Abstract
Enactivism does not have its primary philosophical roots in pragmatism: phenomenology (from Husserl to Jonas) is its first source of inspiration (with the exception of Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism). That does not exclude the benefits of pragmatist readings of enactivism, and of enactivist readings of pragmatism. After having sketched those readings, this paper focuses on the philosophical concept of intentionality. I show that whereas enactivists endorse the idea that intentionality is a base-level property of cognition, pragmatism offer(ed) us some reasons not to proceed this way. It is therefore doubtful to hold that pragmatists and enactivists would converge in the defence of a common, non-representational conception of intentionality.
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Notes
For instance, James’ Principles of Psychology were one important source of inspiration for Husserl’s theory of intentionality. Moran (2017: 275) lucidly remarks a paradox which fits very well with the tone of our own paper: it is James’ account of consciousness and its fringes, halos and horizons which inspired Husserl to go beyond object-centered accounts of intentionality. James, in itself, did not propose a theory of intentionality in the Principles of Psychology (or elsewhere). Indeed, Shaun Gallagher (1998) showed that it is with the help of intentionality that Husserl was able to overcome some difficulties faced by James in his account of time-consciousness.
See Miyahara and Robertson (2021) for an analysis and use of Dewey’s account of habits in the context of enactive discussions.
See Varela et al., 1991: 205: “Cognition as embodied action is always about or directed toward something that is missing”. This feature is not present in Brentano, according to whom “intentional” qualifies the mode of being of the objects of thought (see Moran, 1996). Husserl was the first philosopher who proposed to define intentionality as a relation, in terms of directedness: « intentional experiences have the peculiarity of directing themselves (beziehen) in varying fashion to presented objects, but they do so in an intentional sense. An object is ‘referred to’ (gemeint) or ‘aimed at’ (abgezielt) in them, and in presentative or judging or other fashion.» (Husserl, 1970: 5th Logical Investigation, § 11).
Gallagher and Miyahara are not alone in those rapprochements between pragmatism and phenomenological intentionality. For instance, Madzia (2016: 304) proposes to see in George Herbert Mead’s attitudes the equivalent of Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality.
For instance in the chapter 6 of his book Between saying and doing (2008).
This approach was also Gilbert Ryle’s approach on intentional objects (Ryle, 1971: 183).
As John McDowell says, « If we start from a conception of thinking as in itself without referential bearing on the world, we shall seem to be confronted with a genuine and urgent task, that of reinstating into our picture the way thinking is directed at the world (…) The need to construct a theoretical "hook" to link thinking to the world does not arise, because if it is thinking that we have in view at all—say being struck by the thought that one hears the sound of water dripping—then what we have in view is already hooked on to the world; it is already in view as possessing referential directedness at reality» (McDowell, 1998: 288).
There are, of course, some minor and revealing exceptions. For example, in a course given on December 7th 1921, Dewey describes the conscious and the unconscious phases of experience. In order to describe a type of connection between these two phases, he uses the notion of intentional reference. “Intentional reference” is not here a relation between experience and some object in the world; it is a relation between two phases of experience (Dewey, 2015: 2.2392).
See also: « what has been completely divided in philosophical discourse into man and the world, inner and outer, self and not-self, subject and object, individual and social, private and public, etc., are in actuality parties in life-transactions» (LW16: 248).
This is the option taken by Chemero in his Radical Embodied Cognitive Science: « it is only for convenience (and from habit) that we think of the organism and environment as separate; in fact, they are best thought of as forming just one nondecomposable system, U. Rather than describing the way external (and internal) factors cause changes in the organism’s behavior, such a model would explain the way U, the system as a whole, unfolds over time» (Chemero, 2009: 26).
There is a literature on Heidegger’s pragmatism. See Okrent (1988).
See also Sebbah (2012).
Concerning (3), many things could be said here on the proximity of this strategy and Elizabeth Anscombe’s approach to intentions in her book Intention (Anscombe, 1957), but this will be a story for quite another occasion. For Anscombe, having an intention is not being in a state of mind, hearing an inner voice or experiencing an inner move (Anscombe, 1957: § 25, § 27). The intention of an agent is what he does. The action one intends to do is not primarily described by the description of its target.
Indeed, let me repeat here that all along this paper, I am only discussing intentionality as a general, basic and natural property, not intentionality as an occasional semantic, linguistic property, equated with meaningfulness and/or grammatical aboutness.
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Steiner, P. Not thinking about the same thing. Enactivism, pragmatism and intentionality. Phenom Cogn Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09949-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09949-4