Maverick Philosopher

But suppose there is a definite pomegranate in my visual field, and I want that very pomegranate. It still doesn't follow that the pomegranate I want exists, for a pomegranate that exists in my visual field might not exist in reality.

The fact that there are no matter transmitters does not prevent me from wanting one. I can want what does not exist, indeed, what cannot exist. Mountain bikes, however, do exist. But from the facts that I exist, and that mountain bikes exist, and that I want a mountain bike, it does not follow that there exists a mountain bike that I want. I might want a bike with features that no existing bike has.

Now compare the relational predicates 'x eats y' and 'x wants y.' The surface grammar suggests that each expresses a dyadic (two-termed) relation, the relation of eating, and the relation of wanting, respectively. But the grammar is misleading. The first expression supports Existential Generalization on 'y' while the second does not. That is, from 'x eats y' one can validly infer '(Ey)(x eats y)'; but from 'x wants y' one cannot validly infer '(Ey)(x wants y).'

Isn't this a good reason to deny that wanting is a relation? A relation exists or 'obtains' only if all its relata exist. Consider the relation of being spatially inside of. It relates my cat and a cardboard box. Could a box have a nonexistent cat inside it? And could a cat be inside a nonexistent box? Since that is well-nigh unintelligible, it is quite reasonable to hold that a relation's relata must all exist if the relation is to obtain. Since one can want the nonexistent (a time machine, the fountain of youth, etc.), but not be related to the nonexistent, wanting is not a relation.

But wanting is a case of intentionality. It follows that in at least some cases the 'relation' of intentionality is not a genuine relation.

If wanting is not a relation, what is it? A monadic property of a person? If the surface grammar of 'Poindexter wants a pomegranate' is misleading, should we say that the logical form is better rendered by 'Poindexter wants-pomegranately'? This would suggest a theory according to which intentional objects are adverbial modifications of acts of intending.

Spur both understands me and misunderstands me. For me, mental acts are intrinsically of or about their objects. But this is not to say that mental acts are representations; it would be much better to say that they are presentations. Following Husserl, I say that in outer sense perception the thing itself, a mountain say, is presented directly albeit under limited aspects; there is no mental representation that mediates between the perceptual act and the thing perceived. (The aspectuality of intentionality is crucial, although I haven't harped on it recently. See here.)

But Spur is right to say that the intentionality of mental acts is 'primitive' in the sense that it cannot be further explained. (Surely not everything can be explained in terms of something else.) Thus I consider it to be absurd to take Dennett's ascriptivist line according to which the intentionality of a 'system' is a matter of ascription from the 'intentional stance' and therefore not intrinsic or original. (Ask yourself: what about the person who occupies the intentional stance? Are not his ascribings of intentionality themselves instances of intentionality? And if they are, who ascribes them? Do we move in a circle, or opt for an infinite regress, or what?)

Our debate, however, is not primarily about mental representations, but about things that no one could deny are both material and representational, things like drawings, photographs, and paintings — but forget about Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, think the Dutch Masters. Following Ed Feser, I was arguing that material representations are referentially indeterminate, and that, because of this, any mental representations there are cannot be material, e.g. states of the brain. For our thoughts are referentially determinate.

At this point Spur adduced his theory that the representationality of things like photographs is constituted by resemblance (or some more abstract form of isomorphism). But this has unacceptable consequences. Suppose P is a photo of person X. If resemblance constitutes representation, it is as true to say that X represents P as to say that P represents X. But this is false. And there were several other unacceptable consequences.

I deny, then, that resemblance or isomorphism is sufficient for representation. But Spur misunderstands me when he takes me to be saying that anything X can represent anything Y if a mind interprets X as representing Y. I never said that, and surely it is not true. It is of the essence of a portrait, for example, that it resemble the person of whom it is the portrait. So in many cases resemblance is necessary for representation. Portraiture is a form of representation for which resemblance is necessary. But it is not sufficient. A photo of Edith Stein does not represent her just in virtue of resembling her, although it must resemble her if it is to photographically represent her. Even a caricature must resemble to some extent the person caricatured. But that is not to say that one could take the Stein photo as representing the Eiffel Tower — unless one abstracted entirely from its being a photograph.

Suppose I take a photo of Stein, turn it over, and lay it face down on the table. I do the same with a photo of Husserl. Between the two pieces of white paper I place a salt shaker. I then say, "If this piece of paper is Flagstaff, and this other one is Tucson, then the salt shaker is Phoenix." What I have done is make a very crude map that shows the relation of the three cities. But even here there is no intrinsic representationality. There is an isomorphism between the crude map and what it maps. But the map represents the relation of the cities only for a mind who interprets it AS a map as opposed to three objects on a table top.

This difference in our views leads to disagreements about when representation does and does not occur. For example, I hold that in the case where someone interprets the Stein photo as representing the Eiffel Tower, it does not succeed in representing that structure, whereas you hold that it does. And in the case where there is a photograph of a thing and the thing exists but no mind has interpreted that photograph as a representation of that thing, I say that the photograph succeeds in representing the thing, whereas you say that it doesn't. But do these disagreements entail that we have different concepts of representation? It would seem so.

Spur's theory is that isomorphism constitutes (and is therefore necessary and sufficient for) representation. My theory is that isomorphism (a species of which is resemblance in sense-perceivable respects) is not sufficient for representation although it is necessary in some instances. So I am NOT saying that anything can be interpreted to represent anything. Spur misunderstands me in the passage just quoted.

[. . .] So far I have mainly been on the defensive, but I have serious misgivings about your account of representation, or least what I understand to be your account of representation. For one, I don't see how you account for the fact that sometimes there are two representations of some thing, one of which represents that thing better than the other. For example, there might be a quality map of Baltimore and a cheap one, the quality one representing that city better than the cheap one. On your view, both maps represent Baltimore and do so because there are minds that interpret those maps as representing Baltimore. But what is the explanation for the fact that the one represents Baltimore better than the other? Perhaps this merits another post.

This does not cause me any trouble, since as I said earlier, I am not denying that isomorphism is necessary for some representations. My point was rather that it is not sufficient. So I have no problem saying that the high quality map does a better job of representing Baltimore because the isomorphism is 'tighter' than that of the cheap map. But again, my point is that no map in virtue of its intrinsic properties represents anything: its representationality derives from the intrinsic intentionality of a map-using mind.

What I maintain, by contrast, is that the representationality of every material representation, including paintings and photographs, is derivative. This means that their power to represent is not a power they have in and of themselves, but a power that derives from some being possessing intrinsic or original representationality. A photograph is genuinely of (objective genitive) something distinct from itself; talk of a photo's representing something is not metaphorical or 'as if.' But this genuine representationality is not intrinsic or original. What this means is that it cannot be understood in terms of the monadic properties of the photograph (color, size, shape, thickness, material composition of the paper, etc.) OR in terms of the relational properties it possesses in virtue of its relations to other material objects. What is needed for a photograph to represent is a relation to a mind which interprets the photograph AS a representation, and by so interpreting it, confers upon it directedness to an object.

But does it not make sense to say that a picture of the Eiffel Tower is of the Tower even when the picture is hidden away in a drawer? Of course it does: a photo in a drawer is potentially, but not actually, a representation. But this potentiality requires the actual existence of interpreting minds if it is to be converted into actual representation. If all minds were eliminated, no photograph would actually represent anything. I am not denying that there are isomorphisms between material representations and what they represent; my point is that representation cannot be exhausted by isomorphism.

Spur's theory implies that it is possible that there be a world in which there are pictures, and things pictured, but no minds at any time. Pictures and things pictured would be isomorphs of each other, and that isomorphism would constitute representation. But it would not be an isomorphism that anyone notes or establishes. Elements of the picture would instantiate a relation-structure instantiated by elements of the object depicted.

In such a world there would be photographs that never represented anything TO anyone, and that came into existence by some random physical process, but not by the efforts of purposive agents who embodied their purposes in them. This consequence, I submit, refutes Spur's theory. For it is incoherent to speak of a photograph that is neither the embodiment of a purpose, nor a representation to someone actually or potentially.

By its very concept, a representation is a representation OF something TO someone. To elide the 'TO' part -- the dative of representation to give it a fancy name -- is to radically alter the concept and change the subject. I have no problem with someone using 'representation' to mean isomorphism if that person admits that he has changed the subject and is not addressing the phenomenon of representation as originally understood.

1. You say that intentionality is only exhibited by linguistic things. I find your view arbitrary and idiosyncratic. The modern discussion of intentionality was inaugurated by Brentano in 1874 in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Brentano introduced intentionality as the mark of the mental, as that which distinguishes mental from physical phenomena. Here are some notes that go into some of the details. From Brentano on, through Husserl, Chisholm and Searle, intentionality has been primarily attributed to mental acts such as wishing, willing, desiring, remembering, imagining, perceiving, etc.

2. One of the debates, of course, is whether the intentionality of language can be understood in terms of the intentionality of thought, or whether one should approach it the other way around. A sort of locus classicus of this debate is the Chisholm-Sellars correspondence from 1956, published in 1958 in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II, pp. 507-539. But whichever is primary, it is presupposed that intentionality pertains to both. My own view is that the intentionality of mind is primary.

3. In a broad sense of 'representation,' mental states, linguistic items and such things as photographs, maps, and models can all be reasonably considered representational. Whether it is odd to use the word 'about' in a given context shouldn't impress you too much unless you are an ordinary language philosopher -- which I am pretty sure you are not given your comments on my Wittgenstein posts. Where 'about' sounds odd, one can sometimes substitute 'of.' There is nothing linguistically odd about the question, 'What is this model of?'

The same goes for photographs, paintings, drawings, movies, etc. We don't say, 'What is this photo about?' but we do say, 'What/who is this photo of?' I have many rather clear and poignant mental images of past inamorata: surely those images are of those women.

4. Are you thinking of a representation as a mere proxy or stand-in? I once read a paper at the A.P.A. criticizing Plantinga. The latter wrote comments on my paper, but since he couldn't attend the session, he sent his assistant Menzel in his place to read the comments. Menzel was Planinga's representative (stand-in, proxy) at the session; but that is not to say that Menzel represented Plantinga in the sense in which a photograph of Plantinga represents him, is of him, and will continue to be of him even after he is dead and gone.

I don't deny that a picture might function as a proxy object or stand-in. But I do deny that standing-for can be reduced to standing-in. Suppose I am organizing a dinner party for ten guests, and for each guest I have a photograph. To work out the seating arrangement I lay their photographs on the table in positions that model the positions I want them to sit in. In this case, the photos go proxy for the persons they depict, and there is a certain common relation-structure or second-order isomorphism that the pictures on the one hand, and the guests on the other, instantiate. But the ofness or aboutness of the pictures cannot be reduced to their proxiness, or their instantiation of this relation-structure.

Premise (1) is self-evident. And of course we can generalize to nonpersons. My Christmas lasagne was a thing of beauty, so I took a picture of it. But the proof of its excellence was in the eating which was total. Surely it would be absurd to say that the picture now represents something else, or nothing at all. It represented then, and represents now, a particular batch of lasagne of uncommon delectability. We could put it this way: the pictorial representation has a content, and the content is what it is regardless of the existence/nonexistence of the object depicted.

Premise (2) is not self-evident, but is nonetheless extremely plausible. It presupposes that resemblance is a relation, and, more controversially, that relations are existence-symmetric in the following sense: if R is an n-adic relation, and R is instantiated, then each of R's n relata either exists or does not exist. I prefer to affirm the stronger principle that relations are existence-entailing, but the foregoing argument requires only the existence-symmetry of relations.

Premise (2) also presupposes that what ceases to exist does not exist at all after it ceases to exist. What ceases to exist does not merely lose the temporal property of presentness and acquire the temporal property of pastness; what ceases to exist becomes nothing, or lapses into nonbeing. The ultimate lapsus: the fall into nonentity. Premise (2) thus presupposes the dotrine of presentism according only temporally present items exist.

So if you accept both the existence-symmetry of relations and presentism, then it looks as if you must accept my argument above.

But what about causation? Is it a relation? If it is, then it cannot relate a nonexistent to an existent (by the existence-symmetry principle) and so cannot relate a past item to a present item (given the truth of presentism). But we want to say that the present is what it is beCAUSE of what happened in the past: Poindexter limps today because he sprained his ankle yesterday. The fact of causation suggests an argument against presentism:

4. If x is the cause of y, then both x and y exist.
5. Some temporally present items are caused by items that are not temporally present.
Therefore
6. Some items exist that are not present.

Suppose the barking of the dog startles the cat. Both events must exist if they are to stand in the causal relation, by the existence-symmetry principle. But the barking is temporally prior to the being startled. So the barking exists even though it is not present — which contradicts presentism.

John Bigelow ("Presentism and Properties," Philosophical Perspectives, 1996) deals with this objection by taking a page from the Stoics. He maintains that the relata of the causal relation are not events one temporally prior to the other, but presently true propositions. Thus, it is now true that the dog barked (past tense) and now true that the cat is alarmed (present tense). If this suggestion can be made to work, then we can reject premise (5) of the above argument. For then both cause and effect exist at present.

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

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

So if you take the rock piles as trail markers, then you take them as other than merely natural formations caused to exist by natural causes. You take the stacking and the placement as expressive of the purposes of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer, an intelligent being who had it in mind to convey information to himself and others concerning the direction of the trail.

This shows that any intentionality embodied in the cairns is derivative rather than intrinsic. The rock piles in and of themselves do not inform us of the trail's direction. They provide us this information only if we take them as embodying the purposes of an intelligent being.

Of course, my taking of rock piles as embodying the purposes of an intelligent being does not entail that they do in fact embody the purposes of an intelligent being. But in most cases my ascription of a purpose corresponds to a purpose: I ascribe a purpose and the rock piles do in fact embody a purpose. Thus there are two streams of intrinsic intentionality converging on the same object, one emanating from me, the other from the trail-maintainer. The ascribing and the embodying are usually 'in sync.'

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

Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will. I am rejecting the view that any sort of isomorphism, no matter how abstract, could make the rock piles mean or represent the trail's direction. No doubt there is an isomorphism: the trail goes where the cairns go. No one cairn resembles the trail to any appreciable extent; but the cairns taken collectively do resemble the trail.

Unfortunately, the trail also resembles the cairns. But the trail does not represent the cairns. Representation is most of the time asymmetrical; but resemblance is always symmetrical. I conclude that resemblance cannot constitute representation. Note also that the cairns might resemble things other than the trail. Thus the cairns taken collectively might resemble the path of a subterranean gopher tunnel directly below the trail and following it exactly. But obviously, the cairns do not mark this gopher tunnel.

Note also that isomorphism is not sensitive to the difference between rocks whose stacking is artificial, i.e., an artifact of a purposive agent, and rocks whose stacking came about via random purely natural processes. But it is only if the stacking is artificial that the stacks would mean anything. And if the stacking is artificial/artifactual, then there is a purposive agent possessing intrinsic intentionality.

With a 'proctoscope,' for example, I can 'scope out' my colon and its contents. (Kevin Kim take note: this is right up your 'alley.') With a 'cerebroscope' I can 'take a gander' at the inside of my skull and its contents. My point is that the perceptions I get using these instruments are outer perceptions even though what I am looking at (whether gray matter or brown matter) is spatially inside of my body. Thus the external world includes not only everything spatially outside of my body, but also everything spatially inside of my body. The problem of the external world, by the way, is not the problem of whether or not there is something outside my body or brain, but the problem of understanding how we know that what appears to consciousness as independent of consciousness really is independent of consciousness.

I will now drop the qualifier 'outer' to save bandwidth. I will speak of perception, meaning by it outer perception. But bear in mind that by 'perception,' I mean perceptual consciousness of objects (whether in the visual, olfactory, tactile, or whatever mode). This is what we ordinarily mean by the term, and this is where we must start. It is obvious that perceptual consciousness exhibits intentionality. But I should add that intentionality cannot be understood apart from consciousness. This is a point argued for by Colin McGinn and assumed by me here. It is a separate topic requiring a separate post.

Now here is the question: Is my perception (perceptual consciousness!) of yonder mountain mediated by any kind of internal image or representation? Commenter Spur maintains a picture theory according to which the intentionality of perception is to be understood as constituted by an internal image's resemblance to the thing perceived. So if I am perceiving a red rubber ball, there is on Spur's theory an image inside my brain that resembles the ball, with the resemblance being that which makes the representation a representation of the ball. In a slogan: Ofness is constituted by likeness!

But does it even make sense to posit such images and representations? 'Represent' is a three-place predicate: if x represents, then x represents y to z. A map, for example, represents a chunk of terrain, or an arrangement of city streets and landmarks, to a map-user. The same goes for 'image' the verb: to image is to image something to someone. The point extends to 'mediate': if x mediates, then x mediates y to z. There is an accusative of mediation and a dative of mediation -- to press some grammatical terminology into service.

Spur's images are epistemic mediators. So, given the logic of 'mediates,' the ball-image mediates the ball to someone who, by perceiving the image becomes perceptually conscious of the ball. Spur himself tells us that we perceive these inner images. And here is where the whole story become unintelligible. We want to understand perception of a ball or a mountain or the inside of a bodily orifice. We are told that to understand perception we must posit an image in the brain/mind that mediates between the subject of perceiving and the object of perception. But if this image is itself perceived, then we are back where we started and none the wiser. For perception is precisely what we want to understand! It is useless to explain perception of a ball in terms of perception of an internal image. For then we either move in a circle or embark upon a vicious infinite regress. If I perceive an internal image, is that perceiving itself via a second internal image? If no, then why do I need an image when I perceive the ball? If yes, then an infinite regress arises.

To avoid this mess, already diagnosed by Edmund Husserl back in 1901, Spur must say that by 'perceive,' he does not mean be perceptually conscious of. He must deny that the image is an object of consciousness. But then it is no different than anything else in the organism that is part of the causal basis of perception. Blood flow to the brain is essential to the occurrence of perception, and the blood flow better be properly oxygenated; but surely blood and oxygen molecules do not function as epistemic mediators.

An image that is not an object of consciousness is not an image in the ordinary sense of the term. In what sense, then, are there any images in the head? And how does one distinguish these images in the head from all the other stuff in the head?

Here is a preliminary diagnosis. The materialist philosopher wants to understand perception. But instead of attending phenomenologically to perception, which shows itself to be a direct (unmediated) awareness of objects, he assimilates perception to a phenomenologically quite distinct form of consciousness, consciousness of objects via images. He thinks, quite absurdly, that perceptual consciousness is a type of image-consciousness. But since these mediating images do not appear, he inserts them into the brain where they cannot appear. In doing so, he violently distorts the concept of image he started with. For a brain-image does not appear to anyone, nor could it possess any intrinsic intentionality. So our materialist is stuck with the problem of explaining how this posited brain-image is of or about its object. But this is the very problem with which we began: What makes my thought of him a thought of him? (As Wittgenstein once formulated it.) Nothing is explained by translating this problem into material terms: the problem is only made worse.

Interim conclusion: Materialist theories of intentionality explain nothing.

1. I hike up to Fremont Saddle to have a look see. There before me in all its magnificence is Weaver’s Needle. My perceiving of the Needle and the surrounding landscape is of or about the landscape. Perceiving is not just a state I am in; it exhibits directedness to an object. This directedness is known in the trade as intentionality. Call it for present purposes mental aboutness. Pulling out a guidebook from my pack, I read a description of Weaver’s Needle. The declarative sentences comprising the description also exhibit aboutness. Call this semantic aboutness. Reaching into my pack a second time, I take out a topographical map of the region. It too exhibits aboutness. The map is of the terrain. A map is a kind of model. So we could call this model aboutness. These are three prima facie quite different types of aboutness.

2. My view is that mental aboutness is sui generis and irreducible. But I am open to refutation. One question is whether we can understand mental aboutness in terms of model aboutness. Can we explain the intentionality of mind as a special case of the intentionality of things like maps? What makes my visual perception of the Needle? What directs it to precisely this object? There is a crude image-theory that we should dispose of right away. It would be absurd to say that inside my brain there is a little picture of Weaver’s Needle and that this picture’s resembling the Needle is what confers intentionality on my visual perception. Surely, if you crack open my skull you won’t find any little pictures or drawings or statues in there.

But we can think of models more abstractly. My topographical map, after all, does not have a picture on it of the Needle. Its location is indicated by the words ‘Weaver’s Needle’ and a series of roughly concentric converging contour lines whose increasing closeness indicates the abruptness of the elevation change. The modelling involves what could be called a second-order isomorphism as opposed to the kind of first-order isomorphism one finds in models that literally resemble what they model. I can model a square object by drawing a square on a piece of paper. In this case, model and modelled literally resemble each other in respect of the property of being square. A portrait painter does something similar. If he is severely realistic, he gives a red-nosed drunk a red nose. The property of being (a definite shade of) red is common to both the nose on the painting and the nose on the drunk. But the contour lines and their relations to each other do not resemble anything in the landscape in the same way. Here we have to be careful, however. The lines do resemble streams and trails and striations in the rock. But if we consider their relations to each other, then there is no first-order resemblance to anything in the landscape.

So perhaps we can escape the absurdity of a crude image-theory of perceptual representation by saying that in my brain there is a configuration of matter that stands in a relation of second-order isomorphism to that magnificent spire of stone called ‘Weaver’s Needle,’ and that this second- order isomorphism is what confers intentionality upon my perceptual state. The idea is that there is a complex brain state whose constituents stand in a relation to each other that is isomorphic to the relation that the parts of the Needle stand in to each other.

3. Spur can tell me whether this is a fair rendition of the theory he proposes. Here is one question I have about it. It is obvious that not every state of the brain is a mental state: there is a lot going on in the brain, and not all of it is mind-manifesting. So a viable theory must be able to furnish a criterion for distinguishing those brain states that are mental from those that are not. On a mental models theory, as I understand it, what makes a brain state mental is its standing in a relation of second-order isomorphism to some object in the external world. But doesn't every portion of the brain stand in the relation in question to something or other somewhere? Doesn't every configuration of matter in the brain model something.

What I'm saying is this. A criterion of adequacy for any theory is that it explain why some brain states are mental and some are not. (In particular, why some are intentional and some are not.) But given the incredible complexity of the brain, each of its parts will instantiate relation-structures that are also instantiated by things external to the brain. It follows that each part of the brain will exhibit aboutness so that there will be no way to distinguish the states of the brain that are mental from those that are not. The criterion of adequacy will not have been satisfied.

A related problem. Suppose a portion of my brain and a portion of Spur's brain instantiate the same relation-structure: the two brain-portions are second-order isomorphic and so model each other. One would have to conclude from the theory that the two brain portions are mentally about each other -- which is absurd. There must be more to mental aboutness than isomorphism. If you say, "Yes, being caused in the right way," then I have a different set of arguments for you.

The other way of contesting the Brentano thesis is by adducing phenomena that are intentional but not mental, where mentality implies consciousness or at least the possibility of consciousness. It might be that there is nothing specifically mental about intentionality at all. Perhaps intentionality is to be found in nature and in artifacts below the level of mind. If so, it may be possible to understand intentionality at the level of mind by working up to it 'from below.' It may be possible to build a 'gradualist bridge' from mindless intentionality to minded intentionality. One might then come to understand how intentionality in us has 'evolved.'

What I would like to see are some really clear examples of intentionality in inanimate nature or in mindless artifacts. Daniel Dennett thinks there is intentionality in locks and keys. The following passage is from Kinds of Mind, p. 35:

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

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

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

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

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

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

P1. The aboutness₁ of lock and key, bear and scat, etc., is symmetrical.
P2. Intentionality is asymmetrical.
-----
C. Aboutness₁ is not a form of intentionality.

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

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

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

Husserl also points out that, no matter how carefully I examine the picture, I will discover no intrinsic feature of it that is its "representative character." (593) That is, there is no intrinsic property of the picture that confers upon it its reference to something beyond itself. So Husserl asks:

What therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone is present in consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a certain extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between image and thing will not help. (593, Findlay trans. slightly emended.)

Why won't resemblance help? If picture and thing depicted both exist, then of course there will be resemblance. But it cannot be in virtue of X's resemblance to Y that X pictures or images Y. "Only a presenting ego's power to use a similar as an image-representative of a similar . . . makes the image be an image." (594) Husserl's point is subtle. I'll explain it in my own way. A picture considered by itself is just a physical thing with physical properties. What makes it be an image? Its physical properties cannot account for its being an image. And the fact that it shares physical properties with some other thing cannot make it an image either. A painting of a mountain can be a painting of a mountain even if there is no mountain of which it is the painting. Pictures of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas are pictures of said hotel even though it has been demolished. The intentionality of a photograph can survive the destruction of its 'subject.' A depiction of Cerberus is what it is despite the dog's nonexistence.

But even if there exists something that a picture resembles, that does not suffice to make the picture a picture of a thing it resembles. Suppose I have two qualitatively identical ball bearings. In an Andy Warholish mood, I take a picture of one of them, the one closer to my computer. Gazing fondly at the photo, I say, "This ball bearing is the one that is closer to my computer." Since the photo resembles the other ball bearing as well, but is not of that ball bearing, it cannot be resemblance that confers upon the photo its intentionality.

What Husserl is saying in effect is that pictures, paintings, movie images, and the like possess no intrinsic intentionality: what intentionality they have is derived from conscious beings who possess intrinsic intentionality. For Husserl, and for me, the project of trying to account for intrinsic intentionality in terms of internal pictures that resemble outer objects is a complete nonstarter. For one thing, it leads to a vicious infinite regress: "Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object be itself constituted through an image . . . ." (594)

There are both phenomenological and dialectical reasons for rejecting the image-theory (Bilder-theorie) of consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence that ordinary perception is mediated by internal images. In addition,

1. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance, but resemblance cannot explain the intentionality of pictures that (i) never had an object, or (ii) lost their object.

2. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance, but resemblance cannot account for a picture's being of the very object it is of as opposed to some other one that it merely resembles.

3. The image-theory is involved in a vicious infinite regress.

4. Since image-consciousness presupposes ordinary perceptual consiousness, it is impossible to explain the latter in terms of the former.

5. The image-theory tries to locate the intentionality of consciousness in the intentionality of a picture when it is clear that there is nothing intrinsic to any picture that could account for its intentionality.

As James Ross has argued (in a related argument summarized in the book), this is one of the upshots of arguments like Quine's indeterminacy of translation argument and Kripke's (or "Kripkenstein's") "quus" argument: all of the behavioral, neurological, and other material facts about us are systematically indeterminate vis-a-vis their intentional content. This is why Quine ends up holding that there is just never any fact of the matter about what we mean. But as Ross shows, this is demonstrably false: sometimes, at least, there are determinate facts about meaning, such as when we engage in formal reasoning (addition, modus ponens, etc.) which is of its nature all-or-nothing. And even to hold that we never really strictly engage in such entirely determinate formal reasoning, but only approximate it -- a pretty desperate move, which also entails that none of our arguments (including arguments for materialism!) is ever really valid -- itself involves having a thought with determinate meaning, for we must grasp what addition, modus ponens, etc. are (which means grasping something inherently determinate) in order to deny that we ever strictly carry these operations out.

In short, if materialism is true, we never have any determinate thoughts; but we do have them, at least sometimes; so materialism isn't true.

In re: one commenter's claim that a representation can have dual meanings, he's right, but the point is irrelevant. All that matters for the argument is that at least some representations definitely represent one thing (A, say), and definitely do not represent some other thing (B), even though their material properties alone do not determine which thing is represented.

In re: intentionality and causation, you might recall that in the book I also discuss an argument from Popper against the possibility of a causal theory of intentionality. He says that any such theory must presuppose particular "beginning" and "ending" points in the causal chains it appeals to so as to identify them as the thing represented and the state doing the representing, respectively. Yet any attempt to pick out a precise "beginning" or "ending" point in the chain of physical causes is interest-relative, since there are no genuine "beginnings" or "endings" of the relevant sort in nature. It follows that any attempt to explain intentionality in this way will be viciously circular. (Popper's argument predates Putnam's, but I wish I had also cited Putnam in the book.)

Keep up the good work yourself! And let me know when you will be able to get to L.A. It would be great to get together.

Best, Ed

Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shovelling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shovelling that did him in.

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

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

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

The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interests and desires.

These considerations seem to wreak havoc with attempts to explain reference in causal terms. The materialist thinks he can do so by invoking physical causation. The idea is that the referents of a word W cause W-tokenings. The reference of a word is determined by the causal influence of the word's referents: Cats' causing of 'cat'-tokening is what confers upon these tokenings their aboutness, their reference to cats. If this is to work, it must be cats, and not pictures of cats, or the past behavior of English speakers that causes 'cat'-tokenings. But surely the past behavior of English speakers is part of the total cause of present 'cat'-tokenings. (See Putnam, pp. 48-49.) 'Cat' does not refer to this behavior, however. To exclude the behavior as non-salient requires use of the ordinary interest-relative notion of causation. But this notion, we have seen, presupposes intentionality.

The upshot is that causal accounts of representation are viciously circular: they presuppose the very notion that they are supposed to be reductively accounting for, namely, intentionality. In sum:

1. Our ordinary concept of causation is interest- and context-sensitive and so involves intentional notions.

2. It is this ordinary notion of causation that alone can help explain why, e.g., 'cat' refers to cats rather than to pictures of cats.

Therefore,

3. The causal account, presupposing as it does intentionality, is of no use to the physicalist who cannot countenance unreduced intentionality.

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

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

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

1. Consider a representation such as a picture. You draw a picture of your mother. The picture represents her: it is of or about her, and it would remain about her even were she to cease to exist. The picture is a physical object with physical properties: the paper is of a certain size and shape and texture, the ink of a certain chemical composition, the lines have a definite thickness, etc. Now I would insist that these physical features cannot be that in virtue of which the picture represents your mother: they cannot be that in virtue of which the physical item is a representation. But even if I am wrong about this, there remains a problem for a materialist theory of representation.

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

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

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

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

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

5. Here is the argument:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shovelling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shovelling that did him in.

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

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

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

The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interets and desires.

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

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

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

A proposition is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

1. The sea is blue
2. The sea is blue
3. Die See ist blau
4. Deniz mavidir.

(Since "Turks do it with suffixes," as I like to say, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That same thing is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by uttering them. The proposition is one to their many. And unlike the sentence-tokens, it is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.

So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. The idea is that it is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.

There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. You can't get blood from a stone, or meaning from matter, no matter how hard you squeeze.

Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there is nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds.

Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the belief is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. My believing that p is an intentional state directed upon p; but is it not also the case that p is directed upon the world, or upon a truth-making state of affairs in the world in the case in which p is true?

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

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

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

Since I have independent reasons for rejecting Fregean propositions, reasons that cannot be given here, I do not consider Fregean propositions any threat to Brentano's thesis. Let me end with this consideration: If there is something deeply puzzling about how physical states can exhinit original aboutness, is it not equally puzzling how something causally inert like a Fregean proposition can exhibit original aboutness?

1. Original/Derived Intentionality. All will agree that there is some sort of distinction to be made here. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater.

So some things derive their referential and semantic properties from other things. What about these other things? I draw you a map so that you can find my camp. I use the Greek phi to mark my camp and the Greek psi to mark the camp of a heavily-armed crazy man that you are well advised to avoid. I intend that phi designate my camp. That intending (narrow sense) is a case of intentionality (broad sense). This is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether my intending is a case of original or of derived intentionality.

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

2. Ascriptivism Versus Realism. Dennett appears to hold an ascriptivist or projectivist or imputationalist or instrumentalist theory of intentionality: nothing is an intentional system intrinsically or an sich; a system is intentional in virtue of someone's assigning intentional states to it. Thus there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not my computer (when it is running a chess program) has beliefs and desires (e.g., the desire to inflict mate.) But it may be useful to take up the "intentional stance" vis-a-vis the computer in order to explain its behavior. Given the computer's complexity, the physical and design stances are unavailing.

A realist about intentionality, on the other hand, is someone who holds that some systems really are intrinsically intentional: their having beliefs and desires is not a matter of anyone's viewing them as having such states. One way to be a realist is by being a reductive realist. Such a person admits the reality of intentional states but identifies them with something believed to be more fundamental such as brain states. If you believe, with Dretske, that intentionality does not need naturalizing, but already is a natural phenomenon in the natural world below the level of conscious mind, then you are presumably a reductive realist about intentionality. You are saying this: there is intrinsic intentionality, but it is physical in nature.

I'm a realist too, but I hold that intentionality is irreducibly real: it cannot be reduced to, or identified with, anything else. It is what it is and not some other thing. Part of the reason I believe this is because the alternatives are quite hopeless.

3. The Ascriptivist Regress. Suppose one takes the ascriptivist line. Then an infinite regress appears unavoidable. Suppose I ascribe intentionality to my chess playing computer. Quite obviously, my ascribing, projecting, imputing, is itself an intentional state or a series of such states. So if ascriptivism is true, then my acts of ascribing must themselves be ascribed -- otherwise they are intrinsic and the game is over. This launches us on a regress that is obviously infinite since at each level, one can "kick it up a notch." It is also clear that the regress (unlike the truth regress say) is vicious since at no level is the explanation of intentionality complete.

One might think to avoid the regress by embracing a circle: I ascribe intentional states to the computer and it ascribes intentional states to me. But surely this is even more of an absurdity for reasons that needn't be belabored.

The upshot is that pure ascriptivism is incoherent.

4. Adulterated Ascriptivism. Perhaps the solution is to mix some realism in with the ascriptivism. Maybe it goes like this. I have a head full of homunculi. These little men and women, working together, ascribe intentionality to me. But each homunculus has its intentionality ascribed to it by other, stupider, homunculi which are constituents of it. The stupider homunculi, in turn, are composed of even stupider ones, and so on until we get to the level of individual neurons which, as Pollack says, "aren't 'about' anything." The base level homuncuili are so stupid that one could say that they don't even rise to the level of being either stupid or intelligent.

Does this avoid the dilemma of having to choose between a vicious infinite regress and a vicious circle? What Dennett is proposing is a finite regress that terminates with something naturalistically acceptable, namely entities that lack intrinsic or original intentionality.

Admittedly, this proposal gets rid of the infinity of the regress, but not its viciousness: we still have no explanation of intentionality. Consider the base-level homunculi. They are so primitive as to lack all intentionality. How then can they ascribe intentionality to their colleagues one level up? Surely it is obvious that the ascribing of intentionality is itself an intentional act or series thereof.

The point is quite simple. If the regress terminates with base entities utterly devoid of intentonality, then no higher level entities will be intentional. For the higher-ups get their intentionality only from the ones lower down in the hierarchy. If the ones at the very bottom have no intentionality, then they can't transmit it up. But if, on the other hand, the ones at the very bottom possess intentionality, then it is false that all intentionality is derived.

In the final analysis, Dennett is an eliminativist about intentionality. His position amounts in the end to the denial of intentionality. To see this, you just have to think clearly. Dennett is saying that all intentionality is derivative, none is intrinsic or original. But that makes sense only if one embraces an infinite regress. But in this case an infinite regress must be vicious. On the other hand, a regress that terminates either terminates with entities that are intrinsically intentional or entities that are not. If the former, the game is over. If the latter, no intentionality gets transmitted up and Dennett is an eliminativist.

5. Could Intentionality be Continuously Variable? Pollack thinks this is a reasonable assumption. Presumably he means that it is a matter of degree, not of kind. In one sense, this is unproblematic: I exhibit more intrinsic intentionality than my cat does in that my intentional contents are richer that hers are. I see the TV as a TV, whereas she sees it as merely something stable enough to support her weight should she decide to jump up on it. Similarly, one woman can be more pregnant than another if the first is farther along in her pregnancy than the second. But that is not to say that every woman is pregnant. So even if there is a sense in which some entities are more intentional than others, there still must be, on Dennett's scheme, entities that are devoid of intentionality. Otherwise, he must embrace panpsychism.

Now I am sure that Pollack is not a panpregnantist: he does not hold that all women are pregnant with mere differences of degree distinguishing them. I don't think he is a panpsychist either. If he isn't, then he holds that some entities are utterly devoid of mind. But then how are minded entities supposed to arise from them? Surely a mindless entity cannot ascribe intentionality to anything.

Note also that even if intentionality were variable, it is hard to see how it could be continuously variable. That would imply that there are continuum-many (2 raised to the power aleph-nought) gradations between my intentional contents and those of some other actual or possible being. It is not clear what that could mean.

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

[. . .]

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

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

[. . .]

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

I will now sum up BonJour's reasoning in my own way. BonJour is thinking about dogs. He needn't be thinking about any particular dog; he might just be thinking about getting a dog, which of course does not entail that there is some particular dog, Kramer say, that he is thinking about getting. BonJour's thinking has intentional content. The question is whether the Martian scientist can determine what that content is by monitoring BonJour's neural states during the period of time he is thinking about dogs. The content before BonJour's mind has various subcontents: hairy critter, mammal, barking animal, man's best friend . . . . But none of this content will be discernible to the neuroscientist on the basis of complete knowledge of the neural states, their relations to each other and to sensory input and behavioral output. Therefore, there is more to the mind than what can be known by even a completed neuroscience. Physicalism (materialism) is false.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer.

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by a process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutuionary processes? I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:

. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)

This suggests the following design argument:

1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

Therefore

3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

To resist this argument, the naturalist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.

Thanks for the interesting and fruitful comments. There are properties that it makes sense to say are emergent. Consider the property of being a heap. A grain of sand is not a heap. But add 9,999 grains to it and one definitely has a heap. Somewhere between one grain and 10,000 grains the heap emerges, though one will be hard pressed to say exactly where, and why adding one more grain should suddenly make a difference. Perhaps you are saying that intentionality is like this. At a certain threshhold of complexity intentionality emerges.

But note that emergentism is a kind of dualism: what emerges (intentionality) is radically different from its emergence base, mindless matter. Since emergentism is a form of dualism, albeit not a form of substance dualism, it cannot be used to make sense of Dennett's position which eschews as unscientific every sort of dualism, not just substance dualism.

Note also that it cannot be Dennett's view that original (intrinsic) intentionality emerges. For he explicitly denies that there is an original intentionality. (For example, at the end of "Fast Thinking in The Intentonal Stance, p. 337: "There is no such thing as intrinsic intentionality . . . .")

This implies that all intentionality is derivative. The intentionality of smarter systems derives from that of dumber and dumber subsystems until we arrive at subsystems so dumb that they are utterly free of intentionality (like the solitary grain of sand that is 'heapless').

Intentionality is a useful model for understanding the design and behavior of a system, but I think we must be careful not to grant it some sort of mysterious soul-like status. Obviously a stone has no intentionality, while we have it in spades. But I think Dennett has done a good job of showing how intentionality could ramp into existence gradually, once matter has organized itself into primitive replicators. If a simple organism has over eons evolved cellular mechanisms for engulfing food, then we can read intentionality into those new mechanisms and structures (they are "for" eating), though nothing inexplicable or mysterious has happened.

You say that intentionality is a model, and then you say it can "ramp into existence." There is a tension here. If something comes into existence then it is real and not a mere model of the real. Are you perhaps conflating the intentional stance with intentionality?

Suppose we "read intentionality" into some cellular mechanism. No doubt we can do this just as I can ascribe beliefs and desires to my chess playing computer. But it doesn't follow that there is any intentionality in the cellular mechanism or in the computer. Note also that ascribing is itself a case of intentionality. So if there is no intrinsic intentionality, then my ascribing is intentional in virtue of some other entity's ascribing intentionality to me -- which appears to ignite a vicious infinite regress.

In Dennett's view even the mental mechanisms that underlie our consciousness (with all its rich and multifaceted intentionality) are just a logical extension of that process, a synergistic result of the joint efforts of simpler mental modules, which in turn are the result of the actions of bundles of neurons, and so forth. Our fabulously rich high-level intentionality emerges from all of this in the same way that "performance" or "handling" emerges from the parts of a Porsche. Yes, the individual car parts were designed by the intentionality of German engineers — but our mental parts were also designed by natural selection over deep time.

There is no doubt that you understand what Dennett WANTS to say, but the question remains as to whether or not what he wants to say can be coherently said.

Dennett's theory is ascriptivist: nothing has intentionality intrinsically; intentionality is ascribed or imputed or projected into a system from without. But this ascribing is itself an instance of intentionality, and you want to say that this ascribing is the "synergistic result of simpler mental modules" which are in turn the result of even simpler modules which are "designed by natural selection."

There is a deep unclarity here. How can D's theory be both ascriptivist and emergentist? You said a while back that we ascribe intentionality to primitive cellular mechanisms. Fine. But that implies that those organisms have no intrinsic intentionality. How then can enough of them working together -- syn-ergy -- give rise to the intentionality that ascribes intentionality to them?

There is a vicious circle here. X ascribes intentionality to a, b, and c. Apart from this ascription they would exhibit no intentionality. But X's ascribing is an instance of intentionality that results from the synergy of a, b, and c -- which presupposes that there is some primitive intentionality in a, b, and c that is not the result of X's ascription.

There is also the unclarity of "designed by natural selection." Strictly speaking, natural selection doesn't design anything. Designing is an instance of intentionality, and intentionality emerges only way down the evolutionary road. What Dennett does is help himself to, or presuppose, the very thing he is trying to account for, namely, intentionality.

As for a bridge from causes to reasons, why NOT say that the computer's move is forced by reasons? Yes, we can take an extreme-reductionist view and try to determine the computer's move from the state of its constituent particles, just as we might for a human player, but why bother? We know very well that the computer will avoid mate in one because if it doesn't it will lose , just the same as a good human player. Take any decent chess computer (and there are lots and lots of them - I have about seven or eight myself), and set up an avoidable mate-in-one, and the machine will always avoid it, regardless of the particulars of the hardware or software . I think this is amply sufficient to move from "can be viewed as" to "is". Yes, a human playing a child might lose on purpose (I often did as I was teaching my son the game), but that of course is because a human is a vastly more complex intentional system.

You can impute reasons to a computer or a thermostat or a circuit breaker: it has a reason to trip: it doesn't want the house to burn down and it with it. You could say it senses a surge in amperage caused by a short circuit. But of course it senses nothing: it is just a crude mechanical device. So I fail to see how viewing it as having reasons suffices to show that it has reasons for its 'actions' which of course are not actions strictly speaking.

I think your argument that there is something important left to be explained depends entirely on reifying intentionality, quite unnecessarily, into something more exotic than it needs to be.

I plead innocent. To reify is to make into something real that which is unreal. But intrinsic intentionality is real, and is indeed presupposed as real by any affirmation of derived intentionality. What you and Dennett are doing is denying a plain fact because it fails to fit into your preconceived naturalistic schema. And the cost of that denial is all sorts of absurdities: vicious infinite regresses, vicious circles, equivocations, etc.

Q. Why should intentionality be a problem for naturalists and only explicable on the thesis that the supernatural exists? Having read The Maverick Philosopher's article, I can't see the problem.

A. First of all, I did not use 'supernatural.' People tend to conflate it with 'miraculous,' where the latter means something like 'involving a suspension of the laws of nature' and I see nothing miraculous about the existence of irreducible minds or irreducible mental properties.

The question is whether the whole of reality is exhausted by natural reality, where the latter is the object of the natural sciences. The problem is that phenomena such as consciousness and intentionality appear not be explicable in natural-scientific terms. Suppose they are not explicable in these terms. That would not make them miraculous: there needn't be any violation or suspension of natural laws.

Q. He gives the example of Bush believing Saddam had WMD's. True, we can have intentions about objects that do not exist, but I don't see the problem. After all, computers contain all sorts of software objects that don't exist as a collection of atoms, yet computers are fully materialistic.

A. No offense, but I don't think you are thinking clearly. If computers "contain" "software objects" that are not made of material particles, then how can computers be "fully materialistic"?

Note also that when a program is loaded into a computer, the program does exist in material form. Word Perfect 8.0 for example is stored on my hard drive in physical form.

Q. If the problem is that my intentionality is original and 'not derived or borrowed intentionality of the kind found in words and maps.', then I would like an explanation of how a physical map can contain borrowed intentionality.

A. Well, let say you have a topographical map of a certain chunk of wilderness. The map is of or about that land area, and certain marks on the map are about certain physical features of the landscape. Thus contour lines close together denote a sharp rise in elevation, whereas contour lines far apart denote a much more gradual change in elevation. A certain symbol denotes a mine shaft, etc. It is obvious that the aboutness of the map and its symbols is not intrinsic to the map and its symbols. That lines close together should denote a sharp elevation change is a matter of convention: we assign that meaning to the lines and their closeness, and we might have adopted some different convention. The map therefore derives its aboutness from us. Without us, it is not about anything. it is just a piece of paper with meaningless marks on it.

Isn't that just self-evident? If you deny it then you are saying that the map just by itself, just in virtue of its physical properties, means, refers, denotes, etc. And surely that is false.

A rock cairn indicates where the trail is. It is about the trail and says in effect: the trail is here where I am. But that is only because we assign that meaning to stacked rocks. The intentionality is derivative, not intrinsic.

A green light means: You may proceed. But there is no way to derive that meaning from the physical properties of a green light. The meaning is assigned by us.

Q. When we understand how a physical object can exhibit borrowed intentionality, I will understand better how physical objects can exhibit original intentionality.

A. You have lost me completely now. There is no problem at all in understanding how a physical object can exhibit borrowed intentionality, as explained above. What no naturalist has explained, however, is how a physical system, no matter how complex, can exhibit intrinsic intentionality.

A wordprocessor, for example, is not a meaning-processor but a physical symbol manipulator. Nothing in the hardware, or in the software, or in the hardware running the software makes a physical symbol mean or refer to anything. WE interpret the symbols as meaning something.

Q. If the problem is that I cannot explain how matter is conscious , then this is a fact about me, and not a disproof that matter is conscious. It is a pure ad hominem argument.

A. Well, the problem is not that YOU cannot explain it, but than no one can. But you are right that not being able to show how something is possible does not prove that it is not actual. If some matter is conscious, then it is possible that it be conscious. But on the other hand, if I cannot understand HOW matter can be conscious, then that gives me a reason to deny that it is conscious.

Analogy. If the number 9 is anorexic, then it is possible that it be anorexic. But I don't understand how a number could be anorexic, or have any sort of eating disorder: after all, numbers don't eat. My failure to understand how numbers could be anorexic is not merely an autobiographical or psychological fact about me, but reveals the incoherence of supposing that a number could be anorexic.

Note that consciousness is not third-person observable.

IS THERE INTENTIONALITY IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD?

CRITICAL REMARKS ON DRETSKE

‘Intentionality’ is the philosophical term of art for that property of (some) mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or, in the case of propositional accusatives, may or may not be true. Thus Bush’s belief that Saddam possessed WMDs is the belief it is, and has the aboutness it has, whether or not the proposition the belief is about is true or false.

Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.) But we are now living in naturalistic times. The widespread conviction that physicalism or materialism or naturalism in some version or other just must be true has made it seem important to 'naturalize' intentionality, to show how intentional phenomena such as beliefs and desires can be explained physicalistically. For if they cannot be so explained, if they cannot be identified with physical phenomena, how can they be real? As Jerry Fodor puts it, "If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Jerry A. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 97) This is Fodor’s paradoxical way of saying that there is a problem about explaining how intentionality — the ‘unnatural’ property of reference to what need not exist or be true — can be real given that only natural items are real.

This concern gives rise to what may be called the 'naturalization project,' the attempt to show that intentional phenomena are either identical to or supervenient upon physical phenomena. Others do not see much of a problem here. Fred Dretske, for example, holds that "there is no need to naturalize intentionality" since "It is already a familiar part of our physical world." (Fred Dretske, "If You Can't Make One, You Don't Know How It Works," Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIX, eds. French, et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 471.) He means original, not derived or borrowed intentionality of the kind found in words and maps. A map, for example, is about a portion of terrain. But the map’s aboutness is not intrinsic to it, but borrowed from us, who interpret the map as about the terrain. Our interpreting, however, and our comparing of map and terrain, are presumably instances of original intentionality. Dretske's view, then, is that there is original or intrinsic intentionality in natural systems below the level of mind. Not only are mental intentional phenomena really physical, but there are nonmental intentional phenomena. If Dretske is right, we should not be puzzled by mental intentional phenomena, nor should we take them as posing any threat to a thoroughgoing naturalism.

Dretske invites us to consider a compass the needle of which normally (i.e., when it is functioning properly and is used correctly) points to magnetic (as opposed to geographic) North. Dretske holds that this pointing or indicating is a case of original intentionality: the compass’ “being a reliable indicator does not itself depend on us." (Ibid., p. 471.) It is unlike a map which gets its intentionality from us. So far, so good.

But what makes the needle's pointing to magnetic North an intentional phenomenon? Note that Dretske's claim is not that the needle's behavior is in some metaphorical or 'as-if' sense intentional, but that it is genuinely intentional. Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality. "Anything exhibiting this mark is about something else under an aspect." (Ibid.) The idea is a familiar one. To be aware (whether in perception, imagination, memory...) of something x is to be aware of it as something F. Necessarily, awareness is always awareness of something as something. Furthermore, even if every F is a G, I can be aware of x as F without being aware of x as G. Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc. Dretske sees the same structure in compass needles:

Compass needles are about geographical regions or directions under one aspect (as, say, the direction of the pole) and not others (as the habitat of polar bears). This is the same way our thoughts are about a place under one aspect (as where I was born) but not another (as where you were born). (Ibid.)

Dretske's argument seems to be this:

a. Anything that is about objects under some aspects but not others in the way our thoughts are is an intentional state.

b. Compass states are about objects under some aspects but not others in the way our thoughts are.

Therefore

c. Compass states are intentional states.

This strikes me as a breathtakingly bad argument the badness of which should be evident from my (deductively valid) reconstruction. First of all, to say that the needle is 'about' the polar region as magnetic North is just to say that its pointing in that direction is caused by the magnetic properties of the polar region. What else could 'about' mean here? It is obvious that the needle is not conscious of magnetic North, or of anything else. A compass needle cannot intend or mean anything, any more than a pile of bear scat can intend or mean anything. Of course, one can say such things as, 'This fresh bear scat means that a bear was in the vicinity recently,' but this use of 'means' expresses derivative intentionality, intentionality of the kind which presupposes the original intentionality of minds. And to say that the compass needle's pointing is not 'about' the polar region as bear-inhabited is just to say that its pointing in that direction is not caused by the 'ursine' properties of the polar region, even though the 'ursine' and magnetic properties are coexemplified. Premise (b), then, is simply and strikingly false.

It is widely accepted that causation is always causation in respect of specific properties. Thus a knife cuts through tendons in virtue of its sharpness and not in virtue of its being two feet long, but fits into the drawer in virtue of its being two feet long but not in virtue of its sharpness. The properties may even be necessarily coextensive. Triangularity and trilaterality are necessarily coextensive properties: there is no possible world in which one but not the other is exemplified. Nevertheless, it is in virtue of the triangularity, but not the trilaterality, of a piece of metal that I have three bloody points on the palm of my hand.

What Dretske is doing in the quoted passage, then, is assimilating the aspectuality of intentionality to the 'aspectuality' of causation:

INTENTIONALITY: if x is about y, then x is about y under some aspect F, and x can be about y under F without being about y under G even if necessarily every F is a G.

CAUSATION: if x is caused by y, then x is caused by y in virtue of some property F of y, and x can be caused by y in virtue of F without being caused by y in virtue of G of y even if necessarily every F is a G.

No doubt there is an interesting structural analogy between the aspectuality of intentionality and the 'aspectuality' of causation. But does this analogy warrant saying that the compass needle is about a place in the same way (Dretske's words) that our thoughts are about a place? I would think not. First of all, to use ‘about’ and ‘of’ in connection with the pointing of compass needles is a misuse of terms, or at best a misleading idiosyncrasy. There may be as-ness in the compass example, but there is no of-ness. Genuine intentionality involves both as-ness and of-ness. Second, even if we acquiesce in Dretske's terminological mischief, a compass needle is not 'about' or 'of' a place the way consciousness is — on pain of an egregious equivocation. Consciousness presents its object, makes or lets it appear, which is something it could not do apart from consciousness; the needle does not present its 'object,' nor does it make or let it appear. Strictly speaking, the needle's pointing does not have an object; it has a cause. Nor does the needle present its 'object' under an 'aspect.' One cannot speak literally of aspects here, because nothing is appearing to the needle or to the compass. ‘Aspect’ by its very etymology (ad-spectare) is a mind-involving term. What we have here again is terminological inflation. Furthermore, the needle's pointing to magnetic North is a purely physical, publicly observable, pointing. In this sense, consciousness does not 'point' to its object; it is rather the presentation of its object. I cannot examine your states of consciousness to see what they are about the way I can examine compass needles, weather vanes, etc. to see what they are pointing at. And I do not examine my own states of consciousness to see what they are about. I may examine a state of my body such as a skin rash to inquire about its underlying cause, but I never examine my conscious experiences to see what they are of or about. Experiences are not signs of their objects. Husserl refuted this 'sign-theory' of consciousness long ago. (Cf. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: The Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 593-596.)

Thus it is only by equivocating on such key words as 'about' and 'aspect' that Dretske can come to ascribe original intentionality to compass needles, clouds, smoke, tree rings, and the like. But he may be committing another mistake, namely, that of inferring that if something is not a case of derived intentionality, then it must be a case of original intentionality. For there is the possibility that it is a case of what Searle calls ‘as-if’ intentionality, which of course is not intentionality at all. A good example is a thermostat which, as we say, ‘senses’ a change in room temperature. Such talk is harmless in everyday life but misleading to some philosophers. Clearly, the thermostat does not literally sense anything; it is not conscious of a change in temperature. ‘Sensors’ in general, whether electrical, mechanical, electromagnetic, photoelectric, etc., do not literally sense anything. Sentience is a mode of consciousness, and no such contraption as a thermostat is conscious. Or do you want to say that a chocolate bar melting in a hot car literally feels the heat? Yet thermostats behave as if they sense a change in temperature; it is as if they possess intentional states. The same holds for the pointing of the compass needle. From the fact that this is not a case of derived intentionality, it does not follow that it is a case of original intentionality. What follows is that it is not a case of intentionality at all, but merely behaves as if it were a case of intentionality. As Colin McGinn puts it, "When we think we are conceiving of content in the absence of consciousness we are really treating a system as if it were conscious, while simultaneously denying that this is what we are up to."(Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), p. 33. McGinn does not endorse this view.)

To deny the distinction between intrinsic and 'as-if' intentionality would be to embrace the view that all natural phenomena are intentional. For all natural phenomena have causes, and causation, as noted, is always in respect of properties. But it is surely obvious that not all natural phenomena are intentional in the very same way conscious phenomena are intentional. If they were, absolutely everything would be conscious, which is absurd.

What one could say, perhaps, is that that there are two kinds of intentionality, or two kinds of content. There is unconscious intentionality and there is conscious intentionality. In this way one might hope to avoid the absurd conclusion that every natural phenomenon exhibits conscious intentionality. McGinn speaks in this connection of "two species of content, personal and subpersonal..." He continues:

I doubt that the self-same kind of content possessed by a conscious perceptual experience, say, could be possessed independently of consciousness; such content seems essentially conscious, shot through with subjectivity. This is because of the Janus-faced character of conscious content: it involves presence to the subject, and hence a subjective point of view. Remove the inward-looking face and you remove something integral — what the world seems like to the subject. (Ibid. p. 34)

This is right, and spells the doom of the naturalization project, the attempt to account for such intentional phenomena as beliefs and desires in wholly physicalistic terms. For what it implies is that there can be no third-person, wholly objective, understanding of conscious intentionality. But without an understanding of conscious intentionality, there is no understanding of mind.

But even more fundamentally, could there be two kinds of original intentionality? Is this a coherent proposal? If there are two kinds or species of original intentionality, conscious and unconscious, then there must be a genus of which they are the species. But what could this genus be? We saw, pace Dretske, that the pointing of the compass needle is not about magnetic North in the same sense that a thought is about magnetic North. It is only by equivocating on 'of' and 'about' that one could think otherwise. Thus there is no generic aboutness. If there is no generic aboutness, there can be no kinds or species of aboutness. Clearly, what we must say is that unconscious intentionality is no more a kind of intentionality than artificial leather is a kind of leather. In 'artificial leather,' 'artificial' does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'leather.' Similarly, 'unconscious' does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'intentionality.' Unconscious intentionality, then, is as-if intentionality. And McGinn's subpersonal contents are as-if contents.

BV: Thanks for writing, Dennis. I have been thinking about you in connection with your beloved Pollo alla Marsala. Later, I am going to explain how you can prepare it for yourself so as to end some of the suffering induced by the culinary backwater in which you presently reside. But I digress.

The underlying facts you mention are not in dispute. But I am not sure I understand your argument. If S1 pushes S2 off a building, but S2 survives, then S1 has not caused the death of S2. What you must mean is that if S1 pushes and S2 dies, then S1 caused the death of S2 regardless of the fact that in similar circumstances not every 'pushee' dies. Now I don't deny that there is causation here at the level of event-tokens. But I should think that this causation at the token level is a species of necessitation.

So let's consider the question at the type level. Then your claim is that the event-type pushing causes the event-type dying (subject to all relevant caveats and provisos) even if a tokening of the first event-type merely raises the probability (to a degree <1) of a tokening of the second event-type.

Now what you are saying makes sense and is in accord with the usage of many philosophers nowadays. But for me, causation is a species of necessitation, and the 'action' occurs at the level of tokens, not types. I think you will agree that types as such don't do any causing. It is only the tokening of a type that can serve as a relatum of a causal relation. Now either token t₁ necessitates token t₂ or it does not. It seems to me to make no sense to say that one event-token raises the probability of the occurrence of a second event-token.

But to pursue this further, I would have to hear what your theory of causation is. As you know, there are several theories on offer. To lay one of my cards on the table: I reject regularity theories.

There is also the point that the type smoking and the type lung cancer (or else the disjunctive type: lung cancer or emphysema or . . .) are rather unlike the types mentioned in your two examples. Almost no one survives a ten story fall. (Are you aware of even one documentable case?) But plenty of people smoke all their lives without getting lung cancer. In my family alone, there are perhaps a half dozen examples. One uncle smoked unfiltered Camels.

2. As you might have guessed from my earlier email about liberals and conservatives, I’m not overly happy about the paragraph starting with “[l]iberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons.” Can’t liberals believe as they do because it seems to them, on reflection, the right thing to do, whether or not they can perform a power grab in the process? And the claim that their “loose talk” “aids them in their denial of individual responsibility” seems to me to rest on an implicit false dilemma: surely a liberal can believe in individual responsibility and believe that there are various social structures that are harmful and ought to be censured or restricted in various ways.

BV: That's a good objection, Dennis, and I take it seriously. Let me first say that I write several different kinds of posts. Some are pure philosophy posts. These purport to be rein wissenschaftlich. Others are of a political and social nature, and in them I allow myself to engage in a bit of polemic (from the Gr. polemos, war, strife.) It is a tough question whether there can or even should be pure, polemic-free political philosophy. I am currently thinking about this in connection with study of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, but I have just begun to seriously engage this issue and have no fixed view. In any case, I believe (rightly or wrongly) that the Left must be defeated. If I am right, then some amount of polemic may be not only permissible, but also obligatory.

Did I qualify 'liberals and leftists' with 'many'? I'll have to look. Certainly many libs and lefties are motivated by a desire for power and will say anything to grab it and hold it.

You and I will agree that a theory or policy cannot be refuted by tracing it back to the psychological motivations of its proponents. Theories and policies must be evaluated on their own merits. But once I have refuted a view, then I consider myself justified in explaining how someone could hold such a (false, incoherent, unsupported . . .) view. Why, for example, do MANY Dems oppose SS reform? Their arguments are bad and they have no proposals of their own. (Barbara Boxer would be a good example.) It seems clear to me that they oppose Bush type reforms because they want to retain their power over people, the power that comes from controlling how much money people receive in retirement benefits. If someone maintains a position that obviously benefits him in terms of money, power, status, yet has either no arguments for the position, or demonstrably worthless ones, then it is entirely legitimate to 'psychologize' such a person.

But the psychologizing must come after their arguments have been refuted, not before.

Regarding the false dilemma, you want to say that a liberal can uphold individual responsibility while also holding that certain "social structures" ought to be "censured or restricted." Well, any sane person will agree with that. For example, adults ought to be free to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages, but no one wants them to be made available to children. But you may not be appreciating my point: the liberal tendency is to deny individual responsibility and to displace it onto factors external to the agent. That's not to say that everyone who calls himself a liberal does this. Alan Colmes calls himself a liberal but I'm sure he would come out in favor of individual responsibility. We are talking types and tendencies here. We have gone entirely too far in the liberal direction, as it seems to me, and now for the good of the country we need to make a correction and move back in the conservative direction. I wouldn't be calling myself a conservative if it were not for the extremism of contemporary liberals, an extremism from which I wish to dissociate myself. In some ways, I myself am a classical liberal.

Thanks again for your civil comments, and feel free to counterrespond.