Abstract
In this article I argue that phenomenal intentionality fundamentally consists in a horizonality structure, rather than in a relation to a representational content or the determination of accuracy conditions. I provide a distinctive modal model of intentionality that conceives of phenomenal intentionality as the enjoyment of a plus ultra that points beyond what is actual. The directedness of intentionality on the world, thus, consists in “pointing ahead” to possibilities. The principal difficulty for the modal model is logical: the most obvious way of implementing such a structure results in an analogue of Russell’s paradox. However, this paradox can be avoided by fine-tuning the modal logic deployed in this setting. This way of fine-tuning the logic ultimately amounts to intuitive benefits. For, it captures the intensional character of intentionality, since the way that our mental states refer to things is conception-dependent. Moreover, the way I interpret the modal model leads to a conception of intentionality as a feature of dynamic, diachronic patterns in the way that mental acts subjectively appear, rather than as a synchronic property. We ought to think of intentionality as fundamentally a temporal, subjective determination. In a generalization on Sellars’ approach to concepts, I hold that phenomenally intentional mental presentations involve modal laws and are inconceivable without them.
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Notes
N.b., I use ‘object’ in the term ‘object-directed’ here in the broadest sense. To be object-directed in my sense, then, is to have some kind of intentional object. For my purposes, object-directedness need not be restricted to directedness on full-fledged spatiotemporal particulars, so that object-directedness ought to be understood in a suitably general way as to apply to views on which one can be directed upon universals, abstract entities, and so on.
On subjective character or “for-me-ness”, see also Zahavi and Kriegel (2015).
For recent discussion, see Forrest (2017).
My references to Kant here are purely illustrative. I do not take myself to be doing any serious exegetical work here, and I am not arguing in favor of any particular interpretation of Kant. I merely wish to draw out certain contrasts relevant to present-day philosophy of mind.
N.b., to be ‘directed on the world’ in my sense means simply to be directed on anything other than the “self” (whatever the self may turn out to be). It is for a mental state to have a felt aboutness, to appear to one to be concerned with something other than merely the subject’s private psychological situation. As such, ‘world’ here should be taken in the relevantly inclusive sense.
Husserl says: “If an object appears in the flesh in the perceptual lived-experience, and is thereby characterized in this or that mode of being, this does not mean that perception consists of two elements or layers of which the one constitutes the object in its presentation in the flesh and the other, building upon it, apportions to the object “being” or “non-being,” etc. According to Brentano and his school, with which Meinong was also affiliated, there is supposed to be one unique perceptual presentation that presents the object in the flesh, and in addition to this a judgment that now actively accepts, now rejects, affirming or denying what is presented. In principle, however, those judgments do not have to be supplemented, and in this case we would have a mere presentation.
“But according to our analyses, it is clear that there is not anything, and there cannot be anything, on the order of mere perceptual presentations, neither as particular lived-experiences nor only as sublayers in lived-experiences that are self-contained in an intimately inherent manner. A perceptual presentation would certainly be a consciousness, a consciousness that gives an object originaliter. But such a consciousness would not be anything other than that system of intentions of the structure described, and it would be entirely inconceivable if it were anything but that” (Husserl 2001, p. 358).
For motivation for this claim, see the thought experiment presented at the end of Sect. 4, below.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this.
Here I borrow a convention from event semantics to formalize mental presentations as concrete, particular events (Parsons 1990). This choice, though not without its substantive commitments, will simply be assumed here, since it would be beyond the scope of the present discussion to give a full defense of it. I have argued extensively for it in Banick (forthcoming).
It is worth mentioning also that this principle is a modal variation on Basic Law V from Frege’s Grundgesetze; Cf. Demopoulos and Clark (2005, p. 131).
See the “Appendix”, below, for the proof.
I’m indebted to the comments of an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this parallel.
Whether or not it is ultimately the case that a grounding relation obtains between phenomenology and representational contents, or whether or not our phenomenally-intentional states have representational contents, is a question that I leave open here.
It should be noted that in the dynamic epistemic setting so far deployed, the representation of time is implicit—that is, we have in the formalism so far introduced no explicit representation of time. It is beyond the scope of the present sketch to fully work out the question of whether an explicit representation of time ought to be introduced. For now it is enough to note that the intended interpretation of the model-transforming acts is a temporal change, and that the extension of dynamic epistemic logics with temporal operators is available in the literature (Yap 2011).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this difficulty.
Indeed, Martin (2005) argues that Husserl is an historical predecessor to something like the view I am advocating here.
This is why Husserl felt the need to abandon “descriptive psychology” and instead move to phenomenology, which would be a discipline that is a priori and logical, rather than empirical.
This thought experiment is a variation on Kriegel’s (2007) qualia-inverter thought experiment.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sean Walsh for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, whose insightful feedback helped me to significantly improve the final product.
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Banick, K. A modal analysis of phenomenal intentionality: horizonality and object-directed phenomenal presence. Synthese 198, 10903–10922 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02758-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02758-1