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Intentionality and intensionality: Introduction
In this course I want to say something about “intentionality”. Intentionality as a
technical term in philosophy refers to what we ordinarily speak of as “being conscious
of”. It is in virtue of “being conscious of” that a person stands in a special relation to the
world, whether inside or outside our person, namely the person stands in the relation of
“being conscious of”. So that we are not merely affected by things causally impinging on
us; we are also conscious of them, including our own mental states. It is this relational
character of consciousness that some philosophers have called “intentionality”.
Intentionality is evident in all of “mental life” – the “life of the mind”. That is,
intentionality is a feature of what are said to be “mental predicates” such as hoping,
fearing, loving, knowing, doubting, judging, and even dreaming. In fact, we might well
consider intentionality as definitive of the “mental”, of “consciousness”, and of the
“mind”. As such intentionality is central to all disciplines having to do with the mind:
how the mind relates to the world and of consciousness as that feature of the mind in
virtue of which the mind has this relational character of “aboutness”.
The concept of intentionality was developed by the Czech-German philosopher
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and there are both historical and theoretical reasons why
we should be interested in this concept of intentionality. Historically, Husserl was the
founder of a discipline called “phenomenology” which produced both a philosophy and a
psychology in the 20th century. Indeed, phenomenology began as descriptive psychology
analyzing experience as the subject (i.e., individual person) lives that experience.
Eventually, Husserl developed phenomenology as a transcendental analysis (analogous
to Immanuel Kant) of the basic functions of the ego that are presupposed as necessary for
experiences to be intentional at all (or what makes “experience” possible at all). Husserl
is perhaps best known for this transcendental move in philosophy which includes
“internal reflection” on the content of experience while “bracketing” (epoche) the
relational character of experience to anything outside experience.
But Husserl was also a theoretical or systematic thinker who developed
interlocking doctrines of epistemology, ontology, logic, and phenomenology, as well as a
methodology for developing these doctrines. The foundation for all this work was his
theory of intentionality.
In the 20th c. Husserl’s phenomenology was succeeded by existentialism (as
opposed to transcendental phenomenology), structuralism and, today, post-structuralism
or post-modernism. All these social-cultural philosophical movements in some way
reacted to the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian heritage that preceded Husserl. So that
Husserl’s phenomenology is central to 20th c. thought at least within the European
context.
But perhaps the most important reason for studying Husserl is that his theory of
intentionality stands in sharp contrast to those other great movements of the 20th c.,
namely, behaviorism, physicalism, and functionalism – all those causal theories of mind
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that have dominated psychology, linguistics, the other social sciences, the arts, and
philosophy. What these latter movements share is an externalist - third person - view of
the mind. Phenomenology provides a vital alternative to these movements. With it roots
in Descartes and Immanuel Kant, Husserl’s phenomenology is the most advanced firstperson view of the mind and, unlike his predecessors, phenomenology includes a fully
developed theory of intentionality. So that phenomenology, unlike causal theories of
mind, begins not with the distinction between mind and body (mental and physical,
subject an object) but begins with the concept (or, better, the experience) of
“intentionality”.
We might note that the contemporary cognitivist sciences (causal theories of
mind) also incorporate the concept of intentionality but in the guise of the concept of
“representation” even as these sciences also remain staunchly physicalist in their
ontology (i.e., representation is a property of the brain). However, it is highly unlikely
that an externalist view of the mind an incorporate the concept of intentionality
(consciousness of) and hence it becomes important to examine Husserl’s phenomenology
even as we remain, as Husserl did) neutral of issues of metaphysics (e.g., the truth of
physicalism).
Husserl’s theory is one of the few theories of intentionality (of mental
representation) that has been systematically developed. However, in the last fifty years,
the “philosophy of mind” and the “philosophy of language” have also focused on
intentional states of mind (believing, hoping, fearing, knowing, etc.) which these
disciplines called “propositional attitudes” (i.e., attitudes towards propositions). But they
always focused on the objects on these attitudes and simply assumed that the attitudes are
psychologically “given” objects. Moreover, these theories assume that objects of
consciousness are not ordinary objects and therefore these theories of intentionality aim
to discover what kinds of entities the objects of intentionality really are. Their claim is
straightforward namely these objects are “representations” (“representations” as a
“language of the mind” - a “cognitive” language - analogous to ordinary language).
Husserl provides a radical alternative to these “object theory approaches” to
intentionality insofar as Husserl does not focus on the objects of intentions but on the
contents of intentions. At first Husserl develops an “adverbial theory” rendering an
intentional experience, such as ‘seeing a dog’ or ‘imagining a unicorn’ as a nonintentional state of consciousness. But later his content theory becomes fully relational in
relating the content of experience to ordinary objects (although Husserl’s ontology of
what these objects are is very rich indeed – including imaginary objects). I will focus on
Husserl’s later theory.
Husserl’s account of the phenomenological content of experience is captured in
his theory of noesis and noema (words which derive their meaning from “perception” or
“mind”). My emphasis will be on the noema of experience as the abstract content or form
of experience which embodies the “way” in which an object of experience is intended or
presented in experience as well as the way this abstract content/form is shared by others
who experience the object in the same way. Husserl characterizes this abstract content
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(noema) as a “meaning”. This notion of “meaning” will turn out to be similar to Gottlob
Frege’s notion of “sense” that has been so influential in contemporary semantic theory.
It is through his theory of meaning (content or noema) that Husserl’s theory of
intentionality becomes central to the study of mind and language. It is content that gives
the mind its intentional character:
In case of the mind,
the noema (content) prescribes an object, and if there is such an object, it is the
object as intended in experience.
In case of language,
it is the meaning content (noema) of words (or what Gottlob Frege calls “sense”)
that prescribes the referent of a linguistic expression.
Thoughts expressed in language are abstract and sharable contents (or meanings
or noemata) that succeed in giving language its referential character. Accordingly,
Husserl’s doctrine of mind and language give rise to parallel doctrines of intentionality
(mind) and reference or intensionality (language). In the domain of language, meanings
(noemata or contents) are the proper study of Semantics which finds its parallel in the
domain of Mind where the contents/noemata of intentional experience are the proper
study of Psychology/Phenomenology. Hence, I will try to point to the convergence
between Husserl’s theory of mind (his phenomenology) and Frege’s theory of language
which makes the semantic distinction between meaning and reference.
For Husserl, the phenomenological content of experience –its meaning or noema, is
first of all grasped in inner reflection (epoche) but the meaning of experience can also be
explicated or interpreted by laying out what he calls the horizon of the experience.
Husserl proposes two very different notions of horizon of the experience.
1. The horizon of an experience is the range of further experience (especially in
perception) of the same object from different perspective in a way that is
compatible with the content of a given experience. This notion of horizon is
consistent with a vertificationist/pragmatist analysis of meaning in terms of
possible evidence or experience.
2. The second notion of horizon consists in the range of possibilities left open by the
experience in which the object presented in experience can take on further
properties and relations to other objects in ways that are compatible with the
content of the content of the experience prescribed. This notion of horizon aligns
closely with “possible worlds” semantics (of Rudolf Carnap, Jaako Hintikka, and
Richard Montague) and so leads us directly to linguistic/semantic theory as it
should do.
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I will proceed as follows:
1. Introduce the topic of intentionality in Husserl and his mentor Franz Brentano. I
will relate problems of intentionality to semantic problems of intensionality
(sentences with propositional attitudes such as “John believes that…..”, Mary
hopes that….”). This will result in the Object- theory approach to meaning and
reference (as in Brentano, Meinong, and Frege) which I will reject in favor of
Husserl’s Content-theory approach to meaning.
2. I will then contrast the Object-theory approach to Husserl’s Content-theory
approach and discuss Husserl’s phenomenology and his phenomenological
methods. I will defend the notion noema (content) as meaning and the notion of
horizon of experience (1, above) but will then note that this theory is insufficient
and will turn to Husserl’s horizon explication of meaning (2, above).
3. I will then extend Husserl’s theory of intentionality by relating the noema to the
horizon explication of meaning, and relate these various conceptions of
understanding/interpretation of meaning to the notion of the individual person
(who is after all intentionally related to the world).
4.
Finally, I will criticize Husserl’s phenomenology drawing on Charles Taylor’s
conception of meaning as expressive and constitutive (hermeneutics, particularly
in Ch. 9, 10), and this will lead us to discuss various post-modern perspectives on
mind and language.