Abstract
In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p.
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Notes
I use the term ‘fixed’ to remain neutral between theories on which the thesis is put in terms of ground, constitutive characterization, determination, or supervenience.
The basicness thesis is so widely endorsed by proponents of PIRP that in their Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article about phenomenal intentionality, Bourget and Mendelovici (2017) call it the ‘phenomenal intentionality theory’.
I take it that phenomenal character is constitutive of phenomenal experience. Thus, in this paper, I tend to use the term ‘phenomenal character’ rather than ‘phenomenology’.
It is common to refer to perceptual experiences as perceptual ‘states’, and to certain occurrent thoughts in which we perform a judgment as ‘occurrent beliefs’. Following Crane (2013), however, I will be careful in this paper to distinguish mental ‘events’ and ‘activities’, which are occurrent and conscious processes, from mental ‘states’, which are non-occurrent, non-conscious, and persistent. I will not refer to occurrent doxastic episodes as ‘occurrent beliefs’, but instead as ‘judgments’.
Phenomenal character requires consious activity, so it is at least a necessary condition on phenomenal intentionality that one be undergoing an occurrent mental event. Perhaps not all occurrent mental events necessarily have phenomenal character—that is, perhaps non-conscious occurrent mental activity lacks phenomenal character (though see Prinz 2010 for some discussion of the claim that all occurrent mental activity has a corresponding phenomenal character ).
It should be pointed out that the crucial distinction here is the one between conscious mental events and nonconscious mental states, not the one between occurrent and persistent mental episodes. It is, perhaps, possible to imagine an occurrent mental event that is ‘persistent’, in that it is ongoing (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me).
These distictions are discussed at length in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on ‘Phenomenal Intentionality’ (Bourget and Mendelovici 2017). My use of the terms ‘eliminativism’ and ‘inflationism’ corresponds with the way these distinctions are discussed in that article as well.
While I do not offer a direct criticism of inflationism, I think it is a difficult view to endorse. Crane (2013) provides perhaps the most compelling reason to think that an inflationist account is mistaken. Roughly, his argument is that occurrent thoughts are diachronic processes and so they must have contents with diachronic properties. Since standing mental states are persistent, they must involve contents of a different kind.
It might explain other beliefs of mine, though. For example, if I am committed to imagining dragons as looking a certain way, it might explain beliefs that I have about how dragons look.
As I have noted already, I follow Crane (2013) in insisting on a distinction between occurrent and standing intentionality that precludes this way of speaking.
For example, Hanks (2011) treats all acts of predication as themselves committing, rejecting the notion that a judgment is an act of mental predication performed in any particular way. Hanks’ account rejects the force/content distinction, and so I think a great deal of the appeal of Hanks’ view over Soames’ will turn on what one makes of this distinction.
The case I present bears some similarity to cases discussed by Gendler (2008) and Schwitzgebel (2001, 2010). These are cases where agents have mixed dispositional profiles; they display some of the characteristics of a dispositional belief that p but lack others. Gendler and Schwitzgebel use these cases to argue for the existence of belief-like mental states. In the next section, I will discuss how the belief-like mental states proposed in that literature might be applied to the case I present here.
There is room for the dispositionalist to resist this claim, which I will discuss in a bit.
This does not require that we accept some sort of problematic closure principle on Tom’s beliefs. Tom’s intentions can be stated in terms of an intention to use his key (i.e. an intention to open his heavy office door). This also makes it difficult to resist the claim that he has the key belief on the basis of the claim that he is acting out of some other belief, like a belief that he can open his office door. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helful suggestion here.
Tom would also probably report that he did believe he had his keys. When someone prompts him to judge whether he has his keys (perhaps by asking ‘do you have your keys on you?’) Tom might undergo the occurrent judgment, and then say something like ‘I thought I had them on me!’ Again, this phenomenon will be familiar to many of us who have been in similar circumstances.
It might be claimed that Tom’s disposition is ‘finked’. Cases where dispositions are finked are cases where something a is disposed to do something \(\phi \), given a certain event X, but every time a is triggered to \(\phi \) by X, this triggers a ‘finking’ mechanism that prevents \(\phi \) from happening (Lewis 1997). So we might say that Tom initially had a disposition to judge that the keys are in his pocket, but Tom’s act of introspection triggers a change in his dispositional profile. But it is worth noting that this case is quite unlike the sorts of cases of finkish dispositions that Lewis (and others) have discussed. In the case I present, the triggering event is an act of introspection, which is the very same thing that changes Tom’s dispositions. In other words, there is no finking mechanism distinct from the trigger. If what Tom is disposed to judge changes when he performs an act of judgment, then could it really have been what he was disposed to judge at all?
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection; thanks to Josh Dever and Sinan Dogramaci for helpful discussion in adressing the issues raised in this section.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this concern.
Mandelbaum offers a a compelling argument against a notion of alief, holding that it either collapses into something like habit (and is thus not of great explanatory value), or into belief. We might follow Mandelbaum in thinking that cases like these present cases of contradictory beliefs: Tom both believes that his keys are in his pocket and that they are at the gym. Such a claim further exposes the limits of the dispositionalist account under consideration, as we still need an explanation for Tom’s ‘belief’ that his keys are in his pocket and a further explanation for why it is unintuitive that he believes the keys are at the gym.
Similarly, we might think that Tom’s attitude with respect to the proposition that the keys are in his pocket is somehow intermediate between not believing and believing. Perhaps this is a promising line for the PIRP proponent to pursue, but it is not entirely clear that they have any recourse to an explanation like this. We can explain ‘in-between’ beliefs if we assume that belief is “built upon a broad dispositional base” (Schwitzgebel 2010: p. 533). That is, if some but not all of the dispositions necessary for a belief that p are activated, then someone might be in-between believing and disbelieving p. It is not clear how such an account could be adapted to the basicness thesis.
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Thanks to Josh Dever, Sinan Dogramaci, Alex Rausch, Mark Sainsbury, Michael Tye, and several anonymous reviewers for crucial feedback on multiple drafts of this paper. This paper benefited from helpful discussion with Sam Clarke, Bryce Dalbey, Amanda Evans, Sam Fox Krauss, Jon Litland, Michelle Montague, Alva Noë, participants in the Consciousness and Intentionality seminar at the University of Texas in the spring of 2017, and participants at the Cognition conference at the Catholic University of America in April 2018.
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Schiller, H.I. Phenomenal dispositions. Synthese 197, 3969–3980 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01909-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01909-9