“Intentionality” is a philosophical term for “aboutness”. A movie review is about a movie, and the sentence “Trump is a narcissist” is about Trump. Your thoughts concerning today’s breakfast are about today’s breakfast. Each of these is about something else, so each exhibits intentionality.
How do these things acquire their aboutness? “Trump is a narcissist” isn’t inherently about the man who bears the name “Donald Trump”. Had Trump’s family retained their Germanic surname, Drumpf, then “Trump is a narcissist” would no longer be about the man we call “the Donald”. The intentionality of the sentence is derivative; that is, it derives from the pre-existing convention of referring to a particular man as “Donald Trump”.
Where does the buck stop? If A derives its intentionality from B, and B derives its intentionality from C, it would seem that we must reach a point at D or E or later in the sequence where the regress ends and the intentionality is intrinsic, or original. What is that point?
For many philosophers, that point comes when we cross the line between the non-mental and the mental. For them, thoughts have original/intrinsic intentionality, while spoken or written sentences do not.
My own belief is that original intentionality doesn’t exist, but I’ll leave my argument for the comment thread. I know that others here do accept the existence of original intentionality, so the discussion should be lively.
em, keiths, had Trump retained his germanic surname Drumpf, the sentence “Trump is a narcissist” would not exist. What would exist is the sentence “Drumpf is a narcissist.
Things do not acquire an aboutness. They possess it.
Words are the physical manifestation of thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. They are only the translation.
haven’t you been listening to UB? There is a discontinuity between a thought and the word that represents that thought. that is why we have built in machinery like vocal cords, tongue palate and a frontal lobe. That machinery translates a thought into a physical component in the form of an particular sound with its own recognizable pitch, volume, inflection, etc.
The aboutness of love and hate is never changed by the modification these concepts being translated into language. Just as the aboutness of that person whom is currently referred to as Trump is never changed by tomorrow referring that same aboutness as The Don.
There’s nothing to prevent the existence of the sentence “Trump is a narcissist” in the absence of Donald Trump. It simply couldn’t mean what it does today (unless “Drumpf” were used to refer to Trump). And, of course, there’s nothing to require the sentence “Drumpf is a narcissist” from existing if Donald Trump had been named “Donald Drumpf.” Assuming all else was equal, we could say of such a world that the sentence “Drumpf is a narcissist” (where “Drumpf” refers to the nitwit we call “Trump”) would be true. That’s about it.
If it is not true that Trump is a narcissist, is it really about Trump?
I’ll start with Steve’s comment.
That seems about right to me. And, if I look at it that way, then original intentionality exists.
Going back to keiths in the OP, I read:
To me, that “definition” by keiths is vacuous. It does not define anything at all. So I suppose that original intentionaly is some sort of assumed spiritual dualistic thingy that connects statements to reality in such a way as to allow philosophers to deceive themselves into believing that their vacuous definitions are not vacuous.
So, okay, I’m confused about “intentionality”. If I go by what Steve writes, then it makes sense and the only puzzle is why philosophers think there’s a puzzle. If I go by what keiths writes, then “intentionality” seems to be some sort of religious incantation within the religion of analytic philosophy (“the religion of the academy”).
Then I read this from keiths:
I don’t know what is this imaginary line between non-mental and mental. I see terms such as “mental states” as little more than meaningless incantations.
Now that I have offended everybody, maybe this is a good place to stop — at least until there is a reaction.
I wonder just what it is that keiths intentionally intends to deny.
Anyways, what timing.
Finality Revived: Powers and Intentionality
Steve:
See walto’s reply.
Sentences, like thoughts, have intentionality. “Trump is a narcissist” is about Trump.
If the man known as “Trump” were instead known by the name “Drumpf”, then “Trump is a narcissist” would not have the same intentionality.
Mung,
Yes. A false statement about a person is still about that person.
Example: The statement “Mung is a mensch” is about Mung, though false.
I think you’re begging for unnecessary confusion.
…the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs.
Unless it’s your position that statements about Donald Trump are mental states.
Neil,
You don’t understand that a movie review is about a movie, but a blender isn’t? And that the former, because it is about something else, exhibits intentionality?
No. John Searle, for example, sees original intentionality (he calls it ‘intrinsic intentionality’) as purely physical but not reducible.
Yes. 🙂
Mung,
Intentionality is not restricted to mental states.
You attempt to define by example. But your examples are all circular. They don’t say anything about getting outside the circle. That’s why I say it is vacuous.
By contrast, Steve says that meaning already exists, and we attach symbols to already existing meaning. So he at least gets outside that circle. But Steve has another problem, that of needing to give an account of the meaning at already exists prior to language.
Yes, he does. Yet he seems to assume unexplained magic, though he denies that he is making such an assumption.
This is the implicit dualism that I find in a lot of academic philosophy.
Since I’m on record here as defending original intentionality, I should explain why.
I see the contrast between original intentionality and derived intentionality as being like this: a stop sign has derived intentionality because on its own it has no intrinsic meaning. It means “stop” only because we have stipulated this convention. Likewise for the buzzing noise of an electric doorbell — it means that there’s someone at the door only by virtue of social convention that has instituted those meanings.
As keiths said, the thought that there must be original intentionality only means that the buck has to stop somewhere.
It does not follow, from this thought alone, that the right place to look for original intentionality is the thoughts of the individual thinker.
On a Cartesian picture — whether the Cartesian immaterialism of Descartes himself or the “Cartesian materialism” of Searle — it is in the individual thinker that original intentionality is to be found.
Alex Rosenberg denies that there is original intentionality because he assumes that (1) intentionality must be essentially linguistic and (2) original intentionality must be in the head, but since (3) the brain does not store information in sentence-shaped packages, then (4) there is no place in the natural world for intentionality to be, so given (5) naturalism is true, then (6) there is no original intentionality.
I think that both (3) and (5) are true [though my version of naturalism is different from Rosenberg’s], but I reject (6) because I do not accept (1) or (2).
Instead, I think that there are basically two kinds of original intentionality: the sapient intentionality of rational animals and the sentient intentionality of non-rational animals. Sapient intentionality is “at home” in the discursive community as a whole, whereas sentient intentionality is “at home” in the affordance-engaging pattern of behavior of the living animal.
In neither case do we find original intentionality “in the head”, and certainly not in the brain. Neural representations play an indispensable role in causally implementing the intentional relation, but it is the ongoing transaction between organism and environment, and between persons with one another, that comprise original intentionality.
That seems about right. I’m inclined to say that we can see intentionality in an organism’s behavior. I’d say that a young child can be seen to be developing intentionality as the childs awareness of his world begins to grow. And that’s there prior to language and perhaps prior to there being much of an ability at thought.
Neil,
There’s nothing circular about defining “intentionality” as “aboutness”. Most people are unfamiliar with the technical term “intentionality” and tend to miscontrue it as referring to “intention” in the everyday sense. They are familiar with the concept of “aboutness”, however, and they understand that while a movie review can be about a movie, a blender cannot. Defining “intentionality” as “aboutness” thus links an unfamiliar term to a familiar concept.
keiths:
Neil:
Searle is a physicalist, and he asserts that intentionality is a physical phenomenon. That makes him a monist, not a dualist.
I didn’t suggest that there was.
Your definition depended on examples, and those are what I saw as circular (Trump means Trump).
Yes, that’s what he asserts. However, when I read his recent “perception” book, it seems to rely on magic. Searle, of course, denies that it relies on magic. I can call it “handwaving” if you prefer that to “magic”. His account has serious gaps, which suggests an implicit dualism even though he denies any dualism.
keiths, what is the definition of the technical term “intentionality”? Try to not appeal to aboutness.
Mung,
Why?
Neil,
No, my definition was that
The examples were just that — examples.
And no, I didn’t argue that “Trump means Trump”. I said:
keiths:
Neil:
To lack a physical explanation for something does not make one a dualist, either explicitly or implicitly. If it did, we’d all be dualists. Science is not finished yet, Neil.
You may doubt that Searle (or anyone else) will find a physical basis for original intentionality, and I certainly do, but that does not make Searle an implicit dualist. He thinks that original/intrinsic intentionality has a physical basis.
Personally, I find it hard to entertain any idea that’s not about something, so all my ideas qualify as intentional. And as far as I can tell, they are all original — or at least if they are derivative, it’s because the something that they’re about exists, even if only in my imagination.
FWIW, I think his paper “Why I am not a Property Dualist” shows that he IS a property dualist as most philosophers use that term. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) He definitely opposes substance dualism, though.
Anyhow, where’s the argument against original intentionality we’ve been promised?
The philosophical discussions of intentionality I have reviewed usually emphasize the need to explain norms, that is misrepresentation (for the mental representation approach) or unsuccessful behavior for the approach for non-language intentionality via affordances as described in your post.
Do you recognized a need to explain the source of such norms for the affordance approach, using only descriptive (causal) language, ie which does not itself use norms? If so, how do you do so?
Hint: The name of its author starts with a “D” and rhymes with unrepentant (sort of).
That situation gives me a general feeling of unease, although I have to say I cannot put that feeling into words that would specify exactly what that unease is about.
I don’t think the circularity is vicious, but I do think it might indicate that there is a primitive concept captured by “aboutness” or “refers to” or the philosopher’s definition of “intentionality” that indicates those terms are not going to be completely reducible..
The IEP definition of intentionality from the article of the same name:
This feature of thoughts and words, whereby they pick out, refer to, or are about things, is intentionality. In a word, intentionality is aboutness.
The SEP version:
Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs.
In another thread, I commented on your use of subsystems in the philosophical explanations of life. I had the type of situation you describe above in mind when I questioned how it fit in with externalism in philosophy.
Specifically, how can we reconcile a subsystems approach to defining a living agent with the ideas of externalism in semantics, or perception, or as in intentionality as in your quote?
For example, if one takes Putnam’s long-arm functionalism as a way of capturing this type of externalism, then there will be a causal network encompassing both the life form and the entities it understands as affordances in its niche. In a philosophical (that is, not scientific) analysis, is it acceptable to separate this causal network into subsystems by isolating a causal network which is somehow constituted solely in the organism?
Or, as an alternative to functionalism, I have also seen this approach to doing subsystem decomposition*:
Inter-agent processes (social/cultural)
Agents (psychological)
Intra-agent processes
Substrates (physiological)
In this case, it would seem that the intentionality relation is an inter-agent process and the life definition is an agent process. But is there a philosophically-acceptable way to separate these two into subsystems while still respecting externalism in semantics, perception, intentionality?
—————————————-
*For IT folk: a functionalist decomposition reminds me of structured analysis (yes I started work in the 80s) and the agent-based decomposition of Object-Oriented Analysis.
That is surely a mistake. Norms are social phenomena. Intentionality is individual.
Those are too much tied to language. Intentionality is prior to language.
Another coincidence? Or is keiths reading Feser’s blog?
Brentano on the mental
I do recognize the need, and my a view about this connects what I’ve said about intentionality with what I’ve said about teleology.
Roughly, I think that affordances are normative, in the following sense: an animal’s sensorimotor abilities (including its neurobiological processes) allow it to detect some situation as affording climbing. The animal directly perceives “climbability” as a feature of its situation. But the animal can still fail to climb well, or fast enough, etc.
I would like to distinguish here between very low-level affordance-detectors and responders and more complex ones. In very simple cases — say, a spider or a house-fly — the animal only detects a very small range of ambient stimuli and has a fixed motor response to those stimuli. In contrast, a wolf can detect a wide range of ambient stimuli, including facts about social structures, and has a flexible array of motor responses. Additionally, wolf brains are sufficiently plastic that the behavior of the adult wolf is conditioned by what the animal has learned.
I think learning is extremely important here. I don’t think spiders or flies can learn. From what little I know, I don’t think there’s been enough attention to the evolution of learning in our theories of cognitive neuroscience.
But whether an animal climbs or runs or hunts well or badly is relative to the goals of the animal. And that requires teleology. Affordances are normative for sentient intentionality by virtue of functioning as teleological norms specific to the cognitive system of that kind of animal.
(The main reason I’ve been stressing that we need to naturalize teleology is precisely because I don’t think there’s any way to naturalize intentionality without it. And if we can’t naturalize intentionality, then we would be unable to reconcile one of the most phenomenologically basic facts about ourselves with our best confirmed understanding of the nature of reality. And being unable to do that is a large part of what Nietzsche meant by nihilism.)
So while I accept that intentionality is a normative concept, I think that sentient intentionality as the directedness towards affordances is normative in terms of teleological normativity.
Responding to two remarks of Neil’s:
One reason why I want to distinguish between sentient intentionality and sapient intentionality is because I think Neil is right to be some extent. But there is also a sense in which the kinds of complex thoughts that are characteristic of normal mature human beings — the kinds of thoughts that make intentionality a hard philosophical problem — are inseparable from language.
Whereas the tradition from Descartes through Kant to Brentano, Husserl, and Chisholm holds that thought is prior to language, the tradition that began with Sellars (though arguably with antecedents in Hegel and Peirce) holds that there is no priority of thought over language. Our ability to think and our ability to talk are interdependent.
It is not as if we have full-blown complex thoughts that we then transmit in language, but rather that the acquisition of a language transforms the kinds of thoughts that we are able to have.
So while I do think that sentient intentionality is prior to language, sapient intentionality is not. And that means that while sentient intentionality is exclusively individual, sapient intentionality is collective-and-individual.
I think I am not seeing the force of this question, because it does not seem terribly problematic to me that we can think of semantic or mental-content externalism in terms of a coupling of subsystems, each of which has its own dynamics but also affects the other.
Finally, a note about Searle: Searle does think that original intentionality exists, and he does think it lies in the brain by virtue of the brain’s causal powers. On his view, intentionality and consciousness are just the macro-level description and action potentials across neurons are just the micro-level description. The job of neuroscientists is to tell us how this is done.
Quite frankly I am not a fan of Searle. As McDowell puts it, “John Searle is unique among contemporary neo-Cartesians in thinking that he can both deimmaterialize the Cartesian res cogitans and keep its remarkable powers”. That is, Searle insists that the Cartesian res cogitans, with its remarkable powers of intentionality, consciousness, and self-consciousness, just is the brain.
How this can be, Searle does not bother to tell us.
He is not a dualist, but at the same time, Searle does not take up the question whether there are other kinds of intentionality besides the intentionality of complex thought, or whether the intentionality of complex thought requires a shared language.
He thinks of intentionality as essentially individual (not shared or collective) — although he does think of certain social institutions as forms of collective intentionality, he does not think that sapient intentionality as such is a collective intentionality (on this point Tomasello moves away from his dependence on Searle back towards Mead, Sellars, and Brandom).
What we need, to make sense of original intentionality and to naturalize properly, is something like what I tried in my first book (though that position has rather serious flaws, I’ve come to realize): the intentionality of (complex) thoughts is the sapient intentionality grounded in the linguistic community, and the intentionality of perception is the sentient intentionality grounded in the living animal’s bodily transactions with its environment.
Mung,
What was the first one?
That would be quite a trick, considering that my OP was posted Thursday night while Feser’s was posted on Friday.
Poor Mung manages to fail even at insinuation.
By contrast, I see it as the insistence on connecting intentionality with language that makes intentionality a hard problem.
I agree that the kind of thinking we humans do is connected with language, though the connection goes both ways.
I’m inclined to see two different problems:
(1) the ability of an organism to respond to the details of the environment (roughly what you are calling “sentient intentionality”).
(2) the formation of social norms, such as to allow us to communicate about the environment, with our social group.
But I see these as distinct problems. When you try to merge them into a single problem, you are going to run into difficulties.
I guess there’s also a third issue, though I don’t usually separate it out.
(3) we are able to pick up a great deal of information about the environment by means of our use of language. This may be what leads people to try to tie intentionality to language. However, the expanded intentionality achieved this way is still individual. We use norms to allow us to understand what we hear. But the way that we incorporate that into our intentionity does not depend on norms beyond that use in understanding what we hear.
But I’m not trying to merge them into a single problem — I’m doing the opposite!
I’m saying that the project of “naturalizing intentionality” requires making precisely that distinction. The problem with all previous efforts to naturalize intentionality is that they haven’t made that distinction. And also I am saying that a correct understanding of the second one — what I call “sapient intentionality” — involves understanding it as a modification of the first one.
The key phrase there — that use in understanding what we hear — is sufficient for my purposes.
Some thoughts on original/intrinsic intentionality:
Ending the regress I described in the OP doesn’t require an instance of original intentionality. You can also end the regress with an instance of derived intentionality, as long as it derives from something that itself lacks intentionality.
Something similar goes on with consciousness. Unless you’re a panpsychist, you probably don’t regard individual atoms as conscious. Yet if you combine atoms in the right way, forming a human brain, you have a conscious entity. At some stage in the aggregation process you cross the line from non-conscious to conscious, and it is at that stage that consciousness is derived from something non-conscious.
Physics is purely syntactic, as far as we know — that is, it is insensitive to meaning. If intentionality supervenes on the physical (and as a physicalist, I think it does) then at some point intentionality arises from a substrate that lacks it.
In other words, all intentionality is derived.
I’m still trying to understand the difference between constitutive explanations and causal explanations and how the two types of explanations are related..
I take your original explanation of intentionality — “the ongoing transaction between organism and environment, and between persons with one another, that comprise original intentionality” — to be constitutive (“comprise”). Similarly, I take the Putnam’s “meanings just ain’t in the head” explanation of externalism to be constitutive. For perception, the constitutive, externalist view is “when one is veridically perceiving, the objects of perception are constituents of the experiential episode” (from SEP on problem of perception: disjunctivism). Even Tye, a representationalist about perception, has a paper called “Qualia ain’t in the head”.
I take this explanation as causal: you are saying the externalist approach can be reconciled with the definition of life by considering interacting causal subsystems.
To me, this means that a constitutive explanation can be (sometimes?) re-expressed as a causal explanation of interacting subsystems which together constitute the overall system used in the externalist explanation. Now this makes sense to me; it is essentially the mechanism approach of Bechtel, Craver, and others.
But is that sort of mechanism approach what you had in mind for relating constitutive and causal explanations, at least in this case? And if so, do you think that is a common bridge between constitutive and causal explanations?
I think KN is right about the difference between language and sentient creature intentionalities. So yes, the norms for the language based intentionality are somehow social.
But non-language, sapient intentionality also needs an explanation of norms.
For a frog, flies are an affordance that it eats by flicking out a tongue. But in a lab, the from will flick out its tongue at smal, black pieces of flies. Is it that action wrong? If so, explain that without using norms.
Or if think it is not wrong, what about the case where the frog misses the object it flicked out its tongue at.
That is my point in the post about intentionality not being reducible in some sense. We cannot explain it in language because it is essential to language use.
I suspect we could give an explanation, or at least a warm feeling, about why intentionality is not reducible by thinking about language and intentionality as embodied.
Perhaps our concept of intentionality or referring-to or aboutness is rooted in perception: we are immediately aware of objects (as affordances) in perception but we are also aware that we are separate from them, that we have a point of view. Perhaps this is one source of our intuitive understanding of intentionality.
Another could be the unity of perception. I see a running computer, hear its hum, feel its warmth when I touch it, but I am also immediately aware that these three experiences refer to the same thing.
That makes sense to me as far as it goes, but don’t you then need to explain why a species has these affordances in particular, and thus why an individual of that species can be said to act correctly by appealing to the affordances of its species?
Assuming you think that further explanation is needed, I suspect you will appear to evolutionary history. But if you do, don’t you run into the same issues that Millikan et al run into, eg Swampman?
On naturalizing intentionality: Here is a quote from Putnam; it’s a footnote to his introductory essay in the 2013 book “Reading Putnam”
I still believe our so-called “mental states” are best thought of as capacities to function, but not in the strongly reductionist sense that went with the model of those states as the “the brain’s software.” They are, so to speak, “long-armed” functional states — their “arms” reach out to the environment, and, as Ruth Millikan has stressed, their identity depends on their evolutionary history.
Now in Putnam’s liberal naturalism, intentionality is not reducible to physics (or any science for that matter). Yet at the same time, he acknowledges a role for biology and evolution to understanding their individual identities. But this is a form of naturalization through science. How can those two facts be reconciled?
That continues to puzzle me.
Perhaps one answer might be that we can use science to understand to some extent the mechanisms underlying intentionality, but without at the same time being to fully explain or describe the “outputs” of that mechanism using science.
Fair enough.
But supervenience is a standard approach to physicalism, and in that usage, everything supervenes on the physical. (“Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical” — SEP article on Physicalism).
So saying intentionality is derived because it supervenes on the physical is fine as far as it goes, but to me does not really seem to be saying very much.
I think the challenge is to be more specific about which substrates involve intentionality, how they got to be that way, why that should be considered a “derives” relationship, and at the same time accounting for norms in that explanation.
I’ve got to disagree with that. Physics is rich in meaning.
But I think keiths was saying something different, but worded it poorly.
I’m not seeing why you would use “norms” there.
The frog has to get useful information from the environment. That’s something like measuring. And the measuring apparatus needs to be calibrated. There isn’t an external calibration standard. So what we have is an internal calibration. What you pickup using the left eye must match what you pick up with the right eye. You cross-calibrate them with one another for consistency. And you calibrate your behavior with your perception.
In trying to calibrate the two eyes, if you come across irreconcilable differences (i.e. difference that cannot be eliminated by calibration) then you have some interesting new information (maybe 3D depth information).
I see this calibration as very different from establishing norms. The internal cross-calibration does not have to match any external standard. It only has internal consistency requirements. It can be done to greater precision than is possible with norms, which have to deal with differences between different people.
I should add that I take this to all happen at a level below consciousness. I don’t think we are consciously calibrating our perceptual system.
An engineer sometimes has to do the internal cross-calibration of some equipment. Part of this is done to an external standard. But part of it is done by using test signals and adjusting the parts so that they work well together. We sometimes call that a “tune-up”. My conjecture is that dreaming is the experience of a brain tune-up going on during sleep.
What I see as a flaw in philosophy (“analytic philosophy”) is its over-emphasis on logic. Philosophers cannot account for intentionality because intentionality is not a logic problem. If “reducible” implies using logic, the intentionality is not reducible. You have to get outside of logic. You have to enlarge the tool set. In particular, you need to add tools such as measurement, categorization (and measurement can be described as just a very systematic form of categorization) and calibration.
For that matter, norms also cannot be accounted for by logic. Norms are a kind of calibration for the social group. But it is different from calibration, in that an engineer can tweak every component until he gets things calibrated just right. But, operating in society, we can tweak only ourselves. Politicians and religionists may attempt to tweak every unit in the society, but that never works out. Norms are the best that we can have.
Which philosophers are you referring to?
Many of the philosophers from the last 50 years that I have read from or about would agree with a lot of what you say. Many of the rest would not be trying to explain intentionality by logic; they would instead be trying to eliminate it by scientific reduction or trying to deflate the concept, again by considering humans starting from a social science view point (eg Huw Price).
Is there any sense in which calibration can fail? Can an engineer give wrong answers? Can a frog not catch flies?
If calibration can fail, then that implies norms.
I agree naturalizing norms cannot be accomplished just by invoking standards, because that would just be pushing the problem back to establishing standards right and wrong.
Engineers make normative judgements while calibrating, so appealing to their actions is still a normative, not a causal, explanation.
I didn’t think the “derives” in the OP was intended to be causal. If it was, it wasn’t much of an argument, as keiths’ later post indicates. The claim that “derived” intentionality has to stop someplace was never supposed by anybody to suggest that it wasn’t preceded by non-intentional causes. The argument actually takes place in what some would call the “space of reasons” (not causes).
In other words, “Where does the intentionality of this sentence come from” isn’t a question about what caused a certain bunch of pixels to appear on your screen. It’s a question about what (if any) sort of intentionality must also exist that is prior in a different sense, that needs to be around if words are to have meaning.