The thesis of this post is that there are non-intentional mental states. To establish this thesis all I need is one good example. So consider the felt pain that ensues when I plunge my hand into extremely hot water. This felt pain or phenomenal pain is a conscious mental state. But it does not exhibit intentionality. If this is right, then there are mental states that are non-intentional. Of course, it all depends on what exactly is meant by 'intentionality.' Here is how I understand it.
1. M takes an accusative or is directed upon an object O.
2. M's having an object, and having the very object it has, is not a contingent fact about M, but essential to M. O 'enters into the description' of M. Thus if I am imagining at time t, then this imagining is of a definite object, a unicorn, say, and I cannot describe the act of imagining without using the word 'unicorn.' It is constitutive of the act that it have the object it has: an imagining of a unicorn could not have been an imagining of a flying spaghetti monster; nor could the imagining of a unicorn of such-and-such description have been objectless.
3. From the fact that M has O as it object it does not follow that O exists. I cannot own X unless X exists. But I can want X whether or not X exists. 'Wanting' picks out a type of intentional state; 'owning' does not.
4. From the fact that M has O1 as its object, it does not follow that M has O2 as its object even if O1 is the same as O2. Suppose I am in Iceland and I see an unkempt, bearded old man in a bookstore. Suppose, unbeknownst to me, that this man is the chess grandmaster who defeated Boris Spassky in 1972. The intentional object of visual perceiving has all and only the properties revealed in the visual perceiving: the properties of being unkempt, bearded, old, etc., but not the property of having defeated Boris Spassky.
As John Searle, puts it, "All intentionality is aspectual." (Rediscovery of the Mind, 131) Seeing is seeing-as. A thing is seen under certain aspects and not others. And what holds for seeing holds for every other intentional state.
We are now in a position to answer the question whether the felt pain described above is an intentional state. It is only if all of the four conditions specified above are met. I will argue that none of them are met.
First, does the felt pain have an object or accusative? One might say that the object of the felt pain is the mean molecular kinetic energy of the water. But this can't be right. For one thing, the felt pain does not present or reveal molecules or the collision of molecules in the way seeing an old man presents or reveals an old man. This is a crucial phenomenological difference and by itself is enough to refute the notion that felt pains are intentional. Or to be precise: it refutes the notion that felt pains have as their intentional objects their physical causes.
Now consider condition (2). The seeing of an old man cannot be what it is unless it is precisely the seeing of an old man. 'Old man' enters of necessity into the description of the act (intentional experience). This seeing could not have been the seeing of a sick dog or of a flat tire or of nothing at all. An intentional state must have an object and it must have the very object it has. So if felt pain is an intentional state and its object is water molecules or else the mean molecular kinetic energy of water molecules, then the felt pain oculd not exist without exactly that object. But surely there is no conceptual absurdity in the supposition that the felt pain in question exists in a world in which temperature is not mean molecular kinetic enegy. (Consider Lavoisier's world in which caloric has pride of place.) 'Mean molecular kinetic energy' (MMKE) does not enter of necessity into the description of a felt pain even when said pain is caused by MMKE of a certain degree.
Condition (3) is also not satisfied by felt pain. If the intentional object of felt pain is the extramental cause of felt pain, then one would be able to infer the existence of the object from the existence of the pain. But one cannot infer the existence of the intentional object of an intentional state from the existence of the state. Ergo, etc.
The major premise is true because, if X causes Y, then both X and Y must exist. (Causation is a relation, and every relation is such that, if one relatum exists, then so does the other.) But if X is the intentional object of Y, then, while Y must exist, X need not exist. For this reason, Brentano denied that intentionality is a relation, maintaining instead that it is relation-like, ein Relativliches.
Finally, condition (4) is not satisfied. Suppose I see Big Joe walking towards me. Unbeknownst to me, Joe has just been elected sheriff. Even though Big Joe = the sheriff, from the fact that Big Joe is my intentional object it does not follow that the sheriff is. I see the man as Big Joe and not as the sheriff even though Joe is the sheriff. (The as-structure or aspectuality or perspectivity of intentionality is essential to it.) But if the intentional objects of felt pains were their physical causes, then, from the water's physical temperature being the inetntional object of the felt pain it would follow that a certain degree of MMKE would be the intentional object of the felt pain, since temperature = MMKE. But this does not follow. Therefore, the intentional objects of felt pains are not their physical causes.
But there is no other reasonable candidate for the office of being the intentional object of a felt pain. So I conclude that felt pains are non-intentional mental states.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States
- Two More Putative Examples of Non-Intentional Mental States
- Are There Non-Intentional Mental States?
If the unicorn is red is redness a different intentional state, or constitutive of the intentional unicorn? Would an imagined purple unicorn (same in all other ways) be the same intentional object? My guess is, different.
OK, now let's tie some of these questions together into some claims about pain.It seems the pain inheres in my hand the way colors inhere in the imagined unicorn. So, in your language my hand is the intentional object, and pain is one of its properties. Consciously experienced, but not intentional because it is not an object.
So, would you say a pained hand is an intentional object? Is this a different intentional object than the same hand that is not in pain? E.g., like imagining the same unicorn moving into a different colored light so it has a different imagined color?
You don't get it at all. Have you never read Brentano or Husserl or Sartre or any phenomenologist?
How on earth could redness be an intentional state? Redness is a property.
I wrote a very careful post in which I gave four arguments why felt pain cannot be an intentional state. Not only do you not address anything I actually say, you give no indication of understanding this discussion.
So I am going to ask you not to leave any more comments on my site. We have no common ground. Without common ground, discussion has no point.
My questions on the pain in the hand get at the example you claim supports your conclusion. You know, the example of whether a pain in the hand has intentional content.
I didn't write that post quickly or thoughtlessly. My questions get at the questions Brentano, Husserl (Logical Investigations: see chapter on Mereology and its connection to content), and Twardwoski struggled with.
However, I have obviously pushed a button, and you have just pushed mine, so good day sir.
>>But it does not exhibit intentionality.
Note my comments on Berkeley's arguments in the previous post. If the water is just warm, and not painful, then the feeling seems to be intentional, i.e. you feel the warmth to be an affectio of the water, not, as it were an affectio of you.
When it gets scaldingly hot, by contrast, it seems to be an affectio of you. Berkeley's point is that there is no clear line between the pain arriving, and the feeling of 'mere warmth'. He uses this to prove that even the feeling of mere warmth is an affectio of ourselves, ergo non-intentional.
On another point, I am sure I don't need to point out, and you already know what I think of this:
>>3. From the fact that M has O as it object it does not follow that O exists. I
If M has O has object, it follows by particularisation that M has something (i.e. O) as object. Ergo some object of M (namely O) exists.
I.e. a fire is in intense and horrible anguish all the time. We experience what exists in it, every time we get too close, just as we experience what exists in warm water, when we get close to it.
The prof. thought this argument very strange and disturbing, although had no answer to it.
There are a lot of subtleties here, and I am surely no master of them.
Your example is a very interesting one. Suppose the water is just warm. You say the feeling of warmth is intentional. But that is what I deny. Compare and contrast the following:
A. You see the sink full of water and your hand immersed in it.
B. You feel the sensory quale, 'warmth.'
Now (A) is a clear case of intentionality. To see is to to see something distinct from the seeing, something that may or may not exist. (I am not now using 'see' as a 'verb of success') The seeing reveals to the seer a constellation of objects, hand sink, water, spigot, etc.
But (B) is about a quale which, though a conscious datum, does not reveal to the subject of the quale something distinct from the quale in the very same way as in (A). The quale does not present anything to the subject. Of course, you can infer from the quale that the water you see has a certain objective temperature. But that is an inference, perhaps a very quick one or even an unconscious one. There is no intentionality, no ofness strictu dictu in the (B) case.
Now I claim there is a phenomenological difference between (A) and (B). Do you 'see' it? Subtle stuff, eh?
I'd like to continue, but wifey demands that I take her out to lunch. And as I always say,
PRIMUM EDERE DEINDE PHILOSOPHARI!
(If I got the Latin wrong, please correct me.)
On the feeling of warmth, I made an experiment with the gas fire. My experience was one of something distinct from the feeling (as you would put it) identical to the way that seeing is of something distinct from the seeing. The warmth has a spatial location in the air just outside my hands, i.e. what I sense is a property of the adjoining air itself.
If you question how a 'feeling' can be spatially located outside the organ responsible (the hand) I reply that it is no different from visual perception. The direct stimulation of the optic nerve leads to the illusion, if it is that, of a colour-space structured in 3 dimensions 'outside us'. The same would happen if a hologram stimulated our retina in the same way.
So I don't see any per se distinction between seeing colours, and feeling warmth.
I bite the bullet and say that Lavoisier's world has no temperatures. It has something that has a similar functional role to temperature, but it's not temperature.
I have no idea whether it would be possible to have a feeling of heat in that world, either. Of course, it's imaginable. But imaginability is only a guide to possibility.