Abstract
To say that consciousness necessarily possesses intentionality is to say that all states of consciousness necessarily have an intentional object towards which they are directed or are about. Consciousness does not possess intentionality, then, if it is possible to be conscious without being conscious of anything. This is one of the few issues in the philosophy of mind that can rightly be settled by introspection; it is clear from conscious experience that when one is conscious one is invariably conscious of something or other. In fact, any state of consciousness involves a multitude of objects.
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Notes
The proper reply to the common objection that invokes unfocused moods or objectless depressions involves distinguishing between objects and modes of consciousness. Moods are ways of being conscious of things.
Perhaps other ways of being conscious of such drawings are possible. It may be that certain sorts of visual agnosia would leave their victims unable to be conscious of these figures as unitary objects at all but rather as mere assemblages of line segments. These fractured awarenesses are no less awarenesses under an aspect than are the ways we are normally conscious.
That there is a real difference between the experience of memory and that of mere recalled knowledge marks an important distinction in psychological theories of memory: that between so-called semantic and episodic memory. My knowledge that cows are animals must depend upon a kind of memory, but I do not have any sense of remembering this fact; I just know it. My recall of events in my life is quite different, carrying with it a conscious sense of remembrance (see Tulving 1985). We know very well that this consciousness can be delusory, hence the point of our expression “I seem to remember such-and-such”.
The relevant external features significantly vary across these theories, and include such diverse mechanisms as: causal-historical connection between thinker and the world (e.g., Putnam (1975), Davidson (1987)), socio-linguistic community practices (Burge (1979,1982, 1986), Baker (1987), asymmetrical counterfactual dependencies in the causal production of content bearing items (Fodor (1992)), evolutionary defmed functions (Millikan (1984), Dretske (1986, 1988), and interpretation relative to the predictive desires of a specified (usually only implicit) group of interpreters (Dennett (1987), Cummins (1989)).
As does Searle (see 1992, ch. 7). What seems to me essential to intentionality is aspectuality. This is also the source of intensionality. The aspectuality of some mental states explains the intensionality of the linguistic contexts that involve reference to these states (as in “believes that ...”, “looks like ...” etc.). It is another — presumably non-mental (?) — sort of aspectuality that explains the intensionality of contexts like “the probability of ... is n” which are true only relative to a description. For example, the probability of the next roll of the die coming up 5 is 1/6; the probability of the next roll which come up 5 is 1. But the next roll of the die and the next roll of the die that comes up 5 may be exactly the same event. So probability works on description as such.
Steven Stich’s “replacement argument” for methodological solipsism is presented in 1978. The radical conclusions drawn by externalists, however, seem to begin with Millikan and Davidson.
For those who look askance upon outrageous philosophical thought experiments that transcend the bounds of possibility, I cannot resist mentioning that according to Stephen Hawking (1993), The Swampman — or at any rate a randomly created duplicate of a given physical system, though maybe not one created out of a tree — is a physical possibility, of vanishing but non-zero probability. According to certain quite popular theories of cosmology the Swampman is even as I write coming into being (perhaps infinitely many of them too, just for good measure). Swampman is an easy, if yet more improbable, extrapolation of these remarks of Hawking’s: “... it is possible that the black hole could emit a television set or the works of Proust in ten leather-bound volumes, but the number of configurations of particles that correspond to these exotic possibility is vanishingly small” (1993, pp. 112–3) On second thought, for those with no taste for it, maybe appeals to this sort of cosmology are no more palatable than Swampman himself. But let the thought experiment continue!
It is possible, I suppose, to counter this argument by speculating that individuals, like me and you, are really, as physical beings, somehow “spread out” in space and time. This is a bizarre metaphysical notion one should prefer to avoid (it is however somewhat reminiscent of the view of physical objects in orthodox quantum theory but heaven forbid that externalism should go together with QM mysticism).
Perhaps this hoax could work as follows: all occurrences of the word “London” in my upbringing are to be replaced with the word “Paris” along with the appropriate alteration in the attendant information, coupled with the complete elimination of any reference to the real Paris. In such a case, it is arguable that my conscious thought that, say, Paris is large is really a thought about London. Of course, in such a case it is nonetheless perfectly clear that I am really thinking about what 1 think of as Paris, that my thoughts have a determinate content and that I am indubitably conscious.
Perhaps it is worth noting that my distinction is not the distinction that Colin McGinn labels with the same words in Mental Content (1989).
We need not assume that Swampman is faced with an external situation similar to mine for the argument to proceed. By hypothesis, he is created identical to me when I am conscious of o l. If we like, we can imagine God forcing Swampman’s brain to follow the same physical path as mine does when it goes from being conscious of o 1 to being conscious of o2.
Although I suppose one could regard externalist approaches to epistemology as an attempt to succeed at Descartes’s project in as much as the externalists begin with their states of consciousness and proceed from there to “demonstrate” that our “ideas” must have an external reference. This would, I fear, be regarded as a perverse interpretation of their project by the externalists. What is more, if externalism is restricted to questions of reference, then Descartes himself turns out to be an externalist rather than the arch-individualist he is taken to be (by externalists and any rate).
For a vigorous criticism of Fodor’s argument which maintains the conceptual ladenness of perception, see Churchland (1988).
This discussion suggests a nice way to put the problem: on these views Swampman knows what it is like to see a cat but cannot know what it is like to see a cat as a cat. But I know what it is like to see a cat as a cat. And seeing a cat as a cat is a distinctive experience. Seeing a cat as a cat involves, as it were, the active participation of the concept of cat (although this does not mean that I need to be conscious of the concept of cat as such — that would be a higher order experience). The absurd conclusion would seem to follow that since Swampman does not possess this concept he cannot have this distinctive experience even if he is physically identical to me.
Perhaps externalists are mislead by the correct perception that reference (at least to some ranges of things) cannot be determined strictly internally. But this is an insight as old as Descartes and it should not blind us to the fact that the intentionality of consciousness which presents an “outer” world is a phenomenon that exists quite independently from questions of the referential relations between these states of consciousness and the world beyond it.
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Seager, W. (1999). Conscious Intentionality. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_2
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