Abstract
Alexius Meinong’s specific use of the term “self-presentation” had a significant influence on modern epistemology and philosophical psychology. To show that there are remarkable parallels between Meinong’s account of the self-presentation of experiences and Lehrer’s account of the exemplarization of experiences is one of this paper’s main objectives. Another objective is to put forward some comments and critical remarks to Lehrer’s approach. One of the main problems can be expressed by the following: The process of using a particular experience as a sample, that is, an exemplar that we use to stand for and refer to a plurality of experiences, Lehrer calls “exemplarization”. As concrete experiences are multifarious (red and round, for example), how can we single out a specific sort of experiences (the red ones) by the process of exemplarization when we use such a multifarious experience as a sample?
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Notes
Note that what is often called “content” of intentional attitudes, especially “conceptual content”, is not Meinong’s psychological content. Meinong distinguishes between psychological and logical (= conceptual) content in his later work. Meinong’s psychological content is a concrete mental component, whereas his conceptual content is something abstract or intensional like a Fregean sense.
According to Meinong, ideal relations, in contrast to real relations, subsist necessarily between the terms of the relation. If one color, say red, is different from another, say green, than they must be different. If you compare colors located somewhere, the relation between a color spot and its location is called real because the color, say red, could be located elsewhere, or another color could be in the place of the red color spot.
Examples: “Anne is happy” – “Anne’s being happy”, and “Anne is feeling angry” – “Anne’s feeling angry”, and “Anne wants a cake” – “Anne’s wanting a cake”, respectively. In the following theses, only the first variant is explicitly stated.
Cf. (Chisholm 1996, 72): “For every x, x is F if and only if there is the state x-being-F.”
Brentano thinks that conscious states (mental acts) are necessarily such that if a subject S is in a conscious state, S is also conscious of its* being in this state. This self-consciousness is to be interpreted as inner perception, but not as a separate higher-order perception: Each mental act is primarily directed to an object (my hearing a sound has the sound as its primary object), and it is incidentally directed towards itself (my hearing a sound has itself as secondary object). (Cf. Brentano 1874, Zweites Buch, Zweites Kapitel, §§ 8–9, 166–170; Brentano 1982, 22–25).
“An experience may influence conception without becoming an exemplar. That may, indeed, be the more common response. An experience may cause a reaction in us without calling attention to itself […] without rising to the level of conscious awareness. In such instances […] the experience is not exemplarized. I am not proposing that all conscious experiences are exemplarized into a loop of conceptual self-reference. I am proposing only that this occurs when attention is focused on the sensory character of the experience” (Lehrer 2011, 12; italics by J.C.M.).
“Why must any linguistic description leave out something of what the experience is like and what is contained in it? […] The simple answer is that the experience is part of a conception or representation of what the experience is like. […] The exemplar represents what the experience is like by exhibiting what it is like. The word ‘blue’ cannot exhibit to us what the experience of blue is like in the way that experience exhibits what the experience is like. […] A word might refer to the same objects but it cannot refer to them by showing us what they are like.” (Lehrer 2011, 7–8).
“Discussion of what an experience is like and, especially, attention to what it is like naturally raises the question of whether attending to what the experience is like consists of some recognition of the similarity of the experience to others. […] It seems to me that generalizing from an experience to others need not involve conceiving of the experience as similar to others. […] Generalization, whether of sensory exemplars or other things, gives rise to general conceptions of things being of the same kind, and such conceptions are basis of our conceptions of similarity.” (Lehrer 2011, 12).
My summary is only concerned with a simple exemplarized conscious state, namely an impression of blue, whereas (Lehrer 2011, 11–12) describes the more comprehensive and multifarious case of the aesthetic experience of International Klein Blue paint:
“For example, if the experience is exemplarized as the appearance of international Klein blue paint, we know more about the paint than how it appears. […] The exemplar is part of our conception of the paint, a constituent of the conception, with the role of showing us how the object appears and how we conceive of how it appears. The exemplar is used in aesthetic experience to refer to itself exhibiting what it is like in order to show us how the paint appears.”
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I would like to thank Martina Fürst and Guido Melchior for their advice and patience, and, especially, an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Marek, J.C. Exemplarization and self-presentation: Lehrer and Meinong on consciousness. Philos Stud 161, 119–129 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9935-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9935-2