intentionality
Theories of intentionality come in many colors and flavors. Some lean more towards realism, others lean more towards idealism. And people disagree about whether some particular theory of intentionality is realist or idealist. And as with epistemology, in general, theories of intentionality are subject to the almost comic shortcoming that people with the express intention of adopting a more realistic epistemology (physicalists, logical positivists, logical atomists, phenomenologists) land themselves in a full-blown idealism.
Why so much confusion? The one point all theories of intentionality have in common is that they hold that the senses actually report reality, and that blurs the distinction between the Cartesian knowing subject and the object known. This blurring is why some theories of intentionality tend towards idealism (thought creates the world) and others tend towards realism (the world actually occupies our heads).
Historically, most theories of intentionality have been of the latter sort, including most medieval theories. Medieval thinkers talk as though the thing known has a kind of existence within the intellect that knows, an intentional being (“esse intentionale” or “inesse“).
One late 20th century existentialist Thomist put the idea with useful clarity: “Every act of knowing is an intentional absorbing of the known to the knower.” (1) Real things can enjoy “two modes of existence” so that the thing known exercises a kind of “second existence” within the knowing intellect (2).
As I explain in the glossary entry on immediate awareness, we have to step outside of our reflexive Cartesian way of thinking to understand the truth in these statements.
A little reflection on how our bodies interact with the world can help. The idea that the things we know somehow invade the intellect and have a second act of existing there can be thought of as an inversion of Richard Dawkin’s extended phenotype idea. Dawkins insists that we cannot understand the phenotype of an organism entirely sundered from its environment. So, for instance, we can’t think accurately describe the nature of a beaver without including the beaver’s instinct to build damns. The dam-building instinct is part of their essence, no less than the molecules that make up their bodies, and we can’t understand what a dam-building instinct is if we don’t know what a dam is. The beaver’s environment is part of its nature and identity.
A dam is a tool, and the tools animals use can be thought of as extensions of their bodies. This is true for humans, no less than any other animal. An experienced carpenter learns to treat a hammer as an extension of his body, just as an experienced pianist learns to treat the piano as an extension of his body. We all sense that the pens we write with and even the cars we drive are somehow extensions of our bodies. And our environments contribute to our identities in many other ways. For example, the people whom we know, love or hate become part of who we are. You often hear a bereaved Christian express a desire to be reunited with a deceased love one in heaven. On losing a loved one, we lose a piece of ourselves.
Intentional knowing stands the extended phenotype idea on its head. The faculties by which we allow the external world to invade and occupy our intellects is part of our essence, just like dam building is part of a beaver’s essence. We allow ourselves to become extensions of our environment, because paradoxically, in so doing, we can better incorporate our environment into who we are. It is smart not to “kick against the pricks”. We can better navigate through our world if we allow our world to mold us without allowing it it to totally control us and thereby cancel our purposeful activity.
This way of thinking was common among the ancients and the medievals. In an early draft of Thought and World (3), Ross states that
“… both Aquinas and Aristotle say the knower becomes the thing known.”
It’s all the more remarkable then, as Ross points out, that modern physicalist philosophers who are determined to supply a transparently clear physical explanation of everything, are so reluctant to accept the idea that physical things might have a kind of presence in our intellects:
It is a strange by-product of Cartesian dualism that so many philosophers, even physicalists, resolutely say that the presence of physical things in cognition does not, indeed cannot, happen. But no one has ever shown that to be so. Instead, assumptions are repeatedly, perhaps unthinkingly, made that exclude it (like the immediate awareness principle, that we are immediately aware only of our own ideas). (4)
Cartesian and Kantian epistemology reduce intentional existence to a mere representation or copy of what is known. As Ross suggests above, this “unthinkingly” adopts something like Descartes’s immediate awareness principle, because it simply assumes a self-contained Cartesian subject. If we start with the immediate awareness principle, some form or other of representationalism that treats experience as a mere “copy” of the external world follows ineluctably.
Ross, of course, rejects the copy theory of knowledge and adopts his own updated version of the medieval idea of intentional existence.
There’s no reason that a thing that exists on its own can’t also have transient perceiver-relative being for many people who perceive it. Things don’t have esse intentionale on their own, and things aren’t physically changed by it (except incidentally by our tasting or touching), but still what is intentionally present to someone may be the very thing that is real. (5)
And Ross warns that the way he uses terms like “intentionality” is much closer to the way the medievals used that term than it is to the way some (but not all) moderns use the term.
Philosophers nowadays talk as if intentionality is an agent’s or a thought’s condition of object directedness, towardness, aboutness— as if it were a kind of referring or pointing. But I am using the notion of esse intentionale, “intentional being,” as inclusion in awareness, the presence of real objects events or situations perceived or known. Anscombe (1969) does so too, and Searle (1983) as well. Esse intentionale is presence, especially and primarily of the independently real by the awareness of someone (or some animal). (6)
But Ross also claims that modern phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are, like him, closer to the medievals in their understanding of intentionality than they are to Descartes, and they mostly use terms like esse intentionale and inesse in the traditional way to mean a real presence of the external world within the knowing subject.
The vivid presence of the perceived— a snake, a bad cut, a fire, a threat— is what needs acknowledging; it is not to be implicitly denied by supposing the thought is what is present and about some object, say a vista or a sentence understood. Some recent writers, Sean Kelly and Alva Noe, among others, seem to have recognized too what Husserl and Merleau-Ponty had grasped and emphasized: the inclusion of ‘the other’ in awareness, the intentional inesse of the independently real. That is what in percipient animals obviates a mind/world gap. (7)
(1) Frederick Wilhelmsen, Paradoxical Structure of Existence, Ch. 4, footnote 18.
(2) Frederick Wilhelmsen, Man’s Knowledge of Reality.
(3) Hidden Necessities.
(4) T&W Ch. 5 Perception & Abstraction, footnote 38.
(5) ibid.
(6) ibid.
(7) ibid.