Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental the way in which every intentional act 'includes something as an object within itself'.12 'Inexistence' expresses the idea that the object on which the mind is directed exists in the mental act itself. For example: in hearing a sound, the sound which one hears - a physical phenomenon - is contained within the act of hearing the sound - a mental phenomenon. So, to generalize, we can say that 'in the idea something is conceived, in the judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated and so on'.13 Brentano rejected the claim that sensations of pain and pleasure are not intentional. He argued that although intentional acts can take external phenomena as their objects, sometimes their objects are internal. In the case of sensation, for instance, the mind is directed on an internal object — a sensation.14 Just as 'in the idea something is conceived', we can say that 'in the sensation something is sensed'. So one response an intentionalist can give to McGinn's argument is this. Intentionality is directedness on an object, and in having a sensation, one's mind is directed on an object: a sensation. A pain, for instance, is the object of the mental state of being in pain. (This way of thinking of sensation is what used to be called an 'act-object' account.) The idea that sensations are objects is associated with the sensedatum theory of perception, which is not a popular view in contemporary philosophy. These days it is widely agreed that perception does not involve the mind directing itself upon internal, mental objects - sense-data. But this agreement does not derive from a general rejection of the directedness, or intentionality, of perception. On the contrary, there is a widespread consensus - as illustrated by McGinn's remark just quoted - that perception is intentional. It is just that the objects of perception are not inner mental objects or sense-data, but the ordinary outer objects of the external world. So there will be no dispute between intentionalists and many contemporary philosophers over the question of whether perception exhibits intentionality. If perception were the only mental state under discussion, intentionalism would not be a controversial thesis.15 12 Brentano, Psychology, p. 88. 13 Ibid. 14 This is the essence of Brentano's response to Sir William Hamilton's view that in sensation 'there is nothing but what is subjectively subjective; there is no object different from the self; see Brentano, Psychology, p. 90. 15 Here I am taking as 'intentionalist' two kinds of theory of perception: the theory which holds that perception is the direction of the mind upon mental objects, and the theory which treats perception as a kind of propositional attitude, akin to belief. My usage involves a broader sense of 233
Tim Crane There are philosophers, of course, who think that although perception exhibits intentionality - perceptions are directed on things outside the mind - this does not exhaust their nature. This is the view, defended for instance by Sydney Shoemaker, that in addition to their intentional properties, perceptual states also have non-intentional properties, called 'qualia', which account for the particular conscious or 'phenomenal' character of perceptual states.16 Qualia are not sensation-objects, but properties of mental states. If there are qualia, then there are aspects or properties of mental states which are not intentional, even if those states also have intentional aspects. Qualia raise many questions which I want to avoid for the purposes of this paper. Certainly the strongest form of intentionalism will reject qualia outright, as contemporary intentionalists like Michael Tye and Gilbert Harman have done.17 But in this paper, I want to consider only a weaker form of intentionalism, which says that all mental states are intentional, regardless of whether these states also have non-intentional properties. This weaker claim is certainly within the letter of Brentano's thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental, although it is not so obviously within its spirit. However, there is a good dialectical reason for discussing the weaker thesis first: for if the weaker thesis is false - i.e. there are mental states which are entirely non-intentional - then there is no chance whatsoever of the stronger thesis being true. So from now on, I will mean by 'intentionalism' this weaker thesis. Let's return now to the first group of apparent counterexamples to intentionalism: bodily sensations like pains, itches and so on. McGinn says that we can distinguish between a visual experience and what it is of, but we do not make this distinction in the case of pains. Pains, on this view, are not about anything, they are not of anything, they represent nothing: they have no intentionality. Rather, pains are purely subjective qualities: their existence consists in the 16 See, for example, Sydney Shoemaker, 'Qualities and Qualia: What's in the Mind?' in his The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 17 See Gilbert Harman, 'The Intrinsic Character of Experience', in Philosophical Perspectives 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Tomberlin (Ascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1990); and Michael Tye, 'Visual Qualia and Visual Content', in The Contents of Experience, ed. Tim Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 'intentional' than is sometimes adopted in discussions of the intentionality of perception, where it is restricted to theories of the latter kind: see, for instance, the useful discussion in M. G. F. Martin, 'Perceptual Content', in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 234
Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental existence of a subjective state that tells us nothing about the external world. To hold this view is to distinguish pain from other cases of bodily sensation where we are able to distinguish between the sensation and what it is of: sensations of warmth, of cold, of pressure, of tiredness, of hunger can all be described in terms of what they are sensations of, and what they are sensations of are properties of the external world (temperature, pressure etc.) So these are examples of bodily sensations which can be accommodated by intentionalism: the intentionalist can say that these states of mind are intentionally directed at those objective properties of the world in terms of which we characteristically describe them. But what should an intentionalist say about sensations where it does not seem as if this distinction can be made, as seems to be the case with pain? The answer mentioned above is that there is an object presented in a state of pain, but it is an internal or mental object. Now even if we reject mental objects in the case of the perception of the external world, can a case be made for their existence in the case of bodily sensation? Phenomenologically, the case for mental objects seems somewhat stronger here than in the theory of visual perception. For it could be argued, against McGinn, that a distinction can be made between a pain and the feeling of the pain. Consider, for example, someone being woken up from a dreamless sleep by a pain. For the pain to have woken the person up, and therefore to have caused the person to wake up, it must have existed prior to the awakening. But since the awakening is a matter of becoming conscious of various things, including the pain, it might seem that the pain can exist without the consciousness of it. Less controversially, perhaps, we can distinguish between having a pain and noticing or paying attention to a pain; we might therefore think that we can 'pull apart' the pain itself and our attitude to or awareness of it. These phenomena seem to provide some support for the view that pains are distinct from the consciousness of awareness of pain, and that we can therefore think of pains as the entities on which the mind is directed in states of pain. Further features of the way we think and talk about sensations lend some plausibility to the view. Pains normally seem to have location and extension in space and time, and we effortlessly talk about them using singular terms and we predicate properties of them as we do of objects and events.18 18 Those who approach questions of ontology via questions of logical form might say that just as we can argue for the existence of propositions, the objects of belief, by analysing the logical form of valid inferences involving belief-sentences, so we can argue for the existence of pains, the 235
Tim Crane While many contemporary philosophers are happy to accept the existence of irreducible mental properties, it is fair to say that most would prefer to reject irreducible mental objects.19 Mental objects are generally rejected for metaphysical reasons: their criteria of identity are obscure, and it is hard to see how they can be accommodated by a 'naturalistic' world view. However, my concern in this paper is not with metaphysics, but with phenomenology: the correct account of how things seem to us. It would be consistent to hold that although phenomenology commits us to mental objects, nonetheless we know on metaphysical grounds that there are no such things. To say this would be to hold an 'error-theory' of the phenomenology of sensation, analogous to J. L. Mackie's error theory of the phenomenology of ethical value.20 Although I think that we must be alive to this possibility, it seems to me that - independently of the metaphysical objections to mental objects — phenomenology does not decisively establish their apparent existence. For each of the examples discussed above admit of alternative, equally plausible descriptions which do not require us to posit mental objects. The phenomenon of being woken by pain, for instance, can be redescribed as follows: I might be in pain when I wake up, but it does not follow from this that the pain woke me up. It is equally consistent with the story that I was awoken by some non-conscious event in my brain, which then gave rise to pain when I became conscious. Likewise, the attempt to separate pain from the consciousness of pain by appealing to the distinction between having a pain and attending to it ignores the complexity of the phenomenology of attention and awareness. There are different ways of being aware of an event in consciousness: even when I am not paying attention to it, a pain can nonetheless be in the background of my consciousness.21 19 A notable exception is Frank Jackson, Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). However, Jackson no longer holds these views. 20 See J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977),