Intentional Objects

The idea of an intentional object, or an object of thought, gives rise to a dilemma for theories of intentionality. Either intentional objects are existing objects, in which case it is impossible, contrary to appearances, to think about something which does not exist. Or some intentional objects are non-existent real objects. But this requires an obscure and implausible metaphysics. I argue that the way out of this dilemma is to deny that being an intentional object is being an entity of any kind. 'Object' here does not mean thing or entity. Rather, to say that something is an intentional object is just to say that it is an object of thought (or other intentional state or act) for a subject. It is further argued that theories of intentionality should not dispense with the idea of an intentional object.     

Husserl on Intentionality as an Essential Property of Consciousness

In the phenomenological tradition intentionality is considered to be an essential property of consciousness. Philosophers from this tradition （Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, etc.） generally share the following two commitments： （i） intentionality is an essential property of consciousness; and （ii） all intentional states are directed at, and are intentionally related to, objects. This view of consciousness has two pressing problems. Firstly, philosophers such as John Searle and David Rosenthal have suggested raw feelings and some forms of seemingly undirected and thus non-intentional feelings as counterexamples to the essential intentionality of conscious states. Secondly, some analytical philosophers and Husserlian scholars inspired by Frege, such as Smith and Follesdal, deny that every intentional state is related to a correlative object. This paper presents a Husserlian view concerning the essential intentionality of consciousness. It will be shown that both problems can be successfully dealt with from an essentially Husserlian and phenomenological perspective.     

Making sense of akrasia

There are two extreme poles in the literature on akrasia. Internalists hold that it’s impossible to act intentionally against your better judgment, because there’s a necessary internal relation between judgment and intentional action. To the contrary, externalists maintain that we can act intentionally against our better judgment, because the will operates independently of judgment. Critics of internalism argue that it fails a realism test—most people seem to think that we can and do act intentionally against our better judgment. And critics of externalism argue that it flirts with incoherence by severing the intimate link between judgment and action. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, analytic action theory, and recent “hybrid models” of skilled action, I argue that one route beyond this theoretical impasse is to understand akrasia as a form of skillful pre-reflective intentional action. This strategy, I argue, preserves the internalist insight that there is indeed an intimate relation between judgment and intentional action; and it also confirms the externalist claim that this relation is defeasible, but it does so without falling into incoherence.     

The Marginality of Phenomenology

The essence of Husserl’s intentionality does not lie in any object, but in the marginal horizon presupposed by intentional acts. This characteristic can be seen whether on the level of intensional act or that of noema (intentional object). The reason is that all intentional act and noema come from the stream of internal time consciousness, and thus have Zeithof (time halo or time aureole), while the original meaning constituted by such a halo is prior to the object they are concretized into, and the noema that contains the possibility of meaning will also be intuited together with the perceived adumbration. Using Husserl’s idea that the meaning of non-objectification is prior to the object, Scheler breaks through Husserl’s dogma that the presentation of an object must precede the giving of value to the object, and thus puts forward the new train of thought that the feeling of value is not later than the objectification, or even prior to it. Heidegger deepens and expands the sense of the marginal horizon, revealing in all human behaviors and world presentation such an ontological structure, that is, halo-like meaning or the act of Being itself precedes objects and beings created by the separation of subject and object. Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that the body field is prior to the separation of body and mind, and the body’s perception of external phenomena is first carried out in the manner of field rather than definite objects, therefore, it must have the original ambiguity and be realized in the form of body schema instead of a causal chain. So, the philosophical vitality of phenomenology does not significantly lie in the explanation of the levels and functions of intentional objects, but in the construction premise of such objects, namely, the spatio-temporal halo manifested as marginal horizon, time stream, and the displaying of existential vista.     

Syntax and intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially symmetric sentence (e.g., “John exchanged products with Susan”). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence.     

The range of intentions

Four groups of intentional action sentences can be distinguished. An intentional action sentence belongs in a given group as a consequence of the range of intentions, i.e. it may record an action in which someone intends that he should intentionally do something in a particular manner, for a particular purpose, to a particular object, or it may record an action in which someone intends that he should intentionally do something though he intends no particular manner or no manner at all and intends no particular object. Thus the range of intention affects entailments, compatibility and inconsistency among intentional action sentences. A fragment of a theory of the range of intentions is set out and some of its implications are examined.     

Thinking about non‐being∗

There are genuine references to non‐existent objects, as can be seen through elucidating reference in common language and applying the criteria enumerated to expressions used in writing and speaking about fiction. The concept of a fictitious entity is simply accepted in the adoption of the ‘language‐game’ of fiction and has no undesirable ontological consequences. To think otherwise is to fail to attend to the conceptual status of such talk. Accounts of fictional discourse by Russell, Ryle, and Chisholm are found objectionable. The concept of existence is touched on, and consequences concerning reference to abstract and other objects and also concerning method in ontology mentioned.     

What is it to lose hope?

This paper addresses the phenomenology of hopelessness. I distinguish two broad kinds of predicament that are easily confused: ‘loss of hopes’ and ‘loss of hope’. I argue that not all hope can be characterised as an intentional state of the form ‘I hope that p’. It is possible to lose all hopes of that kind and yet retain another kind of hope. The hope that remains is not an intentional state or a non-intentional bodily feeling. Rather, it is a ‘pre-intentional’ orientation or ‘existential feeling’, by which I mean something in the context of which certain kinds of intentional state, including intentional hope, are intelligible. I go on to discuss severe depression, lack of aspiration, demoralisation and loss of trust in the world, in order to distinguish some qualitatively different forms that loss of hope can take.     

Against Propositionalism

‘Propositionalism’ is the widely held view that all intentional mental relations—all intentional attitudes—are relations to propositions or something proposition‐like. Paradigmatically, to think about the mountain is ipso facto to think that it is F, for some predicate ‘F’. It seems, however, many intentional attitudes are not relations to propositions at all: Mary contemplates Jonah, adores New York, misses Athens, mourns her brother. I argue, following Brentano, Husserl, Church and Montague among others, that the way things seem is the way they are, and that propositionalism must be abandoned.     

Emotions,feelings and intentionality

Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences.     

Intentionality and Presence: On the Intrinsic Of-ness of Consciousness from a Transcendental-Phenomenological Perspective

This paper discusses the nature of consciousness?? intrinsic intentionality from a transcendental-phenomenological viewpoint. In recent philosophy of mind the essentially intentional character of consciousness has become obscured because the latter is predominantly understood in terms of ??qualia?? or the ??what-it-is-like-ness?? of mental states and it is hard to see why such subjective ??feels??, of all things, could bestow states with objective reference. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, this is an inadequate understanding of consciousness, which should instead be defined in terms of presence. Consciousness essentially takes place as presence-of, i.e., consists in something coming to appearance. This presence-of is not only a fundamental, irreducible phenomenon, but also in a radical sense un-naturalisable. Naturalism only knows ??nature??, as the world of objects, and the question of intentionality then seems to be how certain inner-worldly objects can be ??representations?? of other inner-worldly objects. In fact, no object is ever intrinsically ??about?? anything. This is exclusively the nature of subjectivity qua consciousness, which is not an object alongside other objects but rather exists as the manifestation of objects.     

An agentive non-intentionalist theory of self-deception

The self-deception debate often appears polarized between those who think that self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves (‘intentionalists’), and those who think that intentional actions are not significantly involved in the production of self-deceptive beliefs at all. In this paper I develop a middle position between these views, according to which self-deceivers do end up self-deceived as a result of their own intentional actions, but where the intention these actions are done with is not an intention to deceive oneself. This account thus keeps agency at the heart of self-deception, while also avoiding the paradox associated with other agency-centered views.     

The common‐sense view of physical objects

When I perceive a physical object I am directly aware of something. This something may be called a sense‐datum, leaving the question open whether it is indeed the physical object itself. Still, this question must be asked. It seems impossible that the sense‐datum can be identical with the physical object for we do not always say we have different physical objects when we say we have different sense‐data. On the other hand, the plain man does not think of the physical object as something other than the sense‐datum. It is suggested that the plain man regards the sense‐datum as in a sense identical with the physical object he is perceiving. But it is a peculiar sense of ‘identity’ which is in question, one which does not conform to the rules logicians lay down for this word.     

I—From Property Dualism to Substance Dualism

Property dualism is enjoying a slight resurgence in popularity, these days; substance dualism, not so much. But it is not as easy as one might think to be a property dualist and a substance materialist. The reasons for being a property dualist support the idea that some phenomenal properties (or qualia ) are as fundamental as the most basic physical properties; but what material objects could be the bearers of the qualia? If even some qualia require an adverbial construal (if they are modifications of the thing that is conscious because of them, not properties of something else to which the subject of consciousness is related), then the property dualist can be driven to speculative forms of materialism none of which, at this point, looks more likely to be true than the more modest versions of emergent dualism defended by contemporary substance dualists.     

Horgan and Tienson on phenomenology and intentionality

Terence Horgan, George Graham and John Tienson argue that some intentional content is constitutively determined by phenomenology alone. We argue that this would require a certain kind of covariation of phenomenal states and intentional states that is not established by Horgan, Tienson and Graham’s arguments. We make the case that there is inadequate reason to think phenomenology determines perceptual belief, and that there is reason to doubt that phenomenology determines any species of non-perceptual intentionality. We also raise worries about the capacity of phenomenology to map onto intentionality in a way that would be appropriate for any determiner of content/fixer of truth conditions.     

Consciousness in act and action

This paper develops an account of consciousness in action. Both consciousness and action are related to knowledge. A voluntary action is defined as a volition, or something intentionally effected by means of such volitions. Volitions are conscious mental acts whose proper function is to make their content true. A mental act is the exercise of a power of mind and a conscious mental act is identical with knowledge of its own phenomenal character. This set of definitions elucidates the relations between consciousness, action and knowledge.     

Intentionality and word learning

Humans intuitively think about the actions of others in terms of mental states eliefs, desires, emotions and intentions. This 'theory of mind' plays a central role in how children learn the meanings of certain words. First, it underlies how they determine the reference of a novel word. When children hear a new object name (e.g. 'Look at the fendle'), they do not use spatio-temporal contiguity to determine what the word describes; instead they focus on cues to the referential intention of the speaker, such as direction of gaze. Second, an understanding of purpose and design is sometimes necessary to enable the child to understand the entities and actions that nouns and verbs refer to. This is particularly relevant for nouns that refer to collections of objects such as 'family' and 'game', and for verbs that refer to actions defined in terms of an actor's goals, such as 'give' and 'make'. Finally, intentional considerations partially underlie the generalization of names for artifact categories, such as 'chair' and 'clock', which can refer to entities of highly dissimilar appearance.     

Beyond Existence and Non-Existence

Abstract

When Husserl speaks of the so-called ‘transcendental reduction’ or ‘phenomenological epochē’ many believe that he is eschewing the question of truth or existence. Two reasons are given for this: First, Husserl explicitly states that when we perform the reduction, we should no longer naively ‘accept [the world] as it presents itself to me as factually existing’ (Id I §30, p. 53) and should suspend our judgement with regard to ‘the positing of its actual being’ (Id I §88, p. 182). Second, Husserl seems to have no problem in referring to an ‘object’ of thought even when we refer to non-existent, hallucinatory or indeed impossible objects. This seems to suggest that he is not interested in the question whether or not there is a corresponding ‘ordinary’ object. The paper seeks to question this and will show that his inquiry never loses sight of the questions of truth and existence but rather brings them into the foreground.     

Guided by Intention: Preschoolers' Imitation Reflects Inferences of Causation

Object use is a ubiquitous characteristic of the human species, and learning how objects function is a fundamental part of development. In this article the authors examine the role that intentionality plays in children's understanding of causal relationships during observational learning of object use. Children observed demonstrations in which causally irrelevant and causally relevant actions were performed to achieve a desired goal. The intentionality of these actions was manipulated using verbal markers. Irrelevant actions were performed either intentionally (“There!”) or accidentally (“Whoops! I didn't mean to do that!”). Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, were less likely to imitate causally irrelevant actions performed accidentally than when they were performed intentionally. This suggests that older children used intentionality to guide causal inference and perceived intentional actions as causally effective and accidental actions as causally ineffective. Findings are discussed from an evolutionary perspective in relation to the cultural transmission of tool-use knowledge.