Consciousness &
intentionality (and terminology) (draft 28 June)
Galen Strawson
___________________________________________________________
01 Introduction
02 The
No Problem Thesis
03 Intentionality as awareness
04 Intentionality
without concepts
05 Is
experience puzzling?
06 Materialism
07 Cognitive
phenomenology
08 Purely
experiential content
09 The
sense in which all mentally contentful phenomena are experiential phenomena
10 Intentionality
≠ aboutness
11 ‘Intrinsic’
intentionality, ‘derived’ ‘intentionality’
12 Liberal aboutness
13 Robots
and aboutness
14 Key
terms
15 Some comments
16 Intentionality and experience
17 A
mystery?
18 The
No Problem Thesis
19 ‘Behavioural’
intentionality and real meaning
20 ‘Yes,
but what is the relation between
experience and intentionality?’
___________________________________________________________
1 Introduction
Two things particularly bother us, as
philosophers of mind.We want to give a naturalistic account of intentionality, of the way mental
phenomena can be about or of things, directed at one thing or another; of the way a being can be aware of something, mentally in touch with something, mentally apprised or cognizant of something in thought or perception; of the way we can aim at, target, hit, refer to, mean an object, present or absent, concrete or not, in thought. And
we want to give a naturalistic account of consciousness—of
conscious experience, of phenomenal content, of ‘phenomenology’, of experiential ‘what-it’s-likeness’, of the experiential qualitative[1]
character of experience—whatever you
prefer to call it: I’m going to use the expressions ‘experience’ (in its
non-count noun form) and ‘experiential phenomena’ to cover all the phenomena of
consciousness. In my use, these expressions refer specifically and only to the
phenomenon of the experiential qualitative character of experience, and not at
all to the non-experiential being of experiences.[2]
2 The No Problem Thesis
So we want to know about consciousness and
intentionality and the relation between them, and there isn’t much that
argument can do for us.[3]
As for intentionality, we know the relevant facts well enough: we know enough
about what our experience is like, about what dogs and actual and possible
robots can do, about what books, mirrors, pictures, puddles and so on are like.
We decorate our debates with forms of argument, but what we really disagree
about is the best way to put things, the best picture to present, the best
terminology.[4]
Is intentionality especially puzzling? I don’t think so. I think
there’s a powerful illusion here. In Mental Reality (1994) I endorsed the ‘No Problem Thesis’, according to which there is no special
deep problem or puzzle raised by the existence of intentionality over and above
any problem or puzzle raised by the existence of experience, although
intentionality certainly involves special features of experience that need
separate discussion. Since I still believe this, I will try re-express it in a
series of observations in no particular order.
3 Intentionality as awareness
What is it to be in an
intentional state? It is to be aware of something. And to be aware of anything is to be in an intentional
state. So the basic problem of intentionality (if there is a problem of intentionality) equals the
problem of awareness, or if you like awareness-of (if there is a problem of
awareness, or awareness-of). And since awareness entails experience,
intentionality entails experience.
—To
be in an intentional state is to be aware of something, but awareness doesn’t
entail experience. Moira is aware of your existence., but she is not now
thinking about you. In fact she is dreamlessly asleep.
The word ‘awareness’ can be used in two
ways. One implies occurrent experience, the other allows that awareness can be
a dispositional state (like knowledge). I am going to favour the first use,
according to which to be aware of something is to be in some experiential
state. I will leave this choice without support until §9, in which I defend the
view that—expound the sense in which—all truly mentally contentful phenomena
are occurrent experiential phenomena. This view rules the dispositional use of
‘aware’ out of court as an ascription of a mentally contentful state; but I
have no quarrel with the fact (never quarrel with facts) that statements like
‘she is aware of your existence’ are natural and fully intelligible as a
description of dispositions to be in certain sorts of states of awareness.
Note that ‘aware of’ is a ‘success’ or
‘factive’ expression—you can’t be aware of X unless X exists[5]—and
the same is true of intentionality: you can’t be in an intentional state with
respect to X, or, as I will say, an X-intentional
state, unless X exists.[6]
Note also that beings incapable of experience, experienceless beings, are never
aware of anything (although they may
contain or constitute representations of things), and are by the same token
never in intentional states.[7]
4 Intentionality without concepts
Intentionality has nothing specially to do
with concepts or propositional thought. A baby has intentionality when it comes
to consciousness in the womb, for it is aware of things, it has experience of
things. Spiders have intentionality if there is something it is like,
experientially, to be a spider (they are very sensitive to sound). You don’t
have to be aware that you are aware of X in order to be aware of X, and hence
to be in an X-intentional state. You
don’t have to have any conception of awareness-of or intentionality in order to
have awareness-of or intentionality. In the most basic case of intentionality a
creature doesn’t have to have any sense that its experience is of or about
something in the world. That is, its experience doesn’t have to have any internal intentionality,[8]
where this is a phenomenological quality—
an experienced character of aboutness or directedness—that experience can have
whether its subject is normally located in the world or is a ‘brain in a vat’.
It is enough that the creature has external
intentionality—enough that its experience is in fact experience of
something in the world.
We can distinguish perceptual intentionality and conceptual
intentionality to allow for the point that although all genuine intentionality
involves awareness, there can be intentionality—perceptual intentionality—that
does not involve any deployment of concepts. It will be immediately objected
that all genuine perception involves deployment of concepts. I disagree (it’s a
matter of terminology), because a baby perceives things as soon as it quickens
experientially and hears sounds (say). It does not have to deploy concepts or
pay attention in order for this to be so. The same goes for a new born gosling,
imprinting on its mother or on Konrad Lorenz.[9]
By way of (terminological) concession, I
can call perceptual intentionality that does not involve any deployment of
concepts primitive perceptual
intentionality. Now, though, it will be said that perception need not involve
experience at all—that there can be ‘subliminal’ perception. Yes; but in this
paper I am going to use use ‘perception’ and its cognates in such a way that
perception entails experience. If it is important to you to use the word
‘perception’ in a way that allows that there can be non-experiential perception
(in an experiential being), so be it. It’s a perfectly respectable
terminological decision. But my terminological position (see §10) will be that
such mental occurrences can have ofness or
aboutness but not intentionality.
There is another serious terminological
option. One can set the bar for intentionality higher and hold that internal
intentionality is necessary for genuine intentionality; so that what I call
‘primitive perceptual intentionality’ is not genuine intentionality at all. On
this view genuine intentionality cannot occur without some sort of sense or
grasp or experience or living of one’s experience as experience of
something. My terminology is more liberal in allowing primitive intentionality,
but not as (unacceptably) liberal as the terminology that doesn’t even require
experience for intentionality.
5 Is experience puzzling?
I’ve claimed that the problem of intentionality (such as it is) is part of the problem of
experience. Is experience particularly puzzling? I don’t think so. In itself,
it is not a special puzzle at all. It is a puzzle only in so far as it is part
of the puzzle of why anything exists at all—the puzzle of why there is
something rather than nothing (if that is a puzzle). There are no good grounds
for finding the existence of experience more puzzling than the existence of a
stone—whether one is a materialist or not. To be a serious, realistic[10]
materialist, and to think the existence of experience specially puzzling, one
must fulfil two conditions. One must (by one’s own materialist lights) have [a]
an inadequate and incomplete conception of the nature of matter, and yet
believe, with no good grounds, that one has [b] a pretty good understanding of
the (essential or fundamental) nature of matter.[11]
I need to say more about this. These days I
can’t seem to move without a lot of substantive, terminological, and
terminologico-substantive baggage. This is probably a failure on my part, but I
don’t know what to do about it, so in §§6-9 I am going to set out some views:
about materialism and experience; about ‘cognitive phenomenology’; about
‘narrow’ or as I will call it ‘purely experiential’ content; and about the view
that all truly mentally contentful phenomena are experiential phenomena.[12]
These substantive views about materialism and phenomenology have terminological
consequences, for if they are right they have consequences for what
‘materialism’, ‘phenomenology’ and so on really mean; and §§10-15 are also
officially devoted to terminological matters—although they are in fact just as
concerned with matters of substance. It’s a long haul, but in the last six
sections, §§16-20, I see if anything remains to be said about experience,
intentionality and the relation between them.
It follows from the view that all truly
mentally contentful phenomena (and hence all intentional phenomena) are
experiential phenomena that dispositional phenomena like beliefs are not
mentally contentful phenomena, and many will think that this last claim is off
the map. All I ask is that you listen sympathetically to my terminology trying
to work itself out.[13]
6 Materialism
Short form. To be a real materialist, to
get to the starting line of serious, realistic materialism, is to be fully
realist about the ‘what-it’s-likeness’ of experience. It is also to see that
the existence of experience is in no way
more puzzling than the existence of a stone.
Materialism is the view that every real,
concrete[14] phenomenon[15]
in the universe is material or physical. Boats, blushes, works of art, gravity,
experiences—feelings, thoughts—and so on. It seems that some materialists want to deny the existence of
experience—of the experiential qualitative character of conscious goings on.
This, however, is the silliest claim that has ever been made in philosophy,
from Thales of Miletus to Lewis of
Princeton. It shows what happens when the theorizing instinct overpowers
concern for truth, and I am going to ignore it. Life is too short.
Does the existence of experience raise any
special problem for materialists, any problem greater than the problem raised
by non-experiential phenomena? No. To
think that it does is, as remarked in the last section, to make a very large
and completely unjustified assumption. Most present-day materialists still take
the so-called ‘mind-body’ problem (the experience-matter problem) to be the
problem of how experiential phenomena can possibily be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature
of the physical. In fact,
though, we have no good reason to
think that we know anything about the
material or physical that gives us any
reason to find any problem in the
idea that mental or experiential phenomena are physical phenomena. The point is
old and well made by Locke, Priestley, Hume, Kant, Russell, Eddington, and
Chomsky among others,[16]
but many today ignore it (Dennett, the Churchlands and their ilk), treading
most obediently in the (uncharacteristically errant) footsteps of a genius whom
they are always disparaging—Descartes.[17]
If you are a materialist, then, a real or realistic materialist, that is, at the bare minimum, one who is
wholly realist about experience (qualia, phenomenology, etc), you take it that
experiential phenomena are wholly physical phenomena, just like boats and
stones. So you obviously can’t contrast
the mental with the physical, saying, look, here on the one side we have
physical phenomena, and here on the opposite side we have the mental and in
particular experiential phenomena. For this is exactly like saying, look, here
on the one side we have the class of mammals, and here on the opposite side we
have the class of cows. This won’t do because cows just are mammals. So too experiential what-it’s-likeness phenomena just are physical phenomena, according to
materialism.
So: if you are a realistic materialist you
cannot use the mental/physical distinction in the standard way. Instead you
need to distinguish, within the realm of the physical, which is the only realm there is, according to you, between the
mental and the non-mental, or, more particularly, between the experiential and
the non-experiential.
The question is then this. When we embark
on the naturalistic project, does the non-experiential have some sort of
privileged position in our understanding of things, relative to the
experiential? Do we know more about the non-experiential than the experiential?
The simple answer is: No. The stronger
answer is: On the contrary. Today I will simply give some quotations that make
the point, beginning with Russell, who makes the important observation that
physics is mathematical not because we know
so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its
mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest, our knowledge is
negative.[18]
He may exaggerate when, talking as a
realistic materialist, he says that
we know nothing
about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience[19]
or that
as regards the world in general, both
physical and mental [i.e. non-mental and mental, in my terminology], everything that we know of its intrinsic
character is derived from the mental side[20]
but I don’t think he exaggerates much—if at
all.
Do we know anything about the non-experiential physical that gives us any
reason to find any problem in the idea that the experiential is also physical?
No. Priestley makes the point in 1777. As a materialist he holds that
‘sensation and thought do necessarily result from the organization of the
brain’,[21]
and claims that ‘there is just the same reason to conclude that the brain thinks, as that it is white and soft,[22]
but it is his answer to the question ‘What is matter?’ that is important here.
‘With respect to the definition of matter’, he says
I…am not able to be more explicit than I have
been. A definition of any particular
thing…cannot be anything more than an enumeration of its known properties….
I…define…matter…to be a substance possessed of the property of extension, and of powers of attraction and repulsion. And since it has never yet been
asserted, that the powers of sensation
and thought are incompatible with
these (solidity, or impenetrability only, having been thought to be repugnant
to them)…, we have no reason to suppose that there are in man
two…distinct…substances.[23]
The point is clear, but here are a few more
quotations—this time from Eddington—that get things exactly right. Adopting a
standard positivist approach to our epistemological situation (positivism only
goes awry when it goes metaphysical), he points out that
our knowledge of the objects treated in
physics consists solely of readings of pointers [on instrument dials] and other
indicators…. But what
knowledge have we of the nature of atoms that renders it at all incongruous
that they should constitute a thinking [conscious] object?… Science has nothing to say as to the
intrinsic nature of the atom. The physical atom is, like everything else in
physics, a schedule of pointer readings. The schedule is, we agree, attached to
some unknown background. Why not then attach it to something of spiritual
nature of which a prominent characteristic is thought. It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a
so-called ‘concrete’ nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where
the thought comes from. We have dismissed all preconception as to the
background of our pointer readings, and for the most part can discover nothing
as to its nature. But in one case—namely, for the pointer readings of my own
brain—I have an insight which is not limited to the evidence of the pointer readings.
That insight shows that they are attached to a background of consciousness.
Although I may expect that the background of other pointer readings in physics
is of a nature continuous with that revealed to me in this way, I do not
suppose that it always has the more specialized attributes of consciousness. There is nothing to prevent the assemblage
of atoms constituting a brain from being of itself a thinking [or conscious]
object in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable.
If we must embed our schedule of indicator readings in some kind of background,
at least let us accept the only hint
we have received as to the
significance of the background—namely, that it has a nature capable of
manifesting itself as mental activity.[24]
To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of
the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall
have to explain that by ‘mind’ I do not here exactly mean mind and by ‘stuff’ I
do not at all mean stuff…. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something
more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its
nature as not altogether foreign
to the feelings in our consciousness. The realistic matter and fields of force of former
[classical] physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the
mind-stuff itself has spun these imaginings. The symbolic matter and fields of
force of present-day theory are more relevant, but they bear to it the same
relation that the bursar’s accounts bear to the activity of the college. Having
granted this, the mental activity of the part of the world constituting
ourselves occasions no surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge,
and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be—or, rather,
it knows itself to be. It is the physical [in my terms non-experiential]
aspects of the world that we have to explain…. Our bodies are more mysterious
than our minds.[25]
In sum, and again: we know nothing—and we
know we know nothing—about the nature of matter that gives us any reason to
think there is any problem in the idea that experience is a wholly physical
phenomenon. In this sense there is no special problem of experience. We take it
as materialists that matter in this
active arrangement, call it Y, constitutes—is—my seeing yellow. Do we
understand this, or understand how Y
is seeing yellow? No, if you like. But do we understand any better why, or
indeed how, Y—this yellow-experience—is a fizz of billions of particles or
strongs or fields? Certainly not; and there is no good reason to think I can know more about the intrinsic
physical nature of Y=seeing yellow in doing its physics than in experiencing
what I experience. Russell is surely right that, if anything, the reverse is
true. You can problematize things in both directions equally. You can say:
‘Here is the whole of physics, and given all this it is impossible to see why
or how Y constitutes—is—my seeing yellow’. Or you can say: ‘What we start from,
what we know best, are things like the experience of yellow, or the experience
of thinking of you, or of feeling gloomy. We are sure that these things are
arrangements of matter in the head like Y. But, knowing this, it is impossible
to see why or how anything is as in physics says it is’. Which line is better?
Neither. It is pure prejudice to think that non-experiential phenomena are
something that we can legitimately take for granted, take as the starting point
of naturalistic investigation, in some way in which it is not equally
legitimate to take experiential phenomena for granted and as the starting point
of naturalistic investigation.[26]
Some people are deeply in the grip of the view that there is some sense in
which we know or understand the non-mental or non-experiential better than the
mental or experiential; but this view it is obviously false. Some think that
the fact that we can do good—spectacular—public theory with the non-experiential means that we understand it better
than the experiential. That’s just another bad habit of thought to which philosophers
are vulnerable.
8 Cognitive phenomenology
When people talk of experience,
phenomenology in the current loose use, they often have sensations, emotions,
feeling-tones, and so on primarily in mind. But thinking that p (that the gap between n2
and (n + 1)2 is (2n + 1)) or remembering that q is as much an experiential matter as feeling pain (perhaps while
being born) or hearing a blackbird’s alarm call. There is cognitive
phenomenology as well as sensory phenomenology. Episodes of conscious thought
are experiential episodes with cognitive experiential content. Experience is as
much cognitive as sensory. It includes everything a bat or a new born baby can
feel, and everything a great mathematician can experience in thinking.
This
is, perhaps, widely acknowledged. But [cut1] here I want to consider the
disputed case of meaning-experience,
by which I mean the experience of consciously entertaining and understanding
specific cognitive or conceptual contents or of understanding words spoken or
read. Such meaning-experiences have, in David Pitt’s phrase, a ‘proprietary
phenomenology’—a phenomenology wholly distinct from that of the sensory and
feeling-tone modalities.[27]
This claim has been well defended in the
last decade[28] and is
increasingly gaining acceptance, but it is still doubted by many (Ryle and
Wittgenstein are the main causes of this, whether or not they are to blame for
it) and is worth a brief defence. Consider, then, your hearing and
understanding this sentence and the next. Clearly this hearing and
understanding—it is going on at this very moment—is part of the course of your
experience. Equally clearly, the conceptual content of the sentences is playing
a large—dominant—part in determining the overall qualitative character of this
particular stretch of the course of your experience, although you may also be
aware of the page and the print, sunshine, birdsong, your body, and so on. The
word ‘qualitative’ is strictly speaking redundant, here, given the definition
of ‘experience’ in §1, but it is worth using it at least once because one
difficulty people have with the notion of cognitive phenomenology is with the
idea that it too is ultimately a matter—to repeat the pleonasm—of the qualitative character of experience.[29]
All this is obvious to unprejudiced
reflection, but it is very hard to pin down the contribution to the character
of your experience that is being made by the content of the sentence in such a
way as to be able to take it as the object of reflective thought (it is far
easier to do this in the case of the phenomenological character of an
experience of yellow). In fact, when it comes to the attempt to figure to
oneself the phenomenological character of understanding a sentence like
‘Consider, then, your reading and understanding this sentence and the next’ it
seems that all one can usefully do is rethink the sentence as a whole,
comprehendingly, in a way that leaves one no mental room to take the
phenomenological character of one’s understanding of the sentence, redelivered
to one by this rethinking, as the principal object of one’s attention.[30]
For all that, the reality of
meaning-experience remains beyond doubt. It can be sufficiently indicated by
pointing out that the experiential difference between your hearing and
understanding the sentence ‘Hume’s Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion is not a late work; he was working on it as
early as 1749’ and your hearing and understanding the sentence ‘This sentence
is a sentence of English’ is not just a matter of the different auditory experiences
you have in the two cases. Nor is it, in the reading case, just a matter of the
different shapes and/or silently entertained sounds of the words. It is also,
and much more importantly, a matter of their cognitive content.
I use undramatic sentences to make the
point, rather than sentences like ‘A thousand bonobos shot past on fluorescent
green bicycles’, because in talking of cognitive phenomenology or
meaning-experience one is emphatically not concerned with any of the imagistic
or emotional experiences that can accompany the thinking of thoughts or
understanding of words (often in such a way that they seem somehow integral to
the semantic understanding). I am trying to point up something else, something
that is equally real and definite although it can seem troublesomely intangible
when we try to reflect about it: the experience that is standardly involved in
the mere comprehending of words (read, thought, or heard), where this
comprehending is considered quite independently of any imagistic or emotional
accompaniments.[31]
[[I will take another run at this. Suppose
I say ‘This sentence has five words’, or ‘To study is to love, and there is no
relief in love’. Suppose you are attending. Your experience has a certain
overall character between the time I start and the time I finish. It almost
certainly involves some sensory awareness of your surroundings and of your
bodily state. It involves hearing sounds like the sounds produced when someone
with a voice like mine says ‘This sentence has five words’, or ‘To study is to
love, and there is no relief in love’. But there is more: there is the way your
experience is specifically in virtue of the fact that you understand what is
said.[32]
Consider the difference between my saying ‘I’m reading War and Peace’ and my saying ‘tatooli mangbalang’. All this is
obvious on reflection—it is happening now—, but philosophers have denied it
vehemently and, it must be said, scornfully; so it needs to be said.[33]
[[190One way to make the point is to
observe that one often reads or hears words or thinks thoughts that are
extraordinarily interesting, absorbing, and so on. They are
experienced as interesting. This is a fact about the character of experience.
It is logically possible that you are interested in what you are reading at
this moment. If so, your being interested must be a response to something about
the character (pleonastically, the qualitative
character) that your experience has for you now as you have it. What is it in
the content of your experience that it is a response to (rhetorical question)?
Forget the present moment. At some time in your life you have read a book or
listened to spoken words because the content conveyed by them was incredibly
interesting. Why did you continue to read or listen? What was it about the
(qualitative) character of your experience that made you continue? Was it
merely the sensory content of the visual or auditory goings on? Obviously not.
Certainly the experience was pleasurable. Was it pleasurable just because of
the sensory content of the visual or auditory goings on? Obviously not.]]
Note finally that while it is important to
have a good grasp of the notion of cognitive phenomenology when thinking about
intentionality, basic intentionality is prior to anything like the
meaning-experience. The basic case of intentionality is the mere making of
contact, in some experiential manner (sense, perception, thought) with things
or properties, without necessarily engaging in any distinctively propositional activity of mind (§4).
Basic intentionality is just awareness-of (§3), available to neonates,
available to the most primitive experiential creatures that can truly be said
to have experience of objects or
properties in the world.[34]
9 Purely experiential content
For decades analytic philosophy
has tended to separate the notion of cognitive, conceptual content sharply from
the notion of experience,[35]
so that it sounds very odd to many to say that the experience of seeing yellow
and the experience of now understanding this very sentence, or of thinking that
nobody could have had different parents, are alike in respect of having a
certain qualitative character. And yet they are. They fall equally into the
vast category of experiential episodes that have a certain experiential
qualitative character. They fall into this category however much they may also
differ from each other. One can measure how far someone has really absorbed the
ostensibly widely acknowledged point that experience is as much cognitive as
sensory by considering whether that person has really ceased to have difficulty
with the idea that the experience of thinking consciously that nobody could
have had different parents is, considered just as an experience, just a matter
of qualitative character. I tried to make the general point more palatable in
the last section, but I think it remains difficult in the current climate of
philosophical thought.[36]
[[One of the difficulties that
some philosophers have with the idea of the qualitative character of conscious
thought, where thought is considered specifically in its cognitive being (and,
hence, independently of any imagistic, emotional, etc phenomenology it may also
involve) stems from the fact that thoughts are semantically evaluable—assessable as true or false. This can lead
them to suppose that even when thought experiences are considered just with
respect to their experiential character, their nature and content essentially
transcend qualitative character. Some, indeed, may think that philosophers who
insist on the richness of the purely experiential content of episodes of
conscious thought are subject to illusion, an illusion that arises because they
surreptitiously and illegitimately smuggle the richness of the external world
into their conception of such purely experiential content.
To combat this one needs to
make vivid, in a familiar way, the fact that the richness of experiential
content is something that it has just as ‘purely experiential content’. And for
this it is enough to consider your Vat-Twin, whose experience is by hypothesis
identical to your own in every respect, or your Instant-Twin, who has just come
into existence, identical to you in every respect. Or the old point that it is
conceivable that you yourself have just come into existence (whether fully
embodied or as a ‘brain in a vat’). Whatever story one favours, or is prepared
to tolerate,[37] the fact
remains that it is conceivable that there is no world of the sort one believes
to exist. One’s current experience may be of lying in bed in the dark at night.
One thinks about one’s childhood, the Dow Jones, fishcakes. It is possible that
none of these things exist; that there is no such thing as the English
language. There is, for sure, one’s stream of experience, with all the
extraordinarily complex and apparently world-involving content that it has for
one as one has it. But it is conceivable that it should exist without the
existence of the world that it appears to be about.[38]]]
In sum: episodes of conscious
thought are contentfully rich considered just in respect of their purely
experiential content, and hence considered wholly independently of their causes
or non-experiential being. And this richness is, in the end, just a matter of qualitative character.
(What else could it possibly be?) It is just a matter of experiential
what-it’s-like-ness for a subject from moment to moment. This
what-it’s-like-ness is indubitably real, whatever else is or is not real, and
it is (by definition) all there is to episodes of conscious thought considered
just in respect of their purely experiential content.[39]
Here we find all the internal intentionality, all the phenomenological intentionality that
Brian Loar has so eloquently characterized[40]—all
the (phenomenological) directedness,
all the purporting-to-be-about, that
you and your Instant-Twin and Vat-Twin have wholly in common in spite of the
great differences in your success in actually referring to things, being aware
of things, having thoughts about things (one might call it
‘Vat-intentionality’). All you have over them, by virtue of being in the real
world (and long established there), is a different aetiology for your mental
states, a difference in causes: genuine external intentionality as well as
internal phenomenological intentionality. Your thought is about Mount Fuji,
their thoughts are not. You are aware of Mount Fuji, mentally in touch with it,
they are not. (An experienceless robot’s
states may also be about Mount Fuji, but they cannot be intentional states in
the terminology I favour.)
10 The sense in
which all mentally contentful phenomena are experiential phenomena
Now for the view that—the sense in which—all truly, genuinely,
intrinsically, categorically,[41]
mentally contentful phenomena, and hence all intentionality phenomena, are
experiential phenomena [MC4]. I say ‘the sense in which’ because all I’m really
doing is offering a way of putting things that certainly says something true
when its terms are accepted, although many may find its terms unacceptable. I’m
not really going to argue for this view, I’m just going to expound it. As
already remarked, there isn’t much arguing to round here.
Before
going on note an interesting weaker thesis: according to which all truly
mentally contentful phenomena are at least occurrent
phenomena whether or not they are necessarily also experiential phenomena.
(Real content is live!) This thesis may well be coupled with the view that any
non-experiential occurrent phenomena that are plausible candidates for being
truly mentally contentful phenomena must at least occur in an experiencing being
[=MC5]. It is I think well worth the time of day, but I will put aside here.[42]
In The
Mind Doesn’t Work That Way Jerry Fodor writes that
our pretheoretical, ‘folk’ taxonomy of
mental states conflates two quite different natural kinds: the intrinsically
intentional ones, of which beliefs, desires, and the like are paradigms; and
the intrinsically conscious ones, of
which sensations, feelings, and the like are paradigms.
He xxxobserves that some intentional states
are conscious, and adds a footnote:
It is rather an embarrassment for cognitive
science that any intentional mental states are conscious. ‘Why aren’t they all
unconscious if so many of them are?’ is a question that cognitive science seems
to raise but not to answer. Since, however, I haven’t got the slightest idea
what the right answer is, I propose to ignore it.[43]
But if cognitive science raises this
question about intentional states perhaps it also raises the opposite question
Why aren’t they all conscious if so many of
them are—all the tens of thousands of perceptions and conscious thoughts that
fill every waking day?
And perhaps the best answer to give to this
question, all things considered, is that they are all conscious: strictly
speaking every genuine intentional state is a conscious state.
I’m not trying to be iconoclastic, for this
is, surely, the majority view (the preferred terminology) from Aristotle to
Avicenna to Brentano to about 50% of present-day analytic philosophers.[44]
I really do think it is the best way to put things, once one has become clear
about the existence—and centrality to our lives—of cognitive phenomenology
(§7). Talking to you now, it is true to say of me—true without
qualification—that I have thousands of beliefs about things of which I am at
present in no way conscious.[45]
Obviously. But it just doesn’t follow that I GS am now in any genuinely or
intrinsically (etc.) contentful mental states that are about these things. And
it seems plain that I am not. Uncritical use of the expression ‘mental state’
in the philosophy of mind has done amazing damage.[46]
Many talk in a strongly reificatory way about mental states as if they were
things in us, rather than states we are in, and this, stitched in with the
whole long behaviourist-functionalist-strong-representationalist folly, has
greatly eased the way to finding it natural to conceive of beliefs, belief
states, and so on, as mentally contentful somethings that are ‘in us’ and are
rightly thought of as intrinsically mentally contentful quite independently of
our present experience.[47]
Facilis descensus Averno philosophico.
Consider Louis, a representative human
being, lying for our theoretical convenience in dreamless sleep during a
thirty-second period of time t.
Consider the portion of (concrete, physical) reality that consists of Louis,
which I will call the Louis-reality—the
L-reality for short (it is a rough
notion, for as a physical being Louis is enmeshed in wide-reaching physical
interactions, but it is serviceable and useful none the less).
Here is Louis.[48]
We truly ascribe beliefs, preferences and many other so-called ‘propositional
attitudes’ to him as he lies there at t,
and he undoubtedly has tens, hundreds of thousands of dispositions to behave in all sorts of ways, verbal and non-verbal.
Many, many disposition-ascribing mental
predicates are true of him, true without qualification. Many
propositional-content-ascribing predicates (e.g. ‘believes that p’, ‘prefers p’s being the case to q’s
being the case, and so on) are true of him. True enough. But there aren’t strictly
speaking any truly mentally contentful (or genuinely intentional) entities in
experienceless Louis, on the present view.[49]
So what it is about him, lying
experiencelessly there at t, that
makes it true to say that he believes that Mount Fuji is in Australia or that
every even number greater than two is the sum of two different prime numbers?
More particularly: What is it in the
L-reality that makes this true? Answer: a certain arrangement or synergy of
neurons in a certain state.[50]
Call this arrangement of neurons in a certain state N. By hypothesis N is not—does not constitute—a conscious,
experiential state. Is N none the less a genuinely mentally contentful,
intentional entity? Is it, considered in its total intrinsic being, which is
wholly non-experiential being, intrinsically directed at something? Surely
not—whatever has caused it to exist as it does. Louis’s brain has by hypothesis
only non-experiential being at t, and
we can imagine that it is (at t)
something whose properties are in principle wholly capturable by the terms and
techniques of neurophysiology and physics. Will they reveal any mental content,
or intentionality at t? No.
Many, many things are going on in Louis’s
brain, but nothing experiential is going on. Is anything intrinsically mentally
contentful going on—going on? The
phrase ‘going on’ makes it much more natural to say No. But now (shifting into
a larger metaphysical frame) consider the point that there is a fundamental
sense in which Louis’s having the beliefs he has at t is itself wholly a matter of things going on: the unceasing
sub-atomic furore, the unremitting atomic, molecular, cellular, neuronal,
macroelectrical, chemical activity—all a matter of humming fields in the
quantum vacuum, nothing truly intuitively solid to be found. The very existence
of matter—matter in time, matter-in-time—is fundamentally just a question of
process, of things going on. If so, there is a fundamental sense in which what
makes ascriptions of belief states to dreamless Louis true at t is wholly a matter of goings on in his brain at t, and we can ask again ‘Are these
goings on really a matter of truly mentally contentful goings on?’ I don’t
think so.
Take your superpsychocerebroscope and aim
it at Louis’s brain. One switch, two positions A and B. A reveals all
experiential goings on, B reveals all non-experiential goings on. You switch it
to A: nothing. You switch it to B: all the unbelievably complex goings on
accounted for in a perfected physics.[51]
Question: does it, when switched to B, reveal any truly mentally contentful
goings whose contents are what make the thousands of dispositional mental
predicates that are true of Louis true of him? No, say I.[52]
Imagine a future prosthesis that gives you
immediate mental access to a database carried on a hard disk stitched in under
your ribs (one had to go to make way, it’s happened before). It’s great (or is
it?): if someone asks you what the atomic numbers of mercury and platinum are,
and your wetware doesn’t know, it comes to your mind that they are 78 and 80
respectively as easily as the atomic number of gold (etched into your brain by
years of analytic philosophy). Certainly the information on the disk isn’t
intrinsically mentally contentful before you plug in. So does it become so
immediately you plug in? (We plugged in dreamless Louis at t1 without him feeling a thing.) It’s hard to see how
one could say No, on the view according to which dispositional phenomena can be
intrinsically mentally contentful. And I think that should be worrying.[53]
Dreamless Louis keeps things simple, but
you can also aim the superpsychocerebroscope at people who are awake and alert.
You will then find truly mentally contentful goings on—their current
experience—but you will not find any that make it the case that the many thousands
of standing beliefs (etc) that are truly ascribable to them are truly
ascribable to them.
I think Searle has something like this in
mind when he says that ‘what is going on in the brain is neurophysiological
processes [here he means non-experiential
goings on] and consciousness [experience] and nothing more’:[54]
when there is no consciousness or experience there is only non-experiential
neurophysiological process; hence there is no intrinsic content or
intentionality.
At certain points, however, Searle seems to
want to say that although states of belief are non-experiential they are none
the less intrinsically intentional states.[55]
I deny this, but it may well be that we differ only in emphasis, for he goes on
to say that
the ontology of mental states, at the time
they are unconscious, consists entirely in the existence of purely
neurophysiological phenomena.[56]
Here again by ‘purely neurophysiological
phenomena’ he means non-experiential phenomena, and I take the point to be that
they are phenomena that cannot really be said to be intrinsically mentally
contentful or (a fortiori) genuinely intentional, considered in themselves, in
their total physical being, any more than a CD can be said to be intrinsically
musically contentful, considered in itself. One’s dispositions—Louis’s
dispositions—may be what they may be; but neural phenomena in the absence of
experiential phenomena aren’t intrinsically about
anything, any more than words in a book are.[57]
The claim, then, is that all true, actual,
mental content is, necessarily, (occurrent) experiential content, and that
there isn’t any in the L-reality at t.[58]
A state of belief—a state of Louis in virtue of which it is true to say that he
believes that p at t—is not a matter of occurrent
experiential mental content, and there is no other kind (putting aside the
weaker thesis that mental content must be occurrent, but perhaps need not also
be experiential ). The incredibly natural picture according to which it is just
obvious that there is no real, actual mental content in the L-reality at t has become almost invisible to many
present-day analytic philosophers. But from the perspective of this picture,
the (standard) view that there is mental content in the L-reality at t1 is like the view that
there are intrinsically breakage-involving states or goings on in an fragile
but undisturbed object.
—But
ordinary thought endorses the view that there are intrinsically mentally
contentful stat inside the head of dreamless Louis, and that philosophy should
always treat the opinions of ordinary thought with respect.
True, but, first, ordinary thought is no
good general guide to philosophical or scientific truth. Second, even if
ordinary thought does unequivocally endorse the view that there are
intrinsically mentally contentful states in dreamless Louis, I very much doubt
that it endorses the view that dispositional
states are intrinsically mentally contentful. This point is hidden by the
current terminology of analytic philosophy, because it takes over sthe ordinary
words ‘belief’ and ‘believe’, uses them for things it classifies as (merely)
dispositional states, and unwittingly loses touch with ordinary thought, which
(it seems to me) thinks that there are intrinsically mentally contentful states
in dreamless Louis only in so far as it pictures them non-dispositionally, as little sentences, little packets of
intrinsic content, laid up in the head, available for activation by
consciousness, the ground of any
relevant dispositional truths.
11 Intentionality ≠ aboutness
So much for background. I am
now going to stage a Terminologiefest.
Many like to say that
intentionality is just aboutness or ofness, but I am going to put things
differently—at least until §18. I think the outright intentionality/aboutness
equation can set up bad habits of thought, elide distinctions and conceal—beg—a
central question. For while it’s obvious, terminological habituation aside,
that intentionality is a mental phenomenon, that that’s part of what
‘intentionality’—‘intentionality’ no
less—means, it’s also pretty irresistible to say that non-mental phenomena like
films, photographs, mirrors, puddles, books, pictures, road signs and so on can
be or contain representations of
things or can be about things. So I
will call intentionality, which is an
essentially mental phenomenon, ‘intentionality’ tout court, while allowing that aboutness-or-ofness,
‘aboutness’ for short, is not necessarily a mental phenomenon and has a much
wider range. A pool can reflect Mount Fuji and in that sense constitute or give
rise to a representation of Mount Fuji just as a photograph can. A mirror can
reflect an image of you so that there is a representation of you right in front
of you.[59]
Some may want to say that a mirror or its
states cannot really have aboutness because it cannot behave in any way (in some this impulse is deep). But then they
will have to deny aboutness to photographs and films, which are indisputably
about or of things. And this is not because they have what is sometimes called
‘derived intentionality’ (see the next section). They no more have derived
intentionality than a crack in the curtains that functions fortuitously as a camera obscura, casting a perfect
upside-down image of the view from a window onto the opposite wall. You don’t
need to have someone who intends to take a photograph of X, or indeed of
anything, to get a photograph of X.
—Cameras
are designed to do what they do. That’s why films and photographs have derived
intentionality, in having aboutness.
A thing physically identical to a loaded
and functioning camera could conceivably come into existence by cosmic accident
and produce admirable films and photographs. These would no more have derived
intentionality than all the naturally occurring camerae obscurae in the world.
12
‘Intrinsic’ intentionality, ‘derived’ ‘intentionality’
[[360What about this distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘derived’ intentionality? I have defined intentionality in such a way that all intentionality is intrinsic on the terms of the intrinsic/derived distinction, so I have no need for it as it stands, but I can distinguish between derived and underived aboutness—books and tapes of talks have the former, mirrors and photographs the latter,[60] and it is worth setting out the standard distinction.
If, acquainted with Mount Fuji, I type a one-page description of it, I produce something—a piece of paper P1 with marks on it—that is indubitably about Mount Fuji. So if you favour a terminology according to which intentionality just is aboutness, so that non-mental states and beings can be said to have intentionality, then you are committed to saying that P1 has intentionality. But P1 has intentionality only because of my intentions in making the marks I made: only because of the nature of certain (Mount-Fuji-directed) mental states S1 I was in when I wrote what I wrote. It does not have intrinsic intentionality, only derived intentionality. In this idiom, anything that has derived X-intentionality must be produced by something that is or has been in intrinsically X-intentional states, and must stand in the same sort of relation (it is at least a causal relation) to those states as P1 stands to S1.
Imagine, after all, an object P2 qualitatively identical to P1 that comes into existence by cosmic accident. It looks just like P1, but P1 is about Mount Fuji and P2 is not. Imagine a computer programmed to send random sequences of shapes to a printer that produces a piece of paper P3 on which the marks are qualitatively indistinguishable from the marks on P1; and so on. Neither P2 nor P3 is about Mount Fuji, although both would suffice to allow someone who took them to Japan to identify Mount Fuji. (Would any of P2-P4 come to be about Mount Fuji if accidentally inserted into the camera ready copy for a guide book to Japan at just the point at which P1 was meant to be inserted? You can say what one like, I think.)]]
13 Liberal aboutness
So aboutness is liberal, catholic,
ecumenical, in my terminology. If you want to say that a thermostat has
aboutness, fine. You can say that it contains a representation of temperature.
One can say the same sort of thing about a phototropic beetle that has, let us
suppose, no experience, even if one is unsure about sunflowers. Perhaps one can
say that the fingerprint on the guitar, which makes it possible to pick you out
from 6 billion others, has aboutness (the guitar carries information that
uniquely identifies you). Perhaps one can say it about tree rings. According to
Mach’s Principle ‘the slopping of
your drink in…a…lurching aeroplane is attributable to the influence of all the
matter in the universe’.[61]
So if one accepts Mach’s Principle one may want to say that everything is about
everything else.[62] One may
also want to say that R1, an experienceless robot that travels round a room
littered with multicoloured geometrical shapes picking up all and only the blue
cubes and dropping them in a box, is in states that have aboutness.
14 Robots and aboutness
R1, also known as Luke, is built and
programmed by us to perform the cube task straight out of the box. Among its
variants is R2, hardware-identical to R1 but ‘programmed’ by a freak burst of radiation that makes it
software-identical and hence behaviourally-identical to R1. Then there is R3,
hardware-identical to R1 and programmed by us, not in such a way that it can
perform the cube task straight off, but rather in such a way that it learns
to perform the cube task. And then there is R4, also known as Fluke, physically
(hardware and software) identical to R1
although it came into existence by cosmic fluke. R5, physically (hardware and
software) identical to R3, also came into existence by cosmic accident.
None of R1-R5 have or can intentionality on
the present terms, but what about aboutness? I don’t really mind what one says.
I’m being tight with intentionality and am happy to be loose with aboutness.
Some may say No to all of R1-R5. Some may say No to R2 and R4 and Yes to R1, R3
and R5. Some may say Yes only to R1 and R3 (a kind of ‘derived’
‘intentionality’ filtering through in R3’s case).
Table 1
15 Key terms
Here now are the key terms, the first three
of which I have already introduced.
I: intentionality,
genuine intentionality, necessarily a mental matter. This natural use in no way
belittles the talents and riches of thermostats, robots, books, films, and so
on.
A: aboutness,
allowed to reflections in puddles, road signs, thermostats, etc, as a matter of
definition. (‘Aboutness’ behaves like the common unhelpful wide use of
‘intentionality’ in philosophy.)
E: experience:
all the phenomena of consciousness, of ‘phenomenology’ including ‘cognitive
phenomenology’ (§7)
To these I now add
R: a representation
is necessarily a representation of
something. A representation is not just any sort of content (this is an abuse
of words). Nor is every content a representation (’representationalism’ is
false if it says this).
and
C: content.
I take this term as it stands to include even the content of a bucket, but what
is in question in this context is either
RC: representational
content, which is necessarily of or about something
or
MC: mental
content. experiential content (cognitive-phenomenological content, sensory
content, mood content, etc), also non-experiential propositional/cognitive
content.
My overall (terminologico-substantive)
position can be set out in a table (I use ‘of course’ rather than ‘yes’ where I
take a particular claim to be undisputed by all serious participants in the
debate). [Table
2 about here]
® |
I |
A |
R |
C |
E |
EB |
I |
— |
of course |
of course |
of course |
yes(!) |
yes |
A |
no |
— |
of course |
of course |
no |
no |
R |
no |
yes |
— |
of course |
no |
no |
C |
no |
no |
no |
— |
no |
no |
E |
no |
no |
no |
of course |
— |
of course |
C as RC |
no |
yes |
of course |
— |
no |
no |
C as MC |
no |
no |
no |
— |
yes(?) |
yes |
or in a list
15 Some comments
[[xxxwork in progress]]
Perhaps the first thing to say is that to
allow aboutness to experienceless beings and their states (A4) while denying
them intentionality (I4) is not to downplay the connection between aboutness
and intentionality. One might even say that states that have aboutness have
everything needed for intentionality except experientiality. Robot Luke’s
states have true aboutness, given the present terminology, and so do my states
as I look for blue cubes. The difference is only that my states have
intentionality and Luke’s do not. (I will try to address a problem this raises
in the final section.)
In line 3, I take it to be clear that
R2 [R ® A]
not, importantly, because ‘representation’ is a de
facto synonym of ‘content’ and ‘representationalism’ is right to hold that
every content has representational content, but (once again) simply because
anything that is a representation is necessarily a representation of something.
In line 4, I take all of C1, C2
and C3 to be false. As for
C1 [C ® I]
contents—e.g. the contents of a book or
photo—aren’t necessarily mental or experiential, and so aren’t intentional even
if they have aboutness.
As for
C3 [C
® R]
not all contents are representational;
again, ‘representation’ is not some sort of synonym for ‘content’ (a ruinous
word-fudge), and a content needn’t be a representation. The Abstract
Expressionists were not wrong about this. A musical note, whether considered as
a pattern of airwaves or as an experiential content, as heard, need not be—is
not—a representation of anything. A taste need not be—is not—a representation
of anything. Any theory that suggests otherwise is false and word-bending.
As for
C2 [C
® A]
contents needn’t be about anything at all.
This is clearly true of the contents of pockets, packets, buckets, baskets and
stomachs, but even if we restrict our attention to mental contents they needn’t
be about anything. A sensation of physical pain is experienced as having a
location, and it has a physical cause, and is itself a physical entity,[63]
but its sensory-experiential qualitative content isn’t about that location, or about
that cause, or about itself. It
just isn’t about anything, and this
is plain to unprejudiced (terminologically straight) reflection. The same holds
for the sensory-experiential qualitative character of yellow-experience.
This is not to deny that the overall experiential qualitative
character of a yellow-experience may involve a sense of aboutness
(directedness, internal intentionality), and may also have full external
aboutness (and hence full intentionality) in being actually about a feature of
the world. Nor is it to deny that to be aware of anything is to be in an state
with aboutness, with or without any internal intentionality (§4): if a new born baby is aware of something
yellow, then it is in an aboutness state specifically in having
yellow-experience.
The overall experiential qualitative
character of yellow-experience may very well have aboutness, then; but it need
not. Suppose our universe is a black-and-white universe, i.e. a universe in
which all sentient creatures see only in black-grey-white, although we humans
sometimes have colour experiences—red, green, yellow—with our eyes shut in the
dark or in dreams. I take it that the experience of yellow would not represent
anything at all (though see three paragraphs below) . Would it represent
whatever caused it to occur? It might be a reliable sign of its cause to the
learned, but it would not represent it; it would not be a representation of it.[64]
Would it represent the brain condition that it was? No, it would simply be the brain condition that it was.
Can’t a thing represent itself? Certainly. A sentence can represent itself
(‘This very sentence is puzzling’), and perhaps a picture can, featuring a picture
of itself.[65] But the
sensation of yellow, in this story, or indeed any other, is not a case of this
kind.
‘Representation’ and ‘representational’ are
‘success’ or ‘factive’ words. If a content is a representation of Q, then Q
exists. If a content seems to be a representation of something but there does
not in fact exist anything of which it is a representation, then it is not
really a representation after all. A thing can’t be a representation unless
something exists for it to be a representation of.[66]
But is it even possible for a content to
seem to be a representation of something without there being anything of which
it is a representation? Arguably not. The thought makes perfect sense—is
true—in many ordinary speech contexts, but it can be illuminatingly denied in
some philosophical contexts. Thus of every content (e.g. a hallucination, or a
thought about Father Christmas) that seems to be a representation of something
although it is naturally said not to be of anything, one can say that it is always
at least a representation of a content-type or idea-type, where the type is to
be grasped by considering its exemplification in whoever’s content is in
question. One can say the same about yellow-experience in the black-and-white
universe.[67]
I think this may be all one needs to say
about the whole miasma of ‘intentional inexistence’.
In line 5, I take it that
E3 [E
® C]
is obviously true,[68]
while all of E1, E2 and E4 are false. As for
E4 [E ® R]
all experiences have content, but not all
contents are representations, for all love (still less is content nothing but
representation). E4 raises the same issues as C3, and I propose to repeat
myself. Consider an experience that consists of a very peculiar sensation, S,
of elation. It may be caused by a very specific bodily condition (it is itself
a bodily—neural—condition), and it may be a sure indicator of the presence of
that condition for those in the know, but it is not a representation of it in any remotely natural use of the word
‘representation’, any more than a particular sort of flame is a representation
of an act of match striking. Nor is the experiential qualitative character of S
a representation of the non-experiential being of the physical thing S itself
is.[69]
Nor is it a representation of the sensation-type of which it is an instance. It
is just an instance of it. S’s experiential qualitative character is what it
is, it is its experiential content,
and it doesn’t represent anything at
all. To think otherwise is pure Procrusteanism.[70]
The converses of E2-E4, i.e. C4, A4, and
R4, are also false on the present terms—even when we exclude the content of
buckets and baskets and restrict ourselves to representational content, books,
pictures, mirrors, puddles, mirrors, robots, and so on.
I4 [[I
® E]
is also widely held to be false, on the
ground that beliefs are intentional mental states and that Louis has beliefs
about things even when he is in dreamless sleep, but I have proposed (in §9)
that it is true: that only occurrent and indeed experiential phenomena have genuine intentionality.[71]
If you think this is silly (and not just false, say), I think that this is only
because you have acquired different terminological habits.
What, finally, about ‘representational
content’ and ‘mental content’? There are no surprises here. When we replace
‘content’ with ‘representational content’ we get
RC1 [RC ® I] no
RC2 [RC ® A] yes
RC3 [RC ® R] (of
course)
RC4 [RC ® E] no
RC5 [RC ® EB] no
and when replace ‘content’ with ‘mental
content’ we get
MC1 [MC ® I] no
MC2 [MC ® A] no
MC3 [MC ® R] no
MC4 [MC ® E] yes(!)
MC5 [MC ® EB] yes
Comparing this with the original claims
about content
C1 [C ® I] no
C2 [C ® A] no
C3 [C ® R] no
C4 [C ® E] no
C5 [C ® EB] no
The three switches from No to Yes in lines
2, 4 and 5, as we move from the C claims to the RC
and MC claims, are immediately comprehensible. As for C2 and RC2,
content doesn’t imply aboutness but representational content does. As for C4
and MC4, this is the position argued for in §9. As for C5 and MC5, content
doesn’t imply an experiential being but mental content does. Many fruitless
misunderstandings (some are very fruitful) have arisen because of blurrings
between different uses of ‘content’.
Intentionality and experience
May we now
at last begin? I think we may—if we have not already finished. And the
questions we come back to are simple. On my terms only experiential states are
properly called intentional states, but a large and substantive question
remains: What exactly is the nature of
the relation between experience and intentionality—whether we are considering a
blue cube, Cube, that we can see
right in front of us, Mount Fuji ten thousand miles away, the tallest tree in
the Amazonian jungle (assumed to exist, location unknown), marshmallow
camshafts, p, or round squares? What exactly does my conscious thinking
about Cube add to everything in robots Luke and Fluke that is involved in their
efficient search for Cube, their successful location of it, and their
depositing it in the box? What exactly does my conscious experience add to my
thinking about p, given that Luke and Fluke (now equipped with a maths
module add-on) are now smoothly engaged in calculating p’s
decimal expansion?[72]
I will mostly restrict my attention to concrete intentionality, intentionality with respect to real, concrete phenomena, present or absent. Some may think that ignoring thoughts about marshmallow camshafts and so on must distort any treatment of intentionality, and certainly there is more to say about such things (if the paragraph on p. xxx isn’t enough), but I will put them aside for now.
Let me establish a basic case. A and B are both are having qualitatively identical experience—call it
‘X-experience’. It is experience as of thinking about, and perhaps visualizing,
a statue. In fact, it is just like the experience someone might have if
thinking about, and perhaps visualizing, a certain real statue X on Easter
Island. And in fact A’s X-experience
has normal causal links to seeing X or pictures of X, reading about X, and so
on, although A has no memory of where
X is. B’s X-experience is caused by a
freak brainstorm.
A’s
X-experience is about X; it has
classic intentionality with respect to X. B’s
X-experience isn’t; it has no intentionality with respect to X. It is not about
any concrete object, although B thinks
it is. So the two experiences differ dramatically in their aboutness and
intentionality. But the only relevant difference between them lies in their
causes; it does not (by hypothesis) lie in their intrinsic experiential
qualitative character as experiences. Nor is there any relevant difference
between A and B so far as their behavioural dispositions (including their
mental-activity dispositions) are concerned, for we may suppose that they are
identical in this respect.[73]
It is the difference in the causes of their experiences that makes the
difference in respect of X-intentionality.
It is useful to ask why A’s X-experience is about X and B’s is not because it is so obvious that
the difference between them can only be a matter of the difference in their
causes. And the causal difference that explains why A’s X-experience has this aboutness and B’s X-experience does not is not itself philosophically mysterious.
It is not significantly different from the causal difference that explains why
this picture is a picture of Salome (it is a photograph or portrait of Salome),
whereas this qualitatively identical picture is not, since it is a work of pure
imagination. We may think ‘How can a
thought be about an object?’ or ‘How can one thing possibly be about another at all?’ as if there were
some deep further difficulty. But once one has set aside any difficulty raised
by the requirement that genuine intentionality involves experience it is
arguable that there is as much mystery remaining in the (concrete)
intentionality of a thought of an object as there is in the fact that a mirror
or an expanse of water can carry a reflection of an object other than itself.
Such concrete intentionality is just a matter of routine causation as it affects
a certain very special sort of representational system, one that involves
experience.[74] Move a
mirror or a film camera round a room and it will represent all sorts of things.
Move Louis round a room, paralysed and with a fixed gaze, and he will represent
all sorts of things. There is far more to Louis’s representations than the
camera’s (one can substitute a paralysed baby to reduce the difference along
one dimension), but they also have something fundamentally in common (to reduce
the difference along another dimension one can substitute a fabulously more
complicated but still experienceless future ward-nurse robot with
object-recognition, depth-perception, etc software).
17 The No Problem Thesis
‘But how does the thought—the mental episode—make and secure a
connection to the thing?’ It doesn’t. No mere act or episode of thought can
make such a connection. In the imagined case A and B are identical in
respect of the fact that it seems to them that they are mentally in touch with
a particular thing. Both have the same experience of subjective conviction that
a particular object is targeted in thought; both their mental episodes have
internal intentionality, phenomenological purporting-to-be-aboutness, as do the
matching mental episodes in their Vat-Twins and Instant-Twins. Only A’s thought really has X-intentionality,
but it isn’t as if anything about the total current experiential being (or the total non-experiential neuronal being)
of A’s thought episode is sufficient
to make it connect unerringly with the thing it purports to be about, for then B’s thought episode would have
X-intentionality, just as A’s does,
and it does not. None of A’s
behavioural (including mental-activity) dispositions
make the difference, for B’s are
the same. It is, to repeat, mere causal history that makes the difference and
makes it true that A’s thought
connects to X while B’s does not.
Experience may itself be thought especially puzzling, considered as a
representational medium, although it is not clear why it should be. So be it.
The present claim is just that the fact that A’s mental episode has X-intentionality
while B’s does not should not be
thought to be part of why A’s is
puzzling. If there is a puzzle, it is all there in B. If there’s a puzzle, it is just a matter of the experiential
qualitative character of certain sorts of experience—the phenomenological fact
that such thoughts can have the quality of directedness or
purporting-to-be-aboutness, where this is a phenomenological
quality, even if there is nothing they are actually about.[75]
This is the No Problem Thesis (the thesis that there is no special deep extra puzzle raised by the existence of intentionality over and above any puzzle that is raised by the existence of experience), still waiting for its final defence. Intentionality raises no special puzzle for materialism or ‘naturalism’ over and above any puzzle raised by the existence of experience and its many modes and forms: yellow-experience, depression-experience, X-experience, thinking-that-p-experience, and so on.[76] And it is unclear why we should find the experiential qualitative character of intentionality-involving experience any more fundamentally puzzling than the experiential qualitative character of merely sensory, non-intentionality-involving experience, even if its content wonderfully more complicated. Is it fundamentally puzzling that Fido can think about Felix, and about cats in general, and can believe—know—that you’re going for a walk (perhaps he is physically paralysed but wholly conscious)? If not, why is it fundamentally puzzling in the human as opposed to the canine case? It isn’t. It’s just that the things we can think about are much more complicated, and often extremely puzzling in themselves. But these puzzles are not puzzles about the existence and nature of intentionality, although they are the source of the belief that there is a puzzle about intentionality.
Turning to Luke and Fluke, p and Cube, many are inclined to
say, ‘My thought is really about p and about Cube, I really have p and Cube in mind, Luke and
Fluke don’t. Their states and operations are not really about p or Cube at all, and the same goes for my classical zombie twin: a
creature outwardly and behaviourally identical to me, although not physically
identical to me.[77] Its states
and operations are not really about anything at all. Only in the experiential
case are there truly contentful states that are truly intentional states.’ In
this natural way of speaking, intentionality and aboutness, sundered in §10,
are reunited again, taken to be the same thing.
This thought is extremely
natural and the intuition it expresses is sound, but it raises the following
question: How exactly is experience supposed to make the crucial difference in respect
of intentionality? The answer seems to be that all experience adds, in bringing
about the presence of intentionality, is itself. Experienceless entities can
have everything else that could possibly be needed, so far as qualifying for
intentionality is concerned. All that is really relevantly extra in the world,
in the case of the experiencing beings, is just the occurrence of experience
that has a certain more or less complexly contentful experiential qualitative
character. I say ‘just’, but it is hardly a small matter, given the staggering
phenomenological complexity of human experience, thephenomenological, internal intentionality features.
The claim, then, is that there
is (as the No Problem Thesis says) no special problem of intentionality over
and above the problem of experience (such as it is), so far as the task of
giving a naturalistic, materialistic account of mind is concerned. As Luke,
Fluke, and I face Cube, all that is relevantly extra in my case is the presence
of experience—my possession of purely experiential content with a certain
qualitative character. And it is not as if true intentionality is somehow
mysteriously emergent with respect
to, and somehow irreducible to, the total phenomenon of
[a]
experience with a certain experiential qualitative character
occurring in an entity that
also possesses any
[b]
non-experiential properties necessary for intentionality,
which I am taking to be
describable at a level of generality that allows us to say that we and
experienceless machines can have them in common,
together with
[c] certain
basic causal-contact properties
also specified at a level of
generality that allows us to say that Luke, Fluke and I have them in common,
Cubewise. (Obviously we are not exactly the same in relevant causal respects,
even when these are generally described, because the causality must flow
through to condition my experience, in my case, and there is no experience at
all in their case.) Intentionality doesn’t emerge from [a] + [b] + [c] in some
mysterious and exciting sense of ‘emerge’.[78]
The existence of intentionality simply consists—purely additively—in the existence of
the total phenomenon [a] + [b] + [c], and does not in any way transcend it.
This just is intentionality,
considered as a natural phenomenon. This is my proposal. What else might one suppose
there to be?
This fits the No Problem
Thesis, for the existence of [b] is complicated but not fundamentally
problematic from the naturalistic point of view; the existence of [a] raises no
problem other than the problem (if any) of experience—experience with all its
astonishingly complicated forms—and thus wholly concords with the thesis; and
the existence of [c] is again not fundamentally problematic from the
naturalistic point of view. Put experience aside, and everything else about
intentionality is a matter of causal relations and non-experiential properties
that naturalists already take to be wholly naturalistically tractable. And as
for the existence of experience—well, it is, to repeat, no more puzzling, from
the point of view of realistic materialism
or naturalism, than the existence of a stone. So intentionality analyses into
clear components. It falls out rather lightly from the existence of beings that
have evolved the capacity to discriminate, classify, represent, and order their
environment, and do this in experiential or conscious mode. Any further complications lie only in the
complexity of the things we can think about.[79]
—But [a] and[b] ± [c] cannot be supposed to secure or constitute
determinacy of content, of the sort we are sure we can attain, for thoughts
that purport to be about things.
The reply is simple. It is an
illusion to suppose that there is any kind of determinacy of content above and
beyond what can be secured or constituted by the existence of [a] and [b] ±
[c].[80]
19 ‘Behavioural’ intentionality and real meaning
I want to take a final summary
run at the topic. In order to do so I will climb back into the idiom of much present-day
discussion and take ‘intentionality’ and ‘aboutness’ to be effectively
equivalent terms.
Suppose some continue to insist
that experienceless machines can reasonably be said to be in intentional states
or have intentionality. We may then reply that these machines can at most have behavioural intentionality,
intentionality that is attributable essentially on the basis of their behaviour
and causal interactions as they move around or compute things. (The case of
undesigned accidental machines like Fluke is the best one to consider.)
If the supporters of the
experienceless insist that behavioural intentionality is to be counted as full
intentionality, they back No Problem Thesis: there is no deep problem of
intentionality when to comes to giving a naturalistic, materialistic account of
mind because intentionality can be correctly attributed to certain
experienceless (and undesigned) entities simply on the basis of the way they
behave. Facts about intentionality are reducible without residue to facts about
experienceless mechanism, disposition, and behaviour that are not deeply
problematic on any conception (however unrealistic) of the naturalistic,
materialist programme in philosophy of mind. Some creatures also have
experience, on this view, and there is indeed (according to unrealistic
materialism) a special puzzle about the existence of experience, but the intentionality
properties of experiencing entities are not deeply problematic, and are
indeed quite independent of the fact that they have experience.
Like many others, I think mere
behavioural intentionality can never amount to true intentionality, however
complex the behaviour, and that one cannot have intentionality unless one is an
experiencing being. I think, in fact, that if you allow intentionality to
experienceless beings on the basis of their behaviour, then you will not in the
end have any good reason to deny it to puddles. I certainly think one should be
very impressed by the respects in which behaviourally adept experienceless beings
can seem to have perceptual and conceptual intentionality. But when this
instructive episode is over an old and rightly irrepressible thought should
reassert itself, especially in the case of conceptual intentionality: the
thought that there is a fundamental sense in which there is no meaning (or
reference) at all, and hence no
conceptual intentionality at all, in a world in which there is no consciousness
or experience.[81]
On this view, meaning is always
a matter of something meaning something to
something, the second something being, necessarily, an experiential being.
And reference occurs only when an experiential being refers to something. There
is no meaning or reference, hence no conceptual intentionality, in an
experienceless universe in which the words of the Bill of Rights exist,
perfectly formed in 120-point Times Roman, as part of the growth of a fungus;
nor in a universe in which behaviourally complex organisms have evolved and
pursue intricate survival strategies in interacting with their environment but
are experienceless. There is no semantic evaluability, no truth, no falsity, no
accuracy or inaccuracy. None of these properties are possessed by anything
until experience begins. There is in fact a fundamental sense in which meaning, and hence intentionality, exists
only in the conscious present of experience. The conscious moment may seem
a most unsatisfactory item from the point of view of theory, but there it is. I
think one can’t get far in thinking about intentionality without a vivid
appreciation of the sense in which this is true.
20 ‘Yes, but what is the relation between
experience and intentionality?’
—You still haven’t given me any clear picture of the relation
between experience and intentionality. Imagine a sophisticated creature K that
has intensely complex behavioural or ‘as if’ intentionality. It looks after
horses, and does so very competently. Imagine further that it has genuine but
wholly internally caused colour experience, and no other sort of experience,
and that its colour experience plays no part whatever in its capacity to behave
just as if it had intentionality. Here the mere presence of experience is
obviously not enough to justify the attribution of genuine intentionality. This
is obviously not a satisfactory case of [a] + [b] ± [c]. So what is? What more
does K need in the way of [a]? What exactly must [a], the
experiential-qualitative-character component, be like in the case of any
particular genuinely intentional experiential episode E1 on the part
of a particular subject of experience S? It must no doubt have external causes,
in the case of a thought about an external object, but I’m putting that aside.
What I want to know is how exactly
[a] contributes to E1’s intentionality, given that S, in having E1,
fulfils all the non-experiential properties necessary for E1 to be
an intentional episode? And here I am not interested in the primitive sorts of
intentionality that you have allowed to new born babies, but in conceptual
intentionality—the conceptual intentionality involved in your deploying the
concept horse, say, when seeing a horse, or when mistaking a
rock for a horse (K can make the same mistake). Suppose we have a decent
account of all the causal and non-experiential conditions whose fulfilment is
necessary for a being to count as possessing the concept horse.[82]
What are we then to say about experience? How does it fit in? What must the
experiential qualitative character of any genuine conscious deployment of horse be like? What is the lower bound
on acceptable forms of experience in such a case?
Well, I’m not sure there’s much
one can say. One can cite all the vital phenomena of phenomenological
directedness or internal intentionality, which are lacking in K’s case, and to
do that is already to have done a lot. But it is unclear how one might be much
more specific about what it is experientially that distinguishes cases of
genuine conscious deployment of concepts like horse from cases, like K’s, in which there is
experience of some sort, and all the right ‘as if’ or behavioural
intentionality, but no genuine deployment of concepts at all. One can produce a
whole line of further possible creatures, equipping them with progressively
more complicated forms of experience, and establishing plausible causal links
between their experiences and horses, but it is not clear when one will be able
to say ‘This is enough, this is it’. And here it is worth considering the way
in which children grow into concepts and, more generally, the fact that there
are various ways in which one can have thoughts involving concepts that one
grasps only incompletely.[83]
One doesn’t have to study these
obscurities for long to see why analytic philosophy has wished to separate the
issue of conceptual intentionality so sharply from the issue of experience, and
yet the fact remains that experienceless entities cannot have intentionality. A
pool of water reflecting a tree in the wind does not have intentionality. Some
experienceless entities are so constituted that their interactions with their
environment are mediated by highly complex internal processes, but these can
never make them mean or refer to anything. A superrobot can behave as if it had
the concept horse
or gold. It can produce ‘It looks like
gold (a horse) but is it really gold (a horse)?’ behaviour. But complex
behaviour cannot make a fundamental difference. If any experienceless entity
can have intentionality, a pool of water can.
If this is just the expression
of a terminological preference, so be it. It is a terminological preference
that marks a real and profoundly important difference in nature, in reality.
Think of Mount Fuji. You have just done something no experienceless creature
can do; not just (trivially) because you are the host of an experiential
episode, but because you are the host of an occurrence that is truly and
intrinsically about something, that is a truly intentional occurrence, given
its experiential (cognitive-phenomenological) character. This is a hard fact.
It may be an elusive fact, but it is no less hard, and it is a core feature of
the philosophy of mind that some of its central, proprietary facts are like
this one. Some philosophers have a conception of philosophical theory that
makes this hard to accept, even intolerable, but no one can get to first base
(there is a scholastic heaven in philosophy of mind situated some way short of
first base) without grasping such facts. The main reason why they so often get
sidelined in contemporary ‘naturalistic’ analytic philosophy is, first, that
they sit uneasily with a patently inadequate conception of materialism and,
second, that they don’t lend themselves to theory building.
At this point those who
champion intentionality for the experienceless may feel they have the
dialectical advantage, because we their opponents seem unable to give any
precise specification of the sorts of experiential qualitative character that
are necessary for genuine intentionality in particular cases. And we who
continue to insist that only experiencing beings can have intentionality may
feel our position to be fragile, theoretically thin. We may feel that we cannot
reasonably maintain it unless we can give a more substantive answer to the
question that keeps recurring: How exactly does the experiential qualitative
character of experience contribute to the constitution of the intentional
content of thoughts or representations in a particular case?
I think, though, that this
reaction is a mistake—a large philosophical mistake. There is no need to worry.
When we insist that experience is necessary for intentionality, we cannot go
far in giving a precise description of what sort of experience is necessary in
any particular case, but the shining truth remains: we have cognitively rich
experiential lives, we think consciously and precisely about particular things,
triangles, justice, lemon trees, philosophers, and all sorts of ps and qs. Whatever the differences between us, each of us knows, from his
or her own case, what the experience of conceptually rich, object-directed
conscious thought is like. We have such experience almost all the time we are
awake, and often when we are asleep. The phenomenon in question is as real as
any other natural phenomenon, and it just is the natural phenomenon of
intentionality. It is at least the natural phenomenon of internal intentionality;[84]
and if we are indeed located in a world in the way that we suppose ourselves to
be, then it is also (almost always) the phenomenon of external intentionality.
Conclusion: when we consider
intentionality as something that threatens to pose a problem for naturalism as
materialism, we find nothing about it that poses a deep philosophical problem,
unless the experience that it essentially involves creates a deep problem. And
if we are real, realistic materialists we see that experience does not pose a
deep philosophical problem either,
although there is much in this world that we do not understand.
Appendix 1 Are there occurrent non-experiential
phenomena that are truly mentally contentful phenomena?
Appendix 2 Diaphanousness and Transparency:
exaggerated and theoretically abused. Reid’s corrective
Appendix 3 Insubstantiality and Determinacy: two
phenomenological properties of thought
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[1] I qualify the word
‘qualitative’ by ‘experiential’ because experiences also have non-experiential
qualitative character according to standard materialism (every non-relational
property of a thing contributes to its qualitative character).
[2] The
plural-accepting, count-noun form of the word ‘experience’ remains available
for talking of experienceS as things that
have non-experiential being as well as experiential being. It is a standard
(universal ) materialist assumption that experiences have non-experiential
being as well as experiential being, and I am going to take it for granted in
what follows, although it can be challenged (see Strawson 2002).
Note
that one cannot say, on identity-theory-style grounds, that it may be that to
refer to the experiential being of an experience just is to refer to its
non-experiential being because they are in fact the same thing. They are by
definition not the same thing; one might as well say that it may be that A and
not-A are the same thing. It is completely different to claim that a particular
experiential phenomenon is just a matter of neuronal goings on, so that to
refer to it just is to refer to neuronal goings on. This, I take it, is true.
[3] Argument is a small part of
philosophy. It is not its point or heart or essence, as some think. It is a
handmaiden, an underlabourer, sometimes indispensable when carrying out the
business of philosophy: the search for truth.
[4] Intentionality and aboutness
are dyadic relations, and as far as I can see they are non-reflexive,
non-symmetric and non-transitive. Non-reflexive:
a thought can be about itself (‘this very thought is puzzling’) or (much more
commonly) not. Non-symmetrical: X’s
present thought (‘I [X] wonder what it is that you [Y] are thinking about now’)
can be about your present thought both when your present thought is about my
present thought (‘I [Y] wonder what it is you [X] are thinking about now’)—
evolution has seen to it that this situation is quite common—and when it is about
Alpha Centauri. Non-transitive. X’s
thought can be about Y’s thought and Y’s thought can be about Z’s thought
whether or not X’s thought is also about Z’s thought. Moving from
intentionality to aboutness: a book can be partly about itself or not, two
books can be about each other or not, my thought T can be about book U and book
U can be about V without T being about V (I may not know what U is about).
The aboutness relation is also unconnected in the domain of the actual universe, on most
understandings of what aboutness is, and of what entities there are in the
universe, and of what relations hold between them. It is arguable that the
aboutness relation is connected in Leibniz’s universe—so long as A can be
allowed to be about B (by pre-established harmony) without there being any
causal connection between A and B—and also in a universe which contains an
omniscient—or if you like omniputant—god. Aboutness may also be connected in a
godless non-Leibnizian universe such as I take our universe to be, given
certain claims in current physics and a broad understandings of the notions of
aboutness (and information).
[5] Or has existed; I will omit
this qualification.
[6] Let us not speak weirdly of
‘intentional inexistence’; it changes nothing here. I say something about it at
the end of §17.
[7] I am taking it for granted
that only experiencing beings can be in mental
states. Why bother to say this? Only because some philosophers have tried
to realign even the word ‘mental’ in such a way that experienceless being can
be said to be in mental states.
[8] See Loar xxx..
[9] I am assuming there is
something it is like, experientially, to be a new born gosling.
[10] No realistic materialist can
be any sort of ‘eliminativist’ with respect to consciousness.
[11] It must be said that many
materialists have fulfilled them.
[12] Some today use
the word ‘content’, in talking of mental content, to mean only propositional or
conceptual or cognitive content. This use has led to much confusion and I am
going to shun it. No serious conception of mental content can possibly exclude
non-conceptual experiential qualitative content, sensory content, phenomenal
content, whatever you want to call it (I return to ‘content’ in §17 and §20).
[13] Terminological habits can
grip as strongly as dietary prohibitions or class-A drugs.
[14] By ‘concrete’ I simply mean
‘not abstract’. It is natural to think that any really existing thing is ipso
facto concrete, non-abstract, in which case ‘concrete’ is redundant, but some
philosophers have liked to say that numbers (for example) are real
things—objects that really exist, but are abstract.
[15] I use ‘phenomenon’ as a
completely general word for any sort of existent that carries no implication as
to ontological category (the trouble with the general word ‘entity’ is that it
is now standardly understood to refer specifically to things or substances).
Note that someone who agrees that physical phenomena are all
there are but finds no logical incoherence in the idea that physical things
could be put together in such a way as to give rise to non-physical things can
define materialism as the view that every real, concrete phenomenon that there
is or could be in the universe
is physical (Brian Mclaughlin triggered this point).
[16] Locke 1690, Hume 1739,
Priestley 1777, Kant 1781/7, Russell 1927a, 1927b, Eddington 1928, Chomsky
1968, 1994, 1995.
[17] Descartes’s failure to see
this point—Arnauld pointed it out almost immediately—was perhaps his biggest
mistake.
[18] Russell 1927b: 125.
[19] 1956: 153; my emphasis.
[20] 1927a: 402; my emphasis. (Compare
Lockwood 1989: 159: ‘Consciousness…provides us with a kind of ‘window’ on to
our brains, making possible a transparent grasp of a tiny corner of material
reality that is in general opaque to us…. The qualities of which we are
immediately aware, in consciousness, precisely are some at least of the intrinsic qualities that the states and
processes that go to make up the material world—more specifically, states and
processes within our own brains. This was Russell’s suggestion.’)
[21] 3: 303
[22] 4: 40.
[23] 4: 34 1817: 219.
[24] 1928: 258-60; my emphases in
bold. One may compare Eddington’s notion of something’s being mind-stuff in the
sense of ‘not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness’ to
Chalmers’s notion of the ‘protophenomenal’ (1996: ch. 4).
[25] 1928: 276-7.
[26] Chomsky is very good on this
point, and his advocacy of ‘methodological naturalism’ is in very much the same
spirit; see e.g. Chomsky 1995: 1-10. see also Mental Reality xxx.
[27] See Strawson 1994, ch 1.4, Pitt forthcoming. The familiar notion of a sensory modality
needs to be subsumed under the more general notion of experiential modality. Each sensory modality is an experiential
modality, but there are others, even apart from the experiential modalities of
mood: thought experience, notably, is an experiential modality to be reckoned
alongside other experiential modalities. (One could say that propositional-content-entertaining experience
is an experiential modality which covers thought as well as a central
(phenomenological) aspect of all other propositional attitudes, just as sensory
experience is an experiential modality that covers visual, auditory, tactual,
etc experience.)
[28] When Searle
(1992: 60) says that ‘beliefs...are actually experienced as part of our mental
life’, I take it that by ‘beliefs’ he here means conscious thoughts that are
occurrent entertainings of the contents of beliefs. See also Siewert (1998),
Pitt (2003).
[29] To say this is
not to say that meaning-experience is anything less than it is. It is to say
that the qualitative character of experience is much more than some have
supposed.
[30] This is analogous
to the ‘transparency’ or ‘diaphanousness’ of ordinary visual experience
stressed, exaggerated, and theoretically abused by ‘representationalists’ (see
Appendix 1): one’s mind is taken up
with the sense of the thought in such a way that it is very hard to think about
the experience of having the thought.
[31] See Appendix 3 for a comment
on this intangibility.
[32] Slightly more precisely:
there is the way your experience is specifically in virtue of the fact that you
automatically (and involuntarily) experience the sounds you hear as
representing that p, for some
proposition p.
[33] See further Strawson 1994:
4-13, 182-183, Ayers 1991:1.277-288. I originally adopted the term ‘cognitive
phenomenology’ when discussing the experience of being a free agent (Strawson
1986: 30, 55, 70, 96, 107-109).
[34] To this extent I am
disinclined to follow Siewert in taking assessability for truth or falsity as
criterial for intentionality, at least in so far as assessability for truth or
falsity presupposes some sort of distinctively propositional entity; although
his alternative, assessability for accuracy or inaccuracy (relative to a
creature’s normal modes of experiential representation) may sufficiently cover
my cases.
[35] For
some very good reasons as well as some bad ones.
[36] Many are still in the process of working back to where we were in the 1930s
before the Wittgensteinians—the whole emphasis on (public) language—went far
too far and messed everything up. (Some, though, never fell for it.)
[37] Some
philosophers are very snooty about, disdainful of, the not wholly unlovable
brain in the vat. This is because it so very greatly inconveniences them.
[38] The point must be
conceded even by philosophers who claim that in this case one’s freak causal
history means that one doesn’t really have thoughts or even experiences, as
they understand these terms (for the case of thoughts, see Davidson’s
discussion of his own Instant-Twin, the ‘Swampman’ (1987: 444); note that this
thought-experiment is very old). For whatever words are permitted or forbidden in the description of the case,
the nature of what is going on is—once again—sufficiently and dramatically
indicated by saying that it could
conceivably be one’s actual situation now.
[39] See note xxx.
[40] Loar xxx.
[41] Such words may be thought
vague or vacuous or question-begging but they have some useful force in
contexts like the present one
[42] I discuss it in Mental Reality 6.5, 6.6. See also
Appendix xxx below.
[43] Fodor 2000: 4-5, 106
[44] I owe this estimate to David
Chalmers.
[45] The upper tray of my
dishwasher, for example—the point is clear even though I obviously can’t
mention such a thing without bringing it into my consciousness.
[46] This is devastatingly
analysed by Helen Steward (1997, especially ch 4). It may be added that it is
pretty unnatural to use the phrase ‘mental state’
of beliefs and their ilk at all, rather than of states of anxiety,
overexcitement, relaxation; and that the mere use of noun forms like ‘belief’
rather than verb forms like ‘believe’ can very easily mislead (as in many other
areas of philosophy).
[47] Note that any supposed
problems arising from the need to make a distinction between explicit and
implicit beliefs simply vanish on this approach.
[48] Here I draw on Mental Reality, ch. 6.6.
[49] I’m assuming that there
aren’t any other consciousnesses other than Louis’s in the L-reality.
[50] In the case of Mount Fuji, a
causal connection is also necessary, but it is not part of what is in the
L-reality.
[51] Here I mean physics in the
widely accepted sense of something that studies only non-experiential
phenomena. Real, realistic materialists must hold that a truly perfected
physics—God’s physics—would deal equally with experiential phenomena.
[52] Actually I don’t quite.
Obliged, as a hard-nosed materialist, to be a certain sort of panpsychist
(Strawson 2002), I think there may in some sense be mentally contentful goings
on in the L-reality at t; this being
part of what the existence of the fundamental particles consists in. But these
make ascriptions of mental predicates true of Louis only in the sense that
non-experiential states of fundamental particles do according to conventional
materialism.
[53] And not because I doubt that
the ‘extended mind’ thesis (Clark and Chalmers xxx, Clark 2001 ch. xxx) is any
real help with seeing how things are in this part of (mental) reality.
[54] 1992: back cover
[55] 1992: 158.
[56] 1992: 159.
[57] Obviously the cases differ
in other relevant respects. Note that the present proposal entirely obviates
Searle’s need for what he calls the ‘Connection Principle’.
[58] See Appendix 2 for a reply
to the the suggestion that even if no dispositional mental states can be said
to be truly mentally contentful there may yet be occurrent non-experiential
processes going on in Louis that are truly mentally contentful.
[59] It is arguable that ‘about’,
unlike ‘of’ implies an essentially discursive form of representation. I won’t
make anything of this; those who say that thermometers contain representations of temperature are just as likely to say
that they are in states that are about the
temperature.
[60] Perhaps thermostats may also
be said to have underived aboutness. They are unlike books in that it doesn’t
really matter how they got to exist and be the way they are.
[61] Paul Davies, New Scientist, November 3, 2001.
Information entails representation and representation entails aboutness, and
it’s often said that the universe is information….
[62] Might this be true in
Leibniz’s world, or does the non-causal nature of pre-established harmony rule
out aboutness (God aside)?
[63] Remember from §6 that it is
wholly physical considered specifically qua experiential phenomenon, and
whatever its non-experiential
physical being.
[64] Certainly one can’t say that
every effect is a representation of its cause, although every effect may
indicate its cause (I take it that causal overdetermination cases can be dealt
with by giving a sufficiently detailed description of the effect, but this is
not important here).
[65] Here, though, the artist must
allow that the picture in the picture can be taken as a picture of the picture
(one must avoid the ‘intentional fallacy’ fallacy).
[66] ‘Appearance’ works in a
similar way. If A1 is an appearance of Q, Q exists. To be an
appearance of; to be an appearance is
necessarily to be an appearance of something.
[67] Intuitive support
for the idea that yellow-experience is necessarily and eo ipso awareness of something, even in the black-and-white
universe, stems first from a currently irrelevant feature of the word ‘aware’,
the fact that in one use it means the same as ‘conscious’ (yellow-experience
entails consciousness, so it entails awareness, on this use of ‘aware’).
Putting that aside, the point is that yellow-experience in the black-and-white
universe, or indeed in an ordinary congenitally blind person, is awareness-of
only in so far as it is awareness of an abstract object, the content-type
yellow-experience.
[68] If the ‘pure awareness’
achieved in Buddhist meditation has no content, then it is not experience. If
there is ‘pure consciousness experience’ (see e.g. Shear, Forman) then this has
content. Dainton xxx
[69] I’m assuming in line with
standard materialism that all experiences have non-experiential being as well
as experiential being. For possible doubts, see Strawson 2002.
[70] See the quotation from Reid
in Appendix 1.
[71] You might agree with occurrent even if you rejected experiential.
See Appendix 2.
[72] A
missile can track—appear to hunt—a plane. A bug-eyed robot can indefatigably
pursue a human being, maintaining a respectful two-meter distance. And so on.
[73] One’s mental-activity
dispositions (thought-transition dispositions, etc) are just a subset of one’s behavioural dispositions when the
latter are properly understood (see Mental
Reality ch. 10), but I will put this point aside. Some (see e.g. Evans xxx)
construe behavioural dispositions as intrinsically external-object-involving,
guaranteeing that A’s and B’s dispositions are different, but I
understand them in the natural internalist way according to which one shares
all such dispositions with one’s Instant-Twin or Vat-Twin.
[74] Complications
arise that are routine in causal accounts of things. One’s thought about X is
not about the neuronal happenings that directly causally precede and
precipitate the thought. Nor is it about the light waves and optic-nerve
electrical activity that are causally involved in one’s coming to know about X
by seeing it or reading about it. But there is nothing especially
philosophically problematic about these complications (in the same way,
photographs and sound recordings are only of things located at a certain stage
in their causation); they certainly don’t constitute a difficulty peculiar to
the present account of intentionality in such a way as to cast doubt on the No
Problem Thesis.
[75] For a good recent statement
of this point see, again, Loar xxx; and Horgan & Tienson 2002.
[76] Remember
that X-experience is a phenomenological notion; B has X-experience in every sense in which A does.
[77] If it were physically
identical it would have to be experientially identical, on the terms of
realistic (real) materialism. But it has, by hypothesis, no experience.
[78] Actually I don’t think there
is any legitimate ‘exciting’ sense of ‘emerge’. Note that we can drop [c] if we consider p-intentionality
rather than Cube-intentionality. Here the existence of intentionality consists
in the existence of [a] and [b].I discuss these and other complications raised by marshmallow camshafts
in Mental Reality ch. 7.
[79] To say that the
existence of intentionality consists in [a] + [b] ± [c] is not to deny any
traditional controls on what can count as thought. Not only can we judge that
creatures who claim to be thinking about diamond are doing no such thing, given
their causal histories; we can also judge that creatures who claim to be
thinking about justice or the set of prime numbers or a three-inch blue cube
are doing no such thing, given what they say or otherwise do when asked about
these items. This connects with the familiar idea that thoughts are what they
are partly in virtue of their position in a network of other possible thoughts;
in virtue of the way in which they arise from the exercise of a general
(dispositional) capacity that is (necessarily) a capacity to have other related
thoughts.
[80] Compare
Schiffer 1987: ch. 3. And see Appendix 3.
[81] It
is immediate that there is no perceptual intentionality, primitive (see p. 00)
or not, in an experienceless world.
[82] Along Fodorian lines, say.
The No Problem Thesis doesn’t deny that it is hard to give a satisfactory
account of this phenomenon.
[83] See e.g. Burge
1979, Greenberg forthcoming.
[84] The lives of our Vat-Twins
and Instant-Twins are no less rich.