Consciousness and Intentionality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Consciousness and Intentionality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Consciousness and Intentionality
First published Sat Jun 22, 2002; substantive revision Mon Apr 4, 2022
To say you are in a state that is (phenomenally) conscious is to
say—on a certain understanding of these terms—that you
have an
experience
, or that there is
something it’s
like
for you to be in that state. Feeling pain or dizziness,
appearances of color or shape, and episodic thought are some widely
accepted examples. Intentionality, on the other hand, has to do with
the directedness, aboutness, or reference of mental states—the
fact that, for example, you think
of
or
about
something. Intentionality includes, and is sometimes seen as
equivalent to, what is called “mental representation”.
Consciousness and intentionality can seem to pervade much or all of
mental life—perhaps they somehow account for what it is to have
a mind; at any rate they seem to be important, broad aspects of it.
But achieving a general understanding of either is an enormous
challenge. Part of this lies in figuring out how they are related. Are
they independent? Is one (or each) to be understood in terms of the
other? How we address the issues to which these questions give rise
can have major implications for our views about mind, knowledge, and
value.
Sections (1) and (2) offer introductory accounts of what is meant by
“consciousness” and “intentionality”
respectively, highlighting relevant difficulties of interpretation.
Then influential perspectives that have emerged in phenomenological
(Section 3) and analytic (Section 4) philosophy are sketched so as to
facilitate recognition of some common, recurrent themes. These
concern, first: the question of whether either consciousness or
intentionality is “internal to the subject” or instead
essentially tied to environment—the theme of
detachability
. The second concerns the issue of how (or
whether) to distinguish basic kinds of intentionality—e.g.,
intellectual and sensory; conceptual and non-conceptual—and
where to place consciousness with respect to such divisions: this is
the theme of
basic forms
. Third, there are questions about
how consciousness is related to self-consciousness—the theme of
reflexivity
. Section (5) describes diverse perspectives on
the consciousness-intentionality relationship engaging with the themes
of detachability and basic forms. Here separatist views that divorce
consciousness from intentionality are contrasted with various
intentionalist views that bind them together: externalist and
non-externalist; reductive and non-reductive; restrictive and
inclusive; reflexivist and non-reflexivist. This section links to two
supplementary discussions: one summarizes recent ways of arguing for
intentionalism; the other considers how intentionalism figures in
classic phenomenological writings. Section (6) focuses on the
restrictive/inclusive contrast, and on issues regarding
“cognitive phenomenology”. Section (7) returns to the
reflexivist theme, and higher-order representationalist and
self-representationalist accounts of consciousness—linking to a
supplementary discussion of consciousness of self. Section (8)
considers how one’s view of the relationship of consciousness to
intentionality might figure in one’s understanding of its place
in the mind generally. Finally, Section (9) suggests some ways in
which the issues of previous sections impinge on four broad areas of
philosophical interest: the nature and boundaries of mind and self;
the place of consciousness and intentionality in explanation; forms of
knowledge and justification; and kinds and instances of value.
1. The Interpretation of “Consciousness”
2. The Interpretation of “Intentionality”
3. Consciousness and Intentionality in Phenomenology
4. Intentionality and the Analytic Heritage
5. Varieties of Intentionalism
6. How Rich is Consciousness?
7. Consciousness and Self-Consciousness
8. Consciousness in Mind
9. Why It Matters
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
This entry includes the following supplementary documents linked into
the text, as described above.
Arguments for Intentionalism
Phenomenology and Intentionalism
Consciousness of Self
1. The Interpretation of “Consciousness”
On an understanding fairly common among philosophers, consciousness is
the feature that makes states count as
experiences
in a
certain sense: to be a conscious state is to be an experience. Widely
(but not universally) accepted examples would include sensory states,
imagery, episodic thought, and emotions of the sort we commonly enjoy.
For instance, when you see something red, it
looks
somehow to
you; when you hear a crash, it
sounds
somehow to you. Its
looking to you as it does, and its sounding to you as it does are
experiences in this sense. Likewise, when you close your eyes and
visualize a triangle, or when you feel pain, the visualizing and the
feeling are experiences. Similarly, you typically have experiences in
thinking about how to answer a math problem, or what to say in an
email, in recalling where you parked the car, and in feeling anger,
shame, relief, or elation. Experiences in this sense are said to have
varying “phenomenal character” for one who has them. Where
feelings are concerned, these would be the varying ways they feel to
you. However, not all experiences are classifiable as feelings. So
more broadly we might say that how you experience your own
experience—how it is “subjectively
experienced”—is its phenomenal (or its
“subjective”) character.
The relevant notion is also often introduced by saying that there is,
in a certain sense, always “something it is like” to be in
a given conscious state—something it’s like
for
one who is in that state—and what it’s like for you to be
in a state is what makes it a conscious state of the kind it is. The
phenomenal character of an experience is what someone would inquire
about by asking, e.g., “What is it like to experience
orgasm?”—and it is what we speak of when we say that we
know
what that is like
, even if we cannot convey this to one
who
doesn’t
know. Coordinating this with previous
remarks: how you experience your experiences (e.g., how your feelings
feel to you)
is
what it is like for you to have them.
Our understanding of what is meant by “conscious” might
also be sharpened by contrasting conscious states with what we can
readily conceive of keeping from their company. A leaf’s fall
from a tree branch, we will likely suppose, is not a conscious state
of the leaf—an experience in the desired sense. Nor, for that
matter, is a
person’s
fall off a branch a conscious
state of that person. Rather, it is the
feeling
of falling
that is paradigmatically conscious, if anything is.
Dreaming
of falling would also be a conscious state in this sense. By contrast:
we can be said to sense (and so adjust) the position of our limbs when
dreamlessly asleep. But this proprioception, we may suppose, is not
conscious—provided it does not feel anyhow to us sleepers, as it
commonly does when we are awake. And in general we may understand a
contrast between the familiar sensory experience we have of stimuli
(when, say, these smell or sound somehow to us), and other
discriminatory responses to the same stimuli in the absence of any
such experience—which we may still intelligibly describe as
sensing or perceiving. (We can readily think of the sensing or
perceiving attributed to plants and simple artifacts in this way.)
Though the terms “experience” and “something
it”s like for…’ are commonly used more or less in
the way just suggested to identify the notion of consciousness, it
must be said right off that their interpretation is subject to doubt
and controversy that can affect one’s fundamental ideas about
the topics treated here. Anyone wanting to think carefully about
consciousness must face the fact that the basic terms of discussion
are infused with complex disagreements from the start.
To see how the notion of
experience
might occasion such
disputes, consider: Christopher Hill (2009) acknowledges that you may
say that both being struck by a thought (e.g., that the email you just
received is a scam), and feeling a sensation (say, a tingling in your
foot) are “experiences”. But he maintains this is
ambiguous: only the second is properly an experience, hence conscious,
in the
phenomenal
sense. On this view, it seems episodic
thought and sensation would count as univocally experiential, hence
conscious, only if the former is identified with imagery. By contrast,
Charles Siewert (2012a, 2014, 2021) holds thinking and sensing are
indeed univocally experiences, though we should take care to
distinguish the relevant sense from others (such as we might find, for
example, in saying “sea slugs learn from experience” and
“Hurricane Sandy was quite an experience”). Meanwhile,
Alex Byrne 2009 voices skepticism about the very idea of experience in
the “special philosophical” sense.
When it comes to the “what it’s like” locution, Hill
and Siewert would agree that we can speak of there being
something
it’s like
to be in a state whose status as
conscious
, in the target sense, can hardly be taken for
granted. (As Jaegwon Kim 2011 points out, we can meaningfully ask
someone what it was like for her to meet the President.) However,
Siewert (2021) argues that we can surmount this difficulty, provided
we think of conscious states as ones there is
unconditionally
something it’s like for one to be in. But Kim and Hill conclude
that the locution is simply ill-suited to give us a grip on the notion
of consciousness, preferring terminology that Siewert, in turn, finds
suspicious; for them, conscious states are states with
“qualia”, or “qualitative character”. (After
C.I. Lewis 1929 introduced the term “qualia” for what is
given sensorily to the mind prior to conceptualization, it became
common to use it to speak of consciousness generally. See Crane (2019)
and Keely (2009) for illuminating histories.)
Other problems of interpretation complicate recent discussion in ways
very germane to the present topic. As suggested above, the
experiential/what it’s like conception of consciousness is
sometimes marked by the term “phenomenal”. The qualifier
suggests that there are other kinds of consciousness (or perhaps,
other
senses
of “consciousness”). Indeed there
are, at least, other
ways of introducing
notions of
consciousness. And these may appear to pick out features or senses
altogether distinct from that just presented. But their relationship
is controversial. For example, it is said that some (but not all) that
goes on in the mind is “accessible to consciousness”. This
may encourage the thought that consciousness itself is nothing but a
certain kind of access to or accessibility of information—for
instance, to a “speech center” responsible for generating
“direct verbal reports” of the contents of one’s
states of mind—as in Daniel Dennett’s early (1969)
theorizing about consciousness. And Ned Block (1995, 2001, 2002) has
proposed that, on one understanding of “conscious”, (which
he finds at work in psychological theories) a conscious state is just
a “representation poised” (or as he later has it,
“broadcast”) “for free use in reasoning and other
direct ‘rational’ control of action (including
reporting)”. Block labels consciousness in this sense
access
consciousness
. (Early examples of theories he sees as employing
this notion include Baars 1997 and Dennett 1978, 1991.)
But what is the relationship between various kinds of information
access and consciousness in the phenomenal, experiential sense? Block
distinguishes the notions of phenomenal and access consciousness,
arguing that a mental representation’s being poised or broadcast
for use in reasoning and rational control of action is neither
conceptually necessary nor sufficient for the state’s being
phenomenally
conscious. Similarly he distinguishes phenomenal
consciousness from what he calls “monitoring
consciousness”—where this has to do with one’s
capacity to represent one’s mind’s to oneself; to have,
for example, thoughts about one’s own thoughts, feelings, or
desires. One need not take Block’s notions of phenomenal,
access, and monitoring consciousness to reflect clear, definite
distinctions already contained in our pre-theoretical use of the term
“conscious”. Block himself suggests that (on the contrary)
our initial, ordinary concept of consciousness is too confused (too
“mongrel”) even to count as ambiguous. Thus in
articulating an interpretation of the term adequate to frame
theoretical issues, we cannot simply describe how it is currently
employed (Block 1995, 2021).
Though Block’s proposed threefold distinction has proven
influential, some would balk at proceeding on its basis. John Searle,
for example, would recognize phenomenal consciousness, but deny
Block’s other two candidates are proper senses of
“conscious” at all (Searle 1992). The dispute here may
seem no more than terminological. However, Hill 2009 doubts there is a
clear sense in which the information in all the states theorists want
to count as conscious actually is continually being broadcast to some
control faculty. And this is to doubt the reality of access
consciousness, as often understood. The reality of the forms of
monitoring consciousness that figure in contemporary theories (such as
“inner sense”) may also be doubted (Dretske 1995; Siewert
1998, 2012b). Finally, some raise doubts that there is a properly
phenomenal
sense we can rightly apply to ourselves and
distinguish from the other two (see Dennett 1988, 1991; Rey 1997;
Frankish 2016). So it seems the issues here are not trivially
terminological. This is evident also when we consider the idea that
while phenomenal consciousness is real, and our notion of this may be
distinguishable from those of access or monitoring, a proper theory of
these latter two explains what consciousness
is
—what it
consists in. So, what it is for one to have a phenomenally conscious
visual experience of a color or shape, for example, is just for one to
have a visual representation of a certain (potentially unconscious)
type that is poised to affect belief (Tye 1995, 2002), or that
furnishes information of a restricted sort to a short term memory
store with a special role in behavioral control (Prinz 2012). Or it is
to have the right sort of “higher-order representation” of
a visual state (Armstrong 1968; Rosenthal 2021; Carruthers 2000, 2004;
Lycan 1995, 2004). However, for some (Siewert 1998, 2010) recognizing
nothing but access or monitoring in the manner of such theories
amounts to denying the reality of phenomenal consciousness. These are
evidently not just disputes about words; they concern what there is to
talk about.
For the purposes of this survey we will assume there is a reasonable
interpretation of the remarks in the first three paragraphs of this
section under which they pick out something real for us to call
“consciousness”, even if this term may be legitimately
interpreted in other ways. But we should acknowledge it is open to
question whether, when the philosophers here under discussion use the
term “conscious”, its cognates and their standard
translations, they are all talking about consciousness in that sense.
And we will leave open as much as possible how precisely to relate it
to notions such as
rational control
higher-order
representation
, and
conceptual activity
—disputed
issues important to determining its relationship to intentionality, to
be encountered below in various guises.
2. The Interpretation of “Intentionality”
The term “conscious” is not esoteric. But, as we’ve
seen, its use is not readily characterized in a manner that provides
some coherent, impartial framework for disciplined investigation. This
is part of why theorizing about consciousness is so hard. Where the
term “intentionality” is concerned, we also face confusing
and contentious usage. But here the problem lies partly in the fact
that the relevant use is definitely
not
that found in common
speech employing cognate terms (as when we speak of doing something
intentionally). In any case, here too we must recognize basic problems
of interpretation that affect substantive issues, highly pertinent to
the present discussion.
One way philosophers have often explained what they mean by
“intentionality” is this: it is that aspect of mental
states or events that consists in their being
of
or
about
things, as pertains to the questions, “What are
you thinking of?” and “What are you thinking about?”
Intentionality is the
aboutness
or
directedness
or
reference
of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects,
states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco,
or about the cost of living there, or about your meeting someone at
Union Square—your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San
Francisco, or the cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. This
“directedness” conception of intentionality plays a
prominent role in the philosophy of Franz Brentano and those whose
views developed, directly or indirectly, in response to his (to be
discussed in Section 3).
But what positive features distinguish the relevant
intentionality-marking senses of these words (“about”,
“of”, “directed”) from those found in:
“the cat is wandering
about
the room”; “she
is a person
of
integrity”; “the river”s
course was
directed
towards the fields’? As for talk of
intentionality as
reference
, just how are we to distinguish
the way thoughts refer from the way
names
and
descriptions
do? And how does this notion of intentionality
apply to the senses? When we see or touch something, does our mind
also “refer” to what we see or touch, in the same way as
does thought? What unifies the notion of intentionality and governs
its range of application?
One way of bringing the senses under the “intentionality”
umbrella, while suggesting what’s special about
mental
directedness, focuses on phenomena of perceptual constancy. This plays
an important role in the conception of intentionality in Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenology. It also figures, in a rather different
way, in Tyler Burge’s 2010 conception of what it is for the
senses to represent objects. We perceive things as
constant
with respect to some determinable (such as shape, color, or size),
through fluctuation in (a) the
subjective experience
of them
with respect to this determinable, and (b) the corresponding pattern
of
proximal
(e.g., retinal)
stimulation
from them.
Husserl takes the (a) type constancy-though-flux to show perceptual
experience is directed at or refers to objects that go beyond (or
“transcend”) it, while Burge takes the (b) sort of
constancy to show perceptual states are representations of an
objective realm.
However, these approaches seem tailored to the senses, and one will
wonder how to apply “intentionality” univocally to both
sense perception and
thought
. One peculiarity that may
encompass the directedness/aboutness/of-ness/reference of both sense
experience and thought (while covering desire and imagination as
well): they all may seemingly relate (“purport to point”)
to
objects that do not exist
. Thoughts, unlike roads, can
direct you to a city that is not there. One can think about a meeting
that has not occurred and never will; one can think of Shangri La, or
El Dorado, or the New Jerusalem; one may imagine their shining
streets, their total lack of poverty, or their citizens’
peculiar garb; one may long to live in them. Likewise, when one
hallucinates, one can experience what is not there to be seen. Maybe
this suggests a unifying way to identify the relevant sort of
directedness.
But this invites new perplexities. Are we to say (with apparent
incoherence) that there
are
objects we think of that
don’t exist
? And what does it mean to say that, when a
state of mind is in fact directed toward something that
does
exist, that state nevertheless
could
be directed toward
something that does
not
exist? For instance, should we agree
that there is some experiential “common factor” in
perception and hallucination? This has been much disputed by
“disjunctivist” philosophers of perception, who would
insist that perceptual experience, in the non-hallucinatory
good”
case, is fundamentally
relational
. When there is a snake you see, your experience is
a relation between you and
that snake
, and could not occur at
all without it—any more than could
stepping on it
. This
is not so if you experience a
hallucination
of a snake, even
when you cannot subjectively discriminate such experience from the
“good” kind. If this is right, then it is hard to see how
we could get a notion of intentionality to cover both cases, as long
as this is understood as some kind of reference to what might not
exist. It can well be fundamental to the nature of mind that its
states can be of or about things or “point beyond
themselves”. But getting a satisfactory grasp of such mental
pointing in all its generality presents theoretical challenges.
A second approach to intentionality may start from the idea that the
potential reference to the non-existent just discussed is closely
associated with the potential for falsehood, error, inaccuracy,
illusion, hallucination, and dissatisfaction. What makes it possible
to believe (or even just suppose) something about Shangri La is that
one can falsely believe (or suppose) that something exists. What makes
it possible to seem to see or hear what is not there is that
one’s experience may in various ways be inaccurate, or
nonveridical. What makes it possible for one’s desires and
intentions to be directed toward what does not and never will exist is
that one’s desires and intentions can be unfulfilled. And each
of these negative assessments contrasts with a positive one: truth,
accuracy, veridicality, and fulfillment. This suggests another general
strategy for gaining a theoretical hold on intentionality, employing a
notion of
satisfaction
, stretched to encompass susceptibility
to each of these forms of assessment. On John Searle’s (1983)
conception, intentional states are states having “conditions of
satisfaction”. For a
belief
, they are the conditions
under which it is
true
; for sense-experience, they the
conditions under which it is
veridical
; for an
intention
the conditions under which it is
fulfilled or
carried out
A “conditions of satisfaction” approach to intentionality
may seem to furnish an alternative to talk of directedness to objects.
But it is not clear that it can get us around its problems. For
instance, what are we to say where thoughts are expressed using names
of nonexistent deities or fictional characters? Will we do away with a
troublesome directedness to the nonexistent by saying that the
thoughts that Zeus is Poseidon’s brother, and that Hamlet is a
prince, are just false? This is problematic. Moreover, how will we
state the conditions of satisfaction of such thoughts? Will this not
also involve an apparent
reference
to the nonexistent? (For
discussion of these issues, see Thomasson 1999 and Crane 2013.) And
questions about the proper understanding of the relationship among
perception, illusion and hallucination remain.
A third important way to conceive of intentionality, one particularly
central to the analytic tradition derived from the study of Frege and
Russell (see Section 4), is based on the notion of mental (or
intentional)
content
. Often it is assumed: to have
intentionality is to have content. But what is content? Here appeal is
sometimes made to the idea of
representation
: a state has
content insofar as it “represents something to be a certain
way”, or else “tells” or “says” to one
something about how the world is—where the notion of
representing and the saying/telling metaphor are assumed to be
intuitively clear enough to get things started.
Another way to see what is meant by “content” is to think
of this as what is reported when answering the question, “What
does she think?” by something of the form, “She thinks
that
”. And one might regard the content of thought as
what two people
share
, when
what they think
is the
same (and they think the same thought)—and it’s what
differs
when what they think is different. Analogous remarks
apply to belief and intention. (Though it is not quite as clear that
when we speak of
what one perceives
, this is to be understood
in just the same way.) Content is also what may vary independently of
the “psychological modes” of states of mind in ways
illustrated by saying:
Believing
that I’ll soon be bald
and
fearing
that I’ll soon be bald differ in
mode
, but share the content:
that I’ll soon be
bald
, while each differ in
content
from believing and
fearing
that I’ll soon be dead
. (One may also wish to
treat
perception
as a “mode” alongside believing,
fearing, etc.)
Differences in the content of mental states are also commonly thought
to be revealed by certain logical features of sentences we use to
report them. Reports of thoughts or beliefs and other intentional
states (like intention, hope, fear) often do not seem to retain their
truth value when co-extensive expressions are substituted in
“that-clauses”. For example: “Barack Obama”
and “the 44
th
president of the United States”
are co-extensive or co-referential. And if it’s true that Barack
Obama was born in Hawai‘i, it’s true that the
44
th
U.S President was. Even so, Sam can
think
that Barack Obama was born in Hawai‘i without
thinking
that the 44
th
U.S President was. It seems plausible that
this “failure of substitutivity” reflects the fact that
just
what
Sam might be said to think—the
“contents” of his thoughts—differ in such a case.
Or, as it is sometimes said, intentional states relate to the
conditions that would satisfy them, or to what they are about, only
“under some aspects” and not others—and differences
in the “aspect under which” are differences in
content
. (Searle speaks here of the “aspectual
shape” of intentional states.)
This raises the question of just how a “possession of
content” conception of intentionality may be coordinated with
the conditions of satisfaction conception. It is sometimes assumed
that if states of mind contrast in respect of their
satisfaction
(say, one is true and the other false), they
differ in
content
. And if one says what the intentional
content
of a state of mind is, one says much or perhaps all
of what
conditions must be met
if it is to be
satisfied—what its conditions of truth, or veridicality, or
fulfillment, are. But one might also hold that content only determines
satisfaction conditions relative to context. This seems especially
plausible when we consider thoughts expressed with indexicals or
demonstratives. (When I think, on multiple occasions, of multiple
objects,
this is F
, what makes what I think true may differ
with context, but
what
I think of each
this
(and how
I think of it) on each such occasion may be just the same.) And we may
allow that states differing “aspectually” can in some
sense have the same conditions of satisfaction. This, and related
issues, have given rise to diverse interpretations of the notion of
content, and the term has often been alleged to be ambiguous or in
need of subtle theoretical refinement. Consider,
inter alia
Edward Zalta’s 1988 distinction between cognitive and objective
content; Jerry Fodor’s (1991) defense of a distinction between
narrow and wide content; John Perry’s (2001) distinction between
reflexive and subject-matter content); David Chalmers’ (1996,
2010) two-dimensional conception of content; and Katalin Farkas’
“uncompromisingly” phenomenal conception of content. See also Walter
Hopp (2011, Chapter 1) for a discussion of the confusing diversity of
“intentional content” notions in philosophical circulation.
Talk of content clearly has some intuitive basis. We can talk about
what
someone thinks (believes, intends, doubts, etc.) and
regard this “what” as remaining the same on multiple
cases, with multiple subjects: this we may call the content of thought
(belief, intention, doubt). But once we raise questions about just
what this repeatable “what is thought” amounts to, and
what makes it the same or different, “content” becomes a
highly contentious theoretical term. It can be unclear what
assumptions lie behind its use by various philosophers, and whether
they have the same sort of thing in mind.
Each of the gates of entry into the topic of intentionality identified
above—directedness; conditions of satisfaction;
content—arguably opens onto a unitary phenomenon. And some of
the connections among them have been hinted at. But there is a fair
amount of fragmentation in the conceptions of intentionality in the
field, and the complexities just mentioned cannot be ignored. Perhaps
the term “intentionality” only roughly indicates an area
of inquiry, covering a variety of interestingly (but uncertainly)
interrelated phenomena of thought, belief, desire, imagination,
perception, and symbol use. Here, in any case, we leave much open
about how to interpret the notion, in the interests of conducting a
broadly inclusive survey that aims to illuminate different ways in
which what “intentionality” is used to pick out has been
related to consciousness. In the interests of such ecumenical breadth,
it will be useful to conduct an overview of the near history of
thinking about intentionality, covering important ideas arising both
in the phenomenological tradition from the late 19
th
to
mid-20
th
century, and in the area of research that in the
last half century or so has come to be known as philosophy of
mind.
In telling this story, we have to acknowledge (and traverse) the
divide in twentieth century western philosophy between so-called
“analytic” and “continental” traditions. This
distinction is misleading however, partly because the tendency to
categorize phenomenologists en masse as “continental”
wrongly suggests they are all somehow more like all others placed in
that class than they are like anyone in the (also wildly
heterogeneous) group of “analytic philosophers”.
Nevertheless, the history of influence and dialogue linking figures in
the phenomenological movement with one another, and that unifying the
analytic tradition, yield largely distinct narratives. This, together
with the differences in approach, vocabulary, and background
assumptions, make some disjoint treatment of the two inevitable.
However, it seems fitting to try to encompass both in a single
article. For, as will be seen, there are significant thematic
commonalities across the two histories, and the differences and
similarities in how these themes are treated in each may be revealing
and intellectually stimulating.
3. Consciousness and Intentionality in Phenomenology
A history of ideas about consciousness and intentionality could easily
take us further into the past than this article can cover. A
convenient, relatively recent starting point would be in the
philosophy of Franz Brentano. He more than any other single thinker is
responsible for keeping the term “intentional” alive in
philosophical discussions of the last century and a half or so, with
something like its current use, and was much concerned with its
relationship to consciousness (Brentano [1874] 1973). Brentano himself
was quite aware of the deep historical background to his notion of
intentionality: he looked back through scholastic discussions (crucial
to the development of Descartes’ immensely influential theory of
ideas), and ultimately to Aristotle for his theme of intentionality
(Brentano [1867] 1977). One may well go further back, to Plato’s
discussion (in the
Sophist
, and the
Theaetetus
) of
difficulties in making sense of false belief, and yet further still,
to the dawn of Western Philosophy, and Parmenides’ attempt to
draw enormous consequences from allegedly finding that it is not
possible to think or speak of what is not. In this section, we will
review how Brentano conceived of intentionality and consciousness, and
their relationship, and how that conception was transformed in the
thought of his student Husserl—whose name is that most strongly
associated with the phenomenological movement—and in the
writings of some of those he strongly influenced. This will allow us
to introduce the three themes mentioned in the
introduction—detachability, basic forms, and
reflexivity—by which one might unify the disparate discussions
of consciousness and intentionality arising over roughly the last
century.
For Brentano, initially at least, what seems crucial to intentionality
is the mind’s capacity to refer or be directed to objects that
may exist only in mind—what he called “mental or
intentional inexistence”. In a famous passage, he introduces the
notion this way.
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of
the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an
object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously,
reference [or relation] to a content, direction toward an object
(which is not to be understood as a reality), or immanent objectivity.
Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself,
although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation
something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied,
in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Brentano
[1874] 1973: 88)
It is not straightforward just what Brentano meant by saying mental
phenomena include objects within themselves, or that an immanent
object of mentation is not assumed to be “a reality”. He
complained of being misunderstood by his students, and he revised his
position as his thought developed. Experts continue to differ
considerably over how to interpret his view. But clearly his
conception of intentionality, and arguably that of the whole
phenomenological tradition he influenced, is dominated by the first
strand of thought mentioned in Section 2—intentionality as
directedness towards or reference to an object
—and
whatever difficulties that brings in train.
More clearly worked out than Brentano’s early, general notion of
intentionality are his views about what he took to be its most basic
forms (alluded to in the quote above). Brentano’s philosophical
project of giving a typology of intentional states, their constituents
and interdependencies—what he called “descriptive
psychology”—was ambitiously aimed at providing a framework
for experimental inquiries into causal psychological laws, as well as
for logic (including theory of knowledge), aesthetics, and ethics.
All intentionality, he holds, involves a
presentation
Vorstellung
) (in some sense, an
appearance
) of an
object (including mere imaginings or conceivings of objects). To this
neutral mere appearance of an object one may then add a committal
attitude towards it—of either judgment or “emotion”
Gemüt
)—each of which takes positive and negative
forms. In judgment: one either affirms (accepts) or denies (rejects)
the presented object. In
Gemüt
, one either
likes
(loves or values) or
dislikes
(hates or
disvalues) it. The mere affirmation (or liking) of an object presented
does not require categorizing it under a general concept, grouping it
together with like instances, or anything on the order of Kantian
“synthesis”.
How did Brentano relate consciousness to intentionality? He did so by
holding first, that every mental phenomenon is “of an
object” in the intentional sense. Secondly, he held that every
mental act is, in fact, conscious, which he took to imply there is an
intentional consciousness
of
it, which in turn he construed
as a kind of “inner perception”—every conscious
mental act is itself presented, and judged (accepted) as presented.
Brentano did not consider it absurd to suppose there are
unconscious
(for him,
unperceived
) mental acts. But
he found inadequate such reasons as had been offered in his time to
posit their occurrence. On his view, wherever this is proposed on the
grounds of explanatory usefulness,
nonmentalistic
(e.g.,
physiological) explanations would do as well. In this connection, he
also took seriously the worry that if we hold (as he does) that all
mental acts are conscious, and all conscious acts are objects of
consciousness, an infinite regress would erupt. But he thought his
theory could handle the problem: the key was to see that, since inner
perception is not separate from the object it makes conscious, no
regress gets started.
Brentano’s lectures in Vienna attracted and inspired an
impressive, diverse group of central European intellectuals in the
1870s. Of these, it was Husserl who was to have the widest
philosophical impact on the European Continent in the twentieth
century, largely because of his influence on thinkers inspired by his
phenomenology to explore existentialist themes—Martin Heidegger,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Though these are the
heirs of Brentano and Husserl on which we will focus here, a full
treatment of phenomenological ideas about intentionality and
consciousness would need to cast its net much more broadly, covering
figures such as: Aron Gurwitsch, Roman Ingarden, Anton Marty, Alexius
Meinong, Adolph Reinach, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Carl Stumpf and
Kasimir Twardowski.
Husserl ([1900] 1970) adopted Brentano’s concern with
understanding, “descriptively”, from the subject’s
point of view, how experience is object-directed, reinterpreting
Brentano’s “descriptive psychology” as
“phenomenology”, and giving this a similar foundational
role in philosophy. However, Husserl’s basic conceptions of both
intentionality and of consciousness were significantly shaped by his
criticisms of Brentano’s. First, consider his response to
Brentano on intentionality. One of Husserl’s principal points of
departure in his early treatment of intentionality (in the
Logical
Investigations
[1900] 1970, V §§ 9–11, 14) was
criticism of what he—controversially—took to be
Brentano’s notion of the “mental inexistence” of the
objects of thought and perception. Husserl thought it a fundamental
error to suppose that the object (the intentional object) of a
thought, judgment, desire, etc. is something with a special kind of
being in the mind of the thinker, judger, or desirer. For we should
recognize that objects of one’s mental acts of thinking,
judging, etc. often are or can be ordinary objects that
“transcend”, and enjoy some sort of independence from the
acts (states of mind) that are directed towards them (that
“intend” them, in Husserl’s terms). At least if I am
not hallucinating, the object of my visual experience is not something
immanent to my mind, whose existence comes and goes with the
experience—but something (a box, for example) that goes beyond
or transcends any (necessarily perspectival) experience I may have of
it, as relative position, lighting, or attention alters. This
conception of the “objective reference” of sense
experience is grounded in a phenomenology of perceptual constancy,
mentioned earlier in comparison with Burge.
But how about a case in which there is no transcendent object targeted
by one’s experience, and it merely seems as if there is one, as
presumably can occur in hallucination? Here we should say, on
Husserl’s view, not that there is an object of reference
existing in one’s mind, but that the object intended simply does
not exist. This does not do away with the directedness of such
experience, since it is still true to say one’s experience is
of
something (a snake, a dagger), even though there exists no
snake or dagger one then sees—much as it may be true to say one
is
thinking of
a golden mountain, or Zeus, though there
exists no such mountain or god to think of. For (according to the
Logical Investigations
V §§ 16–17,
20
) it is sufficient to make such “conscious of”
statements true that the experience have some
“matter”—where the
matter
of a mental act
corresponds to what, through it, something is interpreted
as
This factor—matter as “interpretive sense”—may
vary among acts with the same object (in Husserl’s example, one
may think of one and the same object (the Kaiser) either as the
grandson of Queen Victoria or as the son of Friedrich III). It also
may vary independently of what he called
“act-
quality
”—of whether, e.g., one judges,
or doubts, or wonders, or hopes, or imagines, or perceives. Husserl
held that every intentional act must have both matter and quality.
Post-
Investigations
, he came to re-interpret these notions in
terms of what he called (in
Ideas
[1913] 1983) the
“noema” that can be common to distinct particular acts.
But this much of the basic picture seems to have survived: intentional
directedness is understood not as a directedness to special (“in
mind”) objects, but rather as the possession by mental acts of
matter/quality (or later, noematic) structure. This can be considered
a version of the content conception of intentionality described in
Section 2, insofar as Husserl would accept that, in some sense, the
matter of an act (later, its “noematic sense”) is the same
as its
content
, that content goes with differences in
“aspect”, and that acts can have content even when there
exists no object to which they refer.
However, to say only this much leaves basic questions about
Husserl’s view unsettled. One concerns whether or in what sense
perceptual experience
ever
constitutes a relation to the
object experienced. Here we encounter the first of the three big
themes announced at the outset: the question of the
“detachability” of either consciousness or intentionality
from “external” “worldly” objects. In what
way, if any, is the conscious subject with its intentionality in
essence intelligible apart from objects in the world it inhabits?
Clearly Husserl thought that a hallucination would still be
intentional, though there exists no object of the experience (mentally
immanent or otherwise) to which it relates the subject. Still, this
leaves open whether, for Husserl, in non-hallucinatory
cases—when there really is a snake you see—the
matter/noematic sense (thus content) of the experience properly
contains the experience-transcending object the experience is of, so
that the experience is essentially a relation to (e.g.,) this very
writhing, flesh-and-blood creature that can strike and bite you. On
this interpretation, if instead you have a subjectively
indistinguishable snake-hallucination, you may have what is
in
other respects
the same noema, minus the snake constituent.
Alternatively, we may interpret Husserl to hold that the experience
itself, along with its entire matter or noematic sense, is always
essentially detachable from whatever “external object” it
is
of
. (For discussion, see Crowell 2013; Drummond 1990;
Erhard 2022; A.D. Smith 2008; D.W. Smith 2007; Zahavi 2003.)
Interpretations of Husserl diverge, partly due to difficulties in
being clear about how to interpret his shift from the
“quality/matter” to the “noema” terminology,
his immanent/transcendent contrast, and a closely associated aspect of
his philosophy—one to which he attached great
importance—his method of “transcendental-phenomenological
reduction”. Husserl claimed it is possible (and, indeed,
essential to the practice of phenomenology as an
a priori
discipline, distinct from psychology) that one investigate
consciousness in a way that withholds certain commitments concerning
spatio-temporal particulars. Husserl held that what makes the relevant
suspension of commitment possible is that, given the essentially
perspectival (in his terms, the evidentially incomplete or
“inadequate”) nature of perceptual experience of an
object, in no case does anything subjectively evident about the actual
course of your experience of an
as such completely rule out
the possibility that there was in fact no transcendent object, then
experienced as an
. (
Ideas
[1913] 1983 §§
42–50.) On one interpretation of his methodological
“bracketing”, Husserl infers that intentional experience
is always in essence detachable from any such worldly
(“external”) objects to which it is in fact directed.
However, on other, “externalist” –or perhaps better,
“relationalist”—interpretations, Husserl
didn’t deny experience is (sometimes) essentially a relation to
experience-transcending objects, or that its contents include these as
constituents. The methodological aim is just to restrict the scope of
concern with these objects (and hence the relevant evidence) proper to
phenomenology: one considers them specifically only
as
intended
(i.e., as interpreted) in whatever kind of experience is
under investigation. To this end it is unnecessary to embrace an
ontology of experiences that says they could always remain essentially
the same, even when detached from such objects altogether.
Another complication concerns just how Husserl would view the general
relationship between content in his sense (either act-matter or
noematic sense) and such semantic correlates of ordinary language
sentences—“propositions”—that some would
identify with the contents of states of mind reported in them.
Relevant here are Husserl’s discussions in
Logical
Investigation
VI of the relationship between the intentionality
of perception and judgment. Husserl maintains that perception allows
us to express judgments with demonstratives like “this”
(what he called “essentially occasional” terms) via
non-conceptual, “non-attributive” senses, and that
experiencing features
in
things perceived (e.g., experiencing
the color or form in an object), is distinct from and underlies our
capacity to
predicate
the relevant features to them. (See
Mulligan 1995; Hopp 2011; and Kidd 2019 for discussion of relevant
issues.) Important here too is Husserl’s discussion in
Experience and Judgment
[1939] 1973 of what he called
“pre-predicative” experience. Husserl holds that the sort
of judgments we express in ordinary and scientific language are
founded on the intentionality of pre-predicative experience, and that
it is crucial to clarify the way in which such experience underlies
judgment. While Husserl rejected Brentano’s general conception
of judgment as the non-predicative affirmation of objects presented,
he endorsed the related idea that there is a form of intentionality,
found in perception, distinct from—and making
possible—that in which we bring objects under general concepts.
Here we encounter in Husserl the second of the initially announced
themes—that of
basic forms
of consciousness or
intentionality.
It is disputed how significantly the most well-known philosophers
strongly influenced by their study of Husserl—Heidegger, Sartre,
and Merleau-Ponty—depart from him in their views. Partly this is
due to interpretive difficulties just mentioned (regarding the
detachability of experience from experience-transcending objects, and
the basic forms of intentionality or content). First, regarding
relationality and reduction: on the views of Heidegger ([1927] 1962,
1982, 1985) and Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2012) at least, intentionality
(or as Heidegger prefers,
Verhaltung
—“comportment”) essentially
involves an engagement with the world that cannot be cancelled by any
abstention from judgment. If Husserl’s reduction denies this,
then their responses to Husserl involve a significant break with him.
But as we’ve seen, interpretation of the reduction is
controversial. An additional complication comes when we try to
consider exactly how attitudes towards
consciousness
figure
into all this. If, as one interpretive approach suggests, Husserl
holds consciousness (or rather, experience of the sort ordinarily
involved in perceptual constancy) is intrinsically both relational and
intentional, then the sort of
consciousness
we enjoy will be
no more detachable in nature from its transcendent objects than is our
intentionality
. What Heidegger would have to say to this will
depend partly on what exactly we make of his abandoning the
terminology of consciousness for his distinctive vocabulary of
“showing” and “unconcealment/discovery”. Might
we regard him as still speaking of consciousness, but only by other,
allegedly less theory-burdened names? Or should we interpret Heidegger
(in line with Crowell 2013) as maintaining (against Husserl) that
consciousness by itself (even of the ordinary sort we enjoy) is
insufficient for comportment/intentionality? How we decide to view
this will undoubtedly be entangled with how we ourselves understand
“consciousness”.
Sartre’s ([1943] 1956) conception of consciousness as nothing
apart from its objects can also be interpreted as a relationalist view
(see McCollough 1994). And in Merleau-Ponty at least, we clearly have
a version of what has since come to be known as
“disjunctivism” regarding perceptual experience: for him
the visual consciousness of an ashtray (his example) is either
genuinely
seeing
the ashtray—or else (in illusory and
hallucinatory cases) merely
like
seeing an ashtray. In the
first case there is no concrete experience that would remain once the
ashtray is subtracted in thought, so as to constitute an ashtray
hallucination. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, ordinarily, when you
see an ashtray (a chair, a tree, etc.), your visual experience is both
intentional and object-dependent. Our understanding of defective,
illusory and hallucinatory cases rests on an analogy with ordinary
cases of visual consciousness understood in an essentially relational
manner. This does not keep him from agreeing with Husserl that, given
the perspectivalness of perception, there’s a sense in which one
can never, in a particular case, rule out the possibility that
one’s experience wasn’t relational after all. But this
doesn’t make it intelligible that
all
one’s
experience is non-relational, or make rational a global Cartesian
doubt that it ever reveals the world. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012:
308–311, 359–360, 393–396)
When it comes to the question of whether ordinary perception and
action involve a kind of intentionality distinct from that of
conceptual judgment, it seems fair to say this about Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty. They took up the theme of an intentionality that is
distinct from and makes possible the kind involved in judgments that
posit and predicate properties of objects, and they gave this, each in
his own way, a strongly
pragmatic
cast. Heidegger describes a
type of understanding of entities in which they “show
themselves” or are “discovered” as
“ready-to-hand” or “available”
zuhanden
)—in which they are understood in their
functionality (as hammers, as doors, as pens, etc.) relative to our
aims: we
understand
them in
using
them for
something. This is a kind of directedness that belongs to our everyday
practical engagement with our surroundings. He sees this as distinct
from, and making possible an understanding of entities in which they
show themselves as “present-at-hand” or (merely)
“occurrent” (
vorhanden
)—as they do when we
understand them in a more detached or theoretical way, merely as
objects that possess certain properties (Heidegger [1927] 1962, 1982).
(For a general account of Heidegger’s taxonomy of understanding,
sensitive to recent interpretive controversies, see Wrathall 2013a.)
Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012 developed a related view, influenced not
only by both Husserl and Heidegger, but by his study of Gestalt
psychologists (who were themselves influenced by the Brentano school
and by Husserl), in which he defends a conception of perceptual
consciousness as a kind of
bodily
understanding. Partly on
the basis of contrasts drawn with case studies of pathologies of
perception and action due to brain damage, he argues that, in normal
sensory perception, our exploratory and goal-directed movement itself
constitutes a way of being conscious of things—and a form of
understanding what is perceived—not derived from activities of
conceptual categorization and inference (which belong properly to the
intellect). Relatedly for Merleau-Ponty: the organization and
adjustment of movements involved in bodily understanding, though
norm-guided, and experienced, must not be regarded as always
chosen—
your moves are objects of personal choice only
when specifically endorsed for reasons.
This may convey some central aspects of phenomenological conceptions
of intentionality and its relation to consciousness. But what can be
said about the general nature of consciousness? How did conceptions of
this develop in the wake of Brentano? Here too it is useful to see how
Husserl’s views emerged from criticism of
Brentano’s—in particular from rejection of the
latter’s inner perception account of consciousness. And here we
can see how the third of the initially identified themes—that of
reflexivity, the relation of consciousness and
self-consciousness—became elaborated in phenomenology.
Husserl held that for a mental state to be conscious is for it to be
an experience (
Erlebnis
), a part of some “stream of
consciousness”. Experiences in this stream of consciousness
sense include, for Husserl, “perceptions, imaginative and
pictorial representations, acts of conceptual thinking, surmises and
doubts, joys and griefs, hopes and fears, wishes and acts of
will”. (For the clarification of his concept of consciousness
from which this is quoted, see Husserl [1900] 1970, V
§§1–6.) An experience in this sense is necessarily
experienced (
erlebt
). But,
contra
Brentano, this
does not mean that experiences continually appear as objects of some
inner perception. (When, for example, a sensation is felt, the
sensation is not some object of which the feeling is an appearance;
the sensation simply
coincides
with feeling it.) Husserl did,
however, affirm that
some
kind of reflexivity is essential to
consciousness. Crucial to this view was a certain conception of
time-consciousness (Husserl 1991). Husserl argues that, distinct from
any capacity for memory directed on an object in the past, in which
you
recall
what experience you just had, there is a sort of
retention”
of what has just happened in your
experience (e.g., what you just heard in a melody or in a phrase) that
enables you to perceive temporally extended wholes. Likewise, more
basic than any
predictions
about what lies in the future is
an anticipation or “
protention”
of what you are
about to experience. You are thus in a sense primitively conscious of
your own experience in retaining and anticipating it, even though you
do not thereby make it into an
intentional object
, as you do
when, in reflection, you think and make judgments about your
experience. Consciousness is, for Husserl, in this way necessarily
reflexive
without necessarily being
reflective
. A
similar view, influenced by Husserl, is prominent in Sartre’s
doctrine that “every consciousness is a non-positional
consciousness of itself”. Though Sartre defends this idea on the
somewhat different grounds that denying it would involve the
(allegedly) absurd notion of a consciousness totally “ignorant
of itself” (Sartre [1937] 1957, [1942] 1956). (For recent
exposition and defense of Sartre’s view, see Williford 2016.)
One might, as Sartre did, distinguish the question of whether
consciousness is somehow necessarily consciousness “of
itself” without becoming “an object for itself” from
another reflexivity question: is all consciousness essentially, in
part, a consciousness of
oneself—
not “as
object”, but “as subject”? Sartre answered this
question in the negative. All consciousness (even
“pre-reflective”) is self-conscious, but only when
reflection occurs, and consciousness becomes (as commonly it is not)
itself an intentional object, is there any consciousness of an ego.
Husserl earlier, in the first edition of
Logical
Investigations
, affirmed a similar view. However, he did not
claim, as Sartre sometimes seems to, that pre-reflective experience is
“non-egological” in the sense of
being no
one’s
, or literally
selfless
, only that,
phenomenologically, there are no grounds for regarding an ego as some
unifying “center” of intentional relations. On this view,
when I correctly say that (even pre-reflectively) an experience
belongs to
me
, I have no
phenomenological
justification to think this means anything more than that this
experience is a constituent in a certain unified complex—a
certain stream of consciousness; I have no warrant to posit that the
ego, the “me” to whom experience belongs, constitutes a
persisting “unifier”. However, Husserl (as he announces in
the second edition of the
Logical Investigations
significantly revised his views, and held there to be a
phenomenological case for the “transcendental ego”.
Figuring centrally in this shift was his desire to recognize an aspect
to experience through which one is
active in making
commitments
(e.g., in judging something to be a certain way)
that—
qua
personal commitments—necessarily involve
a persisting “I”. There is a kind of consciousness of self
in experience, which, while evident to phenomenological reflection,
does not itself consist in reflectively attributing to oneself some
property. (Husserl [1929] 1960 §§ 31–33)
We may now identify three distinct ideas found in phenomenological
thinking about the alleged reflexivity of consciousness. First, there
is the idea that necessarily, whenever there is a conscious state,
there is, in some sense, consciousness
of
it. Second, one
finds the notion that it is, however, only
occasionally
, and
only in
reflection
, that a conscious state is simultaneously
an
intentional object
for the one whose state it is. Third,
there is the claim that one’s conscious states ordinarily
somehow include a non-reflective consciousness of
one
self
—though not as intentional object, but “as
subject”.
With these distinctions in mind, we can see that to speak of
the
phenomenological view of these matters risks eliding
significant differences. For philosophers in this tradition differed
interestingly with respect to the three theses just named. Brentano
would maintain the first, deny the second, and seems to have been
silent on the third. Husserl, however, (eventually) affirmed all
three—with the first two importantly grounded in a view of
time-consciousness, and the third in the idea that we experience
ourselves as active understanding subjects. Sartre, meanwhile, affirms
only the first two theses, and embraces the second on different
grounds from Husserl. One may attribute some version of the second and
third ideas to Heidegger, since he says that when things in our
surroundings show themselves to us (or are “uncovered”)
through our dealings with them, we are also thereby non-reflectively
“disclosed” to ourselves: what
we
are is
disclosed to us through our use of things as we engage in our everyday
projects (Heidegger 1982 §15b). This may be taken to
commit Heidegger also to the idea that consciousness involves some
kind of reflexive, but non-
reflective
, consciousness of self
as subject. But it does so only on the assumption that, when something
is uncovered to me in my use of it, I experience it or am somehow
conscious of it, and that, in being disclosed to myself though my
activity, I am somehow self-conscious. But that interpretation would
be resisted by those who regard it as crucial to seeing what makes
Heidegger differ from Husserl that we take him to deny we are
ordinarily conscious of things in dealing with them (see Dreyfus 1991;
Kaüfer and Chemero 2015). Again, these interpretive matters seem
closely tied to one’s own assumptions about the notion of
consciousness. At least we might say Heidegger’s view’s
about uncoveredness and self-disclosure gives him something strongly
analogous
to the third idea about consciousness. In any case,
it is crucial to recognize this peculiarity of his account: unlike
Husserl, Heidegger links such basic reflexivity (self-disclosure) to
the notion of an inescapable, everyday “inauthentic” or
conventional self-understanding, to be contrasted with an authentic
form that can emerge from this in a kind of
(“
Angst
”-triggered) crisis of meaningfulness. As
for the first of the three reflexivity ideas (all consciousness is
“of itself”), it is unclear Heidegger endorses (or even
mentions) it at all. However, notably, Sartre bases his own
quasi-Heideggerean interpretation of authenticity in
Being and
Nothingness
on his way of combining this with the second
notion.
All three notions are endorsed in Merleau-Ponty. But in his account
(perhaps somewhat like Heidegger’s) the second
(non-reflectiveness) and third (experienced self-as-subject) seem to
carry far more weight. For Merleau-Ponty understanding oneself as
subject connects importantly with his notion of consciousness as
embodied understanding: in perceiving, one experiences one’s own
body as subject of a distinctively sensorimotor form of understanding,
manifest in normatively guided responses that are not analyzable as
personal choices made for reasons. (For discussion of
phenomenologists’ views about consciousness and its relation to
self-consciousness that assimilates them much more than does the
present one, see Zahavi 1998, 2005, 2014. For further discussion
specifically of Brentano’s views on this topic: Kriegel 2018;
Textor 2012, 2017; and Thomasson 2000. For Heidegger, see Blattner
2013 and Crowell 2013. For Merleau-Ponty: Siewert 2013a.)
This overview of consciousness and intentionality in the
Brentano-Husserl tradition brings to light several broad areas of
discussion. Closely related to general concerns about how to interpret
either of these two notions, three interrelated themes have emerged.
One concerns whether intentionality or consciousness are
detachable
from one’s relation to the world and things
within it. A second concerns how to distinguish
basic forms
of consciousness and intentionality—and in particular whether,
distinct from the activity of the intellect or of a properly
conceptual understanding, we should recognize something equally
intentional on which it based, manifest in perception and action.
Finally, there is the theme of the
reflexivity
of
consciousness: is consciousness somehow essentially bound up with a
kind of self-consciousness—either consciousness
of
itself
, or of
the
self (as subject)? As we shall see,
these themes have become important—somewhat later, and largely
independently—in analytic philosophy.
4. Intentionality and the Analytic Heritage
The late nineteenth/early twentieth century heritage of most analytic
treatments of intentionality (or mental representation or content)
lies most significantly not in the writings of Brentano, Husserl and
their direct intellectual descendants, but in the seminal discussions
of logico-linguistic concerns in Gottlob Frege’s ([1892] 1952)
“On Sense and Reference”, and Bertrand Russell’s
(1905) “On Denoting”, widely considered defining documents
of the analytic tradition. But Frege’s and Russell’s work
comes from much the same era and intellectual milieu as
Brentano’s and the early Husserl’s. And certain points of
contact have long been recognized: Russell’s discussion of
Meinong’s theory of objects; Chisholm’s and Quine’s
discussion of what they took to be “Brentano’s
thesis”; and the similarities between Husserl’s
meaning/object distinction (in
Logical Investigation
I) and
Frege’s (prior) sense/reference distinction. Indeed the case has
been influentially (though controversially) made (by Føllesdal
1969, 1990) that Husserl’s meaning/object distinction is
borrowed from Frege (though with a change in terminology) and that
Husserl’s “noema” is properly interpreted as having
the characteristics of Fregean sense.
However, in comparing phenomenological treatments of intentionality to
those found in the analytic tradition the following should be kept in
mind. What Husserl (like Brentano) sought was to characterize general
features of intentional experience from the subject’s point of
view. Accordingly, his conception of intentionality is fundamentally
rooted in reflections on: object-constancy in perceptual experience;
contrasts between the ostensible objects of paradigm intentional
experiences with these objects “as intended” (i.e., how
and “as what” they are intended); and the idea that
experience (whether perceptual, imaginative, or conceptual) can
somehow continue to be “of” something, even when it is
without genuine relation to an object. Thus, in the phenomenological
tradition, the discussion of intentionality is thoroughly enmeshed
with that of experience or consciousness from the start. On the other
hand, those of Frege’s and Russell’s writings most
influential for discussions of intentionality concentrate on issues
that grow from their achievements in logic, and gave rise to ways of
understanding mental states largely through questions about the
language used to report them. Moreover, for other reasons, during much
of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy often dissociated
consciousness (understood largely or entirely in sensory terms) from
aspects of the mind connected with intentionality. Thus our treatment
of intentionality in this section will leave the concept of
consciousness largely in the background. It will, nonetheless,
reemerge explicitly in Section 5, when we see how consciousness and
intentionality were separated, and then reunited in analytic
philosophy.
Central to Frege’s legacy for discussions of mental or
intentional content has been his distinction between sense
Sinn
) and reference (
Bedeutung
), and his use of
this distinction to cope with the apparent failures of substitutivity
of (ordinarily) co-referential expressions in contexts created by
psychological verbs, of the sort mentioned in Section 2. In
Frege’s famous example: you may understand the expressions
“The Morning Star” and “The Evening Star” and
use them to refer to what is one and the same object—the planet
Venus. But this is not sufficient for you to know that the Morning
Star is identical with the Evening Star. For the ways in which an
object (the “reference”) is “given” to your
mind when you employ these expressions (the senses or
Sinne
you grasp when you use them) may differ in such a manner that
ignorance of astronomy would prevent your realizing that they are but
two ways in which the same object can be given.
While Frege did not himself elaborate a general account of
intentionality, what he says suggests the following picture.
Intentional states of mind—thinking about Venus, wishing to
visit it—involve some special relation (such as
“grasping”)—not to a Venus “in one’s
mind”, nor to an image of Venus, but to an abstract entity, a
thought, which also constitutes the sense of a linguistic expression
that can be used to report one’s state of mind, a sense that is
grasped or understood by speakers who use it.
This style of account, together with the Fregean thesis that
“sense determines reference”, and the history of
criticisms both have elicited, provide a significant part of the
background of contemporary discussions of mental content. It is often
assumed, with Frege, that we must recognize that thoughts or contents
cannot consist in images or essentially private “ideas”.
But philosophers have frequently criticized Frege’s view of
thought as some abstract entity “grasped” or
“present to” the mind, and have wanted to replace
Frege’s unanalyzed grasping of abstract entities with something
more “naturalistic”, or at any rate more
explanatory
of what is involved in thinking.
Reaction to the Fregean picture has determined the character of
analytic discussions of intentionality or content in another major
way. It may be granted that the content of the thought reported is to
be identified with the sense of the expression with which we report
it. But then, it is argued, the identity of this content will not be
determined individualistically, and may in some respects lie beyond
the grasp (or not be fully “present to” the mind) of the
psychological subject. For what determines the reference of an
expression may be a natural causal relation to the world—as Saul
Kripke (1972) and Hilary Putnam (1975) have argued is true for proper
names, like “Nixon” and “Cicero”, and
“natural kind” terms like “gold” and
“water”. And (as Tyler Burge (1979) has argued) a speaker
who, considered individually, remains qualitatively the same, may
nevertheless assert something different simply because of a variation
in the linguistic community to which she belongs. (For example, what
her utterance of “arthritis” means is determined not by
what is “in her head”, but by the medical experts in her
community. If their usage were to shift, so would the meaning of her
assertions, independently of any internal change in her.) Now if
reference and truth conditions of expressions by which one’s
thought is reported or expressed are not determined by what is in
one’s head, and the content of one’s thought determines
their reference and truth conditions, then the content of one’s
thought is also not determined individualistically. Rather it is
necessarily bound up with one’s causal relations to certain
natural substances, and one’s membership in a certain linguistic
community. Both linguistic meaning and mental contents are
“externally” determined.
The development of externalist conceptions of intentionality informs
the reception of Russell’s legacy in contemporary philosophy of
mind as well. Russell also helped to put in play a conception of the
intentionality of mental states, according to which each such state is
seen as involving the individual’s “acquaintance with a
proposition” (counterpart to Fregean
“grasping”)—which proposition is at once both what
is understood in understanding expressions by which the state of mind
is reported, and the content of the individual’s state of mind.
Thus for many philosophers influenced by the Russellian heritage,
intentional states are conceived of as attitudes towards
propositions—propositional attitudes. Also importantly,
Russell’s famous analysis of definite descriptions into phrases
employing existential quantifiers and predicates underlay many
subsequent philosophers’ rejection of any conception of
intentionality (like Meinong’s) that sees in it a relation to
non-existent objects. And, Russell’s treatment drew attention to
cases of what he called “logically proper names” that
apparently defy such analysis in descriptive terms (paradigmatically,
the terms “this” and “that”), and which (he
thought) thus must refer directly to objects. Reflection on such
“demonstrative” and “indexical” (e.g.,
“I”, “here”, “now”) reference led
some (Kaplan 1979; Perry 1977) to maintain that the content of our
states of mind cannot always be constituted by Fregean senses but must
be seen as consisting partly of public objects in the world outside
our heads to which we refer, demonstratively,
indexically—another source of support for an externalist view of
mental content, hence, of intentionality.
Yet another important source of externalist proclivities in twentieth
century philosophy lies in the thought that the meaningfulness of a
speaker’s utterances depends on its potential intelligibility to
hearers:
language must be public
—an idea that has found
varying and influential expression in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Davidson. This, coupled with the assumption
that intentionality (or “thought” in the broad (Cartesian)
sense) must be expressible in language, has led some to conclude that
what determines the content of one’s mind must lie in the
external conditions that enable others to attribute that content.
It would be appropriate here to note the emergence of another sort of
externalism in philosophy of mind and cognitive science since the
1990s, distinct from the “content externalism” made
prominent by Putnam and Burge, as strains of “embodied”,
“embedded”, or “enactive”, theorizing about
perception, cognition and action gained prominence. For instance, on
the “extended mind” view advocated in Clark and Chalmers
1998, mental processes are not confined to representational activity
inside one’s head—they encompass an embodied interaction
with one’s environment—cognition (broadly construed) is
not limited to the manipulations of internal representations, but
extends to the use of things out in the world.
It should be noted here too that the movement from Frege and Russell
toward externalist views of intentional content has been, and
continues to be subject to serious detailed challenges, and has
prompted development of alternative (sometimes avowedly internalist)
accounts. (Consider, for example: Crane 1991, Farkas 2008, Ludwig
1996b, and Searle 1983.) And it is no easy matter even getting clear
about the fundamental theses at issue—partly insofar as what it
means to talk about what is “internal” to the subject, and
just what is assumed about the notion of content, are often unclear.
In fact, Brie Gertler (2012b) argues that the
“internalism/externalism debate” is something of a mess,
and there is ultimately no satisfactory univocal understanding of just
what is under dispute.
One other aspect of the Frege-Russell tradition of theorizing about
content that impinges on the consciousness/intentionality connection
is this. If content is identified with the sense or the
truth-condition determiners of the expressions used in the
object-clause reporting intentional states of mind, it will seem
natural (even if it’s not inevitable) to suppose that possession
of mental content requires the possession of conceptual capacities of
the sort involved in linguistic understanding—“grasping
senses”. Here, however, another issue rears its head: is there
not perhaps a form of
sensory
intentionality that does not
require anything as distinctively intellectual or conceptual as is
needed for the grasping of linguistic senses or propositions? (This
would be a kind of intentionality that could be had by the
pre-linguistic (e.g., babies) or by non-linguistic creatures (e.g.,
dogs).) Advocates of varying versions of the idea that there is a
distinctively “non-conceptual” kind of content include
Bermúdez (1998), Crane (1992), Evans (1982), Kelly (2001),
Peacocke (1992), and Tye (1995). For “conceptualist”
voices of opposition to this trend, see Brewer (2005), McDowell
(1994), and Speaks (2005). A deep difficulty in assessing these
debates lies in getting an acceptable conception of
concepts
(and of concept possession) to work with (see Wright 2015).
We can now see, in the analytic tradition, the emergence of themes
similar to the “detachability” and “basic
forms” themes identified in the connection with the
phenomenological movement. Later we will discuss these parallels. For
now, to round out the present historical sketch so as to inform such
comparisons, we may note some of the factors seemingly important to
the course discussion took in analytic philosophy. Though its approach
to intentionality is historically rooted in Fregean and Russellian
treatments of logic and language, developments during the twentieth
century sketched above—various forms of externalism, along with
opposition to allegedly over-intellectualized views of perceptual
intentionality—came in conflict with this heritage to some
extent. Among the sources of this shift, one might plausibly find: a
disenchantment with early twentieth century conceptions of
philosophy’s distinctive role (of, e.g., providing conceptual
analyses, and solutions to logico-linguistic puzzles); aligned with
this, an increasingly perceived need to support claims in philosophy
with experimental science, especially as systematic, academic
psychology grew more sophisticated and successful; and
finally—relatedly—the belief that defending a scientific
worldview requires defending an ontology typically described as
“physicalist” against objections deemed to have
unacceptably dualist implications. Such factors (and others) helped
encourage philosophers in the analytic tradition to tie consciousness
more closely to intentionality in ways that raised issues similar to
those canvassed above in connection with phenomenology—though
often from rather different motives.
5. Varieties of Intentionalism
One evidently fundamental division in views about the relationship of
consciousness and intentionality separates those who think that
consciousness—more specifically, the phenomenal character of the
sort of experience we actually have—necessarily carries with it
some kind of intentionality, and those who do not. We might call the
former (as will be seen, quite varied group)
“intentionalists” and the latter (following Horgan and
Tienson 2002) “separatists”. Intentionalism, so
characterized, can cover a wide variety of positions, partly because
of potential variety in just how intentionality is conceived. Exactly
what contrast is marked by “intentionalism vs. separatism”
will depend heavily on one’s conception of intentionality.
Still, operating at first only with a broad and open notion of this
contrast, perspectives reasonably regarded as separatist occupied the
mainstream of much twentieth century analytic philosophy. According to
an important (once predominant) view, consciousness is exhausted by
non-intentional “qualia” or “raw feels”.
Plausibly, the acceptance of this view owes much to the profound
influence of Gilbert Ryle’s
Concept of Mind
(1949) in
the development of analytic philosophy. As part of his argument
against a Cartesian notion of mind as the site of hidden
(“occult”) “ghostly” occurrences, Ryle
contends that the stream of consciousness has nothing to do with
what’s central to mind, since it contains only sensations and
imagery that provide “no possibility of deciding whether the
creature that had these was an animal or a human being; an idiot, a
lunatic, or a sane man”—nothing of which it is appropriate
to ask whether it is correct or incorrect, veridical or nonveridical.
Also powerfully influential, in the same era and intellectual milieu,
was Wittgenstein’s (1953) attack on the idea of understanding as
an “inner process”, and his criticism of the notion that
there could be a private language. Popularity of Wittgensteinian
insistence on the need for public criteria of meaning could—and
plausibly did—reinforce a Rylean belittlement of consciousness,
on the assumption that
consciousness
, being something hidden
or “inner”, could bring with it distinctions in
understanding and intelligence only if
meaning
were something
purely
private
—as it cannot be. At any rate, partly
through the reception of Ryle and Wittgenstein in U.T. Place’s
(1956) and J.J.C Smart’s (1959) influential brain-based
materialist view about consciousness, the reduction of consciousness
to sensation and sensory imagery became firmly implanted in philosophy
of mind, since these writings did so much to set the terms of its
debates.
Also influential, to similar effect, was the conception expressed in
Wilfrid Sellars’ (1956) distinction between sentience
(sensation) and sapience. Whereas the qualities of
feelings
involved in the former—mere sensations—require no
cognitive sophistication and are readily attributable to brutes, the
latter—involving awareness
of
, awareness
that
—requires that one have the right concepts, which
cannot be guaranteed just by having sensations, but needs learning and
inferential capacities (which Sellars believed come only with
language). Richard Rorty (1979) was not alone in taking Sellars’
views to support a strict separation of the phenomenal and the
intentional (see also Brandom 1994). Rorty’s appropriation of
Sellars (blended with Quinean eliminativism) leads him to deny not
just the importance, but even the reality of consciousness.
Externalist arguments (of the sort mentioned in Section 4) have also
been taken to support the separation of the “qualitative”
from meaning and content (hence the separation of consciousness from
intentionality). For it has been sometimes assumed that the phenomenal
character of one’s experience is “fixed
internally”—i.e., it has no necessary relation to the
nature of particular substances in one’s external environment or
to one’s linguistic community. Thus if externalist arguments
(like those of Putnam and Burge) show that neither meaning nor content
is “in the head”, phenomenal consciousness cannot imply
any intentionality or content. Putnam (1981) himself drew such a
conclusion, and much like Ryle, took the stream of consciousness to
comprise nothing more than sensations and images, which (recalling
Frege) are to be set apart from thought and meaning. Without denying
important differences in the views just mentioned, it seems reasonable
to suppose that together they helped entrench in analytic philosophy a
conception (sometimes welded to the term “qualia”) that
confines consciousness, in the experiential/what it’s like
sense, to sensations and sensory images—and thus segregates it
from thought, concepts, and “propositional
attitudes”—hence from intentionality. (For a recent
defense of this tradition, see Papineau 2021.)
Objections to this conception of sense-experience became increasingly
common towards the end of the twentieth century, from diverse angles
and motivations, in writings affirming a variety of intentionalist
positions. But even before that, separatism was neither unambiguously
embraced nor universal in analytic philosophy (consider Anscombe
1965). And an important explicit statement of broadly intentionalist
views of perceptual experience can be found even in the early nineteen
eighties (Searle’s 1983
Intentionality
). One
significant strain of intentionalism (quite unlike Searle’s)
arising in the 1990s, combines acceptance of externalism about content
with a rejection of internalism about phenomenal character. Thus
Martin Davies (1997), Fred Dretske (1995), and Michael Tye (1995,
2002) argue that the phenomenal character of experience is also
essentially determined by causal environmental connections.
Pace
Putnam, externalism about intentionality should
not
be taken to support separatism. Philosophers working from
this perspective also characteristically limit what kind of
intentionality they took to be inseparable from phenomenal
character—to some extent preserving the Rylean, purely sensory
stream of consciousness—but giving this a crucial intentionalist
twist. One draws a distinction between two sorts of intentionality or
mental representation, one of which is found in sensory states, the
other in cognitive or conceptual states. One then maintains that only
the former is entailed by or constitutive of phenomenal character. As
alluded to earlier, Tye identifies phenomenal character with the
non-conceptual, picture- or map-like representational content he
attributes to perceptual states which are poised to affect belief.
Tye’s account also exemplifies two other features common to a
number of externalist intentionalist views of consciousness that arose
in the shadow of separatism. First, his view is, as we might put it,
thoroughly “non-reflexivist” (in the sense introduced in
Section 3): it finds essential to one’s conscious state neither
a representation of that state (i.e., no higher-order or
self-representation), nor any directedness/reference to that state,
nor any self-consciousness (whether this be construed as consciousness
of the state itself, or of the self whose state it is). Secondly,
Tye’s intentionalism is of what we might call a
reductive
sort. That is to say, the claim is not merely that
it follows from an experience’s having certain kinds of
phenomenal character that it is intentional or has intentionality of
some sort. The claim is that its being phenomenal, and having the
character it does, comes as a necessary consequence of what kind of
intentionality it has (or what kind of mental representation it is),
where this type of intentionality/representation can be explained in
terms that involve no primitive appeal to phenomenal character. Thus
the idea is not just the minimal intentionalist one that some kinds of
phenomenality entail some kinds of intentionality. The idea is that
phenomenal character can be explained as nothing but—it can be
explanatorily reduced to—a certain kind of intentionality or
representation.
Such reductive intentionalism is significantly motivated by a
metaphysical aim that has animated much analytic philosophy of mind:
to say what mental states are in non-mentalistic, physical terms. Part
of what inspires this goal is the thought that, if mind is real and
efficacious, it must somehow be necessitated by the facts of nature
that science reveals—a nature in itself fundamentally mindless.
But how could there be such necessitation of the mental by the
non-mental? Reductive intentionalism about consciousness offers the
outline of an answer. Like the separatist, one starts from a general
conception of intentionality (or mental representation) that does not
assume consciousness, along with some idea about how such
intentionality must arise in a world governed by the operation of
certain non-intentional, natural-causal processes. Then, still without
appeal to consciousness, one purports to identify a certain
species
of intentionality (in terms of its use, its sources,
its content), whose presence (and here one parts from separatism)
purportedly guarantees the occurrence of experience with a certain
phenomenal character. On such a reductive intentionalist perspective,
separatist philosophers do no more than contain the problematic
“inner”, “private”, “subjective”
mind of the Cartesian legacy and mitigate its harm, by sequestering it
in a zone—consciousness—from which understanding,
intelligence, meaning, intentionality have been safely evacuated (as
in the view suggested by Kim 2011). The problem will be fully
resolved, only if, instead of merely shrinking and isolating
consciousness, we find a way of entirely subsuming it in a conception
of mental representation that owes nothing to it.
We have just focused on the emergence of a kind of intentionalism
about consciousness that is not only
reductive
, but
externalist
, strongly
restrictivist
, and completely
non-reflexivist
. But we now need to make it clearer how
intentionalist views can be advanced that depart significantly from
that position along one or more of each of these dimensions. Consider
first how an intentionalist might oppose both separatism and
externalism. One might begin with a Cartesian thought experiment in
which one conceives of one’s consciousness with all its
subjective riches intact, though the spatial realm of nature is
supposed a fiction. Or less radically, one may start with the science
fiction scenario of a “brain in a vat”, whose artificially
induced activity generates an extended history of sense experience
that is indistinguishable—in its subjective, phenomenal
character—from that of a subject with a human body moving about
in the environment, as we believe ourselves to do. Again, if you
assume an externalist view of intentionality, you may conclude that
phenomenal character, being thus detachable from the external world,
is also separable from (and insufficient for) intentionality. However,
you might instead turn your guns in the opposite
direction—
against externalism
. It may seem to you that
the most intuitively plausible reading of the vat scenario would take
the brain’s experience to be a global
hallucination
something like a vivid, massively coherent dream, and so a
systematically
incorrect
experience of where the subject of
experience is and what is happening around it. And so, we should think
the
intentionality
or
representational
character of
such experience would survive its estrangement from the world, along
with its phenomenal character. One may then infer that for at least
some contents/kinds of intentionality or representation, the kind of
causal tie between mind and world that, according to some
externalisms, we need for fixing its intentional content, is not
strictly necessary after all. This route to a non-externalist
intentionalism about consciousness finds varying expression in, for
example, Kriegel 2011, Horgan and Tienson 2002, Loar 2003, and Ludwig
1996b.)
Such a challenge to externalist intentionalism would clearly also
challenge its strategy of reductionism. There are other ways to be an
intentionalist and reject both. One approach (albeit still using
radical thought experiments) would draw on the sort of
“zombie” scenario whose metaphysical significance is
explored in such sophisticated detail by Chalmers 1996: one conceives
of a world type identical to our own in terms of basic physics (laws,
distribution of particles and forces), but with consciousness left
out. One might take the conceivability of such a world to give one
reason to reject the externalist-intentionalist assumption that the
right combination of natural, non-intentional, non-phenomenal facts
metaphysically guarantees the presence of consciousness. And one might
still combine this with the claim that certain forms of consciousness
do guarantee some sort of intentionality. This sort of non-reductive
intentionalist view would actually go beyond challenging externalist
intentionalism about consciousness, to upset the metaphysical picture
commonly motivating it. For this would be to reject the assumption
that mind (conscious mind at least) is not a basic aspect of reality,
to reject, that is, the idea that it’s a necessary consequence of
certain non-mental facts.
There are yet other routes to a non-reductive intentionalism, less
metaphysically bold. One might question the adequacy of various
reductionist strategies that have been employed for specifying a kind
of intentionality (or mental representation) that non-circularly
guarantees phenomenality—as in Tye’s theory. One way
doubts can get a grip is by considering variations on the phenomenon
of “blindsight”—which may be reasonably interpreted
as involving limited visual discriminatory abilities regarding stimuli
that (on account of cortical damage) don’t
look—don’t visually appear—anyhow to the
discriminating subject. Can we coherently conceive of some such
blindsight—a kind of “seeing”
without
visual consciousness (experience) of the visual stimuli—that
nonetheless would meet the conditions this or that reductive
intentionalist is committed to thinking
guarantee
phenomenal
vision? Various kinds of enhanced blindsight have been envisaged
(Block’s superblindsight 1995, 2002; Siewert’s spontaneous
amblyopic blindsight 1998, 2010). We are invited to consider the
prospect of visually mediated responses, in action and report, to
stimuli of which the subject lacks visual experience—responses
that correspond, in their spontaneity and acuity, to what is afforded
by very low-grade visual experience. Suppose we can find no
non-phenomenal intentional/representational difference, necessarily
distinguishing such low-grade visual consciousness from its closest
blindsight analogue, to which we can reduce the difference between the
two. Then certain prominent versions of reductionism are threatened.
But opposition or skepticism regarding all such accounts can coexist
with intentionalism in the broadest sense. However, this sort of
challenge to reductive intentionalism would leave open questions about
what, if anything, to say about brains in vats, zombies, physicalism,
and metaphysical basic-ness—and it would even be compatible with
some forms of externalism.
The possibility of non-reductive intentionalism may be evident in
another important way, particularly relevant to sense experience.
Reductive intentionalism may seem to require that phenomenal character
necessarily supervenes on intentional content—or on this plus
“intentional mode” (where that encompasses sensory
modality). Or, as one might put it, for any phenomenal difference
there must be a difference in what properties something is represented
to have, or a difference in the cognitive mode (or in sensory
modality—e.g., visual or tactile) through which it is
represented to have them. But a nonreductive intentionalism is not
committed to such a strong thesis. For one may allow that various
differences in phenomenal character are sufficient for differences in
intentional features, while holding that there can be differences in
character without differences in what something is represented to be,
or in mode/modality of representation. Such would be the case, for
example, if one argued (like Block 1990) that two visual experiences
could represent the same objective color property on account of
sharing appropriate causal linkages to the physical environment, even
though subjectively the experience of color differed—there was a
difference in “mental paint”—in virtue of some
internally contrived inversion of what it was like for one to
experience color on the two occasions. Independently of such views
about the metaphysics of color and visual representation, one might
maintain (like Siewert 2005) that the subtle but ubiquitous
differences in the subjective character of experience that come with
shifts between what is less and what is more “attended-to”
in the visual field often cannot be justifiably matched to represented
differences in “what properties look to be where”. Both
views appear incompatible with reductive intentionalism. But both are
consistent with the idea that the phenomenal character of visual
experience brings intentionality with it—for example, in making
things in your environment look to you shaped, sized, or positioned
either accurately or inaccurately.
Part of what this section aims to make clear is the variety of views
that might be seen as intentionalist. Intentionalism may be either
externalist or not, reductive or not. Further, intentionalisms may be,
as already suggested, either more or less restrictive or inclusive
(and this in various ways). And they may be either completely
non-reflexivist, or in some respect reflexivist—where the latter
category is very heterogeneous, and can encompass deeply divergent
views. And both of these latter contrasts admit of being developed in
diverse, and either reductive or non-reductive ways. Section 6 will
explore the inclusive/restrictive contrast and some of the positions
that have appeared along this dimension, and Section 7 some varieties
of reflexivist notions. Before delving into these complications, the
reader may wonder what is supposed to justify intentionalism, and how
the issues of this section might appear from the phenomenological
perspectives canvassed in Section 3. Discussion of the first question
can be found in the supplement,
Arguments for Intentionalism
The second question is discussed in the supplement,
Phenomenology and Intentionalism
6. How Rich is Consciousness?
We have met with a contrast between views that are relatively
inclusive, and those that are relatively restrictive in what they
count as properly experiential. Specifically: non-separatists’
positions diverge with respect to
what
differences in
intentionality they regard as brought along with differences in the
phenomenal or subjective character of experience. If we think of
“phenomenal intentionality” as whatever intentionality
comes along with certain varieties of phenomenal consciousness, we can
distinguish those views that recognize
more
phenomenal
intentionality from those that recognize
less
. Philosophers
disagree then over how richly intentional (and thus, as we might also
say, how cognitively rich) phenomenal character is. In this section we
will set separatism aside, and focus on how intentionalist
perspectives differ along this dimension.
We have noted how distinguishing basic forms of intentionality or
content (such as “conceptual” and
“non-conceptual”) may be allied (as in Tye) with a broad
restriction on phenomenal intentionality: phenomenal character is
confined to a
non-conceptual
sort of intentionality (or
content or representation) that is found in
sensory
states
(where these would encompass, e.g., both visual perception and
imagery). Similarly, one may draw a general limit to the
kind of
properties
that can be represented in the phenomenal character of
one’s experience. This is illustrated in Prinz’s (2012)
representationalist theory: he limits phenomenal character to
“intermediate level” “viewpoint dependent”
properties that one may perceive something to have (such as
“2½-D” shapes); “higher-level”
properties (such as
being a chair
) are excluded.
However, to think of such theories as admitting relatively less
richness to phenomenal intentionality could mislead us. An aspect of
this: one may limit richness in the manner just suggested, while
expanding it in other ways. In the case of vision one indication of
richness might lie in how finely discriminatory the
intentional/representational differences in phenomenal character are:
richer
view would recognize
more
differences in
colors or shapes figure in experience in this way, a
sparser
view
fewer
. The question here would be roughly: how much can
you visually experience of space, of color, in a given amount of time?
On such matters, both Tye’s and Prinz’s accounts would
come out as rich relative to others—since they would say that a
higher level of spatial detail is experienced even in relatively brief
visual presentations (such as letter arrays) than would
others—like Dennett, who advocates a professedly
“sparse” view of consciousness. Controversies of
this
sort about richness versus sparseness have recently
played out in complex ways that combine phenomenological
considerations with detailed interpretation of experimental work on
vision (concerned, e.g, with “change blindness”,
“inattentional blindness”, “masking”, and
“Sperling paradigm” cuing effects). (See, for example,
Block 2012 for discussion of such issues, in support of a relatively
rich view.) And such questions about the “fineness of
grain” or “detail” in visual experience have often
been discussed in connection with questions about the conflict or
harmony between what first-person reflective judgment
(“introspection”) seems to tell us about experience and
what experimental data reveal (see Noë 2002 on the “grand
illusion hypothesis”).
At issue in these latter sort of “richness” controversies
is, roughly speaking, the amount of “richness
at a
level
”—e.g., how finely differentiated is spatial
experience of an array of objects? These contrast with the earlier
indicated issues concerning what we might call “richness
of
levels”
in experience. For example, does subjective
experience not only distinguish (“at a level”) differences
in (e.g.) how far a surface bulges out, but differences of
additional levels
—say, whether an object is
spherical or cubical
, and not just these, but whether it is a
ball or a chair
? It seems clear one can have a rich view with
respect to one sort of issue, while maintaining sparseness at the
other. If the question is richness “at a level” Dennett
would seem to hold a sparse view relative to Prinz. But if we are
asking about richness “of levels”, the comparison comes
out differently: Dennett’s view of consciousness, as Prinz
(disapprovingly) notes, puts no limits on what sort of properties
might figure in its content.
Another complicating factor here has to do with how one situates a
taxonomy of views with respect to a distinction between
sensory or
perceptual
phenomena on the on hand, and
thought or
cognition
, on the other. Susanna Siegel has argued for the view
that so-called “high-level” features, like
being a
pine tree
, are “represented in visual experience”.
Tim Bayne (2009) has argued for a position similar to Siegel’s,
partly by appeal to consideration of the kind of deficits in visual
recognition found in associative agnosia. Such views of visual
consciousness contrast with Tye’s and Prinz’s. (See Byrne
and Siegel 2017 for an illustration of this debate. And see Connolly
2019 for defense of a relatively low-level view, discussed in
connection with research on perceptual recognition and learning.) Yet
other alternatives are possible here—one might maintain
experience encompasses a greater richness of levels than do Byrne,
Tye, or Prinz, though without (like Siegel) putting visual experience
in the business of representing objects to have high-level properties.
One might argue for the experiential reality of spatial object
constancy, and of visual recognition of kinds, without committing to
Siegel’s version of representationalism: something might
subjectively and irreducibly
look recognizable
to you as a
pine tree or a glove, for example—but this isn’t
necessarily to say that your visual experience (like your thought)
correctly or incorrectly represents it to have a property that would
be missing in a genetically different plant, or in a differently
purposed artifact (Siewert 2013a, 2015, 2019). The issues raised here
turn partly on what sort of description of experience yields the best
understanding of visual recognition in the light of what is made
evident by Gestalt phenomena and selective deficits in vision, and
they seem to call for careful interpretation of relevant experimental
work (see Block 2014).
Another species of “richness” controversy that arises with
a distinction between thought and sensory states is this. Again, we
may distinguish thinking (cognition of the sort involved in
conceptual, rational understanding) from both perceiving with the
senses and forming sensory images. We may thus
think of
things
when we neither perceive them by the
senses
, nor
form sensory
images
of them (by e.g., visualizing), and even
where such images as we may then form (say, such as an utterance in
inner speech) do not suffice for the
thoughts
we then have.
Even if Siegel’s view is in doubt, it may seem at least that
conceptual thinking in this sense can, in virtue of its subjective
character, be about pines (and not merely “pine-ish”
things), and about gloves (and not merely “glove-ish”
things). That is, one might affirm a phenomenal-intentional richness
of levels, not by having sensory experience attribute to objects a
richer class of properties, but by holding that thinking and
understanding possess phenomenal character that yields richer
cognitive differences than can be delivered by the sort of sensory
experience one can have without full-blown conceptual abilities.
Is there something it’s like for us to think that is not
exhausted by what it’s like for us to have merely sensory
states? Here we come upon the issue that has lately emerged under the
heading “cognitive phenomenology”. Or rather, we come upon
one way of articulating an aspect of issues so labeled. Much of the
challenge of this debate lies in properly framing it; different
parties have done so in significantly different ways. As a start, and
very roughly, we might distinguish views that
include
in
phenomenal character the sorts of differences in thinking and
understanding that go beyond the “purely sensory” and
those that
restrict
phenomenal character in a way that
excludes
these. The latter philosophers hold that phenomenal
character is exhausted by or reducible to non-cognitive, purely
sensory differences, while the former say there is more to it than
this—the “something more” found in thought. The
articles in Bayne and Montague 2011 provide an array of perspectives
on this issue. Chudnoff 2015 furnishes a detailed overview and
assessment of the debate.
A prominent defender of an inclusive view—David Pitt—takes
the question to concern, crucially, whether thought has its own
“proprietary and distinctive” phenomenal character (Pitt
2004). His affirmative answer to this has been glossed by saying there
is a special sort of “non-sensory phenomenology”. (See
also Michelle Montague’s 2016 formulation.) This has been taken to
imply the phenomenal character of thought can be separated from that
of sensory states in certain ways critics have found highly dubious.
Tye and Wright 2011, for instance, assume that if there is indeed
“cognitive phenomenology”, then there is an aspect to the
phenomenal character of verbally expressed thought that would remain
the same if all imagery and sense perception (including the verbal
imagery involved in its expression) were removed from it—a
phenomenological constant that would inevitably be shared by
monolingual speakers of different languages expressing their thoughts
intertranslatably. And they find this consequence quite incredible.
Prinz 2011 assumes that if inclusive (what he calls
“expansionist”) views were right, we should be able to
engage in experiential thought independently of all sensory activity,
much as we can enjoy experience in one sensory modality in the absence
of another (as when we see without hearing). But, he says, we do not.
Related criticisms appear in Pautz 2013 and 2021.
Some proponents of inclusivity do embrace a quite radical in-principle
separability of thought and sensory experience. Kriegel 2015, for
example, invites us to consider the cognitive experience of a subject
engaged in “pure” mathematical reasoning, unaccompanied by
imagery or sensed symbolic expression of any sort. However, neither
this sort of radical separability, nor the kinds criticized in Pautz,
Prinz, and Tye, are essential to all inclusive views. For Siewert
1998, 2011 the issue does not turn on whether linguistic expression or
sensory vehicles are merely incidental to our conscious thinking, or
on whether there’s a cognitive component to its subjective
character that would remain identifiably the same, were everything
sensory is stripped away from it. Rather, the question is whether the
subjective character of your experience when you read, speak, or
listen to others, would remain unchanged if all
understanding
were stripped away, or if differences in how you understood the words
were radically switched around. Chudnoff 2015 also takes pains to
separate the question of cognitive phenomenology from the claims
critics have associated with it.
Clearly then, no small part of justifying a position on this aspect of
the “cognitive richness of levels” issue consists in
arguing for a certain way of framing the issues. Additionally, and in
connection with this, arguments proceed by asking us to consider what
sort of differences (or contrasts) in phenomenal character we
recognize in reflection. For instance: is there a difference in what
it’s like for you to take an ambiguous phrase in one sense, and
then another? Is there such an experiential difference between reading
or hearing something without following it, and then again,
with
understanding? Are we justified in thinking such
differences as we find always coincide with merely sensory
differences? Would what it’s like for us when we understand
something differently be just the same if understanding were absent?
Arguments here also focus on the idea that differences in what
it’s like for one to have experience make for differences in
self-knowledge for which we cannot adequately account, if we assume
the relevant phenomenal differences to be independent of conceptual
thought and understanding. (For a sampling of arguments appealing in a
variety of ways to experiential contrasts, see Chudnoff 2015, Horgan
and Tienson 2002, Pitt 2004, Siewert 1998, 2011, and Strawson 1994.
For an interpretation and critique of “contrast arguments”, see
Koksvik 2015. For representative arguments that all relevant contrasts
are exhausted by purely sensory differences, see Tye and Wright 2011;
Prinz 2011, 2013; and Robinson 2011. For an argument against such
sensory “reductions” appealing to the phenomenon of aphantasia, see
Lennon, forthcoming. For arguments that appeal, in different ways, to
connections between experiential and epistemic differences, see Pitt
2004 and Siewert 2011. For discussion of Pitt’s epistemic
argument, see Chudnoff 2015. For an overview of the issues and
strategies of argument, see Smithies 2013a and 2013b.)
Another aspect to these issues concerns what conception of thought
content one employs, and how this is introduced. Some ways of defining
the issues invoke at the very outset a notion of content (or of
representation). Pitt sees the basic question as whether the
phenomenology of thought “individuates its content”. One
may, however, also approach the issue initially by asking about the
relation of phenomenal differences to differences in how we understand
our words, or how we think of what we are thinking about—where
“understanding” and “thinking” are taken to
imply the possession of relevant conceptual abilities. Only after
this, does one pose questions about content, on consideration of
various ways of construing that notion (see Siewert 2011 and Chudnoff
2015). But when questions about the subjective experience of thinking
do join with questions about differences in
what
is
thought—differences in content—assessment of the
externalist arguments about content (mentioned in Section 3) again
become relevant. Somewhat as in the case of sense perception, thorny
questions arise about how to interpret envisaged scenarios in which
the subjective character
of experience apparently remains
constant
, while certain facts about one’s
environment
are
varied
in imagination (facts such
as: which of a pair of “twin” objects is found there, what
type of hidden microstructure its natural kinds have, what linguistic
practices are followed locally). Should we accept that subjective
character would be invariant across scenarios described in terms of
such variations? If we do, should we take this, together with an
inclusive attitude, to indicate that some differences in content
are
, and some are
not
, set with phenomenal
character? Or should we instead adopt an unqualified externalism that
concludes
no
sort of thought content supervenes on subjective
experience? Or, on the contrary, should we regard no fully
extra-phenomenal differences as constituting genuine differences in
what is thought? To thoroughly address questions about the phenomenal
character of thought and understanding, one needs to examine various
notions of thought content, and what theoretical role they are
supposed to serve.
Further issues that seem to call for treatment in connection with the
phenomenal character of thought include the following. How should we
align a view of this with an understanding of what
concepts
are (and what it is to possess them)? (See, e.g., Peter Forrest’s 2017
argument that the notion that phenomenal character “determines thought
content” aligns poorly with the best theories of concepts, given
certain assumptioins about the relation between concepts and
contents.) In this connection too we may ask—how, if at all,
subjects’ concepts could vary, even if the
totality
of
facts (including dispositional facts) regarding the subjective
character of their experience is held constant? How should a sense of
agency
(and thought “authorship”), and
differences among mental actions (e.g., judging, doubting, merely
considering) figure in our understanding of the experience of
thinking? And how is that experience related to the idea of a
“fringe of consciousness”?
Finally, we may note that this section’s issues raise important
methodological questions for the philosophy of consciousness
especially acutely. What role should
reflection on one’s own
experience
play in argument? And what role should interpretation
of
recent intellectual history
have here? Regarding the first
question: it has been suggested that if this sort of
reflection—“introspection”—
did
have a
legitimate role to play, it should have easily resolved questions of
cognitive phenomenology—as it evidently has not (Schwitzgebel
2011, Spener 2011). Against this, it has been argued that reflection
on experience has indeed a crucial place here, but its value depends
on how well one has framed the questions one puts to it and how good
are the assumptions that guide one’s
reflection—controversial matters of philosophical quality we
have no right to expect to be easily assessed (Siewert 2011).
Regarding the place of historical understanding: one may wonder why
(as noted earlier) separatist and restrictive conceptions of
consciousness—of the sorts that now make inclusive views
controversial—are so little in evidence in phenomenology, or
even in early twentieth century analytic philosophy or psychology. How
and why did the framework in which philosophers think about
consciousness shift? What can this tell us about the dialectical
situation in which we currently find ourselves? (See Crane 2019.)
7. Consciousness and Self-Consciousness
One could see the question of how consciousness relates to
self-consciousness as opening up a further dimension of potential
cognitive richness to investigate: here again one may contrast those
who find
more
and those who find
less
in
experience—the former finding in it this or that form of
self-consciousness
where the latter do not. But these issues
exhibit a unity and complexity of their own, and an importance that
calls for separate treatment. To prepare to survey some ways they have
found expression in recent philosophy, we may recall three questions
about the alleged reflexivity of consciousness that were earlier
identified in phenomenological writings. The first asks in what sense
if any, when there is a conscious state, there must be consciousness
of
it. The second asks whether it is only
occasionally
, in
reflection
, that a conscious state
is simultaneously an
intentional object
for the one whose
state it is. Third, there is the question of whether consciousness
ordinarily somehow involves a non-reflective consciousness of
oneself—
as
subject. These questions may be seen in the
context of understanding the consciousness-intentionality
relationship, insofar as self-consciousness may be considered a kind
of intentional directedness either to one’s own states of mind,
or one’s self, or perhaps, an aspect of conscious intentionality
directed at other things.
In recent analytic philosophy of mind, higher-order and
self-representationalist theorists of consciousness (of the sort
mentioned in Section 1) combine an affirmative answer to the first of
the three questions above with a negative answer to the second. Their
theories typically work from the idea it is a necessary to any
conscious state that one who is in that state be conscious of
it—where to say one is conscious of something implies it is
somehow an intentional, or represented object. In this respect they
resemble Brentano, and are unlike Husserl and other phenomenologists
in how they view the consciousness/self-consciousness relationship.
But unlike Brentano, they use this stance as the springboard for a
reductive intentionalist theory of consciousness, ultimately to be put
at the service of a physicalist conception of mind. What it is for a
state to be conscious can be fully explained by specifying the right
sorts of representation and mental target—where what these are
can be ultimately cashed out in non-mental, non-intentional terms. If
one form of self-consciousness consists in being conscious of
one’s own states of mind
—these reductive
reflexivist theories could be said to claim that state consciousness
generally is explained by being reduced to what we might call
“state self-consciousness”.
The advent of such theories accounts for much recent attention to the
relationship between one’s manner of being conscious of
one’s own conscious states and the fact that they are conscious.
But there are other reasons for interest. One may well think it is in
the nature of conscious states to be available for a distinctively
first-person reflective self-consciousness—when they occur in
beings capable of reflection—and that this involves a form of
thought that cannot arise in the absence of its object. This way of
drawing a close connection between consciousness and
self-consciousness can be found, for example, in
“acquaintance” theories of self-knowledge (Gertler 2012a)
and certain interpretations of the notion of “phenomenal
concepts” (Chalmers 2010), as well as other accounts of how we
know our own minds (Smithies 2012a, 2019; Siewert 2012b, 2014). But
these ideas involve no commitment to claiming that what makes a state
conscious is its being represented in a special way in the very mind
to which it belongs. Their positive philosophical significance lies
not in supporting a reductive intentionalism, but in their efforts to
elucidate the distinctive way we understand ourselves, grounded in an
interpretation of consciousness.
However, it is suitable here to focus on theories that do hold that
what makes a state conscious is being an object of the right sort of
representation, since these lie close to the concerns that have most
dominated philosophy of mind over the last fifty years or so. And, in
any case, they raise issues about the relationship of consciousness
and self-consciousness whose interest goes beyond their immediate
connection with these theories. It will first be useful to note some
of the different forms these theories may take. They differ, for
instance, on the question of whether the conscious-making
representation and its target are distinct states, or collapse into
one. The latter option identifies consciousness with a certain sort of
mental
self
-representation (Kriegel 2009), while the
“higher-order theory” label is sometimes reserved for
accounts of the former type. Another important fork in the road for
such accounts: whether they propose that the targeting representation
aims at its target in a “thought-like” manner, or in a
“perception-like” manner. To take the first option is to
endorse (like Rosenthal 1986, 1991, 1993, 2002b, and Weisberg 2011) a
“higher-order thought” theory of consciousness; to take
the second, a “higher-order perception” (or an
“inner sense”) theory (as is found in Armstrong 1968,
Carruthers 2004, and Lycan 1995, 2004). Kriegel, for his part,
entertains the idea that the right sort of targeting representation is
properly regarded as neither thought-like or sensory, but
sui
generis
. Here it becomes clear how some distinction between what
properly belongs to
thought
, and what to the
senses
(in the last section seen to figure centrally in disputes about
cognitive richness), also figures crucially in articulating and
assessing different metacognitive theories of consciousness.
Such theories can also differ with respect to what they regard as a
suitable candidate state. Is any type of mental state fair game for
being made conscious by being represented, or only sensory
“qualitative” states? Here we see how higher-order and
self-representationalist theories might make consciousness cognitively
rich in
one
way (by including metacognition in it
constitutively), while making it cognitively sparse in
another
(only sensory states need apply).
Proponents of such accounts sometimes explicitly deny that they aim to
explain the “qualitative character” of experience in terms
of higher-order or self-representations. This might lead one to think
that they are not trying to give a theory of
phenomenal
consciousness at all—on the assumption that a theory of that
would
be a theory of “qualia”. However, they do
purport to explain generally, in metarepresentational terms,
what
it’s like for one to be in a state of mind
. And they
don’t appear to treat the phenomenal separately, under the
“qualitative” label. This is especially clear when (as in
Rosenthal)
qualitative
states are illustrated by examples
commonly regarded as paradigmatically
non
-phenomenal: unfelt
pains, for example, and “blindsight” vision. Thus it seems
fair to regard these accounts as proposing a reductive intentionalism
about phenomenal character—pursuing a reflexivist strategy
analogous to that noted in the
non
-reflexivist accounts of
Tye and Prinz. One starts with some way of classifying mental states
that is understood as applying to states of mind regardless of whether
there is anything it’s like for one to have
them—regardless of whether they have phenomenal character. Then,
consciousness (phenomenal character, subjective “what it’s
likeness”) is supplied by adding in further representational
factors—though in the reflexivist story, the extra ingredient
comes in having the states themselves be represented in the right way.
So, for example, in Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory,
what it is for a pain to feel to you as it does is for you to have
pain (of a type that can occur unfelt), when (seemingly without
inference) the thought occurs to you that you do.
An important inspiration for such theories lies in the idea that,
pre-theoretically or commonsensically, we are inclined to endorse the
idea that conscious states are states we are conscious of. One takes
this to have the status of a necessary truth pertaining to all
conscious states, and gives it a representationalist construal. This
yields the starting point:
some
sort of higher-order or
self-representation is
necessary
for a state to be conscious
in a pre-theoretically recognized sense. We also have reason to
believe mental states can occur unconsciously. So maybe: targeting
potentially unconscious mental states with the right sort of
representation necessary for them to be conscious will also yield a
condition
sufficient
for them to be so, and reveal what it is
to be a conscious state.
Such theories’ advocates also draw on interpretation of the idea
that conscious states are ones there is something it’s like for
you to be in—arguing that what it’s like for you to be in
a state is best construed in terms of how you
represent
that
state. (Carruthers 2004; Lycan 1995, 2004; Rosenthal 2002, 2019).
Rosenthal argues his higher-order thought variant version of the view
has a particular advantage in this regard, since it can account for
how what it’s like for you to have sensory states can be
transformed, when you learn to classify sensory states via new
concepts (as, for example, when you learn to discriminate how wine
tastes to you in a connoisseur’s terms). This transformation is
best explained, he argues, on the assumption that what you
think
about your gustatory state just
constitutes
what it’s like for you to have it.
Additional arguments for metacognitive accounts of consciousness
appeal to their alleged explanatory value. For example, Rosenthal
argues that the fact that our conscious states comprise the part of
the our minds available for our first-person report is best explained
by supposing they are always objects of thoughts of the kind such
reports would express. And advocates of higher-order perception or
inner sense versions of the metacognitive approach argue that such
views best explain our capacity to attend to our own experience
introspectively (Lycan 2004), and to form “recognitional
concepts” of our own sensory states (Carruthers 2004).
These strategies of argument have all occasioned criticism. One may
doubt whether commonsense really does support the requisite
interpretation of the idea on which the theories ground their appeal
(i.e., the idea that conscious states are states we are conscious of)
(Prinz 2012; Siewert 1998, 2013b). One may even doubt whether that
idea should be endorsed on
any
construal; according to
Dretske 1995, conscious states are not states we are conscious
of
, but states we are conscious
with
. The
metacognitive interpretation of “what it’s like”
locution has also been criticized (see Byrne 2004; Siewert 2013b; and
Stoljar, forthcoming), as have some of the above appeals to
explanatory value (Siewert 1998, 2012). And one may doubt whether
reflection supports the sorts of self-attributions posited by the
theory. With respect to the higher-order thought theory: whenever I
feel pain, does it in fact occur to me that I am in pain in
Rosenthal’s sense (a sense in which one can be in pain without
feeling anything)? With respect to the inner sense view: when I feel
nauseated, do I find there is some way the feeling is
sensed
distinguishable both from how I feel, and from what I think about it
(Siewert 1998, 2012b)?
One venerable concern about metacognitive theories of consciousness
focuses on the prospect of an infinite regress. We have seen how
Brentano addresses this concern, recently renewed in connection with
contemporary theories (see Kriegel 2009 and Siewert 2013b). The worry
is roughly this. The theories assume we cannot be in a conscious state
without being representationally or intentionally conscious
of
it. But it seems at least as compelling that an
unconscious state cannot make one conscious of something. Putting both
assumptions together appear to lead to the idea that every conscious
state must be represented by a conscious state that makes it
conscious. But does this not generate a vicious infinite regress of
representations? Kriegel’s favored response resembles
Brentano’s: we cut off the regress by means of the notion of
self-representation: conscious states necessarily point at themselves,
and the self-pointing is conscious—not by being the object of a
further act of pointing—but by being one with what it points at.
Other defenders of metacognitive approaches (Carruthers, Lycan,
Rosenthal) respond to the regress problem differently: they reject the
intuition that you can’t be conscious of things by unconsciously
perceiving them or thinking of them. So on Rosenthal’s view,
typically we are conscious of our vision (and it is conscious)
because, as it occurs, we unconsciously think it does.
Another traditional line of criticism (also addressed by Brentano),
specifically targets the idea that all consciousness involves
“thought-like” metacognition. Does such thought not
require the ability to classify one’s own states of
mind—to bring them under concepts? Such conceptualization seems
to imply a level of cognitive sophistication one may doubt belongs to
neonate human beings and many nonhuman animals. But in harboring such
doubts, we shouldn’t take ourselves to question whether these
creatures have any sensory consciousness at all—e.g., whether
colors look somehow to them, or whether they feel pain (Seager 2004;
Siewert 1998). So we shouldn’t think consciousness requires
higher-order thought. In response, some would not flinch at simply
keeping the cognitive bar high for thought, and embrace doubts about
animals and babies feeling pain (Carruthers 1989). The other option is
to set the metacognitive bar low. Brentano ([1874] 1973:
141–142) took that route: again, for him judgment is the mere
affirmation of a presented object. This requires nothing so fancy as
predicating of the object affirmed something one takes it to share
with others. So there really is no cognitive ability involved in
judgments aimed at one’s own sensory states that we can
reasonably doubt young children possess. Rosenthal offers a different
version of the “low bar” response, proposing that it is
enough to have lowgrade concepts of one’s own sensory states
that one can make certain fairly primitive nonverbal discriminatory
responses to them; the idea is that creatures apply such concepts to
themselves whenever they feel something. A question facing “low
bar ” views is to explain why, if thought of sensation comes so
easily, we should take it to be absent in cases of unconscious
perception (such as blindsight, and unfelt pain).
A final important source of challenges to metacognitive theories of
consciousness concerns the fallibility of the posited representations.
What should we say when your higher-order or self-representation
misfires? If it
mis
represents what sort of sensory state you
are in, will the theory claim this makes you feel just as you do when
actually in that sort of state? Will it say, for instance, that when
one
falsely thinks
one is in pain what this is like for one
is the same as what it’s like to
actually feel
pain?
Some critics—Block 2011, Neander 1998—regard the problems
raised by
misrepresentation
as profound. From a Brentanian
perspective, however, the envisaged problem simply cannot arise. The
inevitable affirmation of one’s conscious sensation infallibly
affirms it as presented, and it cannot be presented as other than it
is—and, since such judgment does not really
categorize
the sensation at all, it cannot
miscategorize
it. By
contrast, contemporary accounts tend to allow that the relevant form
of metacognition can represent you to be in a sensory state you
aren’t actually in. They then seek to make acceptable what the
theories imply—for instance, that the way one feels can be
constituted out of false self-attributions of sensation, and that one
can feel pain by being conscious of pain, though there is in fact no
state of which one is thus conscious (see Rosenthal 2011; Weisberg
2011).
In this section the issue of how consciousness is related to
self-consciousness has been seen as a question of how it is related to
“state self-consciousness”. But we may also see this issue
as encompassing the question of how consciousness is related to
consciousness of self “as subject”—what we might
call “subject self-consciousness”—a question earlier
broached in the survey of prominent phenomenologists. Views on this
topic are discussed in the supplement
Consciousness of Self
8. Consciousness in Mind
How do views about consciousness, intentionality, and their
relationship impinge on the question of what it is to have a mind?
Given a thin enough conception of intentionality, we might readily
accept that having intentionality hardly suffices for having a mind.
After all, street signs, books, and computer files could be said to
represent or refer to things, and whatever we want from a distinction
between the minded and the mindless (or between what has and lacks
genuine
understanding
) we intend it to be more restrictive
than that. We may say that the intentionality of
true minds
is obviously a rather different matter than the intentionality of the
symbols
that minded beings use. But still we may wonder
exactly what makes for that difference.
Could
consciousness
perhaps be what confers
“minded” status? Given a paltry enough conception of
consciousness, it’s hard to see how it could—or even how
it could be necessary to mind at all. If one thinks of consciousness
as brute, non-intentional sensation, for instance, it may seem not to
have much to do with mind in any robust sense. But maybe if the right
forms of consciousness are recognized, then these, rightly related to
intentionality, will be enough to make a mind. If one sees
consciousness as sufficient for fairly rich and important forms of
intentionality, one has some prospect for arguing that, since it alone
can endow what has it with intentionality of the right sort, only what
has it, has a mind.
Such a proposal requires we recognize some significant, “in
kind” difference between the minded and the mindless, between
those capable of understanding and those devoid of comprehension. Such
recognition is not universal. On Dennett’s (1981) view, there is
fundamentally nothing more to your being, as he puts it, “a true
believer”—and thus nothing more ultimately to mind and
understanding—than being interpretable by observers in the right
way, via “the intentional stance”, so as to facilitate
successful predictions of your behavior. Dennett points out that even
the behavior of simple mechanisms like thermostats and natural
phenomena like lightning can be regarded in this way. He of course
recognizes a significant psychological difference between human beings
and such marginal case “intentional systems”. This is,
however, conceived of as a (considerable) difference of degree. Given
your patterns of behavior, observers will be able to use much more
complex intentional state attributions to predict what
you
will do, so as to get a much bigger pay-off in predictive value, than
they will in
other
cases. But there is no more profound
division among “intentional systems” than this, to be
marked by talking about what is conscious and what isn’t. For
consciousness
is either just some mythical raw feel of
atomic, non-intentional, ineffable “qualia”, or else it
has to do with the fact that a predictive advantage accrues from
regarding systems as possessed of some assortment of capacities, the
exercise of at least some of which one is inclined to call
“conscious”. But such differences are again a matter of
degree, and the capacities in question exhibit no deep unity (Dennett
1991).
However, many will think there is more to mind (and to consciousness)
than Dennett allows. In offering an alternative to his perspective,
one might try to locate the basic difference in kind between minded
and mindless beings in something other than consciousness. (See, e.g.,
Burge 2007. For a critique of his approach, see Morgan 2018.) Here
however, we will briefly consider how one might put consciousness to
work.
Ways of making consciousness integral to mind are potentially very
diverse. The issue will look rather different, for example, depending
on whether one adopts this or that reductive intentionalist view.
Suppose you hold that consciousness is reducible to states generated
by sensory mechanisms, feeding the information they bear to certain
other cognitive faculties. Then, to maintain consciousness is
essential to mind, you would presumably need to maintain a broadly
empiricist view that required such sensory input for mind. And a
question would then arise about the
sufficiency
of
consciousness for mind—at least for mind at a human
level—as one may doubt that such perception by itself brings
with it the requisite kind of understanding. On the other hand, if
one’s reductive representationalism appeals to some sort of
higher-order or self-representational account, one would need a
conception of mind that explained why some such self-monitoring is
necessary to—and how it could be enough
for—mindedness.
Generally, recent views that (explicitly or implicitly) make
consciousness central to mind have tended not to base their arguments
on reductive intentionalism. Some relevant strategies of argument
unreliant on reductivist accounts are sometimes gathered under the
rubric of “Phenomenal Intentionality Theory”. Such views
aim to show how
all
intentionality may be traced to
phenomenal
intentionality.
This approach often trades on the idea that there is a difference
between what comes by intentionality in some secondary or derivative
way (as when an image or inscription is interpreted as referring to
something), and what has intentionality in an original or more
fundamental way. The proposal would be: consciousness, and only
consciousness, brings with it
original
intentionality. It
would be natural to assume further that only beings that have original
intentionality truly have minds. Consider how this works in the case
of Searle (1990, 1992). He distinguishes between what he calls
“intrinsic” intentionality on the one hand, and merely
“as if” and “interpreter relative”
intentionality, on the other. We sometimes may speak
as if
artifacts (like thermostats) had thoughts and wants (“Mr.
Thermostat thinks it’s too warm in here”)—but this
isn’t to be taken literally. And we may impose conditions of
satisfaction on our acts and creations (words, pictures, diagrams,
etc.) by our
interpretation
of them—but they have no
intentionality independent of our interpretive practices. The
intentionality of mental states, on the other hand, is neither a mere
manner of speech, nor is our possession of it derived from
others’ interpretive stance towards us. But then: what accounts
for the fact that some states of affairs in the world have intrinsic
intentionality—that they are directed at objects under
aspects—and why they are directed under the aspects they are
(why they have the content they do)? With
conscious
states of
mind, Searle says, their phenomenal or subjective character determines
their aspectual shape. Where non-conscious states of mind are
concerned, there is nothing to do the job but their relationship to
consciousness. The right relationship, he holds, is this:
non-conscious states of mind must be potentially conscious. If some
psychological theories (of language, of vision) postulate an
unconscious so deeply buried that its mental representations cannot
even potentially become conscious, so much the worse for those
theories.
Searle’s views have aroused a number of criticisms. (See the
peer commentary in response to Searle 1990.) Among the problem areas
are these. First, how are we to spell out the requirement that
intrinsically intentional states be potentially conscious, without
making it either too easy or to difficult to satisfy? Second, just why
is it that the intrinsic intentionality of non-conscious states needs
accounting for, while that of conscious states is somehow
unproblematic? Third, it appears Searle’s argument does not
offer some general reason to rule out all efforts to give
“naturalistic” accounts of conditions sufficient to
impose—without the help of consciousness—genuine and not
merely interpreter relative intentionality.
One way to get around some of the problems of Searle’s account,
while similarly holding that all intentionality is tied to
consciousness, would be to argue that non-experiential
“aboutness” can be found all too pervasively, and had all
too cheaply—so that only the aboutness that
experience
brings should be considered “real intentionality”. This,
roughly, is the view Galen Strawson (2008) proposes. He acknowledges
we may try to narrow the attribution of intentionality, and avoid a
trivializing Dennett-like proliferation of “intentional
systems”—but without appeal to consciousness. We might,
for example, propose that real intentionality depends on
evolution-imposed functions to indicate. But such approaches he thinks
offer us no truly principled demarcation; they end up simply
dismissing legitimate counterexamples, and ultimately trade on
“anthropomorphic/zoomorphic human prejudices”. However,
once we recognize that “experiential qualitative
character” encompasses a richly diverse range of sensory and
cognitive states, we will be able to see how it also can constrain
what our perceptions are
of
, and what our thoughts are
about
; only such consciousness-imposed constraints will give
us a non-arbitrary “stopping place” for their of-ness or
aboutness to find an object.
Kriegel’s 2011 version of Phenomenal Intentionality Theory
pursues a line of thought with resemblances to both Searle’s and
Strawson’s. Drawing a distinction between original and
interpreter-relative intentionality, he argues consciousness is the
sole locus of the former: consciousness “injects intentionality
into the world”. However, unlike Searle, Kriegel has
consciousness confer intentionality both on otherwise meaningless
symbols and on unconscious mental or cognitive life in much the same
way. What has nonexperiential intentionality gets its aboutness by
being such as would be seen to have it in the experience of an
“ideal interpreter”. Kriegel, in effect, takes the sort of
“interpretivist” view of intentionality advocated by
Dennett, while (unlike Dennett) confining it to cases where
consciousness is missing. Thus it seems he should want to reject
theories like Dennett’s that purport to account for
consciousness in terms of intentional or representational notions that
do not presuppose it. This creates a difficulty, inasmuch as Kriegel
also proposes a self-representationalist account of consciousness that
seems to follow that general reductive representationalist strategy.
He responds to this problem by distinguishing the sort of natural (or
objective) “tracking” mental representation that figures
as a posit in psychological theorizing from the sort of mental
representation we are familiar with from reflection on our own minds,
with its susceptibility to the appearance/reality distinction.
Consciousness, Kriegel argues, is what accounts for the latter.
Angela Mendelovici (2018) advances another type of
“consciousness first” view. What does the crucial work in
her argument is the demand that an account of mental representation
attribute it in accordance with our introspective judgments about
it—leading neither to a “
mismatch
” with
this (as, she says, “tracking” accounts of visual
representation do with respect to color), nor to unacceptable
indeterminacies
in the content assigned (which she finds are
inevitable with non-tracking functional role accounts). Only an
account that bases intentionality on phenomenal character can avoid
these problems, she argues; and she explains how such special content
“matching” challenges that theory prompts can be
overcome.
There are also consciousness-based accounts of mind that do
not
depend on an original/derived intentionality distinction
(as do Searle’s, Kriegel’s, and Mendelovici’s). Consider, for example,
the argument proposed by Kirk Ludwig (1996a). He argues that
consciousness is needed to rightly draw the
boundaries
of an
individual’s mind—for there is nothing to determine
whose
state of mind a given non-conscious state of mind is,
unless that state consists in a disposition to produce a conscious
mental state of the right sort. Alleged mental processes that did not
tend to produce someone’s conscious states of mind appropriately
would be no one’s, which is to say that they would not be mental
states at all. Roughly: consciousness provides the unity of mind
without which there would be no mind. Only with consciousness do we
have a suitable boundary between what’s in a mind, and
what’s outside of it. And Ludwig argues that it is therefore a
mistake to attribute to our
minds
many of the unconscious
inferences with which psychological theorists have long been wont to
populate the brain’s visual system.
Another approach that makes consciousness central (but without appeal
to an original/derived contrast) is that of Declan Smithies 2019. For
him, crucially, beliefs are essentially rationally assessable states,
capable of justifying and being justified. And we can properly account
for their epistemic status, he argues, only by understanding them in
terms of consciousness—as dispositions to conscious
judgments. For only this will yield the intuitively right verdicts
regarding when someone is favorably or unfavorably assessable with
respect to epistemic norms. And only this will properly cohere with a
general epistemology that correctly links justification to
introspectability, and introspection to consciousness. Thus, while we
may conceive of beings behaviorally similar to us, but bereft of
subjective experience (“zombies” of a sort), we should not
suppose they would literally have person-level, rationally assessable
attitudes, even if they harbored internal representations playing
casual roles with respect to their behavior. Without the right sort of
consciousness, they couldn’t have the introspective
self-knowledge they need to be properly subject to epistemic norms,
and so couldn’t literally have attitudes like beliefs.
Another way to give consciousness a starring role is suggested by
Siewert 2014 who uses consideration of blindsight scenarios to argue
that the only perception that will supply the mind with an
understanding of
type
demonstratives (e.g., “this
shape”) and so be capable of functioning in empirical concept
acquisition, is the experiential, conscious kind. (If
this
shape
looks no way to you at all, you will not understand by
vision just
which
shape
this
shape is, and thus
won’t be in a position to learn visually, e.g.,
this shape
is a circle
.) Partly on these grounds it is argued that mind
requires consciousness. And given a cognitively rich view of
experience, we can see how consciousness (of the right sort) will be
sufficient
for mind as well. Siewert’s view, like
Smithies’, sets aside the original/derived contrast. But both
crucially rely (as does Searle’s) on a requirement that certain
facts about the mind should be discernible from the first-person point
of view. Doubts about these views are likely to challenge the
legitimacy of that reliance (see, e.g., Shoemaker’s 1994
criticism of Searle).
Finally, Adam Pautz (2013, 2021) argues that intentionality is based
on consciousness in a way that combines an empiricist appeal to
interpretation theory with a rejection of the idea that our experience
of thought and understnding is inherently cognitive. Embracing a
nonreductive representationalist view of the phenomenal character of
perceptual experience, Pautz draws on a Lewisian theory of
interpretation to argue that we can satisfactorily account for the
determinacy of our mental content if (but only if) we take the
phenomenal intentionality of perceptual experience as basic. Our
thoughts have the content they do not because their phenomenal
character is inherently conceptual, but because the best
interpretation of the totality of the perceptual experience we have
and are disposed to have would assign us that thought content.
9. Why It Matters
Consciousness and intentionality are inherently fascinating. But no
doubt part of their interest lies in the sense that understanding them
is crucial to understanding much else. And an adequate grasp of what
is at stake in views about them may be lost in the abstract matrix of
positions generated in this survey (“reductive restrictive
reflexivist” etc.). Perhaps these views will themselves also
become a little clearer if we summarize and make explicit a few of
their connections with the following four broad areas of philosophical
concern.
The nature and boundaries of mind and self
The place of consciousness and intentionality in explanation
Forms of knowledge and justification
Kinds and instances of value
Let’s take each of these briefly in turn. First: “the
nature and boundaries of mind and self”. Here we may be
interested in questions about: (a) what distinguishes minded from
mindless beings; (b) what unifies the domain of the mental; (c) how
far beyond the brain of a minded organism
its
mind (its
mental content, or its mental states or processes) properly speaking
extend
, and what are their
constituents
; (d) what
sorts of non-mental constraints (in constitution or organization)
limit the range of minded beings; and finally (e) what constitutes a
self (e.g., what is required for its existence and continuity, how
this relates to the organism, and to its social and natural
environment).
Topics (a) and (c)—what makes a minded being differ from a
minded one, and what its properly mental content and activity extend
to encompass—have evident connections with topic (b): the unity
of the mental. For presumably a minded being will be one whose states
have “mental content” and whose activities are properly
mental or psychological in character; to decide what those contents
and activities include will be to decide not only what is part of its
mind, but also what puts something in the domain of the mental at all.
Further, insofar as such boundaries of
mind
also mark
boundaries of
self
(or person or psychological
subject—however these categories are to be related)—we
will find topics (a-c) closely related to topic (e)—regarding
the constitution, continuity and situatedness of self.
As we have seen, disputes over the consciousness-intentionality
relationship are strongly tied to all these “boundary
drawing” questions. As some rough indication (and reminder) of
the connections, we may note, first, that it is difficult to see how a
unified conception of mind (or of its extent) can be had on strongly
non-intentionalist, separatist views, which suggest a deeply
bifurcated conception of the domain of the mental. Even if one does
not embrace separatism, one may wish to draw the boundaries of the
conscious
mind much further “in” than those of
the
extended
mind. Whichever way one goes, questions emerge
about where this leaves the
self
. And turning back to the
minded vs. mindless question—a rejection of separatism still
leaves one with the prospect of a division between two rather
different kinds of mind (conscious and “zombie”). Views on
which no being totally lacking in consciousness would have a mind will
avoid such disunity.
Questions about (d)—the potential constitution and range of
realizations of mind—seem to depend partly on one’s
attitude towards reductive intentionalism. This is readily joined with
broadly functionalist or computationalist perspectives friendly to the
idea that mind is realizable in physically very diverse entities. If
indeed it is, then a confidence in reductive intentionalism should
inspire confidence in the wide diversity of constitutions that
artificial conscious beings can have, and similarly make us more
confident of the potential to extend our own conscious existence in
artifacts transcending our biological limitations. On the other hand,
if we reject or are skeptical about reductive intentionalism, we lose
certain these for such confidence. And if we combine this with the
idea that the right kind of subjective experience is necessary and
sufficient for
mind
, a corresponding biological conservatism
about our grounds for attributing mind to highly physically diverse
entities, and about our own prospects for indefinitely artificially
extended futures, may seem more reasonable.
But these statements need qualification. For one thing, once the
details of an acceptable reductive intentionalism about consciousness
emerge, it could turn out that—as a matter of natural
fact—something very like the biological organization found in
ourselves and other animals is needed for its realization, so it could
turn out that consciousness is not as independent of neurophysiology
as functionalist theories often suggest (consider Prinz’s 2012
“neurofunctionalism”). On the other hand, one could reject
reductionism of any sort about consciousness, while still arguing on
independent grounds (like Chalmers 1996) that, as a matter of natural
(though not metaphysical) necessity, the realization of consciousness
is very loosely physically constrained. And then there are panpsychist
views to consider (Strawson 2006, Goff 2017). If there is no genuinely
non-mental, or at least non-phenomenal, reality to be found even in
particle physics, then the whole “diversity of
realization” question will have to reconfigured. Perhaps the
question then will be something like: which mental or experiential
properties can emerge from which others, and how?
From this sketch, we can see something of how “nature and
boundaries of mind and self” questions associated with earlier
canvassed issues about consciousness and intentionality gain
significant interest from concerns about what (if anything)
unifies the field of study
that we label “the
mind”—the domain of the “mental” or
“psychological”—and about how we should regard the
prospects for
engineering new minds
or
radical
extensions
of our own.
But to limit ourselves to these remarks may be to neglect another
(albeit related) dimension to the interest of these “nature and
boundaries of mind and self” questions, one perhaps more evident
in the phenomenological tradition—an inherent interest in
understanding
what sort of beings we are
. If being minded (or
being capable of understanding) is essential to what we are, the
question of how consciousness figures in mind (or understanding) is
also a question of how it figures in our nature. And, if a
satisfactory philosophical conception of what sort of beings we are
involves a grasp of how our consciousness reveals to us ourselves and
the world, “boundary” questions about its detachability
from our natural and social environments take on an additional
dimension of interest. To answer them, we need also to address the
themes of
basic forms
and
reflexivity
. If (as some
phenomenologists’ views suggest) a pre-predicative,
pre-reflective, practical understanding undetachable from the world is
part of what makes us what we are, we may need to recognize the
undetachability of our intentional consciousness. And if the right
conception of basic forms and reflexivity sees us as essentially
embodied understanders (as in Merleau-Ponty’s view), we should
perhaps be suspicious of hopes or plans to keep our minds and leave
our bodies behind. Further, we need to see—against this
background—what kind of distinctive self-understanding
reflective self-consciousness
makes possible, if this is also
part of what we are. We need to ask how much this sort of
self-consciousness can do to detach us from social roles and
practices, and what room this allows for authenticity, autonomy and
self-constitution. (This brings us to issues prominent in Heidegger
and Sartre—but also, in Korsgaard, and in Kantian moral
psychology generally.)
Let’s now consider the second of the four areas labeled above,
the “
place
of consciousness and intentionality in
explanation
.” This is intended to cover questions about
what should be taken (or sought) to explain each of them, as well as
about what they should be used to explain. It should be clear now
roughly how a reductive intentionalist would configure these issues.
Consciousness is to be explained as a form of intentionality (or
mental representation) that can be characterized without primitive
appeal to experiential notions (like “looking” or
“appearing”)—and the facts about representation can
in turn be explained without primitive appeal to intentional or
representational notions. But it would be too simple to think that
reductive intentionalists in no sense explain intentionality in terms
of consciousness, or that non-reductive intentionalists in no sense
explain consciousness in terms of intentionality. As we have seen, it
is open to both to say (albeit in very different ways) that what makes
for the intentionality of mind is the special kind of representation
that consciousness is. And both can say (in a very different ways)
that to understand how consciousness figures in mindedness, one must
understand in what ways it is intentional.
What we think consciousness can account for would seem to vary with
how cognitively rich we think experience is, and whether it figures in
understanding generally, or in grounding a substantial “in
kind” distinction between the minded and the mindless. (For
instance, it is hard to see how a strongly
separatist
position would allow us to explain very much in terms of
consciousness.) And our answers to questions about richness affect our
view of how consciousness is to be explained. For example, certain
inclusions and restrictions on what’s in consciousness are
presupposed in reductive intentionalist theories—to question
their views of how consciousness is limited is to question the
explanations of it they offer.
The second “explanation” category also encompasses
questions about how to see non-mental nature explaining mind.
Physicalism generally seems committed to saying the former strongly
necessitates the latter—and does not merely guarantee it in
virtue of contingent laws. Typically this claim has been motivated by
the worry that anything less than strong (“metaphysical”)
necessities would leave mind a superfluous add-on, disturbingly
ineffectual or epiphenomenal; our minds would not really explain our
actions and their results. And that it seems would leave us with no
coherent conception of our place in the world that we can live with.
It is often thought that consciousness is the real sticking point
here:
that
is what makes it hard to secure the strong form of
necessitation desired, or to put to explanatory use such necessity as
we have grounds to think is there. These difficulties are articulated
in modal conceivability arguments (Kripke 1972; Chalmers 1996); in
“knowledge” arguments (Nagel 1976; Jackson 1982); in
arguments for the “explanatory gap” (Levine 2001); and in
the case for a “mysterianism” about how consciousness
arises (McGinn 1991). Controversies about whether we can justify the
claim that the right combination of non-mental facts or properties
makes it the case that mind
must
occur, and about whether
this affords us
explanations
of the facts of mind, will take
different forms, depending on how one conceives of the
consciousness-intentionality relationship.
Here again, a separatist position would seem to accord concerns about
consciousness the
least
general import—though one may
(like Kim 2011) argue that by closing off the prospect of reductive
intentionalism, separatism would have us resign ourselves to an
irreducible, epiphenomenal “mental residue” of qualia. But
if one is an intentionalist, then the problems of consciousness will
spread to the intentionality of our minds, and will apparently cut
more deeply, the richer one takes experience to be in intentionality.
And if one accounts for the minded/mindless difference in terms of
consciousness, then whatever metaphysical problem consciousness raises
will affect the mind quite generally. Thus the stakes will evidently
be higher in deciding whether we can secure the controversial
“bottom-up” necessitation of consciousness, and whether
securing
this
could secure, or is
needed
to secure,
a place for consciousness in nature—either as
explanans
or
explanandum
. To deny that it
is
needed is not
necessarily to foreswear the goal of scientifically explaining facts
about consciousness, or to embrace the supernatural. It is just to
allow that such principles as we can appeal to in explaining what sort
of consciousness arises, in what circumstances, are ones we must
confess might have been otherwise than they are. (But—why these
principles
aren’t
in fact otherwise ultimately has no
explanation.) The epiphenomenalist worry may then still rear its head:
aren’t physicalist necessities required if experience is itself
to explain anything that happens in the physical world? One’s
answer will depend on just what one thinks generally needs to be the
case for what happens in the physical world to receive legitimate
explanations (or be produced by causes) that don’t belong to
physics.
Turning now to the third category, “forms of knowledge and
justification”: our questions here concern the
epistemic
significance
of consciousness. What role does consciousness have
in knowledge acquisition, in understanding, and in warranting
judgments? One might argue that it has none (Lee 2014). If we cannot
rule out the possibility of beings functionally like us (but
physically different) that lack consciousness (this kind of
“zombie”), we should arguably admit that such zombie
counterparts would have minds, and then: that the consciousness-free
epistemology accounting for their knowledge would have all that
any
epistemology really needs. In response to this, one could
argue (as in Section 8) that nothing that utterly lacked consciousness
would really understand anything or have a mind—so there is no
“zombie epistemology”. Alternatively (or in addition) one
could argue that we shouldn’t assume the epistemology of
conscious beings like ourselves would be no different than the
epistemology (assuming there is one) applicable to such hypothetical
beings.
If pre-emptive challenges to the epistemic significance of
consciousness can be met, other issues arise to which the
consciousness-intentionality relationship appear relevant. To take
first the question of our knowledge of our surroundings: we want to
say sense perception plays a role in this. But what role is played by
sensory
consciousness
in our account would seem to depend on
how we see that as related to intentionality. As in the other cases,
the potential importance of consciousness seems diminished by
separatism. Thus we have the Davidsonian view that suggests subjective
experience, consisting just in sensations, can play only a causal, and
no justificatory role in support of perceptual judgments (Davidson
1982, 1986). Against this, we have the McDowellian argument in favor
of conceptual content for sensory experience: only if it is this
richly cognitive can it play the epistemic role we rightly assume it
does (McDowell 1994). But this suggests difficult questions (of the
sort canvassed in Section 5) about how to justify an assessment of the
richness of phenomenal character.
Different views on the theme of basic forms of intentionality will
face different challenges in accounting for the sources of our
knowledge, or of warrant for our mundane beliefs about the things we
find around us. Roughly, it might seem that in certain respects, the
story of justification will be easier, the more the intentionality of
sensory experience is assimilated to that of full-blown
concept-applying judgment or belief—inasmuch as it seems
unmysterious how beliefs justify beliefs. On the other hand, going
very far in that direction can bring puzzles of its own. It seems that
sense experience should be of the right sort to enable us to
acquire
concepts (which assumes we don’t
already
have
them), and to
support
our
applying concepts to things (which assumes we haven’t
already done so
). But it may seem harder to maintain these
assumptions, if we make sensory experience itself a kind of judgment
or belief (see the discussion in Siegel and Silins 2015).
Treatments of
detachability
may also have epistemic
implications. Some (e.g., John Campbell 2002) have argued that we
can’t do justice to the role of sense experience in providing
knowledge of the particulars in our surroundings, unless we regard the
experience (and even its subjective character) as essentially
“object-dependent”. On the other hand, one may wonder if
one can do justice to the subjectivity of experience, its perspectival
and error-prone nature, while maintaining some form of
object-dependence. Consideration of Husserl’s and
Merleau-Ponty’s views on perceptual experience, and discussion
of contemporary disjunctivism’s treatment of illusion and
hallucination, engages with this aspect of the epistemic significance
of consciousness.
How one sees the relationship of consciousness to intentionality will
also shape what account one can give of “introspective”
self-knowledge. That is, it will bear on our accounts of how we know
or have warrant for judgments about our own states of mind. One will
likely think the difference between what is conscious and what
isn’t makes some difference to what one can know of one’s
own mind in a distinctively first-person way. Roughly, what’s
conscious would seem to be more directly knowable introspectively. But
holding either a separatist or strongly restrictivist view would
appear to limit the role consciousness can play in one’s account
of self-knowledge. For example, Carruthers’ view of phenomenal
consciousness restricts it almost entirely to nonconceptual sensory
states and patterns of imagery, and correspondingly limits
distinctively first-personal self-knowledge: beyond these confines of
consciousness, your epistemic relation to your mental life—to
how and what you are thinking, for example—is held to be
basically the same as it is to another’s (Carruthers 2011).
Alternatively, one might think that your knowledge of your own
thoughts is
also
fundamentally and distinctively
first-personal—but in a very different (perhaps
“rationalist”) way than knowledge of your own sense
experience and imagery: knowing one’s own mind comes in two
quite different varieties (Moran 2001; Boyle 2009). However, assuming
an inclusive conception of experience, it will be more open to
maintain that consciousness accounts in a partly similar way for
self-knowledge, regardless of whether it is one’s own
sensing
or
thinking
that is known.
Clearly too, understanding the relationship of consciousness to
self-consciousness with respect to the reflexivity theme will play an
important role in determining what to say about self-knowledge. For
instance, proponents of higher-order thought or inner sense theories
of consciousness will have different strategies available in
accounting for the special self-knowledge consciousness affords (and
face different challenges) than those who reject these accounts. For
example, obviously, one cannot offer an inner sense account of
self-knowledge if one thinks there is no inner sense. And if one does
believe in inner sense, special questions arise about how to account
for the possibility of introspective error and self-correction. Also,
even if one distinguishes consciousness from state self-consciousness,
one may think that consciousness makes possible a form of
self-consciousness—a first-person form of reflection—with
distinctive epistemic properties (as, e.g., in Gertler 2012a; Siewert
2012). We might note further that having a rich conception of
consciousness, and putting this to work in a unified and comprehensive
account of introspective self-knowledge fits naturally into an
“internalist” view of justification: if, as an
internalist, you think that what justifies your judgments needs to be
appropriately available to you, a consciousness-based conception of
self-knowledge may seem tailor-made to tell us what “appropriate
availability” comes to here. (See Smithies 2019.)
Finally, a few words about the fourth topic mentioned above: how our
views of consciousness and intentionality might affect the kind of
value
we recognize. What kind of value do we see in
experience? It will not be unusual to think it has for us a
non-instrumental (and in that sense “intrinsic”) value.
One way to make this explicit: consider what goods you think your own
experience brings you, which you could conceive of getting without
it—in an experience-less, “zombified” state. Would
you still much rather have experience than not, even on the condition
that without it, all the goods you think it provides that
could
be had without it, were in fact available? An answer
“yes” seems to indicate you accord conscious experiences
some kind of non-instrumental value. Another question: do you think
something very bad has happened if your own or another person’s
existence is terminated, even if you (or they) are replaced with an
exact duplicate? If you say yes, does the badness of such an
extinction-plus-replacement scenario remain, presuming that prior to
it, the person’s
consciousness
has already been
totally and permanently
extinguished? Suppose you say
no—the truly terrible part to this story comes at the stage
where one is utterly and forever “zombified”; after
that
, nothing of significant non-instrumental value remains
to be destroyed by the envisaged replacement. This suggests that for
you the kind of
irreplaceable
value you accord particular
persons is essentially tied to the non-instrumental value experience
has for you (Siewert 1998, 2014, 2021). Intuitive responses to such
scenarios appear to bring to the surface convictions about the kind of
non-instrumental value consciousness has (and conscious beings have)
for us. But how should we relate this to our views about consciousness
and intentionality?
It seems open still to hold to the value-revealing responses just
imagined, even if one divorces consciousness from intentionality, or
maintains that experience lacks the kind of cognitive richness
involved in conceptual understanding. However, it would then appear
that the value you accord consciousness would be importantly detached
from whatever non-instrumental value you accord the exercise of
understanding. And questions would arise about how, on such a view,
there could be a valuable
pleasure
in that exercise, and
about how one could continue to tie the irreplaceable value of
persons
to consciousness. In general, giving high intrinsic
value to consciousness and reserving the irreplaceable value of
persons for conscious beings will likely seem easier, the richer one
takes experience to be.
But even then we may wonder whether, if consciousness—no matter
how rich—is strictly
inessential to mindedness
, we
should really care about it so much. On the view proposed by Neil Levy
(2014), it is assumed that zombies could have minds possessed of
rational understanding, desires and interests—and so their
well-being would count in considerations of value no less or
differently than that of conscious beings. Thus he maintains (by a
reasoning that parallels Lee’s epistemological deflation of
consciousness): even in our own case (phenomenal) consciousness is
incidental to value. But again, one may contest the assumption of
zombie minds. And even if one does not, it may well seem that, when it
comes to entities that can have no subjective experience of
frustration or satisfaction, it should not much matter to us whether
they get what they are alleged to want, except insofar as we happen
independently to want it ourselves.
There is surely much more to say about how views of the
consciousness-intentionality relationship bear on large questions
about mind, self, explanation, knowledge and value. But what has just
been said hopefully brings out some prominent features of the
philosophical landscape.
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