Maverick Philosopher

Some Notes on Rescher's "Nonexistents Then and Now"

A reader inquires:

Have you read Nicholas Rescher's Nonexistents Then and Now? I read it recently and thought I'd bring it to your attention because it's relevant to your recent posts on fiction. If I understand the article, Rescher would agree with you that a fictional man is not a man, but he would say the same of a merely possible man (denying premise 6 in your post More on Ficta and Impossibilia): he argues that because nonexistents are necessarily incomplete, they are not individuals but schemata for individuals. In response to your post Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization Rescher would probably say that the "table" before your mind is not an individual table but a schema for an individual table, a "schema to which many such individuals might answer" (p. 376). As your concluding apory implies, the argument against the possibility of actualizing Hamlet might apply to any nonexistent. Rescher seems to think it does. It would be interesting to read some of your thoughts on Rescher's essay, but I do see that you're now considering a different problem.

I was aware of this article, but hadn't studied it carefully until today.  I thank the reader  for reminding me of it.  What he says about it is accurate.  Herewith, some preliminary comments.

1. One objection I have is that Rescher tends to conflate the epistemological with the ontological. A careful reading of the following passage shows the conflation at work.  I have added comments in red.

To begin, note that a merely possible world is never given. It is not something we can possibly encounter in experience. The only world that confronts us in the actual course of things is the real world, this actual world of ours -- the only world to which we gain entry effortlessly, totally free of charge. [This is practically a tautology.  All Rescher is saying is that the only world we can actually experience is the actual world, merely possible worlds being, by definition, not actual.]  To move from it, we must always do something, namely, make a hypothesis -- assumption, supposition, postulation, or the like. The route of hypotheses affords the only cognitive access to the realm of nonexistent possibility. [Rescher's wording suggests that there is a realm of nonexistent possibility and that we can gain cognitive access to it.]  For unlike the real and actual world, possible worlds never come along of themselves and become accessible to us without our actually doing something, namely, making an assumption or supposition or such-like. Any possible world with which we can possibly deal will have to be an object of our contrivance -- of our making by means of some supposition or assumption. [In this last sentence Rescher clearly slides from an epistemological claim, one about how we come to know the denizens of the realm of nonexistent possibility, to an ontological claim about what merely possible worlds and their denizens ARE, namely, objects of our contrivance.](364, emphasis added)

As my reader is aware, Rescher wants to say about  the merely possible what he says about the purely fictional, namely, that pure ficta are objects of our contrivance.  But this too, it seems to me, is an illicit conflation.  The purely fictional is barred from actuality by its very status as purely fictional: Sherlock Holmes cannot be actualized.  He is an impossible item.  I am tempted to say that not even divine power could bring about his actualization, any more than it could restore a virgin.  But the merely possible is precisely -- possibly actual!  The merely possible is intrinsically such as to be apt for existence, unlike the purely fictional which is intrinsically such as to be barred from actuality. 

2. The conflation of the merely possible with the purely fictional is connected with another mistake Rescher makes.  Describing the "medieval mainstream," (362) Rescher lumps mere possibillia and pure ficta together as entia rationis.  For this mistake, Daniel Novotny takes him to task, explaining that "Suarez and most other Baroque scholastics considered merely possible beings to be real, and hence they were not classified as beings of reason." (Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel, Fordham UP, 2013, p. 27)   Entia rationis, beings of reason, are necessarily mind-dependent impossible objects.  Mere possibilia are not, therefore, entia rationis.

3. As I understand it, the problem of the merely possible is something like this.  Merely possible individuals and states of affairs are not nothing, nor are they fictional.  And of course their possibility is not merely epistemic, or parasitic upon our ignorance.  Merely possible individuals and states of affairs have some sort of mind-independent reality.  But how the devil can we make sense of this mind-independent reality given that the merely possible, by definition, is not actual?  Suppose we cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a. The merely possible is not actual.

b. The merely possible is real (independently of finite minds).

c.  Whatever is  real is actual.

Clearly, the members of this trio cannot all be true.  Any two of them, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the last two propositions entails the negation of the first.

What are the possible solutions given that the triad is is genuinely logically inconsistent and given that the triad is soluble?  I count exactly five possible solutions.

S1.  Eliminativism.  The limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent, which is to say: there are no mere possibilia.  One could be an error theorist about mere possibilia.

S2.  Conceptualism.  Deny (b) while accepting the other two limbs.  There are mere possibilia, but what they are are conceptual constructions by finite minds. This is essentially Rescher's view.  See his A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Theory of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Basil Blackwell, 1975). He could be described as an artifactualist about possibilities: "A possible individual is an intellectual artifact: the product of a projective 'construction' . . . ." (p. 61)

S3.  Actualism/Ersatzism.  Deny (a) while accepting the other two limbs.  One looks for substitute entities to go proxy for the mere possibles.  Thus, on one approach, the merely possible state of affairs  of there being a unicorn is identified with an actual abstract entity, the property of being a unicorn.  For the possibility to be actual is for the the property to be instantiated. 

S4. Extreme Modal Realism.  Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs.  David Lewis.  There is a plurality of possible worlds conceived of as maximal merelogical sums of concreta.  The worlds and their inhabitants are all equally real.  But no world is absolutely actual.  Each is merely actual at itself. 

S5. Theologism.  Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs.  We bring God into the picture to secure the reality of the possibles instead of a plurality of equally real worlds.   Consider the possibility of there being unicorns.  This is a mere possibility since it is not actual.  But the possibility is not nothing: it is a definite possibility, a real possibility that does not depend for its reality on finite minds.  There aren't any unicorns, but there really could have been some, and the fact of this mere possibility has nothing to do with what we do or think or say.  The content of the possibility subsists as an object of the divine intellect, and its actualizability is grounded in God's power. 

4.  Part of Rescher's support for his constructivism/conceptualism/artifactualism is his attack on the problem of transworld identity.  For Rescher,  "the issue of transworld identity actually poses no real problems -- a resolution is automatically available." (371)  Rescher's argument is hard to locate due to his bloated, meandering, verbose style of writing.  Rescher rarely says anything in a direct and pithy way if he can  pad it out with circumlocutions and high-falutin' phaseology.  (I confess to sometimes being guilty of this myself.)

But basically such argument as I can discern seems to involve equivocation on such terms as 'individuation' and 'identity' as between epistemological and ontological senses.  He gives essentially the following argument on p. 378.  This is my reconstruction and is free of equivocation.

A. All genuine individuals are complete.

B.  All merely possible individuals are complete only if completely describable by us.

C.  No merely possible individuals are completely describable by us.

Therefore

D. No merely possible individuals are genuine individuals.

But why should we accept (B)? Why can't there be nonexistent individuals that are complete?  Rescher just assumes that the properties of such individuals must be supplied by us.  But that is to beg the question against those who believe in the reality of the merely possible.  He just assumes the truth of artifactualism about the merely possible.  Consider the following sentences

d. Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham.

e. Bill Clinton remained single.

f. Bill Clinton  married someone distinct from Hillary Rodham.

Only the first sentence is true, but, I want to say, the other two are possibly true: they pick out merely possible states of affairs.  There are three possible worlds involved: the actual world and two merely possible worlds.  Now does 'Bill Clinton' pick out the same individual in each of these three worlds?  I am inclined to say yes, despite the fact that we cannot completely describe the world in which our boy remains single or the world in which he marries someone other than Hillary.  But Rescher will have none of this because his conceptualism/constructivism/ artifactualism bars him from holding that actual individuals in merely possible worlds or merely possible individuals have properties other that those we hypothesize them as having.  So, given the finitude of our hypothesizing, actual individuals in merely possible worlds, or merely possible individuals, can only be incomplete items, multiply realizable schemata, and thus not genuine individuals.  But then the possible is assimilated to the fictional.

Related articles

The Fictional and the Merely Possible

An Untenable Analysis of 'Sherlock Holmes is a Purely Fictional Character'

More on Ficta and Impossibilia

More on C. J. F. Williams on Existence

My Existence and My Possible Nonexistence

A Catalog of Possible Types of Response to 'Why Is There Anything At All?'

Existence and Essence: An Aporetic Dyad

Actualist and Presentist Ersatzism and Arguments Against Both

A Tension in My Thinking: Hume Meets Parmenides

On Seeing: Intentionality without Aspectuality?

Consider this argument:

1. Tom believes that the man at the podium is the Pope

2. The Pope is an Argentinian

Therefore

3. Tom believes that the man at the podium is Argentinian.

The argument is plainly invalid.  For Tom may not believe that the Pope is an Argentinian.  Now consider this argument:

4. Tom sees the Pope

2. The Pope is an Argentinian

Therefore

5. Tom sees an Argentinian.

Valid or invalid?  That depends.  'Sees' is often taken to be a so-called verb of success:  if S sees x, then it follows that x exists.  On this understanding of  'sees' one cannot see what doesn't  exist. Call this the existentially loaded sense of 'sees' and contrast it with the existentially neutral sense according to which 'S sees x' does not entail 'X exists.'

If 'sees' is  understood in the existentially loaded way, then the second argument is valid, whether or not Tom knows that the Pope is Argentinian.    For if Tom sees the Pope, then the object seen exists.  But nothing can exist without properties, properties most of which  are had independently of our mental states.  If the object has the property F-ness, then the perceiver sees an F-thing, even if he doesn't see it as an F-thing.  So Tom sees an Argentinian despite not seeing him as an Argentinian.

Now seeing in the existentially loaded sense might seem to be a perfectly good example of an intentional or object-directed state since one cannot see without  seeing something. One cannot just see.  Seeing takes an object. 

But whether existentially loaded seeing is an intentional state depends on what all enters into the definition of an intentional state.  Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality.  What I am calling aspectuality is what John Searle calls "aspectual shape":

I have been using the term of art, "aspectual shape," to mark a universal feature of intentionality.  It can be explained as follows: Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others.  These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157)

The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state is such that every aspect of  the object is before the mind of the person in the state.  Suppose you see my car.  You won't help being able to see it is as bright yellowish-green sport-utility vehicle.  But you could easily see it without seeing it as a 2013 Jeep Wrangler.  I take this to imply that the set of perceived aspects of any object of perception not only can be but must be incomplete. This should  be obvious from the fact that, as Husserl liked to point out, outer perception is essentially perspectival.  For example, all sides of the car are perceivable, but one cannot see the car from the front and from the rear simultaneously. 

This aspectuality holds for  intentional states generally.  To coin an example, one can believe that a certain celestial body is the Evening Star without believing that it is the Morning Star.  One can want to drink a Manhattan without wanting to drink a mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and Angostura bitters. As Searle says, "Every belief and every desire, and indeed every intentional phenomenon, has an aspectual shape." (157)

Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something.  And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that  even if every F is a G, one  can be aware of x as F without being aware of  x as G.   Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.

But now it seems we have a problem.  If that which is (phenomenlogically, not spatially) before my mind is necessarily property-incomplete, then either seeing is not existentially loaded, or existentially loaded seeing is not an intentional state.  To put the problem as an aporetic tetrad:

1. If S sees x, then x exists

2. Seeing is an intentional state

3. Every intentional state has an aspectual shape: its object is incomplete

4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent.  Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.

But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands.  At least one of the limbs is false, but which one?   I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection.  That leaves (1) or (2).

I incline toward the rejection of (1).  Seeing is an intentional state but it is not  existence-entailing.  My seeng of x does not entail the existence of x.  What one sees (logically) may or may not exist.  There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature.  The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.

It is of course built into the intentionality of outer perception that what is intended is intended as existing whether or not the act or intentio exists.  To put it paradoxically (and I owe this formulation to Wolfgang Cramer), the object intended is intended as non-object.  That is, objects of outer perception are intended as existing independently of the mental acts that 'target' them, and thus not as merely intentional objects.  But there is nothing like an 'ontological argument' in the vicinity.  I cannot validly infer that the tree I see exists because it is intended as existing apart from my seeing.  This is is an invalid 'ontological' inference:

A. X is intended as existing independently of any  and all mental acts

ergo

B. X exists.

If the above is right, then seeing is an intentional state that shares the aspectuality common to all such states.  A consequence of this is a rejection of  'externalism' about outer perception: the content of the mental state I am in when I see a tree does not depend on the existence of any tree.  The object-directedness of the mental state is intrinsic to it and not dependent on any extrinsic relation to a mind-independent item.  To turn Putnam on his head: the meaning is precisely 'in the head.' 

Are there problems with this?  We shall see.  Externalism is a fascinating option.  But I am highly annoyed that that typical analytic philosopher, Ted Honderich, who defends a version of externalism in his book On Consciousness, makes no mention of the externalist theories of Heidegger, Sartre or Butchvarov.  How typical of the analytic ignoramus, not that all 'analysts' are ignorant of the history of philosophy.

Related articles

Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano's Thesis?

Merely Intentional Objects and the 'Existential Fallacy'

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

On Multiplying Modes of Existence

On Multiplying Modes of Existence

Am I committed to an uneconomical multiplication of modes of existence?  I said that the following set of propositions is logically consistent:

a. Tom is thinking of a unicorn
b. Unicorns do not exist in reality
c. Tom's mental state is object-directed; it is an intentional state.
d. The object of Tom's mental state does not exist in reality.
e. The merely intentional object is not nothing.
f. The merely intentional object enjoys intentional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from existence in reality.

David Brightly in a comment constructs a similar set:

By analogy with your (a)--(f) can we not also consistently assert the following?

a. This tapestry, rather beautifully, depicts a unicorn.
b. Unicorns do not exist in the (C1)-sense.
c. The tapestry is object-directed; it is a depictional entity.
d. The object of the tapestry does not (C1)-exist.
e. The merely depicted object is not nothing.
f. The merely depicted object enjoys depictional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from (C1)-existence.

Likewise,

Whereas my view is that when Tom thinks of a unicorn, he is thinking of something, an item that exists merely as the object of Tom's act of thinking, but does not exist mind-independently,

has the analogy,

When the tapestry depicts a unicorn, it is depicting something, an item that exists merely as the object of the tapestry's depicting, but does not exist tapestry-independently.

Three points.

First, the intentionality of Tom's thinking is original while the intentionality of the tapestry is derivative.  The tapestry is not intrinsically  intentional, but derives its intentionality from a mind's taking of the merely physical object as a picture or image of something else.  By itself, the tapestry depicts nothing.  It is just a piece of cloth.

Given the first point, my second is that there are not two kinds of intentionality or object-directedness, but only one, the intentionality of the viewer of the tapestry who takes it as representing something, a unicorn. 'Derivative' in 'derivative intentionality' is an alienans adjective.

Third, if there are not two kinds of intentionality, then there is no call to distinguish, in addition to (C1)-existence (real existence) and intentional existence, depictional existence.

In this way I think I can avoid multiplying modes of existence by the multiplicity of types of physical things (scribbles on paper, trail markers, grooves in vinyl, etc.) that can be taken to represent something.

Related articles

Merely Intentional Objects and the 'Existential Fallacy'

More on Ficta and Impossibilia

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano's Thesis?

Phenomenon and Existence

Holes and Their Mode of Being

Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization

Merely Intentional Objects and the 'Existential Fallacy'

London Ed wants to pin the 'existential fallacy' on me.  He writes and I respond in blue:

Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization

Peter and I discussed the following over Sunday breakfast.

Suppose I want a table, but there is no existing table that I want: I want a  table with special features that no existing table possesses.  So I decide to build a table with these features.  My planning involves imagining a table having certain properties.  It is rectangular, but not square, etc.  How does this differ from imagining a table that I describe  in a work of fiction?  Suppose the two tables have all the same properties.  We also assume that the properties form a logically consistent set.  What is the difference between imagining a table I intend to build and imagining a table that I do not intend to build but intend merely to describe as part of the fictional furniture in a short story?

In the first case I imagine the table as real; in the second as fictional. Note that to imagine a table as real is not the same as imagining a real table, though that too occurs.  Suppose I remember seeing Peter's nondescript writing  table.  To remember a table is not to imagine one; nonetheless I can imagine refurbishing Peter's table by stripping it, sanding it, and refinishing it.  The imagined result of those operations is not a purely imagined object, any more than a piece of fiction I write in which Peter's table makes an appearance features a purely fictional table.

The two tables I am concerned with, however are both nonexistent. In both cases there is a merely intentional object before my mind.  And in both cases the constitutive properties are the same.  Moreover, the two are categorially the same: both are physical objects, and more specifically artifacts. Obviously, when I imagine a table, I am not imagining a nonphysical object or a natural physical object like a tree.  So there is a clear sense in which  what I am imagining is in both cases a physical object, albeit a nonexistent/not-yet-existent physical object.

So what distinguishes the two objects?  Roman Ingarden maintains that they differ in "ontic character."  In the first case, the ontic character is intended as real.  In the second, intended as fictional.  (The Literary Work of Art, p. 119). 

Now I have already argued that purely fictional objects are impossible objects: they cannot be actualized, even if the constitutive properties form a logically consistent set.  We can now say that the broadly logical impossibility of purely fictional objects is grounded in their ontic character of being intended as fictional.   The table imagined as real, however, is possible due to its ontic character of being intended as real despite being otherwise indistinguishable from the table imagined as fictional.

Now here is the puzzle of actualization formulated as an aporetic triad

a. Every incomplete object is impossible.

b. The table imagined as real is an incomplete object. 

c. The table imagined as real is possible, i.e. actualizable.

The limbs are collectively inconsistent, but each is very plausible.  At any impasse again.

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Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

WARNING!  Scholastic hairsplitting up ahead!  If you are allergic to this sort of thing, head elsewhere.  My old post, On Hairsplitting, may be of interest.

My  Czech colleague Lukas Novak seems to hold that there is no mode of being that is the mode of being of purely or merely intentional objects:

. . . no problem to say that a merely intentional object O has an esse intentionale; but what is this esse? There are reasons to think that it is nothing within O: for objects have intentional being in virtue of being conceived (known, etc. . . ), and cognition in general is an immanent operation, i.e., its effects remain within its subject. It would be absurd to assume that by conceiving of Obama just now (and so imparting to  him an esse intentionale) I cause a change in him! So intentional being seems to be a mere extrinsic denomination from the cognitive act, a merely extrinsic property. Consequently, objects which have only intentional being, are in themselves nothing. They do not represent an item in the complete inventory of what there is. It seems to me that it is an error (yes, I believe there are philosophical errors:-)) to assume that objects must be something in themselves in order to be capable of being conceived (or referred to).

While agreeing with much of what Novak says, I think it is reasonable to maintain that  merely intentional objects enjoy intentional being, esse intentionale, a mode of being all their own, despite the obvious fact that merely intentional objects are 'existentially heteronomous,' a phrase to be defined shortly.  But to discuss this with any rigor we need to make some distinctions.  I will be drawing upon the work of Roman Ingarden, student of Edmund Husserl and a distinguished philosopher in his own right.  I will be defending what I take to be something in the vicinity of Ingarden's position.

1. An example of a purely intentional object is a table that does not exist in reality, but is created by me in imagination with all and only the properties I freely ascribe to it.  In a series of mental acts (intentional experiences) I imagine a table.  The table is the intentional object of the series of acts.  It is one to their many, and for this reason alone distinct from them.  Act is not object, and object is not act, even though they are correlated necessarily.  In virtue of its intentionality, an act is necessarily an act of an object, the italicized phrase to be read as an objective genitive, and the object, being purely or merely intentional, is dependent for its existence on the act.   But although the object cannot exist without the act, the object is no part of the act, kein reeller Inhalt as Husserl would say.  So, given that the act is a mental or psychic reality, it does not follow that the object, even though purely intentional, is a mental or psychic reality.  Indeed, it is fairly obvious that the imagined table is not a mental or psychic reality.  The object, not being immanent to the act, is in a certain sense transcendent, enjoying  a sort of transcendence-in-immanence, if I remember my Husserl correctly.  Of course it is not transcendent in the sense of existing on its own independently of consciousness.  Now consider a really existent table.  It may or may not become my intentional object.  If it does, it is not a purely intentional object.  A purely intentional object, then, is one whose entire being is exhausted in being an object or accusative of a conscious intending.  For finite minds such as ours, nothing real is such that its being is wholly exhaustible by its being an intentional object.

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.

2.  The problem posed by purely intentional objects can be framed as the problem of logically reconciling the following propositions:

A.  Some mental acts are directed upon nonexistent, purely intentional, objects.
B.  Anti-Psychologism:  These purely intentional objects typically do not exist intramentally, for the Twardowskian reasons above cited.
C.  These purely intentional objects do not exist extramentally, else they wouldn't be purely intentional.
D.  These purely intentional objects are not nothing: they have some mode of being.
E.  Existential Monism:  everything that exists or has being exists or has being in the same way or mode.

The pentad is logically inconsistent.  One solution is to reject (D):   Purely intentional objects do not exist at all, or have any sort of being, but we are nonetheless able to stand in the intentional relation to them.  To this Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann view I have two objections.  First, what does not exist at all is nothing, hence no definite object.  Second, if intentionality is a relation, then all its relata must exist. A better solution, that of Ingarden, is to reject (E).

3. Ingarden rejects Existential Monism, maintaining that  there are different modes of being. (TMB, 48) Here are four modes Ingarden distinguishes:

a. Existential Autonomy.  The self-existent is existentially autonomous.  It "has its existential foundation in istelf." (Time and Modes of Being, p. 43) 

b. Existential Heteronomy.  The non-self-existent is the existentially heteronomous.  Purely intentional objects  are existentially heteronomous:  they have their existential foundation not in themselves, but in another.  Now if existential heteronomy is a mode of being, and purely intentional objects enjoy this mode of being, then it follows straightaway that purely intentional objects have being, and indeed their own heteronomous being.  If Novak denies this, then this is where our disagreement is located.

c. Existential Originality. The existentially original, by its very nature, cannot be produced by anything else.  If it exists, it cannot not exist. (52)  It is therefore permanent and indestructible. God, if he exists, would be an example of a being that is existentially original.  But matter, as conceived by dialectical materialists, would also be an example, if it exists. (79)

d. Existential Derivativeness.  The existentially derivative is such that it can exist only as produced by another.  The existentially derivative may be either existentially autonomous or existentially heteronomous.  Thus purely intentional objects are both existentially derivative and existentially heteronomous.

4. Now let me see if I can focus my rather subtle difference from Novak.  I am sure we can agree on this much: purely intentional objects are neither existentially original nor existentially autonomous.  They are existentially derivative, though not in the way a divinely created substance is existentially derivative: such substances, though derivative, are autonomous.  So I think we can agree that purely intentional objects are existentially heteronomous.  The issue that divides us is whether they have their own, albeit heteronomous, being.  Or is it rather the case that their being reduces to the being of something else?  I say that purely intentional objects have a very weak mode of being, existential heteronomy, in Ingarden's jargon.  Novak denies this.  Novak cites his master, the doctor subtilis, Duns Scotus:

 

And if you are looking for some “true being” of this object as such [viz. of
the object qua conceived], there is none to be found over and above that
“being in a qualified sense”, except that this “being in a qualified sense” can
be reduced to some “being in an unqualified sense”, which is the being of
the respective intellection. But this being in an unqualified sense does not
belong to that which is said to “be in a qualified sense” formally, but only
terminatively or principiatively — which means that to this “true being” that
“being in a qualified sense” is reduced, so that without the true being of this
[intellection] there would be no “being in a qualified sense” of that [object
qua conceived]. - Ord. I, dist. 36, q. un., n. 46 (ed. Vat. VI, 289)

The idea seems to be that the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, and that it therefore has no 'true being' of its own. The purely intentional object has being only in a qualified sense.  This qualified being, however, reduces to the being of the intellection.  I think this reduction opens Scotus and Novak up to the  charge of psychologism, against which Ingarden, good student of Husserl that he was, rails on pp. 48-49 of TMB.  For if the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, then the purely intentional object has  mental or psychic being -- which is not the case.  The object is not a psychic content.  It is not the act or a part of the act; not is it any other sort of psychic reality. 

Psychologism is avoided, however, if purely intentional objects are granted their own mode of being, that of existential heteronomy.  Although they derive their being from the the being of mental acts, their being is not the being of mental acts, but their own mode of being.  Analogy:  Though created substance derive their being from God, their mode of being is their own and not the same as God's mode of being.

From the Laws of Logic to the Existence of God

James N. Anderson and Greg Welty have published a paper entitled The Lord of Non-Contradiction:  An Argument for God from Logic. Having worked out similar arguments in unpublished manuscripts, I am very sympathetic to the project of arguing from the existence of necessary truths to the necessary existence of divine mind. 

Here is a quick sketch of the Anderson-Welty argument as I construe it:

1. There are laws of logic, e.g., the law of non-contradiction.

2. The laws of logic are truths.

3. The laws of logic are necessary truths.

4. A truth is a true proposition, where propositions are the primary truth-bearers or primary vehicles of the truth values.

5. Propositions exist.  Argument: there are truths (from 1, 2); a truth is a true proposition (3); if an item has a property such as the property of being true, then it exists. Ergo, propositions exist.

6. Necessarily true propositions necessarily exist.  For if a proposition has the property of being true in every possible world, then it exists in every possible world.  Remark:  in play here are 'Fregean' as opposed to 'Russellian' propositions.  See here for an explanation of the distinction as I see it.  If the proposition expressed by 'Socrates is Socrates' is Russellian, then it has Socrates himself, warts and all, as a constituent.  But then, though the proposition is in some sense necessarily true, being a truth of logic, it is surely not necessarily existent.

7. Propositions are not physical entities.  This is because no physical entity such as a string of marks on  paper could be a primary truth-bearer.  A string of marks, if true, is true only derivatively or secondarily, only insofar as as it expresses a proposition.

8. Propositions are intrinsically intentional.  (This is explained in the post which is the warm-up to the present one.)

Therefore

9. The laws of logic are necessarily existent, nonphysical, intrinsically intentional entities.

10. Thoughts are intrinsically intentional.

The argument now takes a very interesting turn.  If propositions are intrinsically intentional, and thoughts are as well, might it be that propositions are thoughts?

The following invalid syllogism must be avoided: "Every proposition is intrinsically intentional; every thought is intrinsically intentional; ergo, every proposition is a thought."  This argument is an instance of the fallacy of undistributed middle, and of course the authors argue in no such way.  They instead raise the question whether it is parsimonious to admit into our ontology two distinct categories of intrinsically intentional item, one mental, the other non-mental.  Their claim is that the principle of parsimony "demands" that propositions be constued as mental items, as thoughts.  Therefore

11.  Propositions are thoughts.

Therefore

12. Some propositions (the law of logic among them) are necessarily existent thoughts. (From 8, 9, 10, 11)

13. Necessarily, thoughts are thoughts of a thinker.

Therefore

14. The laws of logic are the thoughts of a necessarily existent thinker, and "this all men call God." (Aquinas)

A Stab at Critique 

Line (11) is the crucial sub-conclusion.  The whole argument hinges on it.  Changing the metaphor, here is where I insert my critical blade, and take my stab.  I count three views.

A. There are propositions and there are thoughts and both are intrinsically intentional.

B. Propositions reduce to thoughts.

C. Thoughts reduce to propositions.

Now do considerations of parsimony speak against (A)?  We are enjoined not to multiply entities (or rather types of entity) praeter necessitatem. That is, we ought not posit more types of entity than we need for explanatory purposes.  This is not the same as saying that we ought to prefer ontologies with fewer categories.  Suppose we are comparing an n category ontology with an n + 1 category ontology.  Parsimony does not instruct us to take the n category ontology.  It instructs us to take the n category ontology only if it is explanatorily adequate, only if it explains all the relevant data but without the additional posit.  Well, do we need propositions in addition to thoughts for explanatory purposes?  It is plausible to say yes because there are (infinitely) many propositions that no one has ever thought of or about.  Arithmetic alone supplies plenty of examples.  Of course, if God exists, then there  are no unthought propositions.  But the existence of God is precisely what is at issue.  So we cannot assume it.  But if we don't assume it, then we have a pretty good reason to distinguish propositions and thoughts as two different sorts of intrinsically intentional entity given that we already have reason to posit thoughts and propositions.

 So my first critical point is that the principle of parsimony is too frail a reed with which to support the reduction of propositions to thoughts.  Parsimony needs to be beefed-up with other considerations, e.g., an argument to show why an abstract object could not be intrinsically intentional. 

My second critical point is this.  Why not countenance (C), the reduction of thoughts to propositions?  It could be like this.  There are all the (Fregean) propostions there might have been, hanging out in Frege's Third Reich (Popper's world 3).  The thought that 7 + 5 = 12 is not a state of an individul thinker; there are no individual thinkers, no selves, no egos.  The thought is just the Fregean proposition's temporary and contingent exemplification of the monadic property, Pre-Personal Awareness or Bewusst-sein.  Now I don't have time to develop this suggestion which has elements of Natorp and Butchvarov, and in any case it is not my view.

All I am saying is that (C) needs excluding. Otherwise we don't have a good reason to plump for (B).

My conclusion?  The Anderson-Welty argument, though fascinating and competently articulated, is not rationally compelling.  Rationally acceptable, but not rationally compelling.  Acceptable, because the premises are plausible and the reasoning is correct.  Not compelling, because one  could resist it without quitting the precincts of reasonableness.

To theists, I say: go on being theists.  You are better off being a theist than not being one.  Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable.  But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite.  In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

Related articles

A Review of Barry Miller's From Existence to God

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano's Thesis?

Are the Laws of Logic Empirical Generalizations?

Caesar Is No More: The Aporetics of Reference to the Past

The Aporetics of Existence and Self-Identity

Beating the Dead Horse of the Thin Theory Some More

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Metaphysical Grounding I: True Of

Arguing with Kripke over Existence

Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano's Thesis?

Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality.  Propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. For they are nonmental yet intrinsically object-directed. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later, dispositions — if I am so disposed.

On one approach, propositions are abstract objects. Since abstracta are categorially barred from being mental, it is clear that if intrinsic intentionality is ascribed to abstract propositions, then the thesis that all instances of intentionality are instances of mentality must be rejected. For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely pyschologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.

 A proposition 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 uttering them. The proposition is one to their many. And unlike the sentence-tokens, it is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. 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 can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. The idea is that 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.

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. You can't get blood from a stone, or meaning from meat, no matter how hard you squeeze, and no matter how wondrously organized the meat.

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 is 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 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 way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the belief 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.)

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. My believing that p is an intentional state directed upon p; but is it not also the case that p is directed upon the world, or upon a truth-making state of affairs in the world in the case in which p is true?

But now it looks as if we have two sorts of intentionality, call them noetic and noematic, to borrow some terminology from Husserl.   Noetic intentionality connects a mental state (in Frege's Second Reich) to a proposition (in Frege's Third Reich), and noematic intentionality connects, or purports to connect, a proposition to an object in Frege's First Reich. Frege wouldn't think of this object as a state of affairs or concrete fact, of course, but we might. (The peculiarities of Frege's actual views don't matter for this discussion.)

The problem for Brentano's thesis above is that propositions — which are abstract objects — seem to display intrinsic aboutness: they are about the concrete world or states of affairs in the world. Thus the proposition expressed by 'The Charles is polluted' is intrinsically about either the river Charles or else about the state of affairs, The Charles River's being polluted. Intrinsically, because the proposition's being about what it is about does not depend on anyone's interpretation.

If this is right, then some instances of intentionality are not only not conscious but not possibly conscious. Does this refute Brentano's thesis? Brentano himself denied that there were such irrealia as propositions and so he would not take propositions as posing any threat to his thesis. But if there are (Fregean) propositions, then I think they would count as counterexamples to Brentano's thesis about intentionality.

Is there a way to uphold Brentano's thesis that only the mental is intrinsically intentional?  Yes, if there is a way to identify propositions with thoughts or rather content-laden thinkings.  My thinking that 7 is prime is intrinsically intentional.  Unfortunately, my thinking is contingent whereas the content of my thinking is necessarily true and hence necessarily existent. To identify propositions with content-laden thinkings one would have to take the thinkings to inhere in a necessarily existent mind such as the mind of God.

 

So I end on an aporetic note.  Intentionality cannot be the mark of the mental if there are Fregean propositions.  But given that there are necessary truths and that truth-bearers cannot be physical items, then only way to avoid Fregean propositions is by identifying propositions with divine thoughts, in which case they are Gedanken after all.

More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

This is proving to be a fascinating topic.  Let's push on a bit further.

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 mode of esse.  The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale.  We can speak of these in English as real existence and intentional existence. 

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.

My concern over the last few days has been the exact ontological status of the CN. 

This morning, with the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated earlier:

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 singulars and mental acts.

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, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of LEM) 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.  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 with  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 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 home est rationalis, et no 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 CN humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence.  So we either go the Meioningian route or we say that CNs  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; theitrs, 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.  CNs 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.  One ought to be forgiven for thinking that solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.  But this is a separate can of worms. 

Related articles

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

Lukáš Novák on Common Natures

Stanislav Sousedik's "Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication"

Existentials and Their Equivalents: Aid and Comfort for the Thin Theory?

Aquinas Meets Frege: Analysis of an Argument from De Ente et Essentia

Gyula Klima on Thomistic Common Natures: Some Questions

Differences Between Wishing and Hoping

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly
If our lives could be like that.

Bob Dylan's Dream

Wishing and hoping are both intentional attitudes: they take an object.  One cannot just wish, or just hope, in the way one can just feel miserable or elated.  If I wish, I wish for something.  The same holds for hoping. How then do the two attitudes differ?  They differ in terms of time, modality, and justification.

1.  The object of hope lies in the future, of necessity.  One cannot hope for what was or what is.  In his dream, Dylan wished to be together again with his long lost friends.  But he didn't hope to be together with them again.  Coherent: 'I wish I had never been born.'  Incoherent: 'I hope I had never been born.'  Coherent: 'I wish I was with her right now.'  Incoherent: 'I hope I was with her right now.'

Although hope is always and of necessity future-directed, wishing is not temporally restricted.  'I wish I were 30 again.' 'I wish I were in Hawaii now.'  'I wish to live to be a hundred.'   I cannot hope to be 30 again or hope to be in Hawaii now.  But I can both wish and hope to live to be a hundred.

Can I hope to be young again?  That's ambiguous.  I could hope for a medical breakthrough that would rejuvenate  a person in the sense of making him physiologically young  and I could hope to undergo such a rejuvenation.  But I cannot hope to be calendrically young again.

2. One can hope only for what one considers to be possible.  (What one considers to be possible may or may be possible.)  But one can wish for both what one considers to be the possible and what one consider to be  impossible.  I can hope for a stay of execution, but not that I should continue to exist as a live animal after being hanged.  ('Hanged' not 'hung'!)  I can hope to survive my bodily death, but only if I consider it possible that I survive my bodily death. But I can wish for what I know to be impossible such as being young again, being able to run a 2:30 marathon, visiting  Mars next year.

3. There is no sense in demanding of one who wishes to be cured of cancer that he supply his grounds or justification for so wishing.  "Are you justified in wishing to be cancer-free?"  But if he hopes to beat his cancer, then one can appropriately request the grounds of the hope.

If I both wish and hope for something I consider possible that lies in the future, then the difference between wishing and hoping rests on the fact that one can appropriately request grounds for hoping but not grounds for wishing.

I'll end with my favorite counterfactual conditional:  'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' 

Geach on the Real Distinction II: The Argument from Intentionality

See Geach on the Real Distinction I for some background on the distinctio realis.  This post lays out the argument from intentionality to the real distinction.

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 ofness 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 of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. One could call this an identity theory of intentionality.

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.  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.)

This argument for the real dstinction is only as good as the Thomist theory of intentionality which in turn rests on the notion of a common nature, felinity, say, which is indifferent to existence inasmuch as it can exist with esse naturale in Max and with esse intentionale in a Max-thinker, but taken in itself  and absolutely is neither material nor mental, neither many nor one.

The aporetics of common natures will be taken up in subsequent posts.

Jaegwon Kim on Reductionism and Eliminativism

I've been studying Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton UP, 2005).  Here are some notes and questions.

1. It's clear that mental causation must be saved.  If Kim is right that nonreductive physicalism is not viable, then by his lights our only hope of saving mental causation is via "physical reductionism." (159).  It is of course easy to see how such reductionism, if true, would save mental causation.  Surely my desire for a beer together with my belief that there is beer in the reefer are part of the etiology of my getting out of my chair and heading to the kitchen.  If beliefs and desires are physical states, then there is no in-principle difficulty in understanding the etiology of my behavior.  Reductionism insures the physical efficacy of the mental.  What was a thorny problem on dualist approaches is no problem at all for the physical reductionist. 

2. At this point some of us are going to wonder whether reductionism collapses into eliminativism.  I tend to think that it does.  Kim of course must disagree.  His project is to find safe passage between  nonreductive physicalism and eliminativism.  But first I want to concede something to Kim.

3. Kim rightly points out (160) that we cannot assume that the mental cannot be physical in virtue of the very meaning of 'mental.'  We cannot assume that 'mental' means 'nonphysical.'  The following argument is not compelling and begs the question against the physicalist:

Beliefs and desires are mental
Whatever is mental is nonphysical
Ergo
Beliefs and desires are not physical.

The physicalist finds nothing incoherent in the notion that what is mental could also be physical.  So he will either reject the second premise, or, if he accepts it, deny the first and maintain that beliefs and desires are not mental in the sense in which his opponents think they are.  It seems clear, then, that one cannot mount a merely semantic argument against the physicalist based on a preconceived  meaning of 'mental.'

4.  Is my present state of consciousness real and yet reducible to a pattern of electrical activity in a network of neurons?  Can we secure reduction without elimination?  Reductionist: there are Fs but what they are are Gs.  Eliminativist: There are no Fs.  There at least appears to be a difference in these two sorts of claims.  Kim claims that "There is an honest difference between elimination and conservative reduction."  (160) Phlogiston got eliminated; temperature and heat got reduced.  Witches got eliminated; the gene got reduced. The reductionist thinks he can secure or "conserve" the reality of the Fs while reducing them to the Gs.  In the present case, the physical reductionist in the philosophy of mind thinks that he can maintain both that mental states are real and that they reduce to physical states.

5.  Let's note two obvious logical points.  The first is that identity is a symmetrical relation.  The second is that reduction is asymmetrical.  Thus,

I.  Necessarily, for any x, y, if x = y, then y = x.
R. Necessarily, for any x, y, if x reduces to y, then it is not the case that y reduces to x.

It is clear, then, that identity and reduction are not the same relation.  And yet if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is nothing other than b, and is therefore identical to b.  If you think about it, reduction is a strange and perhaps incoherent notion.  For if a reduces to b, a is identical to b, but, since reduction is asymmetrical,  b is not identical to a!  Reduction is asymmetrical identity.  Amd that smacks of radical incoherence.   This is what inclines me to say that reduction collapses into elimination.  For if a reduces to b, and is therefore identical to b, while b is not identical to a, then it follows that there simply is no a.  And so if my present mental state reduces to a pattern of electrical activity in a network of neurons, then my mental state does not exist; all that exists is the electrical activity.

6.  Kim wants to have it both ways at once.  He wants mental states to be both real and reducible.  He wants to avoid both eliminativism and dualism. My claim is that it is impossible to have it both ways.  Kim thinks that reduction somehow "conserves" that which is reduced.  But how could it?  If my desire for a beer is nothing other than a brain state, then then it is a purely physical state and everything mental about it has vanished.  If 'two' things are identical, then there is only one thing, and if you insist that that one thing is physical, then it cannot also be mental.

7.  My present thinking about a dog is intrinsically intentional, intrinsically object-directed.  But no physical state is intrinsically object-directed.  So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, my present thinking about a dog simply cannot be identical to any brain state, and so cannot reduce to any brain state. Kim of course thinks that intentional properties are functionalizable.  I have already  argued against that view here.  Whatever causal role my thinking about a dog plays in terms of behavioral inputs and outputs, causal role occupancy cannot be make makes my thinking  intentional.  For it is intentional intrinsically, not in virtue of causal relations.

8. Kim speaks of the functional reducibility of intentional/cognitive properties.  But surely it is not properties that need reducing but particular meetal acts.  Properties are not conscious of anything.  Nor are causal roles.  It is the realizers of the roles that are bearers of intentionality, and it simply makes no sense to think of these as purely physical.

9. Once one starts down the reductive road there is no stopping short of eliminativism.  The latter, however, is surely a reductio ad absurdum of physicalism as I explain in this post on Rosenberg's eliminativism. 

The Irreducibility of Intentionality: An Argument From the Indeterminacy of the Physical

If it could be made to work, materialism would be attractive simply on grounds of parsimony. We all agree that entities, or rather categories of entity, ought not be multiplied beyond necessity.  There are those who will intone this Ockhamite principle with great earnestness as if they are advancing the discussion when of course they are not: the real issue concerns what is needed (necessary) for explanatory purposes.  If you agree that philosophers are in the business of explanation, then I hope you will agree that a good explanation must be categorially parsimonious but not at the expense of explanatory adequacy.

So we ought not introduce irreducibly mental items and/or abstracta if we can  get by with just material items By 'get by' I mean explain in adequate fashion all that needs to be explained: consciousness, self-consciousness including self-reference via the first-person singular pronoun, qualia, intentionality, conscience,  mystical and religious experience, the applicability of mathematics to the physical world, the normativity of logic, normativity in general, the existence of anything in the first place, the emergence of life . . . .

My main interest is negative: in showing that materialism doesn't work. Please don't respond by saying that some other theory (substance dualism, say) doesn't work either. For the issue is precisely: Does   materialism work? If theory T1 is explanatorily inadequate, its deficiencies cannot be made good by pointing out that T2 is also inadequate. This is an invalid argument: "Every alternative to materialism is inadequate; therefore we should embrace materialism despite its inadequacies." Wouldn't it be more reasonable under those circumstances to embrace no theory?

One more preliminary point. If materialism is explanatorily adequate, then we ought to embrace it, and dispense with God, the soul, and the denizens of the Platonic menagerie. For if materialism were adequate, there would be no reason to posit anything beyond the material. But if materialism is not adequate, then we do have reason for such posits.

The following argument is my interpretation of remarks made by Edward Feser in his Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (One World, 2005), pp. 156-159)

1. Consider a representation such as a picture. You draw a picture of your mother. The picture represents her: it is of or about her, and it would remain about her even were she to cease to exist. The picture is a physical object with physical properties: the paper is of a certain size and shape and texture, the ink of a certain chemical composition, the lines have a definite thickness, etc. Now I would insist that these physical features cannot be that in virtue of which the picture represents your mother: they cannot be that in virtue of which the physical item is a representation. For it makes no sense to ascribe intrinsic semantic or intentional properties to merely physical items.  But even if I am wrong about this, there remains a problem for a materialist theory of representation.

2. Suppose a 'copycat' comes along and makes an EXACT copy of your picture of your mother. The copycat's intention is not to represent your mother; his intention is merely to represent your representation of your mother. Now there are two pictorial representations, call them R (the original) and R' (the copy). The question arises: Is R' a  representation of your mother, or is R' a representation  of R? Suppose a second copycat comes along and produces a second copy R''.   Does R'' represent R' or R or your mother? The situation is obviously iterable ad infinitum.

3. Clearly, there is a difference between saying that R' represents your mother, a human being, and saying that R' represents R, a nonhuman drawing of your mother. The reference is different in the two cases. But the reference is indeterminate if we go by the physical properties of the representations alone. Suppose I hand you two drawings of your mother, one an exact copy of the other, but you do not know which is the orignal and which is the copy. You cannot, by inspection of these drawings, tell which is which. Thus you cannot  determine the reference from the physical properties.

4. The point is generalizable to other types of representations.  Suppose I say 'cat' to refer to a cat and my copycat brother says 'cat' simply to copy me. If my brother mimics me perfectly, then it will be impossible from the physical properties of the two word-sounds to tell which refers to a cat and which does not.

Please do not say that we are both referring to a cat. For my copycat brother is a mere copycat: his intention is merely to reproduce the word-sound I made. To make it even clearer, replace my brother with a parrot who happens to be a perfect mimic. No one will say that the 'cat'-token produced by the parrot refers to a cat. The parrot is just an animate copy machine.

The same goes for any physical representation. Suppose a pattern of neural firings is taken to be a representation of X. An exact copy of  that pattern needn't be a representation of X; it could be a
representation of the original pattern. In general, no material representation of X is such that its physical properties suffice to make it a representation of X as opposed to a representation of a
representation of X.

5. Here is the argument:

P1. All thoughts have determinate objects.
P2. No purely material representation has a determinate object.
 -----
C. No thought is a purely material representation.

6. Let's consider an objection. "Granted, material representations on their own lack determinate reference, but that can be supplied by bringing in causal relations. Thus what makes a tokening of 'cat' refer to a cat rather than to a word is the fact that there is a causal chain starting with a furry critter and terminating with an utterance of 'cat.'"

But causal connections cannot secure determinacy of reference, as Hilary Putnam appreciates (Renewing Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 23):

     One cannot simply say that the word "cat" refers to cats because
     the word is causally connected to cats, for the word "cat," or
     rather my way of using the word "cat," is causally connected to
     many things. It is true that I wouldn't be using "cat" as I do if
     many other things were different. My present use of the word "cat"
     has a great many causes, not just one. The use of the word "cat" is
     causally connected to cats, but it is also causally connected to
     the behavior of Anglo-Saxon tribes, for example. Just mentioning
     "causal connection" does not explain how one thing can be a
     representation of another thing, as Kant was already aware.

Related Post:  Representation and Causation, With Some Help from Putnam

Could Intentionality be an Illusion? A Note on Rosenberg

Could intentonality be an illusion?  Of course not.  But seemingly intelligent people think otherwise:

A single still photograph doesn't convey movement the way a motion picture does. Watching a sequence of slightly different photos one photo per hour, or per minute, or even one every 6 seconds won't do it either. But looking at the right sequence of still pictures succeeding each other every one-twentieth of a second produces the illusion that the images in each still photo are moving. Increasing the rate enhances the illusion, though beyond a certain rate the illusion gets no better for creatures like us. But it's still an illusion. There is noting to it but the succession of still pictures. That's how movies perpetrate their illusion. The large set of still pictures is organized together in a way that produces in creatures like us the illusion that the images are moving. In creatures with different brains and eyes, ones that work faster, the trick might not work. In ones that work slower, changing the still pictures at the rate of one every hour (as in time-lapse photography) could work. But there is no movement of any of the images in any of the pictures, nor does anything move from one photo onto the next. Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving, and the actors were moving. But all the movement that the movie watcher detects is in the eye of the beholder. That is why the movement is illusory.

The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory in roughly the same way. Think of each input/output neural circuit as a single still photo. Now, put together a huge number of input/output circuits in the right way. None of them is about anything; each is just an input/output circuit firing or not. But when they act together, they "project" the illusion that there are thoughts about stuff. They do that through the behavior and the conscious experience (if any) that they produce. (Alex Rosenberg, The Atheists' Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.  The quotation was copied from here.)

Rosenberg is not saying, as an emergentist might, that the synergy of sufficiently many neural circuits gives rise to genuine object-directed thoughts.    He is saying something far worse, something literally nonsensical, namely, that the object-directed thought that thoughts are object-directed is an illusion.  The absurdity of Rosenberg's position can be seen as follows.

1. Either the words "The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory"  express a thought -- the thought that there are no object-directed thoughts -- or they do not. 
2. If the latter, then the words are meaningless.
3. If the former, then the thought is either true or false.
4. If the thought is true, then there there are no object-directed thoughts, including the one expressed by Rosenberg's words, and so his words are once again meaningless.
5. If the thought is false, then there are object-directed thoughts, and Rosenberg's claim is false.
Therefore
6. Rosenberg's claim is either meaningless or false.  His position is self-refuting.

As for the analogy, it is perfectly hopeless, presupposing as it does genuine intrinsic intentionality.  If I am watching a movie of a man running, then I am under an illusion in that there is nothing moving on the movie screen: there is just a series of stills. But the experience I am undergoing is a perfectly good experience that exhibits genuine intrinsic intentionality: it is a visual experiencing of a man running, or to be perfectly punctilious about it: a visual experiencing AS OF a man running.  Whether or not the man depicted exists, as would be the case if the movie were a newsreel, the experience exists, and so cannot be illusory.

 To understand the analogy one must understand that there are intentional experiences, experiences that take an accusative.  But if you understand that, then you ought to be able to understand that the analogy cannot be used to render intelligible how it might that it is illusory that there are intentional experiences.

What alone remains of interest here is how a seemingly intelligent fellow could adopt a position so manifestly absurd.  I suspect the answer is that he has stupefied himself  by  his blind adherence to scientistic/naturalistic ideology.

Here is an earlier slap at Rosenberg.  Peter Lupu joins in the fun here.

Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation

Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli.  Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69.  An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl.  How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly I am 'brought back' to the fantastic and far-off summer of '69.  Ah yes!  What is memory and how does it work?  How is it even possible? 

Let's start with the 'datanic' as I like to say:

1. There are (veridical) memories through which we gain epistemic access to the actual past, to events that really happened.  The above example is a case of episodic personal memory.  I remember an event in my personal past.  To be precise, I remember my having experienced an event in my personal past.  My having been born by Caesarean section is also an episode from my personal past, and I remember that that was my mode of exiting my mother's body; but I don't remember experiencing that transition.  So not every autobiographical memory is a personal episodic memory.  The latter is the only sort of memory I will be discussing in this post.  The sentence in boldface is the nonnegotiable starting point of our investigation. 

We now add a couple of more theoretical and less datanic propositions, ones which are not obvious, but are  plausible and accepted by many theorists:

2. Memory is a causal notion.  A mental image of a past event needn't be a memory of a past event.  So what makes a mental image of a past event a memory image?  Its causal history.  My present memory has a causal history that begins with the event in 1969 as I experienced it.

3. There is no action at a temporal distance.  There is no direct causation over a temporal gap.  There are no remote causes; every cause is a proximate cause.  A necessary ingredient of causation is spatiotemporal contiguity.  So while memory is a causal notion, my present memory of the '69 event is not directly caused by that event.  For how could an event that no longer exists directly cause, over a decades-long temporal gap, a memory event in the present?  That would seem to be something 'spooky,' a kind of magic. 

Each of these propositions lays strong claim to our acceptance.  But how can they all be true?  (1) and (2) taken together appear to entail the negation of (3).  How then can we accommodate them all?

Memory trace theories provide a means of accommodation.  Suppose there are memory traces or engrams engraved in some medium.  For materialists this medium will have to be the brain.  One way to think of a memory trace is as a brain modification that was caused at the time of the original experience, and that persists since that time.  So the encounter with Pam in '69 induced a change in my brain, left a trace there, a trace which has persisted since then.  When I passed the patchouli lady in the supermarket, the olfactory stimulus 'activated' the dormant memory trace.   This activation of the memory trace either is or causes the memory experience whose intentional object is the past event.  With the help of memory traces we get causation wthout action at a temporal distance. 

(Far out, man!)

The theory or theory-schema just outlined seems to allow us to uphold each of the above propositions. In particular, it seems to allow us to explain how a present memory of a past event can be caused by the past event without the past event having to jump the decades-long temporal gap between event remembered and memory.  The memory trace laid down in '69 by the original experience exists in the present and is activated in the present by the sensory stimulus.  Thus the temporal contiguity requirement is satisfied.  And if the medium in which the memory traces are stored is the brain or central nervous system, then the spatial contiguity requirement is also satisfied.

Question:  Could memory traces play merely causal roles?

Given (2) and (3), it seems that memory traces must be introduced as causal mediators between past and present.  But could they be just that?  Or must they also play a representational role?  Intuitively, it seems that nothing could be a memory trace unless it somehow represented the event of which it is a trace. If E isthe original experience, and T is E's trace, then it it seems we must say that T is of E in a two-fold sense corresponding to the difference between the subjective and objective genitive.  First, T is of E in that T is E's trace, the one that E caused. Second, T is of E in that T represents E. 

It seems obvious that a trace must represent.  In my example,the sensory stimulus (the whiff of patchouli) is not of or about the '69 event.  It merely activates the trace, rendering the dispositional occurrent.  But the memory is about the '69 event.  So the aboutness must reside in the trace.  The trace must represent the event that caused it  -- and no other past event.  The memory represents because the trace represents.  If the trace didn't represent anything, how could the memory -- which is merely the activation of the trace or an immediate causal consequence of the activation of the trace -- represent anything?  How a persisting brain modification -- however it is conceived, whether it is static or dynamic, whether localized or nonlocalized -- can represent anything is an important and vexing question but one I will discuss in a later post.

Right now I want to nail down the claim that memory traces cannot play a merely causal role, but must also bear the burden of representation.

Suppose a number of strangers visit me briefly.  I want to remember them,  but my power of memory is very weak and I know I will not remember them without the aid of some mnemonic device.  So I have my visitors leave calling cards.  They do so, except that they are all the same, and all blank (white).  These blank cards are their traces, one per visitor.   The visitors leave, but the cards remain behind as traces of their visit.  I store the cards in a drawer.  I 'activate' a card by pulling it out of storage and looking at it.  I am then reminded (at most) that I had a visitor, but not put in mind of any particular visitor such as Tom.  So even if the card in my hand was produced by Tom, that card is useless for the purpose of remembering Tom.  Likewise for every other card.  Each was produced by someone in particular and only by that person; but none of them 'bring back' any particular person. 

Bear in my mind that I don't directly remember any of my visitors.  My only memory access to them is via their traces, their calling cards.  For the visitors are long gone just like the '69 experience.  So the problem is not merely that I don't know which card is from which person; the problem is that I cannot even distinguish the persons.  

Had each visitor left a differently  colored card, that would not have helped.  Nor are matters helped if each visitor leaves a different sort of trace; a bottle cap, a spark plug, a lock of hair, a guitar pick.  Even if  Tom is a guitar player and leaves a guitar pick, that is unhelpful too  since I have no access to Tom except via his trace. 

So it doesn't matter whether my ten visitors leave ten tokens of the same type, or ten tokens each of a different type.  Either way I won't be able to remember them via the traces they leave behind.  Clearly, what I need from each visitor is an item that uniquely represents him or her -- as opposed to an item that is merely caused to be in my house by the visitor.  Suppose Tom left a unique guitar pick, the only one of its kind in existence.  That wouldn't help either since no inspection of that unique pick could reveal that it was of Tom rather than of Eric or Eric's cat.  Ditto if Tom has signed his card or his pick 'Tom Riff.'  That might be a phony name, or the name of him and his guitar -- doesn't B. B . King call his guitar 'Lucille'?

If I can remember that it was Tom who left the guitar pick, then of course I don't need the guitar pick to remember Tom by.  I simply remember Tom directly without the need for a trace.  On the other hand, if I do need a trace in order to remember long gone Tom, then that trace must have representational power: it cannot be merely something that plays a causal role. 

Traces theories have to avoid both circularity and vicious infinite regress.

Circularity.  To explain the phenomenon of memory, the trace theory posits the existence of memory traces.  But if the explanation in terms of traces ends up presupposing memory, then the theory is circular and worthless.  If what makes the guitar pick a trace of Tom is that I remember that Tom left it, then the explanation is circular.  Now consider the trace T in my brain which, when activated by stimulus S causes a memory M of past experience E.  M represents E because T represents E.  What makes T represent E? What makes the memory trace caused by the encounter with Pam in '69 represent Pam or my talking with her?  The answer cannot be that I remember the memory trace being caused by the encounter with Pam.  For that would be blatantly circular.  Besides, memory traces in the brain are not accessible to introspection.

Infinite Regress.  Our question is: what makes T represent E and nothing else?  To avoid circularity one might say this:  There is a trace T* which records the fact of E's production of T, and T represents E in virtue of T*.  But this leads to a  vicious infinite regress.   Suppose Sally leaves a photo of herself.  How do I know that the photo is of Sally and not of her sister Ally?  If you say that I directly remember Sally and thereby know that the photo is unambiguously of her, then you move in a circle.  You may as well just say that we remember directly and not via traces.  So, to hold onto the trace theory, one might say the following:  There is a photo of Sally and her photograph, side by side.  Inspection of  this photo reveals that that the first photo is of Sally.  But this leads to regress:  what makes the second photo a photo of the first?

Conclusion:  To avoid both circularity and infinite regress, memory traces must possess intrinsic representational power.  Their role cannot be merely causal.

A later post will then address the question whether memory traces could have intrinsic representational power.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you will be able to guess my answer.

REFERENCE:  John Heil, "Traces of Things Past," Philosophy of Science, vol. 45, no. 1 (March 1978), pp. 60-72.  My calling card example above is a reworking of Heil's tennis ball example.

 

More on Intentionality as a Problem for Functionalism

1. Even if every mental state is a brain state, it is quite clear that  not every brain state is a mental state: not everything going on in the brain manifests mentality. So what distinguishes the brain states that are mental states from the brain states that are not? This question cannot be evaded.

The distinguishing feature cannot be anything intrinsic to brain states qua brain states. To put it another way, the biological, electrochemical, and other terms appropriate to the description of  brain phenomena are of no help in specifying what makes a brain state  mental. Talk of axons, dendrites, synapses, diffusion of sodium ions across synapses, etc. is not the sort of talk that makes intelligible why a particular complex state of Jones' brain is his intense elation at getting his neuroscience text accepted for publication.
  
2. To help you understand what I have just said, I offer an analogy.  Even though every valve-lifter is an engine part, it is quite clear that not every engine part is a valve-lifter. So what distinguishes  the engine parts that are valve-lifters from the parts that are not?

The distinguishing feature cannot be anything intrinsic to engine parts qua physical objects. The mechanical, chemical, electrical, metallurgical and other terms appropriate to the description of engine parts are of no help in specifying what makes an engine part a  valve-lifter. A metallurgist might tell us everything there is to know  about the physical properties of those engine parts that are valve-lifters. But knowing all of that, I do not yet know what makes the part in question a valve-lifter. Similarly, I don't know what makes a certain heavy object under my hood a battery just in virtue of knowing all the electrochemistry involved in its operation.

3. The obvious thing to say at this point is that what make an engine part a valve-lifter or a battery or a generator or a transmission is its function. Physical composition is irrelevant. What makes a part a valve-lifter is the causal role it instantiates within the 'economy'  of the engine. A thing is a valve-lifter in virtue of the job it does  when properly connected to valves, cams, etc. Its being a valve-lifter is not intrinsic to it. Its being is its function within a system whose parts are causally interrelated.

I stress that physical composition is irrelevant. Anything that does the job of a valve-lifter is a valve-lifter. Anything that does the job of a modem is a modem.  There is more than one implementation of the modulation-demodulation function.  The function is 'multiply  realizable' as we say in the trade. Of course, not every physical substratum supports the function: not even in Eskimo land could valve-lifters in internal combustion engines be made of ice.

Another important point is that a particular thing that functions as a valve-lifter can assume other functions, that of paper-weight for example.  So not only are causal roles typically multiply realizable, causal role occupants or realizers are typically multi-functional. 

I think we are all functionalists when it comes to things like valve-lifters, screwdrivers, switches, and modems. Anything that modulates/demodulates is a modem regardless of the stuff inside the
box that realizes or implements the function. For all we care, there is a colony of leprechauns inside the box that chop up the analog input into digital bits. If it does the job of a modem, it IS a modem.

Can we apply this functionalist model to the mind?

4. If there is nothing intrinsic to brain states that explains why some of them are mental states, then the naturalist must look to the extrinsic or relational features of brain states. How do they function? What causal role do they play? How do they stand in relation to inputs and outputs? How did they come into being? What are they good for?

One answer is the functionalist theory that causal role is what makes a brain state a mental state. What makes a mental state mental is just  the causal role it plays in mediating between sensory inputs,   behavioral outputs and other internal states of the subject whose state it is. The idea is not the banality that mental events have causes and effects, but that it is causal role occupancy, nothing more and nothing less, that constitutes the mentality of a mental state. The intrinsic nature of what plays the role is relevant only to its fitness for instantiating mental causal roles but not at all relevant to its being a mental state.

That's the basic idea. What makes a brain state a desire is the causal role that state plays. There is nothing intrinsic to the brain state itself that could tell you that it was a desire for a beer rather than
an intention to paint the bathroom, or a memory of a trip to the Grand Canyon.  In their intrinsic nature mental states are just brain states; it is only their external relations that confer upon them mentality.

5. Here is one problem. It seems clear that my intention to clear brush could not have been a desire for a cold beer. Nor could it be an intention to paint the bathroom. The act of intending is individuated by its intentional content (to clear brush; to pain the bathroom): the content enters into the description of the act. This entails that the act could not have been an act having a different content.

But if it is causal role occupancy that makes brain state B an intention to clear brush, then B could have been an intention to paint the bathroom, had its causal relations been different.  Since this is absurd, it cannot be causal role occupancy  that makes B an intention to clear brush.  The fact of intentionality refutes functionalism.

Compare the valve-lifter. A particular engine part is a valve-lifter in virtue of the causal role it plays in the engine. But that part might not have been in the engine; it might have been on my desk weighing down papers, in which case it would have been playing a different causal role. There is no problem in this case because valve-lifters lack content, or directedness to an object. A valve-lifter is not about anything. But an intention is. And this aboutness is intrinsic to it, which is why it cannot be captured extrinsically in terms of functional role.

So one should not suppose that qualia are the only problems for functionalism.  Intentionality is just as much of a problem.  Compare the Martian neuroscientist argument given earlier.

Besides, one is superficial and thoughtless if one imagines that a clean separation can be made between qualia and intentional phenomena.  But that's a separate post.

Intentionality Not a 'Hard Problem' for Physicalists?

The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism.  The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable.  An earlier post discussed a version of the knowledge argument, which is one of the qualia-based objections.  (Two others are the absent qualia argument and the zombie argument.)  It seems to me, though, that intentionality is also a damned hard problem for physicalists to solve, so hard in fact as to be insoluble within physicalist constraints and another excellent  reason to reject physicalism.

Before proceeding I want to make two preliminary points. 

The first is that the untenability of physicalism does not entail the acceptability of substance dualism. Contrapositively, the unacceptability of substance dualism does not entail the tenability of physicalism.  So if a physicalist wishes to point out the problems with substance dualism,  he is free to do so.  But he ought not think that such problems supply compelling reasons to be a physicalist.  For it is obvious that the positions stand to each other as logical contraries; hence both could be be false.

My second point is that considerations of parsimony do favor physicalism over dualistic schemes -- but only on condition that the relevant data can be adequately accounted for.  And that is one big  'only if.'  (See The Use and Abuse of Occam's Razor: On Multiplying Entities Beyond Necessity.)

An Argument Sketched.  Mary, Meet Marty.

We were talking about Frank Jackson's Mary.  Now I introduce Marty, a Martian scientist who like Mary knows everything there is to know about human brains and their supporting systems.  So he knows all about what goes in the human brain and CNS when we humans suffer and enjoy twinges and tingles, smells and stinks, sights and sounds, etc.  We will suppose that Marty's sensorium is very different, perhaps totally different than ours.  He may have infrared color qualia but no color qualia corresponding to the portion of the EM spectrum for which we have color qualia.  Marty also knows everything there is to know about what goes on in my head when I think about various things.  We may even suppose that Marty is studying me right now with his super-sophisticated instruments and knows exactly what is going on in my head right now when I am in various intentional states.

Suppose I am now thinking about dogs. I needn't be thinking about any particular dog; I might just be thinking about getting a dog, which of course does not entail that there is some particular dog, Kramer say, that I am thinking about getting. Indeed, one can think about getting a dog that is distinct from every dog presently in existence! How? By thinking about having a dog breeder do his thing. If a woman tells her husband that she wants a baby, more likely than not, she is not telling him that she wants to kidnap or adopt some existing baby, but that she wants the two of them to engage in the sorts of conjugal activities that can be expected to cause a baby to exist.  Same with me.  I can want a dog or a cat or a sloop or a matter transmitter even if the object of my wanting does not presently exist.

So right now I am thinking about a dog, but no presently existing dog.  My thinking has intentional content. It is an instance of what philosophers call intentionality.  My act of thinking takes an object, or has an accusative. It exhibits  aboutness or of-ness in the way a pain quale does not exhibit aboutness of of-ness.   It is important to realize that my thinking is intrinsically such as to be about a dog:  the aboutness is not parasitic upon an external relation to an actual dog.  That is why I rigged the example the way I did.  My thinking is object-directed despite there being no object in existence to which I am externally related.  This blocks attempts to explain intentionality in terms of causation.  Such attempts fail in any case.  See my post on Representation and Causation.

The question is whether the Martian scientist can determine what that intentional content is by monitoring my neural states during the period of time I am thinking about a dog. The content before my mind has various subcontents: hairy critter, mammal, barking animal, man's best friend . . . .  But none of this content will be discernible to the Martian neuroscientist on the basis of complete knowledge of my neural states, their relations to each other and to sensory input and behavioral output. To strengthen the argument we may stipulate that Marty lacks the very concept dog. Therefore, there is more to the mind than what can be known by even a completed neuroscience. Physicalism (materialism) is false.

The argument is this:

1. Marty knows all the physical and functional facts about my body and brain during the time I am thinking about a dog.
2. That I am thinking about a dog is a fact.
3.  Marty does not know that I am thinking about a dog.
Therefore
4. Marty does not know all the facts about me and my mental activity.
Therefore
5. There are mental facts that are not physical or functional facts, and physicalism is false.

Credit where credit is due:  The above is my take on a more detailed and careful argument presented here by Laurence BonJour.  Good day!

Sentences as Names of Facts: An Aporetic Triad

There are good reasons to introduce facts as truth-makers for contingently true atomic sentences.  (Some supporting reasoning here.)  But if there are facts, and they make-true contingent atomic sentences, then what is the semantic relation between these declarative sentences and their truth-makers?  It seems we should say that such sentences name facts.  But some remarks of Leo Mollica suggest that this will lead to trouble.  Consider this aporetic triad:

1. 'Al is fat' is the name of the fact of Al's being fat.
2. 'Al is fat' has a referent only if it is true.
3. Names are essentially names: a name names whether or not it has a referent.

Each limb of the triad is very plausible, but they can't all be true.  The conjunction of (1) and (3) entails the negation of (2).  Which limb should we abandon?  It cannot be (1) given the cogency of the Truth Maker Argument and the plausible assumption that the only semantic relation between a sentence and the corresponding fact is one of naming.

(2) also seems 'ungiveupable.'  There are false sentences, and there may be false (Fregean) propositions: but a fact is not a truth-bearer but a truth-maker.  It is very hard to swallow the notion that there are 'false' or nonobtaining facts.  If 'Al is fat' is false it is because Al and fatness do not form a fact.  The existence of a fact is the unity of its constituents.  Where there is the unity of the right sort of constituents you have a fact; where there is not, you don't.

As for (3), suppose that names are only accidentally names, than a name names only on condition that it have a referent.  We would then have to conclude that if the bearer of a name ceases to exist, that the name ceases to be a name.  And that seems wrong.  When Le Verrier put forth the hypothesis of an intra-Mercurial planent  that came to be called 'Vulcan,' he did not know whether there was indeed such a planet, but he thought he had good evidence of its existence. When it was later decided that there was no good evidence of the planet in question, 'Vulcan' did not cease to be a name.  If we now say, truly, that Vlucan does not exist we employ a name whose naming is not exhausted by its having a referent.

So it seems that names name essentially.  This is the linguistic analog of intentionality: one cannot just think; if one thinks, then necessarily one thinks of something, something that may or may not exist. If I am thinking of something, and it ceases to exist, my thinking does not cease to be object-directed.  Thinking is essentially object-directed.  Analogously, names are essentially names.

So far, then, today's triad looks to be another addition the list of insolubilia.  The limbs of the triad are more reasonably accepted than rejected, but they cannot all be true.  A pretty pickle.

By the way, I insist on the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

How Many are the Ways of Denying that Intentionality is a Two-Term Relation?

How shall I deny thee? Let me count the ways.

I need an exhaustive classification of all the ways of denying that intentionality is a two-term relation. (Since one cannot think without thinking of something, one might suppose that intentionality is a dyadic relation connecting a thinker or one of his mental contents to an object.)  Here is what I have come up with so far.  If you know this subject and think that there is a way I have overlooked, the ComBox is open for you to tell me what it is.

1. There is no intentionality at all.  If there is no intentionality, then intentionality is not a relation between a subjective item and an objective item.  This eliminativist option is of course a complete nonstarter. 

2. Intentionality is sui generis.  On this view there are relations, but intentionality is wholly unique and so not a member of the category of relations.  At most, intentionality is relation-like.  One can find something like this view in Brentano and Findlay.

3. Intentionality is not a relation because there are no relations.  For Bradley, there are, in ultimate reality, no relations.  So a Bradleyan might argue that whatever intentionality is, it cannot be a relation.

4. Intentionality is not a dyadic relation; it is a monadic property of objects. (Sartre, Butchvarov, et al.) 

5.  Intentionality is not a relation because it is either an adverbial modification of subjects, or a property of subjects (Bergmann, Addis).

6.  Intentionality is not a two-term relation (though it is a two-place relation); it involves an identity between subject and object. (Thomism)  To see how this might work, see here and here.

7.  Intentionality is a not a two-term relation because it is a multiple-term relation along the lines of Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment.  The idea here is that there is no one thing on the side of the object, no proposition or fact.  Accordingly, Othello's believing that Desdemona loves Cassio is not a two-term relation between Othello and the proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio; it is a four-place relation that can be depicted by 'Believes(Othello, Desdemona, loves, Cassio).'

Did I cover all the bases?  Is my classification exhaustive?

Singular Meaning

Edward Ockham of Beyond Necessity is back from his Turkish holiday and reports that, besides lazing on the beach at Bodrum, he

. . . spent some time thinking about singular concepts. Do you accept singular meaning? Either you hold that a proper name has a meaning, or not (Aquinas held that it does not, by the way). If it does, then what is it that we understand when we understand the meaning of a proper name? The scholastics held that there was a sort of equivalence between meaning and signifying ("unumquodque, sicut contingit intelligere, contingit et significare"). What I signify, when I use a term in the context of a proposition, is precisely what another person understands, when he grasps that proposition that I have expressed.

Do I accept singular meaning?  That depends on what we mean by 'meaning' and by 'singular.'  Let's see if we can iron out our terminology.

1. Without taking 'sense' and 'reference' in exactly the way Frege intended them to be taken, I would say that 'meaning' is ambiguous as between sense and reference.  Unfortunately, Edward seems to be using 'meaning' to mean 'sense.'  Of course, he is free to do that.

2. Edward also uses the word 'signify.'  I should like him to explain exactly  how he is using this word.  Is the signification of a proper name the same as what I am calling its sense? Or is the signification of a proper name its  referent? Or neither? Or both?

3.  Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Peter is tired' in the presence of both Peter and Edward.   My assertion is intended to convey a fact about Peter to Edward.  The latter grasps (understands) the proposition I express by my assertive tokening of the sentence in question.  And of course I understand the same proposition.  What I signify -- 'express' as I would put it -- by my use of 'Peter' is what Edward understands when he grasps the proposition I express. 

4.  Now the issue seems to be this.  Is the meaning or signification or sense  I express, and that I understand,  when I say 'Peter'  a singular meaning?  More precisely: is it an irreducibly singular meaning, one that cannot be understood as logically constructed from general concepts such as man, philosopher, smoker?

5. I say No!   I don't deny that 'Peter' has a sense.  It has a sense and a referent, unlike 'Vulcan' which has a sense but no referent.  But the sense of 'Peter' is not singular but general.  So, to answer Edward's question, I do not accept singular meaning.

Corollary: the haecceity of Peter - Peterity to give it a name -- cannot be grasped.  All thinking is general: no thinking can penetrate to the very haecceity and ipseity of the thing thought about.  One cannot think about a particular except  as an instance of multiply exemplifiable concepts/properties.  This is 'on all fours' with my earlier claim that there are no singular or individual concepts.  The individual qua individual is conceptually ineffable.  So if we know singulars (individuals) at all, we do not know them by conceptualization.

If Edward disagrees with this he must tell us exactly why.  He should also tell us exactly how he is using 'proposition' since that is another potential bone of contention.  Is he a Fregean, a Russellian, or a Geachian when it comes to propositions?  Or none of those?

Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

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

Preliminaries

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

Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence

(UPDATE: 23 March.  Butchvarov sent me some comments via e-mail the main ones of  which I insert in the text in red.)

This post assumes familiarity with Panayot Butchvarov's "protometaphysics," as he calls it.  But I will begin by sketching the distinction between objects and entities.  Then I will present an objection that occurred to me and Larry Lee Blackman independently.  That will be followed by a response that Butchvarov could make to the objection.  Finally, I will try to show that Blackman's objection, despite his disclaimers, commits him to a doctrine of modes of existence, but that this is not the bad thing he thinks it is.  This post ties in with our earlier explorations of the modes-of-existence doctrine which is dogmatically denied by a majority of analytic philosophers.  (These earlier posts are collected in the Existence category.)  There is also an obvious tie-in with earlier posts on Intentionality.

I. Entities and Objects

Entities exist while objects may or may not exist. Some objects exist and some do not. When one imagines Santa Claus or hallucinates a pink rat, an object appears, an object that doesn’t exist. When one perceives his hand, an object appears too, one that exists. The difference between an object that exists and one that does not is explicated by Butchvarov in terms of indefinite identifiability: An object exists if and only if it is indefinitely identifiable with other objects. The domain of objects is logically prior to the domain of entities. The application of the concepts of identity and existence to the domain of objects results in a "conceptual transition" from the domain of objects to the domain of entities or existents. (BQB 39) The concepts of identity and existence sort objects into the existent and the nonexistent. Identity and existence are therefore classificatory concepts.  Of the two concepts, identity is the more basic since existence is explicable in terms of it.  The identity in question is material as opposed to formal identity, the kind affirmed in true, informative identity statements like 'The morning star is the evening star.'  But although identity and existence are genuine concepts, they are only concepts: there is nothing in the world that corresponds to them.

Butchvarov’s Meinongian commitment to nonexistent objects is a direct consequence of his Sartrean view of consciousness as exhausting itself in its objects. For on this view consciousness harbors no representations or other intermediary contents that could serve as surrogate objects when we think about what does not exist. Imagination of a mermaid is not consciousness of a mental image or other content of consciousness but precisely consciousness of a mermaid. Consciousness of a mermaid is just as outer-directed and revelatory of a material item as consciousness of a dolphin. But mermaids do not exist. Therefore, some objects do not exist. To take intentionality at phenomenological face-value, as Butchvarov does, is to accept nonexistent objects. Phenomenologically, consciousness is just the revealing of objects, only some of which are indefinitely identifiable. (THIS SECTION STATES MY VIEWS BETTER THAN I HAVE EVER DONE  MYSELF!)

II. An Objection

There is a strong temptation to suppose that if there are nonexistent objects, as Meinongians maintain, then they must have some ontological status despite their not existing.  After all, they are not nothing.   And so one might suppose that they must have the status of merely intentional objects.  By 'merely intentional object' I mean an accusative of consciousness that does not exist in reality but does exist as, and only as, an accusative of consciousness.  (We will have to ask whether one who accepts merely intentional objects must also accept modes of existence.)  (I AM UNEASY ABOUT YOUR USE OF ‘ACCUSATIVE.’ IT IS A GRAMMATICAL TERM. WHAT YOU MEAN BY IT IS ‘OBJECT,’ BUT THEN YOUR PHRASE “MERELY INTENTIONAL OBJECTS” JUST MEANS “OBJECTS THAT DO NOT EXIST BUT SOMEONE IS CONSCIOUS OF THEM.) But for Butchvarov, the class of nonexistent objects does not have the same extension as that of merely intentional objects.   For he tells us that there is "no contradiction in supposing that there are objects that are not perceived, or imagined, or thought by anyone." (BQB 62, quoted in Larry Lee Blackman, "Mind as Intentionality Alone," Metaphysica, vol. 3, no. 2 December 2002,p. 45)  If there are such nonexistent objects, then of course it cannot be true that x is a nonexistent object iff x is a merely intentional object.

Furthermore, what I am calling merely intentional objects are mind-dependent: they exist as, and only as, accusatives of mind.  No mind, no merely intentional objects.  But Butchvarov's nonexistent objects are neither mind-dependent nor mind-independent, whether logically or causally.  Only what exists is either mind-dependent or mind-independent.  It follows that none of his nonexistent objects are what I am calling merely intentional objects. 

Blackman's worry, and mine too, is expressed by Blackman when he writes, "He [Butchvarov] denies that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent, but in an obvious sense they are, since, in a world without minds, there would be no perceivings of golden mountains, no imaginings of centaurs, etc." (Blackman, 55)  Now Butchvarov denies on phenomenological grounds that there are individual mental subjects and mental acts as well.  So Butchvarov might respond that of course there are no imaginings of centaurs, if imaginings are mental acts.  So we need to put Blackman's objection more precisely.  The objection needn't presuppose that there are individual minds or mental acts.  The essence of the objection is that in a world without mind (consciousness)  there are no perceptual or imaginal objects.  (THIS IS AMBIGUOUS, THOUGH THE FAULT IS MINE BECAUSE I USE ‘PERCEPTUAL’ AND ‘IMAGINAL’ FOR THE NONRELATIONAL PROPERTIES IN QUESTION. BUT THEY ARE EXPLICITLY INTENDED TO EXCLUDE REFERENCE TO A CONSCIOUSNESS.) Denying as he does that there are minds and mental acts,  Butchvarov must deny that imagining, perceiving, remembering, etc. are types of mental acts or properties of mental acts.  Act-differences are displaced onto the object as monadic (nonrelational) properties of objects. Thus it is a nonrelational, and hence intrinsic, property of centaurs that they are imaginal objects.  This being understood, Blackman's objection can be put by saying that in a world without consciousness there would be no perceptual or imaginal or memorial objects, and that therefore, in a world without consciousness, there would be no such nonexistent objects.  Blackman is of course assuming that there could be a world without consciousness.  If Butchvarov were to claim that there could not be, then his theory of objects would have idealism as a consequence.

The problem can be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1. Only what exists is either mind-dependent or mind-independent. (MY POINT IS THAT CAUSAL RELATIONS HOLD ONLY BETWEEN EXISTENT OBJECTS. IF THERE IS AN EXISTENT SUCH AS MIND, THEN DEPENDENCE ON IT WOULD BE SUCH A RELATION.)

2. There are objects that do not exist.
3. Both the distinction between objects and entities, and the related distinction between existent and nonexistent objects, are  mind-involving in the sense that in a world without mind these distinctions would not obtain. (THE TERM ‘MIND’ HERE IS AMBIGUOUS. IF IT MEANS ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ THEN MIND IS NOT THE SORT OF THING ON WHICH ANYTHING CAN DEPEND OR NOT DEPEND.)

The limbs of this triad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent.  For example, (1) and (2) taken together entail the negation of (3).  Indeed, any two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one.  Since Butch is committed to both (1) and (2), he will solve the problem by denying (3).  Unfortunately, (3) is at least as plausible as (1) and (2).  Blackman, if I have understood him, will go further and say that (3) is more plausible than (1).  Accordingly, Blackman will solve the problem by denying (1). 

There is of course the possibility that the inconsistent triad is a genuine aporia, a conceptual impasse, and thus insoluble on the plane of the discursive intellect, which of course is where philosophy must operate.  I can't prove that it is a genuine aporia, but all three limbs, though jointly inconsistent, make a strong claim on our acceptance.  It is therefore not unreasonable to hold that we have no rational ground to prefer the rejection of one limb rather than another.  Of course, there is no way to stop people from being dogmatic.  Thus some will quickly reject (2) while ignoring the phenomenological and dialectical considerations Butch adduces in support of it.

My point, then is that Butchvarov's position, which requires the acceptance of (1) and (2), and the rejection of (3), is not compelling and is rationally rejectable.   

III.  A Possible Butchvarov Response

Suppose we reject (1) as I am inclined to do.  We would then be maintaining that an item can be mind-dependent without existing in reality. ('Exist' when used without qualification just means 'exist in reality.')  An imagined centaur would then exist-in consciousness without existing in reality.  And so we would have to distinguish between two distinct modes of existence, existence simpliciter (existence in reality) and intentional existence (existence in consciousness as a mere intentional object).  A scholastic philosopher would speak of esse reale and esse intentionale.  At this point Butch would probably object by saying that talk of modes of existence involves an intolerable equivocation on 'exists.'  If one adheres strictly to the univocity of 'exists' and cognates, then one cannot sensibly speak of modes of existence (as opposed to categories of existent).  So one can imagine Butchvarov arguing:  (a) To reject (1) is to embrace a doctrine of modes of existence which entails the  thesis that 'exist(s)' is equivocal.  (b) But this equivocity thesis is unacceptable.  So (c) (1) ought to be accepted.  (d) Given the phenomenological evidence for nonexistent objects, (3) ought to be rejected.  On the equivocity of 'exist(s)' see the work by the Butchvarov student, Dennis E. Bradford, The Concept of Existence: A Study of Nonexistent Particulars (University Press of America, 1980), pp. 37 ff.

IV.  Blackman's Attempt to Avoid Equivocity

Blackman agrees with me that in a world without mind there are no nonexistent objects.  But Blackman doesn't agree with me that holding this commits him to modes of existence:  ". . . to assert that gargoyles exist as the objects of our awarenesses is not to employ the term 'exists' equivocally, as Butchvarov might allege." (Blackman, 55)  Why not?

To say that gargoyles exist as the objects of my imaginings and that penguins exist as the the objects of my (veridical) perceptions is no more to use the term 'exists' equivocally than it is to to claim that the word 'exists' is used equivocally in the locutions, 'I exist as a father' and 'I exist as a husband.'  In neither case are we supposing different 'modes' of existence. (Ibid.)

The comparison is faulty.  I grant that there is no equivocation on 'exists' as between 'I exist as a father' and 'I exist as a husband.'  The first is equivalent to 'I exist and I am a father' while the second is equivalent to 'I exist and I am a husband.'   No equivocation!  But then  'Gargoyles exist as the objects of my imaginings' is equivalent to 'Gargoyles exist and gargoyles are objects of my imaginings' and 'Penguins exist as the objects of my (veridical) perceptions' is equivalent to 'Penguins exist and penguins are the objects of my (veridical) perceptions.'  Here there is equivocation! From this one can see that the comparison is flawed.  For while it is true that penguins exist and are the objects of my (veridical) perceptions, it is false that gargoyles exist and are the objects of my imaginings when 'exists' is employed univocally.  Penguins exist but gargoyles do not.

Blackman is trying to have it both ways: he is trying avoid the doctrine of modes of existence (modes of being) while maintaining that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent.  But this is impossible.  If nonexistent objects are mind-dependent, then they must exist in some way or mode.  This is because ontological dependence/independence obtains only between items that have some mode of existence.  An item that has no being or existence whatsoever cannot be said to be independent or dependent on mind or on anything else.  This is the core insight embodied in (1).  On the other hand, if there are no modes of being or existence,  then nonexistent objects cannot be said to be mind-dependent.

Although Blackman is on very solid ground in claiming that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent, he falls into incoherence because of his adherence to the analytic dogma that there cannot be modes of existence.  Further proof of the incoherence is in evidence when Blackman states that  "We might say that nonexistent objects, like the existent ones, belong to something larger called 'reality,' but the claim that nonexistent objects are in a sense 'real' is innocuous, as long as it understood that their 'reality' consists merely in their being the (strictly mental) intentions of certain awarenesses. (55-56)  It seems to me that the first independent clause in this sentence contradicts the second.  If reality is common to existent and nonexistent objects, then surely the reality of an object (whether existent or nonexistent) cannot consist in its being the strictly mental intention (i.e., intentum, intentional object) of certain awarenesses.

I claim that the widespread analytic view that there cannot be modes of existence is but a dogma.  In earlier posts collected in the Existence category I try to show that typical arguments against the doctrine fail and that there is a way between the horns of univocity and sheer equivocity of the river bank/financial bank sort (which I grant is intolerable).  If I am right about this, the insights of both Blackman and Butchvarov can be accommodated.  Blackman is right to insist that nonexistent objects are mind-dependent.  And Butchvarov is right to think that only what exists can stand in relations of dependence or independence.  But Butchvarov is wrong to think that only what exists in reality exists.  What exists in the mode of esse intentionale also exists but not in reality, only in consciousness.

Self-Reference and Individual Concepts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The theory, then, is that my awareness that

3. I am that man!

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

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

So here is the problem expressed as an aporetic pentad:

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

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

 

The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind is king.  Naturalists need to wise up.

BonJour on Intentionality and Materialism

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

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

     [. . .]

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

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

     [. . .]

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

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

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

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

I of course agree. 

The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Argument of Russell Against Mental Acts

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

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

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

The Phenomenology of the Situation

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

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

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

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

The Dialectics of the Situation

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

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

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

Russell's Genetic Claim

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

An Argument for Mental Acts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thinking and Thinking Of

I have claimed more than once that, necessarily, to think is to think of something.  But is that right?  Perhaps one can think something without thinking of something.  That would be a spanner in the works. 

Suppose I think that Tom is tired. The parsing could be done like this: I/think/that Tom is tired.  This suggests that one can think without thinking of or about anything.  One thinks something (e.g., that Tom is tired) without thinking of something.

It is clear that to think that Tom is tired is not to think of or about the proposition that Tom is tired, although of course one can think about that proposition, as when one thinks, of that proposition, that it is true or that it is a proposition.  But I cannot think that Tom is tired without thinking about Tom. Nor can I think that Peter is taller than Paul without thinking about both Peter and Paul. If I am thinking that nothing is in the drawer, or nobody is at home, then I am thinking about the drawer and the home, respectively.  If I am thinking that the null set is unique, then I am thinking about the null set. If I am thinking that wisdom is a virtue exemplified by few leftists, then I am thinking about wisdom and about leftists.

So it looks like I saw a ghost.  I was scared there for a minute.  Necessarily, to think is to think of something, if not directly, then indirectly as in the cases cited.

Mental Acts Versus Mental Actions: Sellars and Bergmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Song Did the Sirens Sing and in What Key?

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?  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 later definite time.  But you understand the story of Ulysses and the Sirens and you are now thinking about the song they sang.  But what sort of object is that?

Intentional Objects and Dispositional Objects

One who balks at intentional objects on the ground of their queerness will presumably also balk at dispositional objects.  But there is reason to speak of dispositional objects. And there is the outside chance that  the foes of intentional objects might be 'softened up' by a discussion of dispositions and their objects.  But I am not particularly sanguine about bringing the Londonistas out from under their fog and into the Phoenician sunshine.

We can sensibly speak of object-directedness both in the case of thoughts (acts of thinking) and in the case of dispositions (powers, potencies, capacities, and the like).  I cannot think without thinking of something. That of which I am thinking is reasonably called the object of my thought.  Said object may or may not exist.  So we speak of intentional objects.  The intentional object of a mental act is the object precisely as intended in the act.

But dispositions have objects too.  Call them 'dispositional objects.'  Dispositions are directed to these objects which may or may not occur.  Thus dispositions to dissolve, shatter, or swell under certain circumstances are directed to dissolvings, shatterings, and swellings which may or may not occur, and indeed without prejudice to object-directedness.

A sugar cube, for example, is disposed to dissolve if immersed in water or some other fluid.  Distinguish the following four:  the sugar cube, its disposition to dissolve, the causal factors needed to trigger the disposition, and the manifestation of the disposition, i.e., its actual dissolving.  The last-mentioned is the object of the disposition, the dispositional object.  It is an event that may or may not occur depending on circumstances.  A disposition can exist without ever occurring.  Suppose a sugar cube is manufactured, exists for a year, and then is destroyed by being pulverized with a hammer.  It never dissolves.  But at each time during its career it harbors the disposition to dissolve. It is liable to dissolve whether or not it ever does dissolve.  It follows that one must not confuse a disposition with its manifestation.  Dispositions are what they are whether or not they are manifested, whether or not their dispositional objects occur.

Similarly, acts of thinking are what they are and have the specific aboutness that they have whether or not their intentional objects exist in reality.  In an earlier post I drew out the parallel between intentionality and dispositionality more fully.  There is no need to repeat myself here.  The point I want to make in this post is as follows.

If you admit that there are dispositions, then you must admit that there are dispositional objects.  Thus if you admit that a sugar cube, say, has the disposition to dissolve in certain circumstances, then you must admit that this disposition points beyond itself to an event -- the manifestation of the disposition -- that may or may not occur.  Why then balk at intentional objects?

Note that the following is apparently contradictory:  X is disposed to do something (e.g., shatter) but nothing is such that X is disposed to it.  That parallels: I am thinking of something but nothing is such that I am thinking of it.  Clearly, both statement-forms have some true substitution-instances.  So the statement forms are not contradictory.

How do we show that the apparent contradictions are not real?  By distinguishing between intentional  and dispositional objects on the one hand and real objects (objects-as-entities) on the other.

How will the Londonistas respond?  Will they deny that there are dispositions?  They might.  But if they accept dispositions, then they must accept dispositional objects and a fortiori intentional objects.  I write 'a fortiori' because, while dispositionality can be doubted, intentionality cannot be doubted, it being phenomenologically evident.  It is certain that I think and just as certain that I cannot think without thinking of something.

 

Representation and Causation, with Some Help from Putnam

1. Materialism would be very attractive if only it could be made to work. Unfortunately, there are a number of phenomena for which it has no satisfactory explanation. One such is the phenomenon of
representation, whether mental or linguistic. Some mental states are of or about worldly individuals and states of affairs. This fact comes under the rubric 'Intentionality.'  How is this intentional directedness possible given materialist constraints? Following Chisholm and Searle, I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. But let's approach the problem of representation from the side of linguistic reference. How is it that words and sentences mean things? How does language hook onto reality? In virtue of what does my tokening (in overt speech, in writing, or in any other way) of the English word-type 'cat' refer to cats? What makes 'cat' refer to cats rather than to pictures of cats or statues of cats or the meowing of cats?  This, in linguistic dress, is the question, What makes my thought of a cat, a thought of a cat?  And how is all this possible in the materialist's world?

2. The materialist has more than one option, but a very tempting one is to reduce reference to causation. The idea is roughly that the referent of a word is what causes its tokening. Thus 'cat'-tokenings refer to cats because cats cause these tokenings. Suppose I walk into your house and see a cat. I say: "I see you have cat." My use of 'cat'  on this occasion -- my tokening of the word-type -- refers to cats because the critter in front of me causes my 'cat'-tokening.  That's the idea.

3. Unfortunately, this is only a crude gesture in the direction of a theory. For it is obvious, as Hilary Putnam points out (Renewing Philosophy, Harveard UP, 1992,p. 37), that pictures of cats cause 'cat'-tokenings, but   pictures of cats are not cats. Cats are typically furry and cover their feces. Pictures, however, are rarely furry and never cover their (nonexistent) feces. Yet I might say, seeing a picture of a cat over your fireplace, "I see you like cats." In that sentence, 'cat' is used to refer to cats even though what caused my 'cat'-tokening was not a cat but a non-cat, namely, a picture of a cat.

Indeed, practically anything can cause a 'cat'-tokening: cat feces, cat hair, cat caterwauling. Suppose I see Ann Coulter engaged in a 'cat-fight' with Susan Estrich on one of the shout shows. I say, "They are fighting like cats." Nota Bene: my use of 'cat' in this sentence is literal, but it is not caused by a cat! (My example, not Putnam's).

4. Our problem is this: what determines the reference of a word like 'cat'? What makes this bit of language represent something extralinguistic? 'Cat' is a linguistic item; a cat is not. (French   'philosophers' take note.) In virtue of what does the former target the latter? If both a cat and a pile of cat scat can cause a 'cat'-tokening, then the causal theory of reference is worthless unless it can exclude these extraneous (excremental?) cases.

The problem is that 'cat' refers to something quite specific, cats, whereas 'cat'-tokenings can be caused by practically anything. To solve this problem, a notion of causation must be invoked that is also quite selective. It turns out, however, that this selective notion of  causation presupposes intentionality, and so cannot be used in a noncircular account of intentionality. Let me explain.

4. Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. 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 a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in.

To take a more extreme example, suppose a man dies in a fire while in bed. The salient cause might be determined to be smoking in bed. No one will say that the flammability of the bedsheets and other room
furnishings is the cause of the man's incineration. Nevertheless, had the room and its furnishings not been flammable, the fire would not have occurred! The flammability is not merely a logical, but also a   causal, condition of the fire. It is part of the total cause, but no one will consider it salient. The word is from the Latin salire to leap, whence our word 'sally' as when one sallies forth to do battle at a
chess tournament, say.   A salient cause, then, is one that jumps out at you,  grabbing you by your epistemic shorthairs as it were, as opposed to being a mere background condition.

Putnam cites the example of the pressure cooker that exploded (p. 48).  No one will say that it was a lack of holes in the pressure cooker's vessel that caused the explosion. A stuck safety valve caused the   explosion. Nevertheless, had the vessel been perforated, the contraption would not have exploded!

What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative and (if I may) point-of-view-ish. A wholly objective view of nature, a Nagelian view from nowhere, would not be able to discriminate the salient from the nonsalient in matters causal. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time t determines its state at subsequent  times. At this level, a short-circuit and the current's being on are equally causal in respect of the effect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the current'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.

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.

5. Recall what the problem was. The materialist needs to explain reference in physicalist terms. He thinks to do so by invoking physical causation. The idea is that the referents of a word W cause W-tokenings. The reference of a word is determined by the causal influence of the word's referents. So it must be cats, and not  pictures of cats, or the past behavior or English speakers that causes  'cat'-tokenings. But surely the past behavior of English speakers is part of the total cause of present 'cat'-tokenings. (See Putnam, pp. 48-49.) 'Cat' does not refer to this behavior, however. To exclude the   behavior as non-salient requires use of the ordinary interest-relative notion of causation. But this notion, we have seen, presupposes intentionality.

6. The upshot is that the above causal account of representation --  which is close to a theory proposed by Jerry Fodor -- is viciously circular: it presupposes the very notion that it is supposed to be   reductively accounting for, namely, intentionality.

Does a Cube Have 12 Edges?

Well of course.  In reality every cube has 12 edges. But one could think of a cube without thinking of something that has 12 edges, and indeed without thinking of something that lacks 12 edges.  If you know what a cube is, and I ask you, "How many edges does a cube have," you might reply, "I don't know."  During this exchange you are most assuredly thinking of a cube, but a cube indeterminate in respect of the property of having 12 edges.  What you have before your mind is an incomplete object, one that, because incomplete, cannot exist.  Your thought has an intentional object, but it is an object that does not exist.

Another example.  Peter shows up at my door.  I note that he is wearing a brown leather vest.  Now anything made of leather must be made of cow leather or horse leather or alligator leather or . . . .  But the leather vest that is before my mind as the object of my visual experience is indeterminate with respect to type of leather.  What is before my mind is an intentional object.

Peter's vest is brown, and in reality everything brown is colored.  But the intentional object of my visual experiencing is brown but not colored.  Extracting the principle, we may erect the following thesis:

Non-Closure Under Property-Entailment:  Intentional objects, reflecting as they do the finitude of the human mind, are not closed under property-entailment. 

It follows from this principle that no merely intentional object exists.  (For everything that exists is complete.)  But that is not to say that they are denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein.  Talk of merely intentional objects does not commit one to Meinongianism.  One could take the line that merely intentional objects are "ontically heteronomous" to borrow a phrase from Roman Ingarden: their existence is parasitic upon the existence of the mental acts whose intentional objects they are.

Now there are problems with this sketch of a theory of intentional objects, but it is not an obviously senseless or incoherent theory.  So I suspect Edward of London feigns incomprehension when he says he doesn't understand it.  Does he have a better theory? 

The Aporetics of the Intentional Object, Part I

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

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

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

The puzzle expressed as an aporetic dyad:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Intentionality Aporia 'Ockhamized'

Edward of London proposes the following triad

O1. The proposition ‘Bill is looking for a nonexistent thing’ can be true even when there are no nonexistent things.
O2. The proposition ‘Bill is looking for a nonexistent thing’ expresses a relation between two things.
O3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, all of its relata exist.

as a nominalistic equivalent to my

W1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
W2. Intentionality is a relation between thinker and object of thought.
W3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

Edward imposes the following contraint on aporetic polyads: "The essence of an aporetic polyad is that any proper subset of statements (including the singleton set) should be consistent on its own, and only the whole set being inconsistent."  I accept this constraint. It implies that nothing can count as an aporetic polyad if one of its limbs is self-contradictory. 

My definition runs as follows.  An aporetic polyad is a set S of n self-consistent propositions (n>1) such that (i) any n-1 members of S, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the remaining member; (ii) each member of S has a strong claim on our acceptance.  Edward's constraint follows from this definition.  For if any member is self-inconsistent, then it cannot have a strong claim, or any claim, on our acceptance.

If I understand Edward, he is urging two points.  His first point is that my formulation of the triad is inept because (W1), unlike (O1), is self-contradictory.  If this charge sticks, then my formulation does not count as an aporetic polyad by my own definition.  His second point is that his version of the triad has a straightforward and obvious solution:  reject (O2). 

Reply to the First Point.  There is nothing self-contradictory about 'We sometimes think of the nonexistent.'  As I made clear earlier, this is a datanic, not a theoretical, claim.  On this score it contrasts with the other two limbs.  It is meant to record an obvious fact that everyone ought to grant instantly. Because the fact is obvious it is obviously self-consistent.  So if Edward denies (W1), then it is not profitable to to continue a discussion with him. 

All I can do at this point is speculate as to why Edward fails to get the point.  I suppose what he is doing is reading a theory into (W1), a theory he considers self-contradictory.    But (W1) simply records a pre-theoretical fact and is neutral with respect to such theories as Meinong's Theory of Objects.  Suppose I am imagining a winged horse.  If so, then it would be false to say that I am imagining nothing.  One cannot simply imagine, or just imagine.  It follows that I am imagining something. We are still at the level of data.  I have said nothing controversial.  One moves beyond data to theory if one interprets my imagining something that does not exist as my standing in a relation to a Meinongian nonexistent object.  That is a highly controversial but possible theory, and it is not self-contradictory contrary to what Edward implies.  But whether or not it is self-contradictory, the main point for now is that

1. BV is imagining a winged horse

Is neutral as between the following theory-laden interpretations

2. BV (or a mental act of his) stands in a dyadic relation to a Meinongian nonexistent object.

and

3. BV is imagining winged-horse-ly.

The crucial datum is that one cannot just imagine, or simply imagine.  We express this by saying that to imagine is to imagine something.  But 'imagine something' needn't be read relationally; it could be read adverbially.  Accordingly, to imagine Peter (who exists) is to imagine Peter-ly, and to imagine Polonious (who does not exist) is to imagine Polonious-ly.  I am not forced by the crucial datum to say that imagining involves a relation between subject and object; I can say that the 'object' reduces to an adverbial modification of my imagining. 

So even if the relational reading of (1) were self-contradictory -- which it isn't --  one is not bound to interpret (1) relationally.  Now (1) is just an example of (W1).  So the same goes for (W1).  (W1) is obviously true.  He who denies it is either perverse or confused.

Reply to the Second Point.  One can of course solve Edward's triad by denying (O2). But the real question is whether one can easily deny the distinct proposition  (W2).  I say no.  For one thing, the alternatives to saying that intentionality is a relation are not at all appetizing. All three of the limbs of my triad lay claim to our acceptance, and none can be easily rejected -- but they cannot all be true.  That is why there is a problem. 

Intentionality in Locks and Keys?

The mind-body problem divides into several interconnected subproblems. One concerns the relation of consciousness to its material substratum in the brain and central nervous system. A second concerns the aboutness or intentionality of (some) conscious states. A third problem is how a physical organism can be subject to the norms of rationality: How does an abstract argument-pattern such as Modus Tollens 'find purchase in' and 'govern' the transitions from one brain state to another? A fourth subproblem has to do with mental causation. Obviously, mental states are causally efficacious in bringing about physical states and other mental states. My desire for another cup of java is part of the causal chain that eventuates in the physical process of ingesting caffeine. Note also that knowledge of the physical world would presumably not be possible unless physical states could enter into the etiology of mental states. (I say 'presumably' because my formulation begs the question against idealism. And don't let anyone tell you that idealism is not a live option! The fact that it is not much discussed these days doesn't mean anything. Academic philosophers can be as fashion-conscious as teenage girls, and as worried about how they appear; idealism is currently not discussed in the more fashionable salons.)

Divide and conquer is one approach to any complex problem: separate out the subproblems and try to solve them separately. For example, separate the 'qualia' problem — which is part of the first subproblem mentioned — from the intentionality problem.

It might be that there is nothing specifically mental about intentionality at all. Perhaps intentionality is to be found in nature and in artifacts below the level of mind. If so, it may be possible to understand intentionality at the level of mind by working up to it 'from below.' It may be possible to build a 'gradualist bridge' from mindless intentionality to minded intentionality. One might then come to understand how intentionality in us has 'evolved.'

Now one very serious question is whether intentionality can be prised apart from consciousness and treated separately. This is a question Colin McGinn raises with great skill. It deserves  a separate post. In this post, however, I will examine a passage from Daniel Dennett in which our man, having separated the qualia and intentionality problems, tries to get from mindless intentionality to the minded variety. The passage is from Kinds of Mind, p. 35:

Intentionality in the philosophical sense is just aboutness. [. . .] A lock and key exhibit the crudest form of intentionality; so do the opioid receptors in brain cells — receptors that are designed to accept the endorphin molecules that nature has been providing in brains for millions of years. [. . .] This lock-and-key variety of crude aboutness is the basic design element out of which nature has fashioned the fancier sorts of subsystems that may more deservedly be called representation systems, so we will have to to analyze the aboutness of these representations in terms of the (quasi?) aboutness of locks-and-keys in any case.

If I am thinking about Jude Acers, my thought is about him: he is not about my thinking. Generalizing, we can say that intentionality is an asymmetrical relation: if X stands in the intentional relation to Y, then Y does not stand in the intentional relation to X. (Brentano rightly pointed out long ago that intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, but ein Relativliches, something relation-like; but this nuance does not harm my point.)

Now in Dennett's example, is the lock about the key or the key about the lock? Well, there is a sense in which each is about the other. By studying the key, I can infer something about the lock, and by studying the lock I can infer something about the key. Each provides information about the other, and to a locksmith, a great deal of information.

There are many cases like this. Animal droppings on the trail provide information about what manner of critter has been by recently. Bear scat 'means' bears have been around. One sort of footprint 'indicates' that a coyote has passed by, another sort a mountain lion. The paw of a coyote provides information about the type of print it would leave if it were to leave a print, and a footprint provides information about the design of the paw. (Here 'design' just means pattern.)

So in the coyote case as in the lock and key case we have symmetrical aboutness: lock is about key, and key about lock; paw is about footprint, print is about paw. Or consider a compass needle. It is about magnetic North in the sense that one can infer where magnetic North is from the direction in which the the needle is pointing. But equally, one can infer from the location of magnetic North where a properly functioning compass needle will point.

The symmetry of this sort of aboutness — call it aboutness₁ — gives us excellent reason to distinguish it from intentionality, or aboutness₂, which is asymmetrical.

From this one can see that Dennett is completely mistaken in his claim that lock-and-key aboutness is a "form of intentionality." It is not a form of intentionality, and to think that it is is to confuse the the two senses of 'aboutness' lately distinguished. Dennett himself seems to be aware of this since at the end of the passage quoted he shifts his ground and speaks of "quasi-aboutness." This fudge is very telling. No doubt there is some likeness as between lock-and-key aboutness and intentional aboutness, but that proves nothing since everything is like everything else in some respect.

The point is that one gains no insight at all into how intentionality emerges — if it does emerge — by having it compared with locks and keys. Note also that to infer something about the lock from the key presupposes genuine intentionality on the part of the locksmith.

To sum up. To build his gradualist bridge, Dennett looks for a form of primitive intentionality below the level of mind or consciousness. He thinks he has found it in his lock and key example. But what I have just shown is that the symmetrical aboutness in the lock and key case is not, and cannot be, a form or type or species of intentionality — which is asymmetrical. The former merely resembles the genuine article. But if A resembles B, it does not follow that A is a form of B. A decoy duck resembles a duck but is not type of duck.

Posits or Inventions? Geach and Butchvarov on Intentionality

One philosopher's necessary explanatory posit is another's mere invention.

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1994), 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, Butch 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 Butch claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects.  (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the proverbial hallucinated pink rat  are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.

But now consider the following  1961 passage from Anscombe and Geach's 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 painting, 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 in its being by its revelation of objects? 

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein.  Get it?

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.

 

Aquinas on Intentionality: Towards a Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope to expatiate further on this tomorrow.

Esse Intentionale and Esse Naturale: Notes on Geach on Aquinas on Intentionality

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts 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?

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 ofness 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 of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max.  One could call this an identity theory of intentionality. 

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.  There is more to it of course, and it is open to some very serious objections.  These will be discussed tomorrow perhaps.

Two Puzzles Anent Brentano's 1874 Locus Classicus on Intentionality

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

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.  Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way.  In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Humanities Press, 1973, ed. McAlister, p. 88)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution to the Problem of Intentionality

Perhaps the central problem to which the phenomenon of intentionality gives rise can be set forth in terms of an aporetic triad:

1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
2. Intentionality is a relation between thinker and object of thought.
3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

The datanic first limb is nonnegotiable, a 'Moorean fact.'  The other two limbs, being more theoretical, can be denied if one is willing to pay the price.  But something has to give since they cannot all be true. 

Brentano denied (2) with unpalatable consequences to be explored in a separate post. Why not accept (2), deny (3) and admit that there are abnormal relations, relations that connect existents with nonexistents?      

Consider the round square, that well-worn example that goes back at least to Bernard Bolzano.  Since there is no such thing, and cannot be, one will be tempted to say that the round square is an idea (presentation, Vorstellung) without an object.  That is what  Bolzano maintained using that very example of rundes Viereck.  (Theory of Science, pp. 88-89)  In section 5 of Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (1894), Kasimir Twardowski criticizes Bolzano's position.

Twardowski distinguishes among the following:  there is the expression 'the round square.'  Then there is the mental act, the act of presentation (Vorstellungsact) that transpires in someone who uses the expression with understanding.  Corresponding to the act is a content (Inhalt)  which constitutes the meaning of the expression.  But there is  also a fourth item, that to which the expression refers, the round square itself, that which combines logically incompatible properties and whose existence one denies as soon as one advances from the presentation round square to a judgment about it. (Cf. the Brentanian theses that judgments are founded upon presentations, and that every judgment is existential, involving the acceptance or rejection of a presentation.)

This of course  sticks in the craw.  One hesitates to admit that there is something outside the mind to which 'round square' refers, something that has the property of nonexistence.  It smacks of a contradiction.  Clearly, 'There exists an x such that x does not exist' IS a contradiction, but this is not what a Meinongian will say.

Note that Twardowski has a couple of powerful reasons for not identifying the round square and its colleagues with mental contents.  The first is that contents exist while nonexistent objects don't.  So the round square cannot be identified with the content expressed by 'the round square.'  The second reason is that we ascribe to the round square attributes that not only cannot be ascribed to the corresponding content, but are logically incompatible to boot.  Thus no content is round and no content is square and of course no content is both round and square.  Since contents exist, they cannot have contradictory properties.

These arguments, spelled out a bit perhaps, show that mental contents cannot go proxy for nonexistent items, whether merely possible like the celebrated golden mountain or impossible like the round square.  One could extend the argument to cover abstract objects which are not mental contents or in any way mind-dependent.  They too are unsuited to go proxy for nonexistents.  For (1) abstracta exist while nonexistents do not, and (2)  the properties of nonexistent concreta cannot be attributed to abstracta.  Thus a flying horse is an animal, a golden mountain is a mountain, and a round square is round.  But no abstract object is an animal or a mountain or round.

When I think about the round square or the golden mountain (in whatever psychological mode)  the object of my thought is neither a mental content nor an abstract object.  What is it then?  Why, it is the round square or the golden mountain!  As bizarre as this sounds, it makes a certain amount of sense.  If I want to climb the golden mountain, I want to climb a physical prominence, not a mental content or an abstractum.

The position under examination, then, is not only that every mental act has a content, but that every mental act has an object as well.  But not all of these objects exist.  One obvious advantage of this approach is that it allows us to hold onto (2) of our opening triad in full generality: in every case, intentionality relates a thinker through a content to a transcendent object, and not to some surrogate object, either! 

Why is this a good thing?  Well, if intentionality is relational only in some cases, the veridical cases, then it cannot be essential to mental acts to be of an object:  whether or not an act actually has an object will depend on contingent facts in the world beyond the mind.  For Brentano, all mental acts are intentional by their very nature as mental.  The Twardowski-Meinong approach upholds this.

But the price is very steep: one must accept that there are items that actually instantiate properties (not merely possibly instantiate them), and that these items nevertheless do not exist, or indeed, as on Meinong's actual view, have any mode of being at all.  This is his famous doctrine of the Aussersein des reinen Gegenstandes, the 'extrabeing of the pure object.'  Thus the golden mountain is actually golden and actually a mountain despite having no being whatsoever.  It is a pure Sosein utterly devoid of Sein.

Some, like van Inwagen, think that Meinong's theory of objects is obviously self-contradictory.  I don't believe this is right, for reasons detailed here.  Even so, I find Meinong's theory incoherent.  'Some items have no being at all' is not a formal contradiction.  Still, I cannot get a mental grip on the notion of an item that actually has properties, but is wholly beingless.

In addition, one must accept that there are genuine relations that connect existents to nonexistents. 

The price is too steep to pay.  The Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann solution is just as problematic as the original problem.

REFERENCE:  Reinhardt Grossmann, The Categorial Structure of the World, Indiana UP, 1983, p. 197 ff.

Two Motivations for a Relational Account of Intentionality (Peter Lupu)

(A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Minor edits and comments in blue by BV.)

There are at least two ways in which the relational character and object-directedness of intentional states such as beliefs, wants, desires, seekings, etc., is motivated:

A. The individuation of intentional states;

B.  Aristotle’s belief-desire model of explaining actions.

I. Motivation (A). Consider the following:

1) Jake seeks the golden mountain;

2) Jake seeks the keys to his car.

Clearly, (1) and (2) express two different intentional states of the same individual. But, in virtue of what do (1) and (2) express two different intentional states? It appears that the best and only explanation for the difference is that the two cases relate Jake to two different objects: i.e., in (1) Jake seeks the golden mountain; in (2) Jake seeks his car keys; and, of course, the golden mountain and Jake’s car keys are two distinct objects.

The point, though correct, needs to be made with a bit more exactitude. Presumably, the intentional states are numerically distinct in virtue of occurring at  different times.  If so, someone could reply that what makes the states different is their occurring at different times.  The question, however, is not what makes the states token-distinct, but what makes them type-distinct.  And the answer can only be that it is distinctness of intentional object that explains type-distinctness of states.

Intentionality and Haecceity

Steven Nemes inquires:

Do you think that your stand on intentionality not requiring the existence of the intentional object is contradictory with your argument against haecceity properties (as non-qualitative thisnesses)? You say that an individual can have the property of searching after Atlantis, let's say, even if Atlantis doesn't exist. But your argument against haecceities is that identity-with-Socrates would be nonsense if Socrates didn't exist.

How would you solve the apparent contradiction?

Let's first note an ambiguity that infects 'intentional object.' Intentionality is object-directedness.  So there is a clear sense in which every intentional mental state 'takes an accusative,' 'is of or about an object.'  That object could be called the intentional object.  Accordingly, whether I want a three-headed dog or a one-headed dog, my wanting has an intentional object.  The nonexistence of three-headed dogs does not prejudice the object-directedness of my wanting a three-headed dog.  It is equally important to note that the existence of one-headed dogs plays no role in making my wanting a one-headed dog object-directed.  This is because object-directedness is an intrinsic feature of mental acts.  To see this more clearly, suppose I want a one-headed dog that is distinct from every one-headed dog that presently exists.  This mental state is object-directed, but its object-directedness does not derive from the present existence of any one-headed dog, or anything else.

But one could also use 'intentional object' to refer to the mind-independent entity, if there is one, that satisfies the description (definite or indefinite) that expresses the content of the intentional state.  If we use the term in this second way, then my wanting a three-headed dog does not have an intentional object.

It is only in this second sense that intentionality does not require the existence of the intentional object.  It is part of the very essence of wanting as an intentional mental state that it be a wanting of something (that is an objective genitive, by the way, not a subject genitive.)  But it doesn't follow that the something exists.  Similarly for perceiving, imagining, believing, etc.

As for the haecceity-property identity-with-Socrates, it is nothing at all at times and in worlds in which Socrates doesn't exist.  I stick to that self-evident point pace Plantinga. (See A Difficulty With Haecceity Properties)

It seems to me that my line on haecceities is entirely consistent with my line on intentionality.  Socrateity (identity-with-Socrates) essentially involves Socrates himself, that very individual, in a way in which seeking Atlantis (construed as a mental state, not as a physical action or actions) does not essentially involve Atlantis itself.  And this is a good thing since there is no such island.

You seem to think that an intentional mental state acquires its object-directedness from without in virtue of the mind-independent existence of an entity that the state is directed to.  It is this misconception that suggests to you that there is a contradiction in my affirming  both

1. An haecceity H of x is nothing if x does not exist
and
2. It is not the case that a wanting W of x is nothing if x does not exist.

But note that  'H of x' is a subjective genitive whereas 'W of x' is an objective genitive.  The haecceity or nonqualitative thisness of Atlantis is nothing at all because Atlantis does not exist. There is nothing for it to be the haecceity of.   But a wanting of Atlantis is what it is whether or not Atlantis exists. 

And similarly in other cases.  An ancient Greek can be a Zeus-worshipper whether or not Zeus exists.   But the same Greek cannot own a slave unless there exists some slave he owns.  The instance of of ownership requires for its individuation the existence of both relata.  But the instance of worshipping does not require the existence of both relata.

Intentionality: Peter Lupu's 'Surrogate Object' Solution

I suggest we approach the problem, or one of the problems, of intentionality via the following aporetic triad:

1. We sometimes intend the nonexistent.
2. Intentionality is a relation.
3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

This is a nice neat way of formulating the problem because, on the one hand, each limb is extremely plausible while, on the other hand, the limbs appear collectively inconsistent.  To solve the problem, one must either reject one of the limbs or show that the inconsistency is merely apparent.

Enter Peter Lupu's solution. He described it to me last night after Christmas dinner.  He thinks we can uphold all three propositions.  Thus his claim is that the triad is only apparently inconsistent.

Suppose Shaky Jake seeks the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine (LDM).  Now seeking things like lost gold mines typically involves all sorts of physical actions; but at the root of, and animating, these actions are various mental states many of which are intentional or objected-directed.  Believing, hoping, desiring,  fearing, planning -- these are all intentional states.  Among them is the state of wanting.  To want is to want something.  Thus Jake wants, or wants to find, the LDM.  But a subject's wanting of x does not entail the existence of x in the way that a subject's owning of x does entail the existence of x.  You can't own, beat, eat, etc. what does not exist; but you can desire, imagine, think about, etc. what does not exist.  This is a crucial fact about intentionality.  Peter of course is well aware of it.

Now either the LDM exists or it does not.  If it exists, then Jake's wanting relates him (or his mind) to the LDM in a way that is consistent with the truth of both (2) and (3).  If the LDM does not exist, then Jake's wanting relates him (or his mind) to the CONTENT of Jake's mental act.  But this too is consistent with the truth of both (2) and (3). For the content exists whether or not the object exists.

In this way, Peter thinks he can uphold each of (1)-(3).  Supposing, as is overwhelmingly likely, that the LDM does not exist, (1) is true:  Jake intends (in the mode of wanting) something nonexistent.  This instance of intentionality is relational: it connects Jake's mind to a content.  (2) is thus maintained.  But so is (3): Jake's mind and the content both exist.

I will call this a 'surrogate object' solution.  It works by substituting the content for the external object when the external object does not exist.  This guarantees that there will always be an existent object, either the external object, or the surrogate object to serve as the object relatum of the intentional relation.

But isn't there an obvious objection to the 'surrogate object' solution?  Jake wants a gold mine.  He doesn't want a content.  A gold mine is a physical thing.  But whatever a content is, it is not a physical thing.  A content is either mental as a part of the intentional mental state, or it is an abstract item of some sort.  To appreciate this, let us consider more carefully what a content is.  A content is an intermediary entity, roughly analogous to a Fregean sense (Sinn), which mediates between mind and external concrete reality.  And like Fregean senses, contents do not reside in external concrete reality.  They are either immanent to consciousness like Twardowski's contents, or abstracta like Frege's senses.  And just as linguistic reference to the planet Venus is achieved via the sense of 'morning star' or via the sense of 'evening star,' mental reference to an object is achieved via a content.  To employ the old Brentano terminology of presentations (Vorstellungen), the object is that which is presented in a presentation whereas the content is that through which it is presented.

Now my point against Peter is that when I want something that doesn't exist, my wanting cannot be said to relate me  to a content.  My wanting involves a content no doubt, but the content is not the object.  Why not?  Well, if I want a flying horse, I want a physical thing, an animal; but no content is a physical thing, let alone an animal.  When Bobby Darin pined after his Dream Lover, it  was something lusciously concrete and physical that he was pining after.

Suppose I am imagining  Pegasus and thinking: Pegasus does not exist.  The imagining is an intentional state that involves a content, the mental image.  But this mental image exists.  So it cannot be the mental image that I am thinking does not exist.  It is Pegasus himself that I am thinking does not exist.  And therein lies the puzzle. 

Suppose Peter responds as follows.  "I grant you that it is not the mental image that I am thinking does not exist.  For, as you point out, the image does exist.  What I am doing is thinking that the mental image is not a mental image of anything.  So when I imagine Pegasus and think: Pegasus does not exist, the object relatum is an existent item, the Pegasus image, and what I am thinking about it is that it is not an image of anything."

But this too is problematic.  For the nonexistence of Pegasus cannot be identified with the Pegasus-images's not being an image of anything. And this for the simple reason that an objective fact such as the nonexistence of Pegasus cannot depend on the existence of mental images.  There are times and possible worlds in which there are no mental images and yet at those times and worlds Pegasus does not exist.

But Peter persists:  "Well, I can say that when I am thinking about Pegasus I am thinking about a necessarily existent conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are being a horse, having wings, etc., and when I think that Pegasus does not exist I am thinking that this conjunctive property is not instantiated.  And when I think that Pegasus is winged, I am thinking that the conjunctive property has being winged as one of its conjuncts."

This is better, but still problematic.  If Peter wants Pegasus, then presumably what he wants on his analysis is not the conjunctive property in question, but the being instantiated of this property.  Being instantiated, however, is relational not monadic:  if the conjunctive property is instantiated it is instantiated by an individual.    And which individual must it be?  Why, Pegasus!  The analysis, it appears, is viciously circular.  Let's review.

Peter wants to say that intentionality is a relation and that the holding of a relation entails the existence of all its relata.  But Pegasus does not exist.  To want Pegasus, then, cannot be to stand in relation to Pegasus, but to a surrogate object.  If you say that the surrogate object is a necessarily existent property, then the problem is that wanting Peagsus, an animal, is not wanting a causally inert abstract object.  If. on the other hand, you say that to want Pegasus is to want the being instantiated of that abstract object, then you want the being instantiated of that abstract object by existing Pegasus -- in which case we have made no progress since Pegasus does not exist!

What Is Intentionality?

He now calls himself 'Edward Ockham.'  I was pleased to receive an e-mail from him this morning in which he directs me to his latest post, Is There a Problem of Intentionality?, and suggests a crossblogging effort.  So I perused his post.  He opens:

Is there a problem of intentionality? That depends what intentionality is. Let's accept the following definition, for the sake of argument.

(1) Intentionality: the existence of some thoughts depends on the existence of external objects

Is that a problem? Yes, and for two reasons.

As far as I can see, the definition on offer bears little resemblance to anything called 'intentionality' in the discussions of this topic since the time of Brentano.  So before  discussion of any problem of intentionality, we need to come to some agreement as to what intentionality is.  Here is how I characterized it in an earlier post:

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 (some) 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 -- thoughts or thinkings, cogitationes, in the broad Cartesian sense of the term --  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. 

This is nearly the opposite of what 'Ockham' is saying above.  He seems to be saying that intentional thoughts are all and only those thoughts whose existence depends on the existence of an external object.  Accordingly, the intentionality of a thought is its existential dependence on an existing external object.

But this misses the crucial point that  the directedness of a cogitatio to a cogitatum qua cogitatum -- which is the essence of intentionality standardly  understood -- does not at all depend on the external existence of the cogitatum. So I find the above definition of 'Ockham' wildly  idiosyncratic.  He goes on to argue against it, but that's like rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple.  Too easy, a 'slap job.'

My posts on intentionality are collected here (Intentionality category) and here (Brentano category).

 

More on Alienans Adjectives: Relative Truth and Derived Intentionality

I am sitting by a pond with a child. The child says, "Look, there are  three ducks." I say, "No, there are two ducks, one female, the other  male, and a decoy."

The point is that a decoy duck is not a duck, but a piece of wood  shaped and painted to appear (to a duck) like a duck so as to entice  ducks into range of the hunters' shotguns. Since a decoy duck is not a duck, 'decoy' in 'decoy duck' does not function in the way 'male' and   'female' function in 'male duck' and 'female duck,' respectively. A   male duck is a duck and a female duck is a duck. But a decoy duck is not a duck.

'Decoy' is an alienans adjective unlike 'male' and 'female' which are specifying adjectives. 'Decoy' shifts or alienates the sense of 'duck' rather than adding a specification to it. The same goes for 'roasted' in 'We are having roasted duck for dinner.' A roasted duck is not a  duck but the cooked carcass of a duck. Getting hungry?

Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy

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

Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses

1. Original/Derived Intentionality. All will agree that there is some sort of distinction to be made here. 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. What about these other things? I draw you a map so that you can find my camp. I use the Greek phi to mark my camp and the Greek psi to mark the camp of a heavily-armed crazy man that you are well advised to avoid. I intend that phi designate my camp. That intending (narrow sense) is a case of intentionality (broad sense). This is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether my intending is a case of original or of derived intentionality.

If the latter, then a regress ensues which appears to be both infinite and vicious. But before discussing this further, I need to bring in another point.

Brentano and Whether Propositions are Intrinsically Intentional

Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality. The last post in this series considered apparent counterexamples to this thesis. But there are others.  Joseph Jedwab usefully pointed out in a comment on my old blog that propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later, dispositions — if I am so disposed.