reality. So we say that it is a merely intentional object (MIO). To say that this IO is inexistent in the act is just to say that the act has an intentional object which may or may not exist (in reality) without prejudice either to the directedness of the act or to the identity of the act. (The identity of an act token is determined by its IO; equivalently, act tokens are individuated by their IOs.) So don't confuse 'inexistent' with 'non-existent.' Every intentional object is inexistent, but only some are non-existent. If an IO is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.
2) Mental acts, not to be confused with mental (or physical) actions, are occurrent episodes of object-directed experiencing. Acts exist in reality. Obviously, Jupiter is not a real part or constituent of my act when I think of Jupiter. Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof. (The same goes for the PLANET Jupiter. I have a big head, and a broad mind, but not that big of a head or that broad of a mind.) But neither does the god Jupiter exist in reality, extramentally. As H. says, "it does not exist at all." This much is clear. Jupiter is not in my head, nor in my mind as a real constituent of the mental events and processes that occur when I am thinking about Jupiter. It is also not an extramental existent. Jupiter is before my mind as the intentional object of my act. This object is what it is whether or not it exists in reality. Suppose we are all wrong, and the god Jupiter does exist in reality. Nothing would change phenomenologically, as H. says.
3) Ed asks, "What is the intentional object here? Is it the idea-of-Jupiter? Or Jupiter himself?"
It is not the idea-of-Jupiter because that is the act -- the occurrent episode of object-directed experiencing -- I live through when I think of Jupiter. We cannot say that because Jupiter does not exist in reality, it must exist in my head or in my mind. That is nonsense as Twardowski made clear.
The intentional object is also not a really existent extramental thing.
The intentional object is Jupiter himself, a transcendent non-existent item. The above passage seems headed in a Meinongian direction. How this comports with the strict correlativity of act and intentional object is surely a problem.
I decided to insert a brief critique of London Ed into one of the intentionality chapters of my book in progress. Here it is:
One mistake to avoid is the conflation of object-directedness with object-dependence. D. E. Buckner speaks of an “. . . illusion that has captured the imagination of philosophers for at least a hundred years: intentionality, sometimes called object-dependence, a supposed unmediated relationship between thought and reality . . . .” (Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? Rowman and Littlefield, 2020, p. 195) Apart from his eliminativism about intentionality, Buckner is doubly mistaken in his characterization of it. No one except Buckner has, to my knowledge, characterized intentionality in general from Brentano on down as object-dependence, but it is standard, especially among analytic philosophers, to characterize it in terms of object-directedness. As George Molnar puts it,
The fundamental feature of an intentional state or property is that it is directed to something beyond itself . . . All mental states and processes have an internal reference to an object. The identity of the intentional state is defined in terms of this intentional object. . . . Since intentionality constitutes the identity of mental phenomena, it follows that the nexus between the mental state or process in question and its intentional object is non-contingent. (Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 62, second and third emphases added.)
Molnar goes on to make the usual points that the intentional object may or may not exist and that intentional objects are property-indeterminate (Ibid.) Given this intentionality 'boilerplate,' it should be clear that object-directedness and object-dependence are distinct notions that pull in opposite directions. Given that the nexus of act and intentional object is non-contingent, the identity of the act and its directedness does not depend on an external object. An object-directed thought need not be object-dependent in the sense of requiring an external thing for its identity. If I am thinking of Lucifer, I have a definite object in mind, an object to which my thought is directed. But of course, having an object in mind is no guarantee of its existence 'outside' the mind. The Lucifer-thought is what it is whether or not its intentional object is real. The thought does not depend on a real object for its identity or its directedness. The directedness of the thought is intrinsic to it and not supplied by a relation to a thing in the external world. This is why Brentano denies that intentionality is a relation, strictly speaking, but only something relation-like. Relations, standardly understood, require for their obtaining the real existence of all of their relata; many of our acts of thinking, however, are directed at objects that do not exist, and this without prejudice to the identity of these acts. This is not to deny that there may be some object-dependent thoughts, where an object is a real thing in nature. Perhaps it is the case that (some) meanings “ain't in the head” (H. Putnam) but are in the external world in roughly the way the meaning of the demonstrative 'this' is exhausted by the real thing to which it refers on a particular occasion of its use; intentionality theory, however, in both the phenomenological and analytic traditions has had from the outset a decidedly internalist bias, where internalism is the view that the individuation of mental items depends entirely on factors internal to the subject and not on any factors external to the subject as on externalism. This should come as no surprise since phenomenology is philosophy from the first-person point of view.
Buckner's first mistake is to interpret intentionality along the lines of an externalist model when this model makes hash of what the main thinkers have maintained, including Brentano, Husserl and Chisholm. His second mistake is his claim that the intentional nexus is unmediated or direct, a conceit belied by Husserl's doctrine of the noema.
What follows is a re-do of an entry that first saw the light of the blogosphere on the 4th of July, 2014. The draft Lukáš Novák (on my left in the photo) sent me back then for my comments has since appeared in print in Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics (Volume 12: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics) eds. Gyula Klima and Alexander W. Hall, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 155-188. I note that our old sparring partner Edward Buckner has an article in this volume, "On the Authenticity of Scotus's Logical Works," pp. 55-84.
.............................................
Our Czech friend Lukáš Novák sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:
(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.
In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view that he seems to be endorsing.
I. Novak's Scotistic View
Novak writes,
Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.
[. . .]
It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced.
[. . .]
In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.
[. . .]
And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:
[. . .]
In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (p. 181, emphases added)
II. Some Questions and Comments
As a matter of Moorean fact we do at least seem to refer both in thought and in speech to nonexistent objects and to say things about them, true and false. The celebrated goldner Berg discussed by Bernard Bolzano, Kasimir Twardowski, Alexius von Meinong et al. is a stock example. Suppose that I am thinking about the golden mountain (GM). Since I cannot think without thinking of something, when I am thinking of or about the GM, I am thinking of something. But thinking is not like eating. Necessarily, if I eat something, that thing exists. I cannot eat a nonexistent comestible. Eating takes an existing object; thinking, however, needn't take an existing object. But it must take an object. So it is quite natural to say that in the case before us, the act of thinking is directed to a nonexistent object.
That some objects do not exist (or have any mode of being at all) would seem to following directly from the intentionality or object-directedness of consciousness. My act of thinking about the GM (or about Frodo, to use Novak's example), being intentional is directed to, intends, an object that is not part of the act, but transcendent of it. It follows straightaway that some objects of thinking and linguistic reference have no being. So far, it seems that Dr. Novak is right: we must reject (P) according to which it is impossible to refer to that which is not.
But of course this is puzzling. An object that has no being is nothing. How then can I be thinking about something that is nothing? And if what I am thinking about is nothing at all, then how is my thinking of Frodo different from my thinking of the GM? Acts are individuated by their objects; if the objects are nothing, then they do not differ and cannot serve to individuate the acts trained upon them. What's more, if the GM is nothing at all, then it has no properties; but it does have properties, ergo, etc. So we have an aporetic dyad that needs solving:
a) The GM is something (because every thinking is a thinking of something, and I am thinking of the GM.)
b) The GM is nothing (because there are no mountains of gold in reality outside my mind, nor, for that matter, inside my mind).
If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy:
D1. Metaphysical possibilism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being. (Novak distinguishes metaphysical possibilism and actualism from semantic possibilism and actualism. Cf. p. 185)
D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceity properties that stand in for mere possibilia.
D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational and not quasi-relational (etwas Relativliches) as in Brentano is to be respected and somehow accommodated. No adverbial theories!
D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided. Intentionality is real!
D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided. When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!
Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him. He can tell me if my imputation is unjust. In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands. Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?
Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge. If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a philosophical jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite. But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God. See p. 185. And see my substantial post on deus-ex-machina objections in philosophy, here. Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God. Then he can be put to work. Or, as my esteemed and fondly remembered teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."
So how does Novak's solution work?
It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain. But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being. Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being. In themselves, they have no being at all. God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind. The intelligibility is not projected onto items external to the divine intellect. And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility. It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.
This is the theory, assuming I have understood it. And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata (D1)-(D5) with the possible exception of (D3). But here is one concern. We are being told that the intelligibility of the GM, for example, is due to a wholly immanent operation on God's part. That is: no act of divine intellection is directed outward toward a transcendent object even if said object is beingless. But if the divine production of the intelligibility of the GM, say, is wholly immanent then this can only mean that the production proceeds by God's conceiving-GM-ly. But this amounts to adverbialism and a denial of the relationality of intentionality, which Novak is otherwise committed to. Cf. the "pre-philosophical datum" mentioned on p. 186 according to which "we all know that we can refer to non-existing things" such as Frodo Baggins, and yet "we all know that they are not there." Frodo, after all, is purely fictional item "made up" by Tolkien. Talk of reference whether it be thinking reference or reference expressed verbally implies relationality: I am related to what I refer to. But talk of wholly immanent operations of cognition and conception sits none too well with the relational talk of reference.
So my question for Novak is: Did Scotus anticipate the adverbialism of Roderick Chisholm, et al.? Is Scotus an adverbialist?
Here is a second concern of mine. We are told that:
. . . it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to.
This implies that both divine and creaturely cognition and conceiving are wholly immanent operations. So what is going on when I think of, or refer to, the GM? It seem that I too would have to be conceiving-GM-ly. But then the objections to adverbialism would kick in.
Here is a third concern not unrelated to the second. The Scotistic-Novakian theory seems to imply that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. But that is not what I seem to be thinking about. (And how would I gain access to God's mind?) It falls afoul of the phenomenology of intentionality. What I seem to be thinking about has very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. An intentional object that does not exist has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.
Connected with this third concern is the suspicion that on Novak's Scotistic theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach. He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own. So he identifies them with divine conceivings. But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski.
My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.
My point could be put like this. The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act. But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc. Novak's theory appears to fall into 'divine psychologism.'
This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.
..........................................
I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states. Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view. I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences. Please note that the intentionality of my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley. No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains. The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):
Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.
How do I know that Bradley is right? By doing a little phenomenology. Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation. At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree. Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself -- pick your favorite phraseology. The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not. No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.' At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.' And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments? Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.
ADDENDA (11 December 2020)
1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore every mental state is object-directed. I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:
Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.
Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.
2) I suggest above that some questions in philosophy can be answered phenomenologically, just by carefully attending to what is qiven, the itch sensation in our example, under bracketing of all questions about causes and effects. One compares the felt itch, precisely as felt, with a clearly object-directed conscious mental state such as desiring to be itch-free. The act of desiring is obviously a desiring of something, namely, being itch-free. The act (intentional experience) refers beyond itself to something not contained within it. One cannot just desire; necessarily, to desire is to desire something that is no part of the act of desiring. Having done the comparison, one just 'sees' the difference: it is not intrinsic to sensory qualia that they refer to anything beyond themselves in such a way as to present an object to a subject; but this is intrinsic to intentional states. As Bradley puts it, sensory qualia, "have no reference to anything else . . . ." They have "no meaning whatsoever." That is, they do not mean, signify, intend, or refer. Qualia have content alright, but not intentional or representative content. (Cf. Husserl's distinction between descriptive and intentional content, Log. Inv. II, 576 ff.)
3) Was I able to make my point above with phenomenology alone thereby avoiding dialectic or argument entirely? No, I argued in a way that can be explicitly set forth as follows:
a) Some sensory qualia are not object-directed. b) All sensory qualia are mental states. Therefore c) Some mental states are not object-directed.
I had to reason to my conclusion, but I did so from a premise -- (a) -- the evidence for which is phenomenological. To be precise, (a) itself is a conclusion of an inference from 'This itch sensation is not object-directed.' Phenomenology needs dialectic and vice versa.
4) In the comment thread to the linked entry above, Harry Binswanger, the noted Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand ), gives essentially the following argument against that thesis that some mental states are non-intentional:
d) An itch is a bodily sensation. e) The intentional objects of bodily sensations are states of one's body. Therefore f) An itch is an intentional mental state.
But in what sense is an itch a bodily sensation? Only in the sense that its cause is physical. In itself, the itch is not bodily or physical but mental. It is a mental state with a physical cause. But one ought not confuse cause with intentional object, a mistake that Husserl exposes at Log. Inv. II, 572. Binswanger's argument commits this very mistake. Whatever the cause in the scalp or elsewhere of the itchy sensation, that cause is not presented by the sensory state. The state has a cause but no intentional object.
Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page:
[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. ( Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144
This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.
Ad [1]. I basically agree. I'm an old Husserl man. But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche Einstellung, it doesn't follow that they cannot be understood "at all" from within the natural attitude or outlook. So I would strike the "at all." I will return to this issue at the end.
Ad [2]. Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction. And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness.
But note the equivocation on 'world.' It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us. Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place. To say that would be to embrace an intolerable form of idealism.
Ad [3] We are now told that this is not idealism. Very good! But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness. The equivocation on 'world' persists. There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the 'space' within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed. These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.
Ad [4] To be precise, the world as the 'space of disclosure' is inconceivable without consciousness. But this is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness. If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.
Ad [5] In the final sentence, 'world' clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. As OF the world -- genitivus objectivus -- consciousness is not IN the world. But the world in this sense IS conceivable apart from consciousness.
And so the confusion remains. The world in the specifically pheomenological sense, the world as the 'space' within which things are disclosed -- compare Heidegger's Lichtung or clearing -- is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of idealism.
So I'd say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the 'Continental Shuffle' as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses of 'world.' Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic. I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic. But the brave attempt does not succeed. A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears. To speak like a Continental, the purport is 'inscribed in the very essence of the act." But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional. Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?
I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden's critique of Husserl's idealism. I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.
To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically. But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them. A sartisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.
My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in which we read:
What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.
Husserl’s phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return “to the things themselves” sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind. This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a “new scholasticism.” By pointing “beyond” modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path “back” to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas. Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism.
The article is annoyingly superficial, and the last sentence quoted is just silly. Do I need to explain why? At the very most, Husserl's doctrine of intentionality prior to the publication in 1913 of Ideas I could be interpreted as supportive of realism, and was so interpreted by many of his early acolytes, among them, the members of the Goettingen and Munich circles. And so in some very vague sense, Husserlian intentionality could be taken as pointing back to medieval thought and to Thomas Aquinas in particular, assuming one didn't know much about Thomas or Husserl. But the claim that "Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism" is risible. Roman Catholicism consists of extremely specific theological doctrines. No one could reasonably hold that a realistically interpreted Husserl could soften secular philosophers up for Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, etc. The most that could be said is that the (arguably merely apparent) realism of the early Husserl was welcomed by Catholic thinkers.
But now let's get down to brass tacks with a little help from Peter Geach. I will sketch the intentionality doctrine of Thomas. It will then be apparent, if you know your Husserl, that there is nothing like the Thomistic doctrine in Husserl.
A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.' How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max? Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am seeing him. What makes my seeing a seeing of him?
Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:
What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X -- it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)
But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain.
The main point here is that of-ness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature -- felinity -- which occurs physically in Max. Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind. It is his form that is in my mind. But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat? Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form -- felinity -- exists in two different modes. Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.
Because my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence in my mind of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. There is no gap between mind and world. One could call this an identity theory of intentionality, or perhaps an 'isomorphic' theory. The knower is not enclosed within the circle of his ideas. There is a logically antecedent community of nature between mind and world that underwrites the latter's intelligibility.
What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him? My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before. The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.
That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it supplies a reason for the real distinction of essence and existence. For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul, pp. 62-64.)
I don't have time to explain in detail how Husserl's approach to the possibility of knowledge differs from the above. But if you consult his The Idea of Phenomenology, which consists of five lectures given in 1907, just a few years after the publication of the Logical Investigations in 1900 which so inspired his early followers, you will soon appreciate how absurd is the notion that Husserl's phenomenology is a "new scholasticism."
Front Row (from Ieft to right): Adolf Reinach, Alexandre Koyre, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Max Scheler, Theodor Conrad. Back Row: Jean Hering, Heinrich Rickert jr., Ernst Rothschild, Siegfried Hamburger, Fritz Frankfurter, Rudolf Clemens, Hans Lipps, Gustav Hübener, Herbert Leyendecker, Friedrich Neumann.
I claimed earlier that there are no intrinsically intentional items that lack consciousness. The claim was made in the context of an attempted refutation of the notion that abstract entities, Fregean senses being one subspecies thereof, could be intrinsically intentional or object-directed. One argument I gave was that (i) No abstract entity is conscious; (ii) Only conscious entities are intrinsically intentional; ergo, (iii) No abstract entity is intrinsically intentional.
David Gudeman demurs, targeting premise (ii):
I may have a counter-example for you, a class of items that 1. Are intrinsically intentional, 2. Are not conscious. The class of things I have in mind is possible thoughts. For example, right now I am thinking about thoughts, but if I had bought that cherry pie earlier today, I would probably be thinking about the cherry pie. My thought of the cherry pie is possible but not actual, so it is not conscious, but it is about the cherry pie, and therefore intrinsically intentional. Also, if there were no actual objects in the universe there would still be possible minds with possible thoughts--intentional objects that exist in a universe without minds.
I take Dave to be arguing as follows:
1) Every thought (thinking) is intrinsically object-directed.
Therefore
2) Every merely possible thought (thinking) is intrinsically object-directed.
3) Some merely possible thoughts (thinkings) are not conscious.
Therefore
4) Some intrinsically object-directed items are not conscious.
A delightfully seductive argument!
I question the inference from (1) to (2) on the ground that there are no merely possible thoughts. (1) is true, but (2) is false if there are no merely possible thoughts.
It is of course possible that I think about cherry pie. But it doesn't follow that there is a possible thought about cherry pie which somehow subsists on its own. Possibilities are grounded in actual items. I actually exist and have various powers. Among them are powers to think about this or that. So, from 'Possibly, I am thinking about x' it does not follow that there is a possible thought about x.
I believe I have said enough to show that Dave's argument, as I have reconstructed it, is not rationally compelling.
Commenter John and I are having a very productive discussion about intentionality. I thank him for helping me clarify my thoughts about this fascinating topic. I begin with some points on which (I think) John and I agree.
a) There is a 'third world' or third realm and it is the realm of abstracta. (I promise: no jokes about Frege's Third Reich. But I can't promise not to speak of Original Sinn and Original Sinn-ers.) Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are abstracta, but not all abstracta are reference-mediating senses. John and I are operating with a provisional tripartite or tri-categorial ontology comprising the mental, the physical, and the abstract.
b) There are instances of intrinsic intentionality. Neither of us is an eliminativist about intentionality in the manner, say, of Alexander Rosenberg. (See Could Intentionality be an Illusion?)
c) There is no intentionality without intrinsic or original intentionality: it cannot be that all intentionality is derivative or a matter of ascription, pace Daniel Dennett. (See Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses.)
d) Nothing physical qua physical is intrinsically intentional, although some physical items are derivatively intentional. (Combine this true proposition with the false proposition that all mental states are physical, and you have an unsound but valid argument for the eliminativist conclusion that there is no intrinsic intentionality.)
Agreement on the foregoing points leaves open the question whether there could be intrinsically intentional abstract items. I tend to think that there are no intrinsically intentional abstract items. John's position, assuming I understand it, is that some abstract items are intrinsically intentional, and that some intrinsically intentional items are not abstract, mental states being examples of the latter.
The bare bones of the debate between John and I may be set forth as an aporetic triad:
1) Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items.
2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.
3) Fregean senses are not conscious.
It is easy to see that this threesome is not logically consistent: the propositions cannot all be true. John and I assume that the Law of Non-Contradiction holds across the board: we are not dialetheists. So something has to give. Which limb of the triad should we reject? (3) is not in dispute and presumably will be accepted by all: no abstract item is conscious, and senses are abstract. 'Abstract' was defined in earlier entries, and John and I agree on its meaning. The dispute concerns (1) and (2). I reject (1) while accepting the other two propositions; John rejects (2) while accepting the other two propositions.
I argue from the conjunction of (2) and (3) to the negation of (1), while John argues from the conjunction of (1) and (3) to the negation of (2).
My rejection of (1) entails that there are no Fregean senses (Sinne). This is because Fregean senses, by definition, are intrinsically intentional. It follows that they are essentially intrinsically intentional. So if they can't be intrinsically intentional, then they can't exist. Why are senses essentially intrinsically intentional? Well, as platonica, senses are necessarily existent: they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds. It follows that they exist in worlds in which there are no finite minds.* Now a sense, by definition, is a mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise) of its object. It mediates between minds and things. Reference, whether thinking reference or linguistic reference, is routed though sense. The (re)presentational power of a sense is essential to it, and it has this power even in worlds in which there are no words to express the sense, no things to be presented by the sense, and no minds to refer to things via senses. For example, consider a possible world W in which there are no languages, no minds, and no planet Venus. In W the sense that 'Phosphorus' -- 'Morning Star,' Morgenstern -- expresses in our world exists (because it exists in every world) and has its (re)presentational power there in W. Thus its intentionality is intrinsic to it and does not depend on any relations to words or to things or to minds. It (re)presents non-linguistically and non-mentally and without the need for physical embodiment.
I think it follows that there is no distinction in reality -- although there is one notionally -- between the power of a Fregean sense to represent and its exercise of this power. There is, in other words, no distinction in reality between the power of a sense to represent and its actually representing. I say this because the existence of what an intrinsically intentional item is of or about has no effect whatsoever on the aboutness of the item. Suppose I am thinking about the Washington monument, but that while I am thinking about it, it ceases to exist. That change in objective reality in no way affects the aboutness of the intentional state. Thus the power of an intrinsically intentional item to represent does not need an external, objectively real, 'trigger' to actualize the power. The extramental existence of the Washington monument is not a necessary condition of the aboutness of my thinking about it. The content and aboutness of my thinking is exactly the same whether or not the monument exists 'outside the mind.' The same goes for senses. The sense of 'Phosphorus' presents Venus whether or not Venus exists. And the content of the sense is exactly the same whether or not Venus exists.
There is an important difference, however, between an intrinsically intentional mental state and a Fregean sense. The occurrent mental state or 'act' -- in the terminology of Twardowksi, Husserl, et al. -- is the state of a mind. It is the act of a subject, the cogitatio of an ego, where the last three occurrences of 'of' all express the genitivus subjectivus. This is essentially, not accidentally, the case. There has to be an ego behind the cogitatio for the cogitatio to be a cogitatio of a cogitatum. But there needn't be an ego 'behind' the sense for the sense to be a sense of or about a thing. If a Fregean sense mediates a reference between a mind and a thing, it is not essential to the mediation that there be a mind 'behind' the sense.
Here then is an argument against Fregean senses:
4) Every instance of intrinsic intentionality has both a subject and an object. 5) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense do not have both a subject and an object. Therefore 6) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense are not instances of intrinsic intentionality.
When I reject the proposition that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items, I thereby reject the very existence of Fregean senses. I am not maintaining that Fregean senses exist but are derivatively intentional items. I do hold, however, that there are derivatively intentional items, maps for example. Maps get their meaning and aboutness from us original Sinn-ers. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater.
So some things derive their referential and semantic properties from other things. That is also true of language. Words and phrases don't mean anything in and of themselves. Mind is king: no minds, no meaning. I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.
John and I agree that Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are explanatory posits. They are not 'datanic' as I like to say. Thus it is a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical datum that the sentences 'The sky is blue' and Der Himmel ist blau 'say the same thing' or can by used to say the same thing. But that this same thing is a Fregean proposition goes beyond the given and enters the explanatory realm. One forsakes phenomenology for dialectics. Now what am I claiming exactly? That there is no need for these posits, that to posit senses is to 'multiply entities beyond necessity in violation of Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem? Or am I saying something stronger, namely, that there cannot be any such items as Fregean senses? I believe my view is the latter, and not merely the former. If senses cannot exist, then they cannot be reasonably posited either.
John's view, I take it, is that both Fregean senses and some conscious items are intrinsically intentional or object-directed. He is not maintaining that only third-world entities (abstracta) are intrinsically intentional. By contrast, I maintain that only second-world entities (mental items, both minds and some of their occurrent states) are intrinsically intentional.
I assume that John intends 'intrinsically intentional' to be taken univocally and not analogically. Thus he is not saying that Fregean senses are of or about first-world items in a manner that is analogous to the way second-world items are of or about first-world items.
Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional, necessarily existent, abstract entities. By its very nature a sense presents or represents something apart from itself, something that may or may not exist. It is a natural, not conventional, sign.
Do I have a compelling argument against Fregean senses? Above I mentioned the following argument:
2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.
3) Fregean senses are not conscious. Therefore:
1) It is not the case that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional.
But this argument appears to beg the question at (2). Why can't there be intrinsically intentional items that are not conscious? If there can be intentionality below the level of conscious mind in the form of dispositionality -- see Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality -- why con't there be intentionality above the level of conscious mind in platonica?
Nevertheless, there seems to me something incoherent about Fregean senses. They actually represent even in worlds in which there is nothing to represent and no one to whom to represent. Consider again the sense of 'Phosphorus.' It exists in every world including worlds in which Venus does not exist and no mind exists. In those worlds, the sense in question actually represents but does not represent anything to anyone. It is therefore a non-representing representation, and thus an impossibility.
_____________________
*A finite mind is the kind of mind that needs such intermediary items as Fregean senses or Husserlian noemata to mediate its reference (both thinking reference and linguistic reference) to things that it cannot get completely before its mind in all their parts, properties, and relations. An archetypal intellect such as the divine mind can get at the whole of the thing 'in one blow.' As an infinite mind it has an infinite grasp of the infinitely-propertied thing. An infinite mind has no need of senses. The existence of senses therefore reflects the finitude of our minds. That the reflections of this finitude should be installed in Plato's heavenly place (topos ouranos) seems strange. It looks to be an illict hypostatization. But this thought needs a further post for its adequate deployment.
Which Platonist theories of propositions did you have in mind in your original post, and what are the problems involved in accepting such views?
I had in mind a roughly Fregean theory. One problem with such a view is that it seems to require that propositions possess intrinsic intentionality. Let me explain.
Propositions: A Broadly Fregean Theory Briefly Sketched
On one approach, propositions are abstract items. I am not suggesting that propositions are products of abstraction. I am using 'abstract' in the (misconceived) Quinean way to cover items that are not in space, or in time, and are not causally active or passive. We should add that no mind is an abstract item. Abstracta, then, are neither bodies nor minds. They comprise a third category of entity. Besides propositions, numbers and (mathematical) sets are often given as candidate members of this category. But our topic is propositions.
For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely psychologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it. Like its German counterpart, the English 'thought' is ambiguous. It could refer to an act of thinking, a mental act, or it it could refer to the intentional object or accusative of such an act. Some use the word 'content,' but it has the disadvantage of suggesting something contained in the act of thinking. But when I think of the river Charles, said river is not literally contained in my act of thinking. A fortiori for Boston's Scollay Square which I am now thinking about: it no longer exists and so cannot be contained in anything. The same is true when I think that the Charles is polluted or that Scollay Square was a magnet for sailors on shore leave. Those propositions are not psychological realities really contained in my or anyone's acts of thinking. And of course they are not literally in the head. You could say that they are in the mind, but only if you mean that they are before the mind.
A proposition for Frege is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:
1. The sea is blue. 2. The sea is blue. 3. Die See ist blau. 4. Deniz mavidir.
(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')
The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That 'same thing' is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by (assertively) uttering them or otherwise encoding them. The proposition is one to their many. (I have just sounded a Platonic theme.) And unlike the sentence-tokens, the proposition is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Herewith, a second Platonic theme. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.
So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content or sense can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages. We also need to account for the fact that the same thought can be expressed by the same person at different times in the same or different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. It is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true. Similarly with judgments and beliefs: they are derivatively true if true. For Frege, propositions are the primary truth bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.
There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. Therefore, a string of marks cannot be either true or false. It is the office of minds to mean. Matter means nothing.
One could agree that a string of marks or a sequence of noises cannot, as such, attract a truth-value, but balk at the inference that therefore propositional meanings (senses) are self-subsistent, mind-independent abstract items. One might plump for what could be called an 'Aristotelian' theory of propositions according to which a sentence has all the meaning it needs to attract a truth-value in virtue of its being thoughtfully uttered or otherwise tokened by someone with the intention of making a claim about the world. The propositional sense would then be a one-IN-many and not a Platonic one-OVER-many. The propositional sense would be a unitary sense but not a sense that could exist on its own apart from minds or mean anything apart from minds.
But how would the Aristotelian account for necessary truths, including the truths of logic, which are true in worlds in which there are no minds? Here the Platonist has an opportunity for rejoinder. Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there are no minds and/or nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that necessarily true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds. The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.
Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One cannot just believe. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition or dictum. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the occurrent belief state is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)
A Consideration Contra
Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. There are all of these entities that there could have been. Each necessarily exists although only some are necessarily true. As necessarily existent and indeed necessarily existent in themselves and from themselves, they have no need of minds to 'support' them. Hence they are not mere accusatives of mental acts. They are apt to become accusatives but they are not essentially accusatives. They can exist without being accusatives of any mind. To borrow a phrase from Bernard Bolzano, they are Saetze an sich. They are made for the mind, and transparent to mind, but they don't depend for their existence on any mind, finite or infinite.
Even more salient for present purposes is that these Platonic propositions are not only existent in themselves but also meaningful in themselves: they do not derive their meaning from minds. It follows that they possess intrinsic intentionality. At this juncture an aporetic tetrad obtrudes itself.
A. Fregean propositions are non-mental representations: they are intrinsically representative of state of affairs in the world.
B. Fregean propositions are abstract items.
C. No abstract item possesses intrinsic representational power.
D. Fregean propositions exist.
The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true. One can therefore reasonably argue from the conjunction of the first three to the negation of the fourth.
The alarm means 'there is a fire in the building'. An assertion has taken place, that there is a fire. But it is triggered by a sensor in the building. So asserting is not just something people do.
This is a loose way of talking quite in order in ordinary life, but false if taken literally and strictly. I have no objection to people in ordinary life saying things like, 'The fire alarm is telling us that there's a fire in the building.' But people don't talk like that. You tell me, "There's a fire!" I ask, "How do you know?" You reply, "The fire alarm went off." You DON"T say, "The fire alarm told me so,"or "The fire alarm made an assertion to that effect." You COULD say, "A fireman told me so."
But let's not get hung up in Ordinary Language analysis. The 1950s are long gone.
My claim is that a mechanical contraption cannot make an assertion any more than a 'sensor' can sense anything. Thermostats don't feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke. Oscilloscopes do not detect sine waves; an engineer detects a sine wave by the instrumentality of the oscilloscope. Neither my dipstick nor the oil on my dipstick asserts that there is sufficient oil in the crankcase; I infer that there is from the oil I observe on the dipstick. Inferring, like asserting, is something people do.
All meaning traces back ultimately to Original Meaners, Original Sinn-ers. Am I being too clever for clarity?
A green light means proceed. A red light means stop. But how did those signals come to acquire their conventional meanings? From us, from minds whose intentionality is original, not derived. Surely you don't believe that green, or a green light, intrinsically means that one may proceed.
Let us see if the Opponent and I can find some common ground. I concede that there is a clear sense in which the sounding of a fire alarm means that there is a fire in the building. But this meaning is an instance of derivative, as opposed to original, intentionality. The intentionality derives from us. The sounding of the alarm means what it means only because we have assigned it that meaning. Its intentionality or meaning is thus not intrinsic to it. After all, a fire alarm could be constructed for deaf people that emits a smell instead of a sound, perhaps the awful smell of burnt hair. Obviously, such a smell is not intrinsically significative of anything.
So: if the Opponent concedes that the intentionality of a fire alarm is merely derivative, then we have agreement. If he holds that it is original, then the disagreement continues.
There is a similar pattern with sentences and propositions. I will allow you to say that a sentence is true or false in a secondary or derivative sense so long as you admit that it is propositions that are the primary truth-bearers. Do we have a deal? A declarative sentence is true in virtue of expressing a true proposition.
The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:
1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.
2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.
3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.
It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.
And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well. (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)
The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs. But which one? Eliminativists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3).
I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility. (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence. So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).
As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time. We live in a secular age. 'Surely' -- the secularist will assure us -- there is nothing concrete that is supernatural. God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real. Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism. If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.
Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3). But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature. Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.
What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move.
He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston.
(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity. Put him under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)
Or a materialist mysterian can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature. Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.
If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first. Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material. Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson:
Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them. As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case). But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists. Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is. ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)
Strawson and I agree on two important points. One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.
I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so. At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.
This strikes me as bluster.
An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.
As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'
If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say you are talking nonsense. You are creating grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.
Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.
Why is Strawson's mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism? Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose. This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory! The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter. But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.
Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69) Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature. This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret. Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.
But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry? It doesn't strike me as particularly intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental. It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.
And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble by us.
Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.
Question: Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think?
Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.
A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.
The proponent of A needn't deny that we are meatheads. Of course we are. We are literally meat (and bone) all the way through. His point is that the res cogitans, that in us which thinks, cannot be a hunk of meat.
Both arguments are valid, but only one is sound. The decision comes down to the initial premises of the two arguments. Is there a rational way of deciding between these premises?
A materialist might argue as follows. Although we cannot at present understand how a hunk of living meat could feel and think, what is actual is possible regardless of our ability or inability to explain how it is possible. The powers of certain configurations of matter could remain hidden for a long time from our best science, or even remain hidden forever. What else would be doing the thinking and feeling in us if not our brains? What else could the mind be but the living and functioning brain well-supplied with oxygen-rich blood? The fact that we cannot understand how the brain could be a semantic engine, an engine productive of and sensitive to meanings, is not a conclusive reason for thinking that it is not a semantic engine.
It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity could trigger a metabasis eis allo genos. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Some speak of 'emergence.' But that word merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it. You may as well say, as in the cartoon, "And then a miracle occurs." But then it's Game Over for the materialist.
Our materialist would do better to insist that unintelligibility to us does not entail impossibility. Our inability to explain how X is possible does not entail that X is not possible.
My response would be that while unintelligibility does not entail impossibility, it is excellent evidence of it. If you tell me that a certain configuration of neurons is intrinsically object-directed, directed to an object that may or may not exist without prejudice to the object-directedness, then you are saying something unintelligible. It is as if you said that .5 volts intrinsically represents 1 and .7 volts intrinsically represents 0. That's nonsense. Or it as if you said that a pile of rocks intrinsically indicates the direction of the trial. (See The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers.)
No rock pile has intrinsic meaning or intrinsic representational power. 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 or venial but vital. Intrinsic, underived intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.
So if the materialist says that the brain means, intends, represents, thinks, etc., then I say that makes no sense given what we understand the brain to be. The brain is a material system and the physical, chemical, electrical, and biological properties it and its parts have cannot be meaningfully predicated of mental states. One cannot speak intelligibly of a voltage drop across a mental state any more than can one speak intelligibly of the intentionality of synapses or of their point of view or of what it is like to be one.
Of course, the materialist can pin his hope on a future science that understands the brain in different terms, terms that could be sensibly attached to mental phenomena. But this is nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms. It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.
There is also the dogmatism of the materialist who insists that the subject of thinking must be the functioning brain. How does he know that? He doesn't. He believes it strongly is all.
So I give the palm to Argument A: Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.
I do not absolutely foreclose on the abstract possibility that there be thinking meat. For I grant that unintelligibility to us is not invincible proof of impossibility. But when I compare that vaguely described abstract possibility with the present certainty that matter as we know it cannot think due to the very unintelligibility of the idea, then the present certainty wins over the abstract possibility and over the faith and hope of the materialist.
If you need to pin your hopes on something, pin them on the possibility that you are more than meat.
Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God:
[Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the tree's leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear, followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God's providence and power which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that his impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn't changed in all of the forty years he has been walking with Him.
P. J. comments that
. . . nature is sometimes said to serve as a 'signpost' to God's existence, without the need for auxiliary premises such as the complexity of things, the orderly patterns of substances as described by the laws of nature, the intelligibility of the world, and so on and on. It is almost as if -- at least for Br. Lawrence -- nature, just by being there, served to point toward God in a primitive or non-inferential way. Nature, for him, pointed not simply to God's existence, but to a more positive account of God as the providential orderer of nature.
I admit that I don't know where to take this idea, or how far it can be taken, but it strikes me as an interesting topic to research in natural theology: the way(s) in which nature, without the aid of auxiliary premises, can point to God's existence, and to a more content-rich account of the divine attributes.
I agree that the question is interesting and important. Perhaps we can formulate it as the question whether nature can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God, and certain features of nature as natural signs of certain of the divine attributes. I will consider here only the first question. Whether nature as a whole can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God will depend on what we understand by 'natural sign.' Suppose we adopt Laird Addis' definition:
An entity is a natural sign if by its very nature, it represents some other entity or would-be entity, that is , if it is an intrinsically intentional entity. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple UP, 1989, p. 29)
I don't doubt that there are intrinsically intentional entities, thoughts (acts of thinking) being an example. Intrinsic intentionality is to be understood by contrast with derived intentionality. The intentionality or aboutness of a map, for example, is derivative, not intrinsic. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's intrinsic properties such as physical and geometrical properties. Suppose a neutron bomb wipes out all minded organisms. Maps and chunks of terrain remain. Do the maps in this scenario map anything, mean anything? No. This is because there are no minds to give the maps meaning.
Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned and agreed upon by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater. The intentionality of the map and its features (contour lines, colors, etc.) is derivative from the intrinsic intentionality of minds.
So our question becomes this: Could nature be a natural sign in virtue of being intrinsically intentional? I don't think so. Nature can be taken or interpretedor read as pointing to God, but that would be a case of derivative intentionality: we would then be assigning to nature the property of pointing to God. But there is nothing intrinsic to nature that makes it point to God.
But of course one might mean something else by 'natural sign.' Fresh bear scat on a trail is a natural sign that a bear has been by recently. A natural sign in this sense is a bit of the natural world, or a modification of the natural world, that typically has a natural cause and that by its presence 'refers' us to this cause. The scat is the scat of a bear, but this 'of' is not the 'of' of intentionality. Similarly with the tracks of a mountain lion. They are typically caused by a mountain lion but they are not about a mountain lion.
Note the difference between the subjective and the objective genitive. The tracks of a mountain lion are a mountain lion's tracks (genitivus subjectivus) whereas the hiker's fear of a mountain lion is not a mountain lion's fear but the hiker's fear (genitivus objectivus). Both genitives can occur in one and the same sentence. My favorite example: Timor domini initium sapientiae. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A second example: Obsidis metus mortis magnus est. The fear of death of the hostage is great. The hostage is the subject of fear; death the object. Analysis of this example in German here.
But I digress.
Could the natural world point to God in the way mountain lion tracks point to a mountain lion? Yes, if the natural world is the effect of a divine cause. But how do we know this? One cannot tell that the natural world is a created world just by observing it. Even if it is created, its createdness cannot be 'read off' from it. It can only be 'read into' it.
Now let me try to answer my reader's question. I take him to be asking the following question:
Q. Does the the natural world, by its sheer existence, directly show (i.e., show without the aid of auxiliary premises), that there exists a transcendent creator of the natural world?
If (Q) is the question, my answer is in the negative. This is invalid: the universe exists; ergo, God exists. This is valid: the universe exists; the universe is contingent; whatever contingently exists cannot exist as a matter of brute fact but must have a cause of its existence; nothing can cause its own existence; ergo, God as transcendent causa prima exists. Whether the second is a sound argument and how one would know it to be sound are of course further questions; it is, however, a valid argument.
But we had to bring in auxiliary premises. And similarly for this question:
Q*. Does the apparent designedness of the natural order directly show the existence of a transcendent designer?
And this one:
Q**. Does the beauty of "The starry skies above me" (Kant) directly show that this beauty has a transcendent Source which "all men call God" (Aquinas)?
I was going through some of your posts from earlier this month (Belief, Designation, and Substitution, January 10, 2017) and was interested in seeing your comment that "[l]inguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality."
. . . I have to say that your above sentence was the first time I've heard anyone articulate what you have articulated in such a direct manner. It's something that certainly makes the most sense to me in terms of thinking about some of the broad discussion points in the field, but I'm surprised, actually, that no one I've come across has articulated this, and I'm curious whether that lacuna has to do with the analytic tradition's anti-metaphysical tendencies (of a more robust type of metaphysics, in any event): if one moves the object of analysis from questions about how language refers to how the mind refers, perhaps it gets one into hoary metaphysical waters that people back in the day would rather have left alone. Is this actually the case or am I missing something or is the whole thing simply too obvious for most people to bother mentioning?
It is actually an old debate within analytic philosophy. I would refer you to the 1957 Roderick Chisholm-Wilfrid Sellars correspondence although the debate antedates their discussion. Your note warrants the reposting of an old entry from six years ago. This is a redacted and expanded version.
Note to the Astute Opponent: Can you come up with a powerful counterargument to the primacy of the intentional? I'd like to test whether there is perhaps an aporia here.
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 epistemic 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. Dispositionality would count as physical intentionality.)
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? How does it work? How does the mental act of thinking 'grab onto' a thing whose existence does not depend on my or anyone's thinking?
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. First of all, no cat is an event. Second, no cat is a content of consciousness. It's an object of consciousness but not a content of consciousness. Cats ain't in the head or in the mind. Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my skull, or spatially inside my nonspatial 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 for his existence my thinking of him as little as my thinking needs to be about him. We are external to each other. Cats are physical things out 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?
How is it that the act of thinking and its content 'in the mind' hooks onto the thing 'in the world' and in such a way that true judgments can be made about the thing, judgments that articulate the nature and existence of thing as it is in itself apart from any (finite) thinking directed upon it?
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:
A. 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 is a matter of conventional that they mean what they mean. And that brings minds into the picture.
B. 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.
C. 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)
These considerations strike me as decisive. Or are there counter-considerations that 'cancel them out'?
The influential Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)
What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term of art (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. Such states are intrinsically such that they 'take an accusative.' The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The idea is not merely that when one perceives one perceives something or other; the idea is that when one perceives, one perceives some specific object, the very object of that very act. The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or may or may not be true in the case of propositional objects. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object." It is also why Husserl can 'bracket' the existence of the object for phenomenological purposes. Intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is relation-like. This is an important point that many contemporaries seem incapable of wrapping their heads around.
There are some interesting points of analogy between intentionality and potentiality. An intentional state exhibits
a. directedness to an object b. an object that may or may nor exist c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.
For example, right now I am gazing out my study window at Superstition Mountain. The gazing is an intentional state: it is of or about something, a definite something. It takes an accusative, and does so necessarily. The accusative or intentional object in question presumably exists. But the intentional object is what it is whether or not it exists. The phenomenological description of object and act remains the same whether or not the object exists. Moreover, the object as presented in the act of gazing is incomplete: there are properties such that the intentional object neither has them nor their complements. Thus, to a quick glance, what is given in the intentional experience is 'a purplish mountain.' Just that. Now anything purple or purplish is colored, and anything colored is extended; but being colored and being extended are not properties of the intentional object. No doubt they are properties of the mountain itself in reality; but they are not properties of the precise intentional object of my gazing, which has all and only the properties it is seen to have. Furthermore, in reality, yonder mountain is either such that someone is climbing on it or not; but the intentional object of my momentary gazing is indeterminate with respect to the property of being climbed on by someone.
The potentiality inherent in a thing exhibits
a*. something analogous to intentional directedness: a potentiality is a potentiality for something, or to something. For example, a human embryo has the potentiality to develop, in the normal course of events, into a human neonate. But a human sperm cell lacks this potentiality. It has a different potentiality: it can combine with a human egg cell to form a zygote. A thing cannot just have a potentiality: every potentiality is a potentiality for something or to something. This something is not merely a something or other, but a definite something, analogously as in the case of intentional directedness.
b*. something analogous to the feature of an intentional experience whereby, from the occurrence of the intentional experience, one cannot infer the existence of its intentional object. Just as the intentional object may or may not exist without prejudice to its being an intentional object, a potentiality may or may not be realized. The embryo's potentiality to develop into a neonate may go unrealized -- and this without prejudice to the potentiality's being something quite definite and quite real.
c*. something analogous to the incompleteness of intentional objects. To revert to a hackneyed example, an acorn has the potentiality to become an oak tree. But this is not to say that there is some perfectly determinate (definite) oak tree that an acorn has the potentiality to become, a 50 foot oak tree the diameter of whose trunk is two feet, etc.
The same points can be made about dispositions. If a piece of glass is fragile, then it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. There cannot be a disposition that is not a disposition to do something, to shatter, or explode, or melt. Second, the reality of a disposition is independent of its manifestation: a fragile piece of glass is fragile whether or not it ever breaks. From the fact that x is disposed to F one cannot infer that x ever Fs. This parallels a feature of intentionality: from the fact that x is thinking about Fs one cannot infer that there exist Fs that x is thinking about. (If I am thinking about unicorns it does not follow that there exist unicorns I am thinking about; if I want a sloop it doesn't follow that there is a sloop I want; if Ernest is hunting lions it doesn't follow that there are any lions he is hunting.)
Third, although a manifested disposition is a fully determinate state of affairs, this complete determinateness is not present in the disposition qua disposition. The disposition to shatter if suitably struck is not the disposition to shatter into ten pieces if suitably struck, although it is of course the disposition to shatter into some number or other of pieces, the exact number being left indeterminate.
Now here is a tough question: are dispositionality and intentionality merely analogous, or can we take it a step further and say that utimately there is no difference between dispositionality and intentionality? If that case could be made, then Brentano would be shown to be wrong in his claim that intentionality is the mark of the mental. For if the three characteristics of intentionality mentioned above are found below the level of mind in the physical world, then it looks as if intentionality cannot be the mark of the mental. Or should we stay instead that, since intentionality is the mark of the mental, and intentionality is found in nature below the level of mind, that there is something mind-like about all of nature?
Ed Buckner raises this question, and he wants my help with it. How can I refuse? I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later.
Kant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. This awakening begins his Critical period in which he struggles mightily to find a via media between rationalism and empiricism. The result of his struggle, the Critical philosophy, is of great historical significance but is also an unstable tissue of irresolvable tensions. As a result there are competing interpretations of his doctrines.
I will propose two readings relevant to Ed's question. But first a reformulation and exfoliation of the question.
Can one think about God and meaningfully predicate properties of him? For example, can one meaningfully say of God that he exists, is omnipotent, and is the cause of the existence of the natural world? Or is it rather the case that such assertions are meaningless and that the category of causality, for example, has a meaningful application only within the realm of phenomena but not between the phenomenal realm as a whole and a putative transcendent causa prima? Are the bounds of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) also the bounds of sense (Sinn), or are there senseful, meaningful assertions that transgress the bounds of sensibility?
Weak or Moderate Reading. On this reading, we can think about God and meaningfully make predications of him, but we cannot have any knowledge of God and his attributes. We cannot have knowledge of God because knowledge necessarily involves the interplay of two very different factors, conceptual interpretation via the categories of the understanding, and sensory givenness. God, however, is not given to the senses, outer or inner. In Kantian jargon, there is no intuition, keine Anschauung, of God. All intuition is sensible intuition. The Sage of Koenigsberg will not countenance any mystical intuition, any Platonic or Plotinian visio intellectualis, at least not in this life. That sort of thing he dismisses in the Enlightenment manner as Schwaermerei, 'enthusiasm' in an obsolete 18th century sense of the English term.
But while Kant denies that there is knowledge of God here below whether by pure reason or by mystical intuition, he aims to secure a 'safe space' for faith: "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." (Preface to 2nd ed. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787, B xxx.) Now if God and the soul are objects of faith, this would imply that we can think of them and thus refer to them even if we cannot have knowledge of them.
The soul is the object of the branch of metaphysica specialis called rational psychology. Since all our intuition is sensible, there is no sensible intuition of the soul. As is well-known, Kant denies that special metaphysics in all three branches (psychology, cosmology, and theology) is possible as science, als Wissenschaft. To be science it would have to include synthetic a priori judgments, but these are possible only with respect to phenomena.
Kant's key question is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? He believes they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science. To put it quick and dirty: synthetic a priori judgments are possible in math and physics because the phenomenal world is our construction. The dignity and necessity of the synthetic causal principle -- every event has a cause -- is rescued from the jaws of Humean skepticism, but the price is high: the only world we can know is the world of phenomena. Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken. And yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.). This restriction of human knowledge to the physical rules out any knowledge of the metaphysical.
On the moderate reading, then, Kant restricts the cognitive employment of the categories of the understanding to phenomena but not their thinking employment. We can think about and refer to the positive noumena, God, the soul, and the world as a whole, but we cannot have any knowledge of them. (And the same goes for the negative noumena that correspond to sensible appearances.) We can talk sense about God and the soul, and predicate properties of these entities, but we cannot come to have knowledge of them. Thus we can meaningfully speak of the soul as a simple substance which remains numerically self-same over time and through its changing states, but we cannot know that it has these properties.
The arguments against the traditional soul substance of the rationalists are in the Paralogisms section of KdrV, and they are extremely interesting.
Strong or Extreme Reading. On this reading, we cannot talk sense about positive or negative noumena: such categories as substance and causality cannot be meaningfully applied beyond the bounds of sensibility. Riffing on P. F. Strawson one could say that on the strong reading the bounds of sensibility are the bounds of sense. This reading wins the day in post-Kantian philosophy. Fichte liquidates the Ding an sich, the neo-Kantians reduce the transcendental ego to a mere concept (Rickert, e.g.), the categories which for Kant were ahistorical and fixed become historicized and relativized, and we end up with a conceptual relativism which fuels a lot of the nonsense of the present day, e.g., race and sex are social constructs, etc.
How's that for bloggity-blog quick and dirty?
So my answer to Ed Buckner's title question is: It depends. It depends on whether we read Kant in the weak way or in the strong way.
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence (being) and intentional existence (being). Real existence is existence 'outside' the (finite) mind. Intentional existence is existence 'in' or 'before' the mind. The mentioned words are obviously not to be taken spatially. Esse is the Latin infinitive, to be. Every human mind is a finite mind, but don't assume the converse.
According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.
Pause to appreciate how attractive this conception is. It secures the intrinsic intelligibility of the world while avoiding the 'gap problem' that bedevils post-Cartesian thought.
I need to know more, however, about the exact ontological status of the common nature (CN) which is, as it were, amphibious as between knowing mind and thing known.
With the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated in earlier forays:
A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.
B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete extramental singulars and mental acts. (Note: a mental act is a concrete singular because in time, though not in space.)
C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, it does not merely possibly have them, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of the Law of Excluded Middle) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.
D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.
(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting in earlier entries.. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits -- to put it anachronistically -- all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up in the jungle with a Meinongian monkey on his back.
Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.
Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete extramental singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):
Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.
Socrates est rationalis, quia homo est rationalis, et non e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)
Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.
Now this obviously implies that the common nature humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meinongian route or we say that comon natures exist in the mind of God. Kenny:
Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; third, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)
This may seem to solve the problem I raised. Common natures are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.
The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. Solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.
Ulysses had himself bound to the mast and the ears of his sailors plugged with wax lest the ravishing strains of the sea nymphs' song reach their ears and cause them to cast themselves into the sea and into their doom. But what song did the Sirens sing, and in what key? And what about the nymphs themselves? Were their tresses of golden hue? And how long were they? Were the nymphs equipped with special nautical brassieres to protect their tender nipples from rude contact with jelly fish and such?
One cannot sing a song without singing some definite song in some definite key commencing at some definite time and ending at some definite later time.
But you understand the story of Ulysses and the Sirens and you are now thinking about the song they sang. And you are thinking about the nymphs and their ravishing endowments. But what sorts of objects are these? Incomplete objects. Are there then in reality incomplete objects?
I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back. The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body." The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion. But his colorful phraseology got me thinking.
The words 'soul' and 'spirit' carry a cargo of both religious and substance-dualist connotations. And that is the way I will use them. The soul is that in us which thinks in the broad Cartesian sense of 'think.' it is the subject of consciousness and self-consciousness and moral sense (conscience). It is the thinker of our thoughts and the agent of our actions. It is the ultimate reference of the first person singular pronoun 'I' in its indexical use. But I must add that the soul is these things construed as capable of independent existence, as having not only an immaterial nature, but also an immaterial nature capable of existing on its own apart from these gross physical bodies with which we are all too familiar. So 'soul' is a theoretical term; it is not datanic or theory-neutral. 'Consciousness,' by contrast, is theory neutral. If you deny that there are souls, you will be forgiven, and you may even be right. If you deny that there is consciousness, however, then you are either a sophist, a lunatic, or an eliminativist, which is to say, a lunatic. Sophists and lunatics are not to be debated; they are to be 'shown the door.'
A substance, among other things, is an entity metaphysically capable of independent existence. The soul is a substance. It does not require some other thing in which to exist. (Nulla res indiget ad existendum.) So it is capable of independent existence. We encounter it as 'attached' to the body, but it can 'separate' from the body. The question is what these words mean in this context. The problem is to ascribe some coherent sense to them. What is the nature of this strange attachment?
1. Only physical things can be physically separated and physically attached. (The toenail from the toe; the stamp to the envelope; the spark plug from the cylinder; the yolk from the white, etc.) The soul is not a physical thing; ergo, souls cannot be physically separated from or attached to anything. So in this context we are not to take 'separation' and 'attachment' in any physical or material sense, whether gross or subtle. So don't think of ghosts or spooks floating out of gross bodies. Spook-stuff is still stuff, while what we are talking about now is not 'stuffy' at all.
2. It follows from this that every physical model is inadequate and just as, or more, misleading than helpful. The soul is not like the pilot in the ship, the man in his house, the oyster in the shell, the prisoner in his cell. These analogies may capture certain aspects of the soul-body relation, but they occlude others so that on balance they are of little use. But they are of some use. The morally sensitive, for example, experience a tension between their higher nature and their animal inclinations. There is more to the moral life than a struggle against the lusts of the flesh, but that is part of it. Thus the resonance of the Socratic image of the body as the prison-house of the soul.
3. The soul-body relation cannot literally be an instance of a physical relation, nor could it be an instance of a logical or mathematical or mereological or set-theoretical relation. We can lump these last four together under the rubric 'abstract relations.' Presumably the soul-body relation is sui generis. It's its own thing. Just as it would be absurd to say that entailment is an instance of a physical relation, it is absurd to suppose that soul-body is an instance of a physical or a logico-mathematical relation. The soul is neither a physical entity nor an abstract entity.
4. It seems to follow that if the the soul-body relation is sui generis, then there can be no model for it borrowed from some more familiar realm. The relation can only be understood in 'soulic,' or as I will say, spiritual terms. It can only be understood in its own terms. So let's consider mental or spiritual attachment. I am attached to my cat in the sense that, were he to die, I would grieve. Clearly, this is not a physical relation. Whether he is on my lap or far away, the attachment is the same. Spiritual attachment is consistent with physical separation. And spiritual non-attachment (spiritual separation) is consistent with physical proximity and indeed contact.
We allow ourselves to become attached to all sorts of things, people, and ideas, especially our own ideas. Attachments wax and wane. Many are foolish and even delusional. We become attached to what cannot last as if it will last forever. We become attached to what has no value. We have trouble apportioning our degree of attachment to the reality and value of attachment's object. As has been appreciated in many religions and wisdom traditions, much of our misery arises from desire and attachment to the objects of desire. For Pali Buddhism it is desire as such that is the problem; on more moderate views inordinate and misdirected desire. We are also capable of non-attachment or detachment, and this has been recommended in different ways and to different degrees by the religions and the wisdom traditions. There can be no doubt that non-attachment is a major component in wisdom.
5. None of this attaching and detaching would be possible without intentionality. The spiritual self, by virtue of its intentionality, flees itself and loses itself among the objects of its attachment. Chief among these is the mundane self: the body, the personality, their pasts, and the myriad of objects that one takes to be one's own. My car, my house, my wife, my children, my brilliant insights . . . . And now I come to my speculation. The soul attaches itself to this body here in a manner similar to the way it attaches itself to everything else to which it attaches itself. So attaching itself, my soul makes this body here my body. I come to 'inhabit' this body here, thereby making it my body, by my having chosen this body as the material locus of my subjectivity, as the vehicle of my trajectory through space-time. But when" Where? How? I chose this fall into time?
I am telling a Platonic story. I am penning yet another footnote to Plato. Who can believe it? Well, consider the alternatives! You are not your body and yet you are attached to it. What is your theory as to the nature of this attachment? I know what you will say. And I will have no trouble poking holes in it.
I am happy to see that Ed is back to blogging. It have reproduced his latest entry and added some comments.
....................
Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that the following sentence can be true even if there are no witches, yet can only be true if Hob and Nob are, as it were, thinking of the same witch.
Hob thinks that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow.
But how it could be true? If we read it in the opaque way of reading indirect speech clauses then each that-clause must stand on its own syntactically, but there is no way of interpreting the pronoun ‘she’ as a bound variable. The two thoughts add up, as it were, to ‘for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and x killed Cob’s sow. But we can’t split them up into two separate thoughts, because of the second part of the conjunction. I.e. the following is not well-formed.
* Hob thinks that for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether x killed Cob’s sow.
On the other hand, if we render the original sentence in the transparent way, we have to presume the existence of a real witch, i.e. some witch such that Hob thinks that she has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow. Neither of these are satisfactory. I don’t propose any answer yet, but I will start by noticing that the same problem attaches to saying what sentences say, rather than what people think.
(1) A witch has blighted Bob’s mare. (2) She killed Cob’s sow. (3) Sentence (1) says that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare. (4) Sentence (2) says that she (or the witch) has blighted Bob’s mare.
Clearly sentences (3) and (4) are true, even though sentences (1) and (2) are false. Yet the problem is exactly the same as the problem involving different thoughts. Thus we have simplified the problem. We don’t have to worry about explaining thoughts in different minds, but only how we express the meaning of different sentences. Meanings are a little easier than thoughts.
...................................
Ed maintains that the problem of intentional identity can be put as a problem concerning what sentences say rather than as a problem concerning what people think. Ed thinks that this reformulation renders the problem simpler and more tractable. But here I object.
Strictly speaking, sentences don't say anything; people say things using sentences. For (1) to express a thought or proposition, it must be assertively uttered by a definite person in definite circumstances. What's more, the assertive utterance has to be thoughtful, i.e., made by a thinker who intends to express a proposition by his assertive utterance of (1). So we are brought right back to people and their thoughts. We have turned in a circle. (Out of respect for Ed, I will not comment on the 'diameter' of the circle.)
To exfoliate or unwrap what I just wrote:
a. Strictly speaking. In philosophy we must speak and write strictly and avoid the sorts of shorthand expression that are perfectly acceptable in ordinary discourse. Philosophy is not ordinary discourse. It is (in part) an attempt to understand ordinary discourse, its logic, its ontological commitments, and its connections with thought.
b. Utterance. To utter a sentence is to produce a token of it consisting of sounds or phonemes. If x is a token of y, then y is a type. So (1) above represents a sentence-type. What your eyes see is of course a token of that type, a token that deputizes for the type, which you cannot see with your eyes. The token you see is of course not an utterance, but an inscription consisting of visible marks. To utter a sentence is only one way of tokening it. To token is to produce a token in some medium.
c. Assertive utterance. Not every tokening is assertive. If I write or say 'Cats are animals' in English class to illustrate, say, noun-verb agreement, I have not asserted that cats are animals. Assertion is a speech act. I can utter a sentence without asserting anything even if the sentence is grammatically declarative.
d. Circumstances. There are many people in the world who rejoice under the nickname 'Bob.' A context of utterance, or, more broadly, a context of tokening is required to know which Bob is being referred to when (1) is assertively uttered.
e. Thoughtful. To say something I cannot merely mechanically produce a token of a sentence even if the sentence upon being heard by a hearer conveys a proposition or thought to the hearer. Voice synthesizers never say anything, even when they produce such sentence tokens as 'Your prescription is ready at Walgreen's pharmacy at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.' Saying involves a person or thinker's intention to express a thought or proposition.
As for solving Geach's puzzle, I have nothing to propose with confidence. But how would Ed counter the following suggestion? Ed tells us that, "if we render the original sentence in the transparent way, we have to presume the existence of a real witch, i.e. some witch such that Hob thinks that she has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow."
Ed is assuming that the particular quantifier is an existential quantifier. He is assuming that 'Some witch is such that _______' is logically equivalent to 'There exists a witch such that ________.' The assumption is entirely plausible. But it could be rejected by a Meinongian. If 'a witch' picks out a nonexistent item from the realm of Aussersein, then what would be wrong with a transparent reading of the original sentence? If there are nonexistent items, then one can quantify over them using quantifiers that are objectual (as opposed to substitutional) but not existentially loaded.
Might Geach's puzzle dissolve on a Meinongian approach? Is there any literature on this?
Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape. I say, "That tree has a strange shape." Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!" Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world independently of us. But what I take to be a tree, Dale takes to be a scarecrow. Suppose further that the thing in the external world, whatever it is, is the salient cause of our having our respective visual experiences. Are we referring to the same thing? The cause of the visual experiences is the same, but are the referents of our demonstrative phrases the same? Could we say that the referents are the same because the cause is the same?
If this makes sense, then perhaps we can apply it to the 'same God?' problem.
'Same cause, same referent' implies that the cause of my tokening of 'That tree' is its referent. It implies that we can account for successful reference in terms of physical causation. The idea is that what makes my use of 'that tree' successfully refer to an existing tree, this particular tree, and not to anything else is the tree's causing of my use of the phrase, and if not the tree itself, then some physical events involving the tree.
But the notion of salience causes trouble for this causal account of reference. What make a causal factor salient? What makes it jump out from all the other causal factors to assume the status of 'the cause'? (Salire, Latin, to jump.) After all, there are many causal factors involved in any instance of causation. Can we account for reference causally without surreptitiously presupposing irreducibly intentional and referential notions? Successful reference picks out its object from others. It gets to an existing object, and to the right object. Causation might not be up to this task. I shall argue that it is not.
We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe anangiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in. A liberal might say that the heart attack was caused by smoking.
Or suppose a short-circuit is cited as 'the cause' of a fire. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the power's being on are equally causal in respect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the power's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite. Desire and interest are of course intentional notions: to desire is to desire something; to be interested is to be interested in something.
What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative. The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interests and desires.
In the case of my tokening of 'that tree,' what justifies us in saying that it is the tree that causes the tokening as opposed the total set of causal conditions including sunlight, my corrective lenses, my not having ingested LSD, the absence of smoke and fog, the proper functioning of my visual cortex, etc.? How is it that we select the tree as 'the cause'? And what about this selecting? It cannot be accounted for in terms of physical causation. The tree does not select itself as salient cause. We select it. But then selecting is an intentional performance. So intentionality, which underpins both mental and linguistic reference, comes back in through the back door.
The upshot is that an account of successful reference in terms of causation is viciously circular. What makes 'that tree' as tokened by me here and now refer to the tree in front of me? It cannot be the total cause of the tokening which includes all sorts of causal factors other than tree such as light and the absence of fog. It must be the salient cause. To select this salient cause from the among the various casual factors is to engage in an intentional performance. So reference presupposes intentionality and cannot be accounted for in non-intentional, purely causal, terms. Otherwise you move in an explanatory cricle of embarrassingly short diameter.
The point could be put as follows: I must already (logically speaking) have achieved reference to the tree in a noncausal way if I am then to single out the tree as the physical cause of my successful mental and linguistic reference.
Of course, I am not denying that various material and causal factors underpin mental and linguistic reference. What I am maintaining is that these factors are useless when it comes to providing a noncircular account of reference.
Now if causation cannot account for reference, then it cannot account for sameness of reference.
Dale and I are both in perceptual states. These two perceptual states have a common cause. But this common cause cannot be what makes one of our references successful and the other unsuccessful.
Christ and Allah
The above questions are analogs of the 'Same God?' question. Suppose a Christian and a Muslim each has a mystical or religious experience of the same type, that of the Inner Locution. Each cries out in prayer and each 'hears' the inner locution, "I am with you," and a deep peace descends upon him. Each is thankful and expresses his thanks. Suppose God exists and is the source of both of these locutions. But while the Christian may interpret the source of his experience in Trinitarian terms, the Muslim will not. Suppose the Christian takes the One who is answering to be a Person of the Trinity, Christ, while the Muslim takes it to be Allah who is answering. In expressing his thankfulness, the Christian prayerfully addresses Christ while the Muslim prayerfully addresses Allah.
Are Christian and Muslim referring to one and the same divine being? Yes, if the referent is the source/cause of the inner locutions. But this common cause does not select as between Christ and Allah, and so the common cause does not suffice to establish that Christian and Muslim are referring to one and the same divine being.
So far, Ed Feser's is perhaps the best of the Internet discussions of this hot-button question, a question recently re-ignited by the Wheaton dust-up, to mix some metaphors. Herewith, some notes on Feser's long entry. I am not nearly as philosophically self-confident as Ed or Lydia McGrew, so I will mainly just be trying to understand the issue for my own edification. But I am sure of one thing: the question is difficult and has no easy solution. If you think it does, then I humbly suggest you are not thinking very hard, indeed, you are hardly thinking.
1. Feser rightly points out that a difference in (Fregean) sense does not entail a difference in (Fregean) reference. So the difference in sense as between 'God of the Christians' and 'God of the Muslims' does not entail that these expressions differ in reference. Quite so. But I would add that on a descriptivist semantics reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of an identifying description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whichever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community. So while difference in sense does not by itself entail difference in reference, difference in sense is consistent with difference in reference, so that in a particular case it may be that the difference in sense is sufficiently great to entail a difference in reference. Suppose that in one linguistic community a person understands by 'God' the unique contingent being who created the universe but was himself created, while in another a person understands by 'God' the unique necessary uncreated being who created the universe. In this case I think it is clear that the difference in sense entails a difference in reference. Both uses of 'God' may fail of reference, or one might succeed. But they cannot both succeed. For nothing can be both necessary and contingent.
From what has been said so far, 'God' (used by a Christian) and 'Allah' (used by a Muslim) may have the same reference or may have a different reference. The issue cannot be decided by merely pointing out that a difference in sense does not entail a difference in reference.
2. Feser makes a point about beliefs that is surely correct. You and I can have conflicting beliefs about a common object of successful reference without prejudice to its being precisely a common object of successful reference. For example, we both see a sharp-dressed man across the room drinking from a Martini glass. Suppose I erroneously believe that he is drinking a Martini while you correctly believe that he is drinking water. That difference in belief is obviously consistent with one and the same man's being our common object of perceptual and linguistic reference. "Similarly, the fact that Muslims have what Christians regard as a number of erroneous beliefs about God does not by itself entail that Muslims and Christians are not referring to the same thing when they use the expression 'God.'" (Emphasis added.)
True, but it could also be that conflicting beliefs make it impossible that there be a common object of successful reference. It will depend on what those beliefs are and whether they are incorporated into the respective senses of 'God' as used by Muslims and Christians. I will also depend on one's theory of reference, whether descriptivist, causal, hybrid, or something else.
It should also be observed that in perceptual cases such as the Martini case there is no question but that we are referentially glomming onto one and the same object. The existence and identity of the sharp-dressed drinker are given to the senses. Since we know by direct sensory acquaintance that it is the same man both of us see, the conflicting beliefs have no tendency to show otherwise. But God is not an object of perception via the outer senses. So one can question how much weight we should assign to the perceptual analogies, and indeed to any analogy that makes mention of a physical thing. At best, these analogies show that, in general, contradictory beliefs about a putatively self-same x are consistent with there being in reality one and the same subject of these beliefs. But they are also consistent with there not being in reality one and the same subject of the contradictory beliefs.
But not only is God not an object of sensory acquaintance, he is also arguably not an object among objects or a being among beings. Suppose God is ipsum esse subsistens as Aquinas held. It will then be serious question whether a theory of reference that caters to ordinary references to intramundane people and things, beings, can be extended to accommodate reference to self-subsistent Being. Not clear! But I raise this hairy issue only to set it aside for the space of this entry. I will assume for now that God is a being among beings. I bring this issue up only to get people to appreciate how difficult and involved this 'same God?' issue is. Do not comment on this paragraph; it is off-topic for present purposes. See here for one of the posts in which I disagree with Dale Tuggy on this issue.
3. Now consider these conflicting beliefs: God is triune; God is not triune. Please note that it would be question-begging to announce that the fact of this dispute entails that the object of the dispute is one and the same. For that is exactly what is at issue. The following would be a question-begging little speech:
Look man, we are disputing whether God is triune or not triune; we are therefore presupposing that there is one and the same thing, God, about whose properties we are disputing! The disagreement entails sameness of object! Same God!
This is question-begging because it may be that the tokens of 'God' in "God is triune; God is not triune" differ in sense so radically that they also differ in reference. In other words, the mere fact that one and the same word-type 'God' is tokened twice does not show that there is one and the same object about whose properties we are disputing.
4. Feser writes,
Even errors concerning God’s Trinitarian nature are not per se sufficient to prevent successful reference. Abraham and Moses were not Trinitarians, but no Christian can deny that they referred to, and worshiped, the same God Christians do.
[. . .]
But shouldn’t a Christian hold that some reference to the Trinity or to the divinity of Jesus is also at least necessary, even if not sufficient, for successful reference to the true God? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that being Trinitarian is, from a Christian point of view, also essential to God? No, that doesn’t follow at all, and any Christian who says otherwise will, if he stops and thinks carefully about it, see that he doesn’t really believe that it follows. Again, Christians don’t deny that Abraham and Moses, or modern Jews, or Arians and other heretics, refer to and worship the same God as orthodox Christians, despite the fact that these people do not affirm the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus.
There is a modal fudge across these two passages that I don't think it is mere pedantry on my part to point out. In the first passage Feser claims in effect that
A. No Christian CAN deny that Abraham and Moses worshiped the same God that Christians do
while in the second Feser claims in effect that
B. No Christian DOES deny that Abraham and Moses worshiped the same God that Christians do.
If we charitably substitute 'hardly any' for 'no' in (B) then we get a statement that I am willing to concede is true. (A), however, strikes me as false. I myself am strongly tempted to deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God -- assuming that the Jewish God is non-triune and explicitly determined to be such by Jews -- and what I am strongly tempted to do strikes me as entirely possible and rationally justifiable. Why can't someone reasonably deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God?
Feser thinks he has cited some incontrovertible fact that decides the issue, the fact being that everyone or almost everyone claims that Jews and Christians worship the same God. I concede the fact. What I don't concede is that it decides the issue. My claim against Feser on the present occasion is not that he is wrong to maintain that (normative) Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, but that he is not obviously right, his confident asseverations in the passages lately quoted notwithstanding. I am saying to Feser what I said to Beckwith and Tuggy: you gentlemen think this issue easily resolved. But it isn't, in large part because its resolution depends on the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the philosophy of language.
Here are two questions we ought to distinguish:
Q1. Do Christians use 'God' and equivalents with the intention of referring to the same being that Jews refer to or think they are referring to with 'God' and equivalents?
Q2. Do Christians and Jews succeed in refer to the same being?
An affirmative answer to the first question is consistent with a negative answer to the second question. I agree with an affirmative answer to (Q1). But this affirmative answer does not entail an affirmative answer to (Q2). Moreover, it is reasonable to return a negative answer to (Q2). I will now try to explain how it is reasonable to answer (Q2) in the negative.
5. The crux of the matter is the nature of reference. How exactly is successful reference achieved? And what exactly is reference? And how is worship related to reference?
First off,the causal theory of Kripke, Donnellan, et al. is reasonably rejected and I reject it . It is rife with difficulties. (See e.g., John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge UP, 1983, ch. 9) Connected with this is my subscription to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. Part of what this means is that words don't refer, people refer using words, and they don't need to use words to refer. All reference, at bottom, is thinking reference or mental reference. Reference at bottom is intentionality. To refer to something, then, whether with words or without words, is to intend it or think of it. This is to be understood as implying that words, phrases, 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. They are not intrinsically object-directed. There is no object-directedness in nature apart from mind. (Though it may be that dispositionality is an analog of it. See here.) This is equivalent to saying that there is no objective reference without mind. A word acquires reference only when it is thoughtfully used.
Reference to particulars in the sense of 'refer' just explained is always and indeed necessarily reference to propertied particulars. This is because reference to a particular 'picks it out' from all else, singles it out, designates it to the exclusion of everything else. Particulars taken in abstraction from their properties cannot be singled out to the exclusion of all else. To think of a thing or person is to think of it as an instance of certain properties and indeed in such a way as to distinguish it from all else. So, to think of, and thus refer to, a particular is to think of it as an instance of a set of properties that jointly individuate it.
To refer to God, then, is to think of God as an instance of certain properties. I cannot think of God directly as just a particular, and then as instantiating certain properties. This ought to be quite clear from the fact that in this life our (natural) knowledge of God is not by acquaintance but by description. I don't literally see God when I look upwards at "the starry skies above me" or gaze inward at "the moral law within me" to borrow a couple of signature phrases from Immanuel Kant. Our only access to God here below is indirect via his properties, as an instance of those properties. Here below we approach God from the side of his properties as we understand them. The existence and identity of my table is known directly by acquaintance. Not so in the case of God. The existence of God is not given to sense perception but has to be understood as the being-instantiated of certain properties. The God I know by description is God qua uniquely satisfying my understanding of 'God.'
Someone could object: What about mystical experience? Is it not possible in this life to enjoy mystical knowledge by acquaintance of God? This is a very large, and I think separate topic. To the extent that mystical experience leads to mystical union it tends to collapse the I-Thou and man-God duality that is part of the framework of worship as we are discussing it in this context. See my Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism. It also tends to explode the framework in which questions about reference are posed . I mean the framework in which: here is a minded organism with linguistic capacity who thoughtfully utters certain words and phrases while out there are various things to which the organism is trying to refer and often succeeding.
There is also the question of the veridicality of mystical experience. How do I know that an experience of mine is revelatory of something real? How do I know that successive experiences of mine are revelatory of the same thing? How do I know that the mystical experiences of different people are veridically of the same thing? So I suggest we bracket the question of mystical experience.
Any natural knowledge of God in this life, then, is by description. Reference to God is indirect and via the understanding of 'God' within a given religion. Now the orthodox Christian understanding of 'God' is that God sent his only begotten Son, begotten not made, into our predicament to teach us and show us the Way (via, veritas, vita) and to suffer and die for our sins. Together with this contingent Sending goes the triunity of God as the necessary condition of its possibility. This is part of what an orthodox Christian means by 'God,' although I reckon few Christians would put it the way I just did. It is part of the sense of 'God' for an orthodox Christian. But this is not part of the sense of 'God' for the orthodox Muslim who denies the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the soteriology connected with both.
So do Christians and Muslims succeed in referring to the same being? No. Successful reference on a descriptivist semantics requires the cooperation of Mind and World. Successful reference, whether with words or without words, requires that there exist outside the mind something that satisfies the conditions set within the mind. (Remember: it is not primarily words that refer, but minds via words and mental states.) Now suppose there exists exactly one God and that that God is a Trinity. Then the Christian's understanding of 'God' will be satisfied, and his reference to God will be successful. But the Muslim's reference will fail. The reason for this is that there is nothing outside the mind that satisfies his characteristic understanding of 'God.'
Of course, the Muslim could put it the other way around. Either way, my point goes through: Muslim and Christian cannot be referring to the one and the same God.
You say the Christian and Muslim understandings of 'God' overlap? You are right! But this overlap is but an abstraction insufficient to determine an identifying reference to a concrete, wholly determinate, particular. In reality, God is completely determinate. As such, he cannot be neither triune nor not triune, neither incarnated nor not incarnated, etc. in the way the overlapping conception is. So if the triune God exists, then the non-triune God does not exist. Of course, we can say that the Christian and the Muslim are 'driving in the same direction.' Heading West on Interstate 10, I am driving toward the greater Los Angeles area, and thus I am driving toward both Watts and Laguna Niguel. But there is a big difference, and perhaps one pertaining unto my 'salvation,' whether I arrive in Watts or in Laguna Niguel. What's more, I cannot terminate my drive in some indeterminate location. The successful termination of my peregrination must occur at some wholly definite place. So too with successful reference to a concrete particular: it must terminate with a completely determinate referent.
Here is another related objection. "If the Christian God exists, then both Christian and Muslim succeed in referring to the same God -- it is just that this same God is the Christian God, i.e., God as understood in the characteristically Christian way. The existence of the Christian God suffices to satisfy the common Christian-Muslim underdstanding of 'God.'"
In reply I repeat that both mind and world must cooperate for successful reference on a descriptivist semantics. So it is not enough that God exists and that there be exactly one God. Nor is it enough that the one God satisfy the common Christian-Muslim conception; for the Muslim God to be an object of successful reference it must both exist and satisfy the characteristic Muslim understanding of 'God.'
Conclusion
My thesis is a rather modest one. To repeat what I said above:
My claim against Feser on the present occasion is not that he is wrong to maintain that (normative) Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, but that he is not obviously right, his confident asseverations in the passages lately quoted notwithstanding. I am saying to Feser what I said to Beckwith and Tuggy: you gentlemen think this issue easily resolved. But it isn't, in large part because its resolution depends on the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the philosophy of language.
Having just read Peter Geach's "On Worshipping the Right God" (in God and the Soul, Thoemmes Press, 1994, pp. 100-116, orig. publ. 1969) I was pleased to discover that I had arrived by my own reasoning at some of his conclusions. On Christmas Eve I quoted Michael Rea:
Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs about God; but they agree on this much: there is exactly one God. This common point of agreement is logically equivalent to [the] thesis that all Gods are the same God. In other words, everyone who worships a God worships the same God, no matter how different their views about God might be.
Rea's argument is this:
A. There is exactly one God if and only if all Gods are the same God
Ergo
B. Everyone who worships a God worships the same God.
But as I pointed out, the state of worship/worshipping is an intentional or object-directed state, and like all such states, not such as to entail the existence of the object of the state. One cannot worship without worshipping something, but it does not follow that the object worshipped exists. So (B) is false. Geach makes the same point in 'formal mode':
It may be thought that since there is only one God to worship, a man who worships a God cannot but worship the true God. But this misconceives the logical character of the the verb 'to worship.' In philosophers' jargon, 'to worship' is an intentional verb. (108)
Exactly right. And so, just as I can shoot at an animal that is not there to be shot at, I can worship a God that is not there to be worshipped.
I put the point in my own 'formal mode' way when I said that 'worships' is not a verb of success.
The possibility of worshipping what does not exist is connected with the question whether 'God' is a logically proper name. Geach rightly argues that "'God' is not a proper name but a descriptive term: it is like 'the Prime Minister' rather than 'Mr. Harold Wilson.'" (108) One of his arguments is similar to one I had given, namely, that God is not known by acquaintance in this life. As Geach puts it, ". . . in this life we know God not as an acquaintance we can name, but by description." (109)
God is therefore relevantly disanalogous to the examples Beckwith and Tuggy gave. Those examples were of things known or knowable by sensory acquaintance here below. Suppose Dale and I are seated at one and the same table. I pound on it and assert "This table is solid oak!" Dale replies, "No, it is not: there is particle board where you can't see." Dale thinks that a disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x presupposes, and thus entails, that there really is a self-same x whose properties are in dispute. But that is not the case. Disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x is merely logically consistent with there really being a self-same x whose properties are in dispute. In the case of the table, of course, we KNOW that the dispute is about one and the same item. This is because the table is an object of sensory acquaintance: its existence and identity are evident. But it can be different in the case of God with whom we are not sensorily acquainted.
Clearly, a Spinozist and a Thomist are not worshipping one and the same God despite the fact that for both Thomists and Spinozists there is exactly one God. One of them is worshipping what does not exist.
And so it is not at all obvious that Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all worshipping the same God. That, I submit, is crystal-clear. And so those who think that the question has an obvious answer are plainly wrong.
But this is not to say that Jew, Christian, and Muslim are NOT worshipping one and the same God. That is much more difficult question.
One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention.
In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1) Curiously enough, however, Butchvarov goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong! Actually, 'posit' is not a word he would use since Butchvarov claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects. (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the hallucinated pink rat are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.
But now consider the following passage from Anscombe and Geach's 1961 Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:
But saying this has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else: it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat. This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist -- a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix. Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)
Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology. What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!
Ain't philosophy grand? One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given.
What is also striking about the above passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.
Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations. There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether a painting, a photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat. Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X. There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.
The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs realization in some medium. It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff. Why can't consciousness of a cat be nothing more than consciousness of a cat? Why can't consciousness be exhausted by its revelation of objects? This is the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness that Butchvarov espouses. I don't advocate it myself, but I don't see that Geach has refuted it. That derivative intentionality requires a medium does not show that original intentionality does. No picture of a cat is exhausted by its depicting of a cat; there needs to be a physical thing, the picture itself, and it must have certain properties that found or ground the pictorial relation. But it might be otherwise for original intentionality.
Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein. Consciousness as being-conscioused. Get it? If memory serves, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp has a theory along these lines, although the word I think he uses is Bewusstheit which, to coin an English expression, is the monadic property of consciousedness. Perhaps there is an anticipation of Sartre/Butchvarov in Natorp.
But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental-contents conception.
If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood.
Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter. Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think. To think is to think about something, and it is this intrinsic aboutness or original intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism. I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here. (Here is a characteristic post.)
But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think? Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare? Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not. Why not? Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the set of evens. It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible.
Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains. We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think. But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.
Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines. But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement. For that is a sort of dualism too. There are the physical properties and powers we know about, and the physical properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. So instead of an ontological property dualism or an ontological substance dualism we have an epistemological property dualism, a dualism as between properties and powers we know about and properties and powers we have no idea about.
There is, second, the ontological dualism as between thinking and feeling matter and ordinary hunks of matter that do not think or feel. Even the materialist must admit that there is a huge difference between Einstein and a piece of chalk. How explain that some parcels of matter think and some do not?
It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!) of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos, a shift into another genus. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Will you say that consciousness emerges from certain parcels of sufficiently complex matter? But then it is not matter any more, is it? It is an emergent from matter. Emergentism is a form of ontological dualism. What's more, the word 'emergence' merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it. Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat? Do you believe in magic?
There is, third, a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mundane functions. Why are some brain states mental and others not?
The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics. On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. I tend to hold that this unintelligibility is a very good reason to hold that it is not my brain or any part thereof that thinks when I think, and that it is not my brain or any part thereof that feels when I feel. (I am using 'think' in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all instances of intentionality, and 'feel' to cover all non-intentional conscious states and events.)
"But from the fact that such-and-such is unintelligible to us now it does not follow that it is not the case." True. Two possibilities. It might be the case that p even though we will never understand how it is possible that p, and it might be the case that p, even though we cannot understand at present how it is possible that p. The first is a mysterian position, the second is not mysterian but a pin-hopes-on-future-science position.
My thesis is that it is reasonable to hold that when I think and feel it is not my brain or any part of it that thinks or feels. But who knows? Maybe future science will prove me wrong. It is just that I wouldn't lay any money on being wrong.
(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?)
.....................
A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights. Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull. I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion. Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here. Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:
There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.
"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.
One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it. We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else. If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin. Feel that, Dan? That's a quale. (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions. But I can't prove he isn't. Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)
In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself. He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think. The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings. So far I understand him. It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts. This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter. So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.
I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third. For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon. How does he know it? Obviously, he doesn't know it. It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one. After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel. I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances. But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so. All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.
Here is Strawson's argument in a nutshell:
1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.
2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.
Ergo
3. There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.
The problem with this argument is premise (2). It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism. I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:
4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.
5. We have no good reason to assume -- it is wholly gratuitous to assume -- that brain matter has occult powers.
Therefore
6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.
7. We know that (1) is true.
Therefore
8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false.
Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)
Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings." Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful. But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious? What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"? There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast. 'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast. And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical. To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting. It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous. It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast. If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.
Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical. We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't. That is a huge difference. What Strawson has to say is that in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter. Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.
But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter, does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?
If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical? God is a mind too. Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition. But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious -- if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness -- then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.
If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of. Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible. God is pure spirit, pure mind. How can Christ ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body, enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity? It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical. A mysterian would say it is a mystery. It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us.
On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here: some parcels of matter have amazing powers. For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel. It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat! If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and -- without prejudice to his physicality -- has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity. It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability. He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul.
The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. She too entered bodily into heaven. On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.
To sum up. If matter actually thinks and feels in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter. But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?
A character in a novel is an example of a purely fictional item provided that the character is wholly 'made up' by the novelist. Paul Morphy, for example, is a character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players but he is also a real-life 19th century New Orleans chess prodigy. So Paul Morphy, while figuring in a piece of fiction, is not a purely fictional item like Captain Ahab or Sancho Panza or Frodo.
Earlier I said that it is a datum that Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist. Saying that it is a datum, I implied that it is not something that can be reasonably questioned, that it is a 'Moorean fact.' After all, most of us know that Frodo is a purely fictional character, and it is obvious -- isn't it? -- that what is purely fictional does not exist. Whatever is purely fictional does not exist looks to be an analytic proposition, one that merely unpacks the sense of 'purely fictional.'
The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true.
I think this sentence would make more sense if van Inwagen had 'linguistic datum' for the second occurrence of 'ontological datum.' If the nonexistence of Holmes is a datum, then it is an ontological datum; but the fact that we can use the sentence in question to say something true is a linguistic datum.
In any case, PvI is saying the opposite of what I was saying earlier. I was saying something that implies that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity whereas PvI is saying in effect that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory!
To sort this out, we need to understand PvI's approach to ficta.
Van Inwagen's Theory of Fictional Entities
We first note that van Inwagen holds to the univocity of 'exists' and 'is.' The ontological counterpart of this semantic thesis is that there are no modes of being/existence. He also has no truck with Meinongian Aussersein. Bear in mind that Aussersein is not a mode of being. And bear in mind that the doctrine of Aussersein is not the same as, and goes far beyond, the thesis that there is a weak mode of being had by the fictional Mrs. Gamp and her ilk. The thesis of Aussersein is that
M. Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.
For van Inwagen, (M) is self-contradictory. He thinks that it entails that something is not identical with itself, which, if the entailment went through, would amount to a reductio ad absurdum of (M). (95) Now I have argued that van Inwagen is wrong to find (M) self-contradictory. But let's assume that he is right. Then it would follow, in conjunction with the univocity thesis, that everything exists and indeed in the same sense of 'exists.' And what sense is that? The sense supplied by the existential quantifier of standard modern predicate logic. Van Inwagen is thoroughly Quinean about existence. There is nothing more to existence than what existential quantification expresses. I call this a dogma of analysis. Fo an attempt at refutation, see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
Now consider the sentence
1. Tom Sawyer is a character in a novel by Mark Twain.
By van Inwagen's lights, when (1) is translated into the quantifier-variable idiom it can be seen to imply that Tom Sawyer exists. I won't repeat van Inwagen's tedious rigmarole, but the idea is simple enough: (1) is plainly true; (1) cannot be supplied with an ontologically noncommittal paraphrase; and (1) ontologically commits us to the existence of the fictional character, Tom Sawyer. This is plausible and let's assume for present purposes that it is right: we accept (1) as true, and this acceptance commits us to the existence of a referent for 'Tom Sawyer.' Tom Sawyer exists! The same goes for all pure ficta. They all exist! They exist in the same sense that you and I do. Indeed, they actually exist: they are not mere possibilia. (What I just said is, strictly, pleonastic; but pleonasm is but a peccadillo when precision is at a premium.)
But now we have a problem, or at least van Inwagen does. While we are ontologically committed to the existence of purely fictional characters by our use and acceptance of true sentences such as (1), we must also somehow accommodate everyone's firm conviction that purely fictional characters do not exist. How?
When we say that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, we can be taken to express the proposition that "No one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds . . . ." (105, emphasis added) There are properties that fictional characters HAVE and those that they HOLD. Among the properties that fictional characters HAVE are such logical properties as existence and self-identity, and such literary properties as being a character in a novel, being introduced in chapter 6, being modelled on Sancho Panza, etc. Among the properties fictional characters HOLD are properties like being human, being fat, having high blood pressure, being a resident of Hannibal, Missouri, and being a pipe-smoking detective.
What van Inwagen is doing is making a distinction between two modes of property-possession. A fictional item can possess a property by having it, i.e., exemplifying it, in which case the corresponding sentence expresses an actual predication. For example, a use of 'Tom Sawyer was created by Mark Twain' is an actual predication. A fictional item can also possess a property by holding it. For example, 'Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of Mississippi River in the 1840s' is not an actual predication but a sentence that expresses the relation of HOLDING that obtains between the fictional entity and the property expressed by 'was a boy who grew up, etc.'
With this distinction, van Inwagen can defang the apparent contradiction: Tom Sawyer exists & Tom Sawyer does not exist. The second limb can be taken to express the proposition that no one exemplifies or HAS the properties HELD by the existing item, Tom Sawyer.
To put it in my own way, what van Inwagen is maintaining is that there really is an entity named by 'Tom Sawyer' and that it possesses (my word) properties. It exemplifies some of these properties, the "high-category properties," but contains (my word) the others but is not qualified (my word) by them. Thus Mrs Gamp contains the property of being fat, but she does not exemplify this property. Analogy (mine): The set {fatness} is not fat: it holds the property but does not have (exemplify) it.
For van Inwagen, creatures of fiction exist and obey the laws of logic, including the Law of Excluded Middle. So they are not incomplete objects. On a Meinongian approach, Tom Sawyer is an incomplete nonexistent object. For van Inwagen, he is a complete existent object. Now although I am not aware of a passage where van Inwagen explicitly states that purely fictional entities are abstract objects, this seems clearly to be entailed by what he does say. For Tom Sawyer exists, and indeed actually exists -- he is not a merely possible being -- but he does not interact causally with anything else in the actual world. He does not exist here below in the land of concreta, but up yonder in Plato land. So if abstract entities are those that are causally inert, Tom Sawyer is an abstract object. That is consistent with what van Inwagen does explicity say, namely, that "creatures of fiction" are "theoretical entities of [literary] criticism." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, p. 53.)
Some Questions about/Objections to van Inwagen's Theory
1. The theory implies that Sherlock Holmes exists, and exists as robustly as I do. That he exists follows from there being truths about him. That he exists as robustly as I do follows from the rejection of Meinongian nonentities and the rejection of modes of being/existence (and also of degrees of being/existence). But when I think about Sherlock I seem to myself to be thinking about something that does not exist. For I know that Sherlock is a purely fictional item, and I know that such items do not exist. If I am asked to describe the object of my thinking, I must describe it as nonexistent, for that is how it appears. So what should we say? Should we say that when I think of Sherlock, unbeknownst to myself, I am thinking of an existing abstract object? Or should we say that there are two objects, the one I am thinking of, which is nonexistent, and the existent abstract object?
Either way there is trouble. Surely I am the final authority as to what I am thinking of. It is part of the phenomenology of the situation that when I think about a detective that I know to be purely fictional I am thinking about an item that is given as nonexistent. But then the existing abstract object is not the same as the object I am thinking of. Van Inwagen's abstract surrogate exists; the object I am think of does not exist; ergo, they are not the same object.
On the other hand, if there are two objects, and it is van Inwagen's surrogate object that I am really thinking of when I think of Sherlock, then I am always in error when I think of pure ficta. I appear to myself to be thinking about nonexistent concreta when in reality I am thinking about existent abstracta.
2. When I think of Sherlock, I think of a man, and when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But no abstract object has sex organs. So either I am not thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, and a systematic error infects my thinking of pure ficta, or I am thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, namely, a man or a woman, in which case I am not thinking of an abstract existent.
3. When I think of Mrs Gamp as fat, I think of her as exemplifying the property of being fat, not as holding the property or containing it or encoding (Zalta) it. But then I cannot be thinking about an existent abstract object, for no such object is (predicatively) fat.
According to the Meinongian, when one think about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about a fat woman who does not exist. According to van Inwagen, when one thinks about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about an existing abstract object that is (predicatively) neither a woman not fat. Pick your poison!
I say neither theory is acceptable.
A Possible Objection to My Critique
"In the articles you cite, van Inwagen doesn't address our thinking about fictional items. He is not doing descriptive psychology or phenomenology; his approach is linguistic. He argues that fictional discourse -- discourse about fictional items -- commits us ontologically to fictional entities. He then tries to square this commitment with our acceptance of such sentences as 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' Your objections, however, are phenomenologically based. So it is not clear that your objections hit their target.
In response I would say that no adequate theory of fictional discourse or fictional objects can abstract away from the first-person point of view of one who thinks about fictional objects. Such linguistic reference as we find in a sentence such as (1) above is parasitic upon intentional or thinking reference. But this is a very large and a very hairy theme of its own. See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.
Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle. The puzzle in one sentence: we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist?
Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad:
1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now, I am thinking about, precisely, Frodo: not about some semantic or epistemic intermediary or surrogate or representative. I am thinking about a concrete, albeit nonexistent, item. I am not thinking about an idea in my mind, or a mental image, or any mental content; nor am I thinking about an abstract entity of any kind such as a property; nor am I thinking of a word or a phrase or anything linguistic.
2. Thinking about (thinking of) is a relation the relata of which are a subject who thinks and an object thought of. Thinking is triadic: ego-cogito-cogitatum.
3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, then all its relata exist/are.
4. There are no different modes of existence/being. This is the ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis of the univocity of 'exists' and 'is' and cognates.
5. To exist is to exist extramentally and extralinguistically, where the minds in question are finite.
6. Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist.
The limbs of the hexad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. To solve the problem we must reject one of the limbs. But which one? (6) is a datum, and (5) is an unproblematic definition. So the the candidates for rejection are (1)-(4). I'll take these in reverse order.
Deny (4): There are two modes of being, esse reale and esse intentionale. When we say, with truth, that Frodo does not exist, we mean that he lacks esse reale. But we can still think about him in a manner to satisfy (1)-(3) since he has merely intentional being.
Deny (3): Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution. There are items that have no being at all, and there are genuine relations that connect existents such as minds to beingless items in the realm of Aussersein.
Deny (2): Thinking-of is not relational, whether or not the obtaining of a relation requires that all its relata exist. This can be developed in different ways. Adverbial theories, Brentano's theory, Butchvarov's theory.
Deny (1): One way to deny (1) is via abstract artifactualism. A number of philosophers, including van Inwagen, have been putting forth some version of this view. The idea is that purely fictional items such as Frodo are created by the authors of works of fiction in which they figure. They are a peculiar species of abstract object since they come into being, unlike 'standard' abstract objects. They exist, but they are abstract. Meinong, by contrast, held that they are concrete but do not exist or have any being at all. Here is a paper that defends artifactualism against some objections by Sainsbury.
Now, gentlemen, pick your poison! Which limb will you deny? I claim, though this is but a promissory note, that no theory works and that the problem, though genuine, is insoluble.
Our Czech friend Lukas Novak sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:
(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.
In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view he seems to be endorsing.
I. Novak's Scotistic View
Novak writes,
Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.
[. . .]
It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced:
[. . .]
In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.
[. . .]
And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:
[. . .]
In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (emphasis added)
II. Some Questions and Comments
As a matter of fact we do at least seem to refer to nonexistent objects and say things about them, true and false. Alexius von Meinong's celebrated goldner Berg, golden mountain, may serve as an example. The golden mountain is made of gold; it is a mountain; it does not exist; it is an object of my present thinking; it is indeterminate with respect to height; it is 'celebrated' as it were among connoisseurs of this arcana; it is Meinong's favorite example of a merely possible individual; it -- the very same one I am talking about now -- was discussed by Kasimir Twardowski, etc.
Now if this seeming to refer is an actual referring, if we do refer to the nonexistent in thought and overt speech, then it is possible that we do so. Esse ad posse valet illatio. But how the devil is it possible that we do so? (PR) is extremely plausible: it is difficult to understand how there could be reference to that which has no being, no esse, whatsoever.
If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy
D1. Possibilism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being.
D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceities that stand in for mere possibilia.
D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational or at least quasi-relational is to be respected and somehow accommodated. No adverbial theories!
D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided. Intentionality is real!
D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided. When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!
Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him. He can tell me if my imputation is unjust. In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands. Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?
Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge. If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite. But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God. See my substantial post on DEM objections in philosophy, here.
Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God. Then he can be put to work. Or, as my esteemed teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."
So how does it work? It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain. But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being. Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being. In themselves, they have no being at all. God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind. And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility. It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.
That is the theory, assuming I have understood it. And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata with the possible exception of (D3). But here is one concern. The theory implies that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. But that is not what I seem to be thinking about. What I seem to be thinking about has very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. An intentional object has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.
Connected with this concern is the suspicion that on Novak's theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach. He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own. So he identifies them with divine conceivings. But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski. (See article below.)
My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.
My point could be put like this. The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act. But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc. Novak's theory appears to fall into psychologism.
What follows are some ideas from London Ed about a book he is writing. He solicits comments. Mine are in blue.
The logical form thing was entertaining but rather off-topic re the fictional names thing. On which, Peter requested some more.
Let’s step right back. I want to kick off the book with an observation about how illusion impedes the progress of science. It looks as though the sun is going round the earth, so early theories of the universe had the earth standing still. It seems as though objects are continuously solid, and so science rejected the atomists’ theory and adopted Aristotle’s theory for more than a millenium.
A final example from the psychology of perception: in 1638, Descartes takes a eye of a bull and shows how images are projected onto the retina. He finally disproves the ‘emissive theory of sight’. The emissive theory is the naturally occurring idea that eyesight is emitted from your eye and travels to and hits the distant object you are looking at. If you ask a young child why you can’t see when your eyes are shut, he replies (‘because the eyesight can’t get out’).
Scientific progress is [often] about rejecting theories based on what our cognitive and perceptual framework suggests to us, and adopting theories based on diligent observation and logic.
We reject ‘eyebeams’. We reject the natural idea that the mental or sensitive faculty can act at a distance. When we look at the moon, science rejects the idea that a little ethereal piece of us is travelling a quarter of a million miles into space. Yet – turning to the main subject of the book – some philosophers think that objects themselves somehow enter our thoughts. Russell writes to Frege, saying “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high”. Kaplan mentions, with apparent approval, the idea that the proposition ‘John is tall’ has two components: the property expressed by the predicate ‘is tall’, and the individual John. “That’s right, John himself, right there, trapped in a proposition”. The dominant theory in modern philosophical logic is ‘direct reference’, or object-dependent theories of semantics: a proper name has no meaning except its bearer, and so the meaning of ‘John is tall’ has precisely the components that Kaplan describes.
BV: I too find the notion that there are Russellian (as opposed to Fregean) propositions very hard to swallow. If belief is a propositional attitude, and I believe that Peter is now doing his grades, it is surely not Peter himself, intestinal contents and all, who is a constituent of the proposition that is the accusative of my act of belief. The subject constituent of the proposition cannot be that infinitely propertied gnarly chunk of external reality, but must be a thinner sort of object, one manageable by a finite mind, something along the lines of a Fregean sense.
The purpose of the proposed book is to advance science by showing how such object-dependent theories are deeply mistaken, and also to explain why they are so compelling, because of their basis on a cognitive illusion as powerful as the illusions that underlie the geocentric theory, or the emissive theory of sight.
What is the illusion? The argument for object dependence is roughly as follows
(1) We can have so-called ‘singular thoughts’, such as when we think that John is tall, i.e. when we have thoughts expressable [expressible] by propositions [sentences, not propositions] whose subject term is a proper name or some other non-descriptive singular term.
(2) A singular term tells us which individual the proposition is about, without telling us anything about it. I.e. singular terms, proper names, demonstratives, etc. are non-descriptive. They are ‘bare individuators’.
BV: This is not quite right. Consider the the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' This is an indexical expression. If BV says, 'I am hungry,' he refers to BV; if PL says 'I am hungry,' he refers to PL. Either way, something is conveyed about the nature of the referent, namely, that it is a person or a self. So what Ed said is false as it stands. A use of 'I' does tell us something about the individual the sentence containing 'I' is about.
Examples are easily multiplied. Apart from the innovations of the Pee Cee, 'she' tells us that the individual referred to is female. 'Here' tells us that the item denoted is a place, typically. 'Now' picks out times. And there are other examples.
There are no bare items. Hence there cannot be reference to bare items. All reference conveys some property of the thing referred to. But variables may be a counterexample. Consider 'For any x, x = x.' One could perhaps uses variables in such a way that there is no restriction on what they range over. But it might be best to stay away from this labyrinth.
One criticism, then, is that there are no bare individuators. A second is that it is not a singular term, but a use of a singular term that individuates. Thus 'I' individuates nothing. It is PL's use of 'I' that picks out PL.
(3) If a singular term is non-descriptive, its meaning is the individual it individuates. A singular term cannot tell us which individual the proposition is about, unless there exists such an individual.
The course of the book is then to show why we don’t have to be forced into assumption (3). There doesn’t have to be (or to exist) an individual that is individuated. The theory of non-descriptive singular terms is then developed in the way I suggested in my earlier posts. Consider the inference
Frodo is a hobbit Frodo has large feet ------- Some hobbit has large feet
I want to argue that the semantics of ‘Frodo’ is purely inferential. I.e. to understand the meaning of ‘Frodo’ in that argument, it is enough to understand the inference that it generates. That is all.
BV: 'Frodo' doesn't generate anything. What you want to say is that the meaning of 'Frodo' is exhausted by the inferential role this term plays in the (valid) argument depicted. Sorry to be such a linguistic prick.
What you are saying is that 'Frodo,' though empty, has a meaning, but this meaning is wholly reducible to the purely syntactical role it plays in the above argument. (So you are not an eliminativist about the meanings of empty names.) But if the role is purely syntactical, then the role of 'Frodo' is the same as the role of the arbitrary individual constant 'f' in the following valid schema:
Hf Lf ------- (Ex)(Hx & Lx).
But then what distinguishes the meaning of 'Frodo' from that of 'Gandalf'?
Meinongian nonentities are out. Fregean senses are out. There are no referents in the cases of empty names. And yet they have meaning. So the meaning is purely syntactical. Well, I don't see how you can squeeze meaning out of bare syntax. Again, what distinguishes the meaning of the empty names just cited? The obviously differ in meaning, despite lacking both Sinn and Bedeutung.
We don’t need an object-dependent semantics to explain such inferences, and hence we don’t need object-dependence to explain the semantics of proper names. If an inferential semantics is sufficient, then the Razor tells us it is necesssary: Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.
BV: You should state explicitly that you intend your inferential semantics to hold both for empty and nonempty names.
And now we see the illusion. The proposition
John is thinking of Obama (or Frodo, or whomever)
has a relational form: “—is thinking of –”. But it does not express a relation. The illusion consists in the way that the relation of the language so strongly suggests a relation in reality. It is the illusion that causes us “to multiply the things principally signified by terms in accordance with the multiplication of the terms”.
That’s the main idea. Obviously a lot of middle terms have been left out. Have at it.
BV: So I suppose what you are saying is that belief in the intentionality of thought is as illusory as the belief in the emissive theory of sight. Just as the the eye does not emit an ethereal something that travels to the moon, e.g., the mind or the 'I' of the mind -- all puns intended! -- does not shoot out a ray of intentionality that gloms onto some Meinongian object, or some Thomistic merely intentional object, or some really existent object.
You face two main hurdles. The first I already mentioned. You have to explain how to squeeze semantics from mere syntax. The second is that there are theoretical alternatives to the view that intentionality is a relation other than yours. To mention just one: there are adverbial theories of intentionality that avoid an act-object analysis of mental reference.
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 epistemic 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, let alone my head, 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 the world be like 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 a computer screen, etc. have no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature. It is a matter of convention that they mean what they mean. And that brings minds into the picture.
Mind is king. Mind is the source of meaning. No mind, no meaning.
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)
Suppose I am conscious of an object in the mode of visual perception: I see a bobcat in the backyard. Does it make sense to try to analyze this perceptual situation by saying that 'in my mind' there is an image or picture that represents something 'outside my mind'?
In the Fifth of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl refutes this type of theory. One point he makes (Logical Investigations, vol. II, 593) is that there is a phenomenological difference between agenuine case of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and ordinary perceptual awareness. Suppose I am looking at a picture of a mountain. The picture appears, but it refers beyond itself to that of which it is a picture, the mountain itself. In a case like this, it is clear that my awareness of the object depicted is mediated by a picture or image. Here it makes clear sense to speak of one thing (the picture) re-presenting another (the mountain). But when I look at the mountain itself, I find no evidence of any picture or image that mediates my perceptual awareness of the mountain. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence of any epistemic intermediary or epistemic deputy. So on phenomenological grounds alone, it would seem to be a mistake to assimilate perceptual consciousness to image-consciousness. The two are phenomenologically quite different.
A second consideration is that consciousness of a thing via a picture or image presupposes ordinary perceptual consciousness inasmuch as the picture or painting must itself be perceived as a precondition of its functioning as an image. How then can ordinary perceptual consciousness be explained as involving internal images or pictures?
Husserl also points out that, no matter how carefully I examine the picture, I will discover no intrinsic feature of it that is its "representative character." (593) That is, there is no intrinsic property of the picture that confers upon it its reference to something beyond itself. So Husserl asks:
What therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone is present in consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a certain extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between image and thing will not help. (593, Findlay trans. slightly emended.)
Why won't resemblance help? If picture and thing depicted both exist, then of course there will be resemblance. But it cannot be in virtue of X's resemblance to Y that X pictures or images Y. "Only a presenting ego's power to use a similar as an image-representative of a similar . . . makes the image be an image." (594) Husserl's point is subtle. I'll explain it in my own way. A picture considered by itselfis just a physical thing with physical properties. What makes it be an image? Its physical properties cannot account for its being an image. And the fact that it shares physical properties with some other thing cannot make it an image either. A painting of a mountain can be a painting of a mountain even if there is no mountain of which it is the painting. Pictures of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas are pictures ofsaid hotel even though it has been demolished. The intentionality of a photograph can survive the destruction of its 'subject.' A depiction of Cerberus is what it is despite the dog's nonexistence.
But even if there exists something that a picture resembles, that does not suffice to make the picture a picture of a thing it resembles. Suppose I have two qualitatively identical ball bearings. In an AndyWarholish mood, I take a picture of one of them, the one closer to my computer. Gazing fondly at the photo, I say, "This ball bearing is the one that is closer to my computer." Since the photo resembles theother ball bearing as well, but is not of that ball bearing, it cannot be resemblance that confers upon the photo its intentionality.
What Husserl is saying in effect is that pictures, paintings, movie images, and the like possess no intrinsic intentionality: what intentionality they have is derived from conscious beings who possess intrinsic intentionality. For Husserl, and for me, the project of trying to account for intrinsic intentionality in terms of internal pictures that resemble outer objects is a complete nonstarter. For onething, it leads to a vicious infinite regress: "Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object be itself constituted through an image . . . ." (594)
There are both phenomenological and dialectical reasons for rejecting the image-theory (Bilder-theorie) of consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence that ordinary perception is mediated by internal images. In addition,
1. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance, but resemblance cannot explain the intentionality of pictures that (i) never had an object, or (ii) lost their object.
2. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance, but resemblance cannot account for a picture's being of the very object it is of as opposed to some other one that it merely resembles.
3. The image-theory is involved in a vicious infinite regress.
4. Since image-consciousness presupposes ordinary perceptual consiousness, it is impossible to explain the latter in terms of the former.
5. The image-theory tries to locate the intentionality of consciousness in the intentionality of a picture when it is clear that there is nothing intrinsic to any picture that could account for its intentionality.
One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy. And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research. Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy. A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader. It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]." In the body of the article we read:
This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience.
For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly - although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.
Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.
Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.
Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner. (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.
I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point. Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about. What is conscience?
Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference. It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory. It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.
The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions. Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't. Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should. If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is. Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to nonmoral consciousness: if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.
So just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience. Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains. Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question. Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong. That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.
Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole? If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain. But this is impossible. A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state. But no physical state is object-directed. So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state.
So that is one absurdity. A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain. Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds. What is being examined here? Obviously not some bit of brain matter. And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.
If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan. But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate. No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.
There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk? Either way, absurdity. Examining is an intentional state. So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.
I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone sufficies to refute the scientistic nonsense. And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms. I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain. Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.
Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist: how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these nonnatural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme? Answers: It is not possible, and they don't.
Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation? Maybe not. Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity. David Gelernter is good on this.
Recent Comments