Maverick Philosopher

What interests me is the deflationary conclusion that Brentano draws from his schedule. Consider 'Diogenes is honest.' The copula 'is' is synsemantic, or syncategorematic, or co-signifying (mitbedeutend). That is, it "has no meaning in and of itself. . . ." (Psychology, 212) The copula does not have a referent, nor does it have a sense. It is not a name. 'Diogenes' is a name, and it may be that 'honest' is a name of a property, honesty. But surely 'is' in its copulative use is not a name. Now given the above intertranslatability, Brentano concludes that what is true of the copulative 'is' is also true of 'exists': it is synsemantic. This implies that 'exists' is not a genuine predicate, one that has corresponding to it either a concept of existence or a property of existence. For Brentano, then, existential propositions are not predications of existence. Existence is not a property of individuals.

But of course Brentano doesn’t merely deny that existence belongs to individuals themselves, he has a positive theory: he replaces the existence of a tree, for example, with a judger’s acceptance (Anerkennung) of a tree, or else a judger’s acceptance of the presentation of a tree, and the nonexistence of a unicorn with a judger’s rejection (Verwerfung) of a unicorn or else a judger’s rejection of the presentation of a unicorn.

Brentano's positive theory is anticipated by Hume in this passage quoted by Peter Geach in his "Assertion":

It is far from being true, that in every judgment which we form we unite two different ideas, since in that proposition, God is, or indeed, any other, which regards existence, the idea of existence is no distinct idea, which we unite with that of the object . . . . The act of the mind exceeds not a single conception; and the only remarkable difference, which occurs on this occasion, is, when we join belief to the conception, and are persuaded of the truth of what we conceive." (Treatise, Book I, sec. vii.)

The theories of Bentano and Hume imply that every existential proposition is an existential judgment, where the judgment that A exists is just the acceptance of A, or as Hume would put it, the joining of belief to the conception of A, as opposed to the combining of a concept with the concept of existence.

Now if Geach is right that "An existential proposition need not express a judgment of existence," (Logic Matters, 264), then Brentano and Hume are wrong. Geach gives the example, 'Either there is a Loch Ness monster, or many observers have been unreliable.' (264) Someone who asserts this is not asserting that there is a Loch Ness monster. Yet one could assert that there is a Loch Ness monster, and if one did, then the content of one's assertion would be identical to the content of the first disjunct of the disjunctive proposition lately cited. The existential proposition expressed by 'There is a Loch Ness monster' can occur either asserted or unasserted. This shows that existential propositions can occur both judged and unjudged. Now if an existential proposition can occur both judged and unjudged, then there must be a concept or property of existence included within the existential proposition.

Let me try to clarify this with a further example. Someone who asserts or judges that Either God exists or life is meaningless does not judge that God exists. Yet God exists is a part, a disjunct, of what the person judges. It seems to follow that a concept or property of existence must be a constituent of the proposition, God exists. This implies that Hume was wrong to say that there is no "distinct idea of existence" and that Brentano was wrong to hold that existence is never predicated. It also casts doubt on E. Gilson's claim that existence is not conceivable.

So Geach seems to have a point. But I wonder: Is the existence that can figure in a proposition as a predicate concept the genuine article? Should we distinguish between existence proper, which cannot be predicated, and existence as concept?

2. Brentano was indeed eclipsed by his brilliant students, and this is part of the explanation of his invisibility. Meinong, Twardowski, and Husserl immediately come to mind. And then Husserl was eclipsed by his brilliant student, Heidegger. There is a definite Brentano-Heidegger connection via Brentano's dissertation, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, written under Trendelenburg. It was this book, Heidegger reports that got him thinking about die Seinsfrage, the question of Being. Given that to de on legetai men pollachos, "being is said in many ways," (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1003a30), what is it that unifies these senses?

For outstanding students of Heidegger like Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose Wahrheit und Methode (1960) put philosophical hermeneutics on the map, Brentano was of little interest. I recall a conversation with Gadamer from the '70s. I mentioned Brentano, and Gadamer repeated the name in a drawn-out and dismissive way — Brent-a-n-o — and went on to make a remark that matched his dimissive tone.

3. Although Brentano was the father of phenomenology via his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, which influenced Husserl, and also the grandfather of the later phenomenology via his dissertation with its influence on Heidegger, his 'dialectical' way of doing philosophy was dismissed by both Husserl (after the Logical Investigations) and Heidegger. Phenomenology is a matter of 'seeing' and describing rather than arguing. There is little of aporetics to be found in Husserl or Heidegger. But Brentano was steeped in Aristotle and the Scholastics whose philosophical style consisted in framing questions, canvassing the opinions on both sides of them, presenting arguments, and responding to counterarguments. With the dying out of argumentative and aporetic style among Continental philosophers, the influence of Brentano was bound to wane.

4. In the Anglosphere, however, Brentano was probably perceived as insufficiently argumentative and too phenomenological. He did, however, find a very able champion in Roderick Chisholm. I strongly recommend the latter's Brentano and Meinong Studies.

5. 'Ockham' opines that Heidegger and Sartre were "abominations." I beg to differ, but my differing should be reserved for a separate post.

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. Intentionality without conscious awareness but with an easy transition to conscious awareness.
2. Intentionality with neither conscious awareness nor an easy transition to conscious awareness.
3. Intentionality below the level of mind.

Ad 1. One can be aware of X without being consciously aware of it, i.e., aware of it in such a way that one is aware of one's awareness of it. If memory serves, Hector-Neri Castaneda used to refer to this sort of awareness as that of an externus. Suppose I have been driving for a while on 'automatic pilot': I have been negotiating turns, stopping at traffic lights, etc., but I have not been aware of being aware of the road, the traffic lights, etc. That sometimes happens. And then one snaps out of 'automatic pilot' mode.

Clearly, I was not unconscious during the period in question: I was conscious of the road, etc.; it is just that this primary outer-directed consciousness C was not accompanied by a simultaneous secondary inner-directed consciousness C*. Had I been unconscious, I would have crashed. I was conscious, not merely in the sense of being awake, but also in the sense of being conscious of objects; it is just that I was not conscious of being conscious of objects.

So I don't see the externus awareness as a counterexample to the claim that all intentional states are conscious states. At most it is a counterexample to the distinct claim that all intentional states are accompanied by what Brentano called inner perception, innere Wahrnehmung. C without C* is not an unconscious intentional state. For if C were unconscious, how could I be aware of the transition from C alone to C accompanied by C*?

Consider a related example. A piece of noisy machinery shuts off, a refrigerator or A/C unit. You note the absence of the sound, and at the same time realize that a moment before you had been unaware of being aware of it. And yet you had been aware of it, otherwise you would have not become aware of its absence. There was an externus-type awareness. Again, I do not see that this is a counterexample to Brentano's claim that all intentional states are conscious states.

Ad 2. Now consider a repressed memory of a traumatic event. The memory is intentional: it is about the event. Being repressed, it is below the surface of conscious awareness. But after a psychoanalytic session or twenty, it may be brought to the surface. That sometimes happens. What we should say is that the subconscious intentional state was potentially conscious, not that it was wholly unconscious. If it had been wholly unconscious, it could not have been brought to the light of consciousness. So I don't see that subconscious intentional states are counterexamples to the claim that all intentional states are conscious states.

Ad 3. The really interesting question is whether or not there could be intentional states that are neither actually nor potentially conscious. These woould be states that could exist even if there were no consciousness. Hence, these would be states whose understanding would require no reference to consciousness at all. We could call them radically unconscious: neither actually conscious or self-conscious, nor potentially conscious. If there are such states, then it will makes sense to do what many philsophers and cognitive scientists do, namely, 'divide and conquer'" separate the the problem of intentionality from the (hard) problem of consciousness. But if there are no such radically unconscious intentional states, then the two problems will not be susceptible of separate solution.

Here then is where we should look for clear counterexamples to Brentano's claim. Could there be intentional states that are neither actually nor potentially conscious? That is a topic for a separate post.

1. What is the mark of the mental? Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)

2. What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of 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. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object."

3. For Brentano, then, all and only mental phenomena are intentional. Equivalently, all and only conscious phenomena are intentional. Brentano uses 'consciousness,' 'mental phenomenon' and 'mental act' as synonyms. (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, p. 102) Note that a mental act is not the same as a mental action, although there are mental actions. If I 'wrack my brains' to remember someone's name, perhaps by running through the alphabet (Al, Andy, Bill, Bob . . .) then I am engaging in a mental action; but if I merely note the shape of an object, that is a mental act. Every mental action is a mental act, but not conversely. Act has the connotation of occurence, actuality, as opposed to something merely potential or dispositional.

4. Colin McGinn (The Problem of Consciousness, p. 33) writes that "Brentano's thesis was that all consciousness is intentional . . ." but goes not to mention a "converse Brentano thesis . . . that all intentionality is conscious." I think this shows a misunderstanding on McGinn's part. Brentano held both theses: intentionality is both necessary and sufficient for mentality. Indeed that is why took intentionality to be a mark or criterion of the mental.

By the way, it is quite common for analysts in the Anglosphere to invoke Brentano while betraying virtually no knowledge of what he actually thought. The attitude of Searle is widespread: "My method in philosophy is to try to forget about the history of a problem and the traditional ways of thinking about it and just try to state the facts as far as we know them." (Mind: A Brief Introduction, p. 111) I would only add that one cannot forget what one has never learned. I can't be sure, but my impression is that Professor Searle has not done much historical 'homework.'

5. Are there non-intentional mental states? If all consciousness is intentional, then what do we say about pleasures and pains? To be in pain is to be in a mental state, a conscious state. But there is no clear sense in which my present headache pain is about anything. It does not present an object distinct from itself in the way a memory of the Boston Common presents the Boston Common. Of course, it has a cause, dehydration perhaps, but it is not about dehydration. It is what it is and can described regardless of its cause or even whether it has a cause. By contrast, an intentional state cannot described without describing its object.

On this question, Jedwab comments,

a bodily sensation of pain has a body or a bodily state as its intentional object, whether the subject has a body or not. But maybe that's wrong: there is no intentional object of my thought that there is nothing.

I think that is wrong: headache pain is not of or about my head or my brain or any part of my brain, and could conceivably occur even if I had no body or brain. Even if the latter is not possible, it is conceivable, and this suffices to show that "intentional inexistence of an object" is not essential to a pain's being a pain in the way it is essential to an intentional state's being an intentional state.

6. The thought that there is nothing. Jedwab raises an interesting question here. Does this thought take an accusative or not? Brentano does not admit propositional accusatives given his (Aristotelian) hostility to Platonica, idealia, abstracta. But suppose we admit (Fregean) propositions as the direct objects of some intentional states. The thought that there is nothing can be understood as the entertaining of the proposition, Nothing exists. Entertaining, whether or not with hospitality, is undoubtedly an intentional state. Now Nothing exists though false, and indeed necessarily false, exists! That is, the Fregean proposition exists. (If it didn't exist it couldn't have a truth-value.) Therefore, the thought that there is nothing does, pace Jedwab, have an intentional object. It is just that the intentional object in this case is a false proposition.

Note also that the existence of the proposition Nothing exists is proof that Nothing exists is false. Indeed, given that the proposition exists in all metaphysically possible worlds, its existence shows that Nothing exists is necessarily false.

In sum, Jedwab entertains the right view (that there are non-intentional mental states) for the wrong reason.