Abstract
The Physical Intentionality Thesis claims that dispositions share the marks of psychological intentionality; therefore, intentionality is not exclusively a mental phenomenon. Beyond the standard five marks, Alexander Bird introduces two additional marks of intentionality that he argues dispositions do not satisfy: first, thoughts are extrinsic; second, the direction of causation is that objects cause thoughts, not vice versa. In response, this paper identifies two relevant conceptions of extrinsicness, arguing that dispositions show deep parallels to thoughts on both conceptions. Then, it shows that Bird’s discussion of direction of causation overlooks complexities of dispositionality and intentionality that problematize apparent differences between thoughts and dispositions. The paper ends with a discussion of why we find these parallels between thoughts and dispositions.
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Notes
Brentano (1874) initiated current discussion of intentionality, picking up the thread from medieval philosophers.
These philosophers disagree over the degree to which physical and psychological phenomena compare in terms of intentionality, as well as over the implications of the Physical Intentionality Thesis—for instance, over whether it means that we need a new criterion to separate the psychological and the physical.
The strong version of this thesis is that physical and psychological intentionality are identical, while the weak version is that they are strongly analogous. These two interpretations are found in Molnar (2003: 61, 81), who appears to hold the weaker version (Molnar 2003: 186). The authors mentioned above may disagree about which version of the thesis is accurate. The formulation here captures the idea that dispositions and thoughts share the essential marks of intentionality but stops short of claiming identity, as the former is sufficient for purposes here.
First, these five marks were used by Martin and Pfeifer (1986) in arguing that intentionality is the mark of the dispositional, not the mental, to the effect that we need a different conception of intentionality that marks off the mental from the dispositional. By contrast, Place (1996) and Molnar (2003) argue that we should simply accept intentionality as the mark of the dispositional. Second, the marks are culled from a variety of sources, as Place (1996) clarifies, to include Anscombe (1965), Chisholm (1957), and Searle (1979). Third, the term “referential opacity” derives from Quine (1953), and Chisholm (1957) uses that phrase in employing it as a mark of intentionality. Fourth, the last two marks pertain to linguistic phenomena. Place (1996), for one, argues that the intensional (with an “s”) criteria are not relevant to the Physical Intentionality Thesis. Fifth, Bird (2007: 119) condenses these five marks into four, by incorporating Lack of Truth Import as a corollary of Intentional Inexistence.
Bird (2007: 8) holds that the natural properties are universals; however, the natural/non-natural properties distinction is compatible with the claim that “natural properties are classes of perfectly resembling tropes” (2007: 9).
Bird (2007: 45, footnote 40) notes that potencies are what some others, e.g., Molnar (2003), call “powers.” Bird prefers neither the term “disposition” nor “power” since these might refer to properties that do not have dispositional essences, i.e., “potencies”. Also, Bird (2013) argues that we should distinguish between powers and dispositions.
Putnam (1973, 1975) forms the twin-earth thought experiment, and Davidson (1987) forms the swamp-man thought experiment. Although this paper assumes that externalism is true, and it remains more popular than internalism (Bourget and Chalmers 2014), it has faced recent substantial criticism (e.g., Mendola 2009).
Bauer (2011: 82–86) distinguishes between a property being extrinsic and being extrinsically grounded (in a non-intentionality context), which is similar to the distinction being advanced here.
These considerations are also relevant to the mark of Directedness, but that is not being evaluated here. Some of these considerations are also relevant to Direction, which is addressed in Section 4.
This observation involves the phenomenon of Intentional Inexistence, one of the original five criteria of intentionality. It is assumed here, insofar as it is relevant to the relation picked out by Extrinsic, that dispositions plausibly share this mark in an analogous form with beliefs and thoughts.
Priority monism contrasts with blobjectivism (Horgan and Potrč 2008), which holds that the whole world or the blobject is the only genuine concrete individual object. Derivatives such as stars, planets, organisms, and particles are objects in name only, ontologically mere confluences of properties of the blobject. If blobjectivism is true, it would appear that all properties are intrinsic, if properties are properly possessed only by objects.
Interestingly, the plausibility that all parts of the world are unified may be enhanced by the dispositional view found in Martin (2008), which in turn meshes with the dispositional monism of Bird (2007) (although Bird is concerned only with sparse dispositions, as noted already, whereas Martin’s view concerns all dispositions). Martin (2008: 29) posits the existence of a network of interrelated dispositions: each disposition is “projective for endless manifestations with an infinity of present or absent, actual or nonactual alternative disposition partners.” Each disposition requires a partner to manifest on Martin’s view (e.g., to manifest in breaking, a vase’s fragility requires a triggering disposition, like a hammer’s hardness), but there are an infinite number of potential partners and ways of manifesting—a “complex line” (Martin 2008: 29) of dispositions, what Martin (1993) calls a “Power Net.” Given the array of dispositional partners, there is a network of dispositions connected by their possible interactions. So Martin’s Power Net implies interconnectedness between all dispositions, thus suggesting the unification afforded by Schaffer’s priority monism (it is not meant to be implied that Schaffer would accept any dispositionalist interpretation of unity and interconnectedness that supports priority monism).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for recommending these lines of reasoning for priority monism.
For more information, visit the CERN page: http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/higgs-boson (accessed November 21, 2015).
This conclusion applies to both inertial mass and rest mass, since these are physically equivalent according to Einstein’s equivalence principle.
“Objects” could be “particles”; “intentions” or “intentional character” could be “aboutness” or “directedness”; and “properties” could be “sub-properties” if the various marks of intentionality are sub-properties of the intentional or dispositional state itself.
The passage mentions “intentional character,” so the complete truth of the passage assumes that dispositions meet the other marks needed to have an intentional character.
Supposing that thoughts should fit events or properties in the world, there is a direction to the fit. This refers to which side (mind or world) gets privileged. Beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit, wherein the belief should match the world: if the fit is good, the belief is true. By contrast, desires have a world-to-mind direction of fit, wherein the world should match the desire: if the fit is good, the desire is fulfilled. Some thoughts arguably have null fit, as Searle (2004: 169) explains: being “glad that the sun is shining” presupposes a direction of fit, and therefore, there is no question of whether the fit is good or bad. See Searle (1983, 2004) for further discussion.
If the arguments in Section 3.3 show that sparse dispositions satisfy Extrinsic-G, then something extrinsic to the object bearing a sparse disposition grounds the disposition. This grounding relation is similar, but not identical, to something external causing the object to have a sparse disposition; Schaffer (2016) argues that the concept of grounding is strongly analogous to that of causation. Despite this similarity, in this case, it would still not be the manifestation, Y, causing the disposition, X, and thus, it would not fit the form of Direction. In the arguments in Section 3, the point of interest was the parallel between sparse dispositions and thoughts in which something extrinsic, not necessarily the object of the intentional state, grounds the intentional state (or disposition).
There are many examples in which an intentional state and a dispositional state are closely associated, as in the chocolate example.
The identity hypothesis, it is worth noting, does not beg the question against Bird’s view. Rather it is simply an alternative explanation of the relevant phenomenon.
It is assumed that dispositions are causally relevant or can play causal roles in events. Martin (2008) defends the idea that all causes reduce to dispositions—a cause is just a disposition or set of intersecting disposition “lines”. McKitrick (2005) argues that dispositions are causally relevant. Mumford and Anjum (2011) extensively defend causal dispositionalism, the idea that effects are the products of manifesting powers.
Bird actually gives three accounts of intentionality and explains how none of them entail that intentionality is compositional, evaluation of which is not the purpose of this paper.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful, detailed comments and suggestions concerning multiple aspects of this paper. Thanks also to participants at a meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society (October 2, 2015) for discussion of ideas in section 4.
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Bauer, W.A. Physical Intentionality, Extrinsicness, and the Direction of Causation. Acta Anal 31, 397–417 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0283-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0283-2