Intentionality and the Object of Moral Perception: Ricoeur's Challenge

Ricoeur tantalizingly challenges the Husserlian (and common sense) notion that the intentional object remains the same throughout various intentional acts. Consider, for example, the following: “that person with the heavy bags needs a seat” vs. “that person is standing with heavy bags.” On the common view, the intentional object, “the person standing with heavy bags,” is the same in both cases. This view, that the intentional object is given an identity through an act of understanding, is central to standard accounts of moral perception and is an important point for philosophy of mind and agency.

To work out the common view, let me take a version of the standard account from Angela Smith, who takes moral perception to be a case of “seeing under an aspect” (I do not mean to imply that this is Smith's own view; she suggests that it may be mistaken in the paragraph that follows):

A morally insensitive person may, in a literal perceptual sense, “see” exactly the same thing as a morally sensitive person—for example, that a person is standing on a crowded subway with two very full grocery bags. What differs is that the morally sensitive person sees this person as uncomfortable and in need of a place to sit down, while the morally insensitive person does not. (1, 259)

This point is taken to be independent of the further point about moral perception that a morally sensitive agent is more likely to notice features of her surroundings that call for a moral response (perceptual salience). Here, the issue is rather of how, or under what aspect, the morally sensitive or insensitive person perceives a situation provided that both have already noticed it. And this view—that intentional objects are somehow basic particular units of meaning that, already constituted, can enter into various intentional acts—has some obvious support: If, for example, I am to want to have chicken soup for dinner, then “having chicken soup for dinner” or something of the sort must have a meaning independently of my particular act of wanting it; after all, the very same object must be able to play a role in my epistemic judgments, or else I would never know how to satisfy my desires.

This is the sort of view Ricoeur has in mind. He calls on us to consider the following infinitive proposition: “I am to go on a trip.” This grammatical form

Is a neutral signification which could be incorporated in acts of different quality. It will occur some day that “I shall go on a trip”: here the meaning is at the same time called and held in suspension by its hypothetical modifier. In a decision the meaning is inserted into a positing of existence which is not stated but is affirmed as depending on me… (2, 43)

So what is the common meaning in these intentional acts? Ricoeur rejects the idea that the common meaning is given by a founding act of understanding, which allows it to enter into other intentional acts such as willing, hoping, predicting, etc. Nor “is it a primitive judgment of existence modified afterwards as a wish or a decision” (44).

Ricoeur's own view is that,

this meaning is distinguished only by abstraction from the concrete act of stating, wishing, ordering, or deciding… This proposition is not a judgment about that which I state, hope, command, or will, but a convergent product of abstraction, formed in the context of a reflection on acts and their objects (43-44)

Thus, the intentional object of a wish is not identical to the intentional object of the understanding; the identity of the two objects is not primary, but is established through a later act of abstraction. Similarly, the perception of a person standing with heavy bags will not be identical to the perception of a person with heavy bags in need of a seat: these intentional acts have a different quality, and are filled by different objects. (Ricoeur makes a similar point in “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology of the Will,” published in (3), though in similarly vague terms and also without any clear analysis of the implications. If anyone is familiar with further sources, please let me know.)

One way of bringing this out is by going back to the distinction I mentioned above, between seeing something under an aspect and noticing it at all. We can, of course, make this distinction in abstraction, but it is not at all clear that we can draw any fine line. For one thing, to take the example Smith uses, it seems a fact about the situation that the person with heavy bags needs a seat. So the morally sensitive observer is not adding something of his own to the situation; rather, he is simply seeing the situation for what it is. That the person with heavy bags needs a seat is part and parcel of the perceived situation, and it is a feature of the situation that the morally insensitive person simply does not notice. Similarly, an even less sensitive person might fail to notice that the bags are heavy, or might fail to notice a person standing with them at all. “Seeing under an aspect” is easily distinguishable from perceptual salience only if we assume that the “aspect” under which a perception might be seen is something added by the agent’s subjective attitudes, in opposition to what is objectively there to be perceived. But if we accept a moral realist picture, the “aspect” is really there, to be noticed by any sensitive observer in the way that the person with bags is really there.

So why does this matter? For one, if Ricoeur is right, we have to reexamine the standard classification of cognitive and conative acts in terms of directions of fit. For another, it suggests that valuation is integral to perception rather than projected on it, perhaps as some secondary quality. Of course the account would—to pose any serious challenge—still require a serious work-up of how a secondary act of abstraction, through which sameness of meaning is determined, could serve to unite our various judgments (say, judgments about what we want and judgments about how to get it; or judgments about moral responsibility and judgments about moral desirability). In any case, I suspect there is a way to pull off such an analysis by working out exactly how second-order acts govern first-order acts.

PS. What looks like a blue jay just pooped on my copy of Smith's paper. A spirited philosophical debate at last!

References:

(1) Angela Smith, “Responsibility for Attitudes,” Ethics 115 (January 2005): 236-271

(2) Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1966.

(3) Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Chicago: Northwestern, 2007.

Continue Reading...

Dreyfus and McDowell, Concepts and Coping

I have finally gotten around to reading the Dreyfus-McDowell exchange in Inquiry. It’s fun and quite clear, and I recommend it to everyone. No doubt I will be scribbling more about it in the future, but at this point I want to raise a point about Dreyfus’s odd insistence that expertise is somehow non-conceptual. Not only does McDowell throw clear doubt on the need for such a view of expertise, but Dreyfus’s own examples seem to undermine his point. Sorry about the length of this; I had to write it out to get clearer on it. If I come back to it, I'll keep my points tighter.

McDowell repeatedly makes it clear that, in saying that our experience is permeated by rationality, he does not mean that reflection is constantly operative, nor does he mean that there are general principles in the background of everything we do. Conceptual action and perception are situational, and conceptualization need not be explicit. Thus, McDowell distinguishes between experience that “is embraced by conceptual capacities… that we already had before we enjoyed the experience,” other experience can be isolated and articulated by “annexing bits of language to” it, and “some of the content of a typically rich world-disclosing experience never makes its way into constituting part of the content of our repertoire of conceptual capacities” (347). So while obviously not all of our experience—not even most of it—is articulated in the perception itself, “all its content is present in a form in which… it is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities” (idem).

Dreyfus finally seems to pick up on what McDowell means, and responds with a rather feeble call for proof: “This conclusion [that our coping is permeated with rationality] is supposed to follow from the fact that if one has a capacity—in this case the capacity to use situation-specific concepts—this capacity must be “operative”, as McDowell puts it, in all situations whether or not I am aware of exercising it.” And this, we discover, is a “category mistake”: “Capacities are exercised on occasion, but that does not allow one to conclude that, even when they are not exercised, they are, nonetheless, “operative” and thus pervade all our activities” (372). This is quite weak: Dreyfus is no longer insisting, as he did in earlier parts of the debate, that conceptual capacities cannot be operative in our coping. McDowell’s account has dealt with all the objections to that effect (i.e., the generality objection and the reflection objection I mention above). [There is a pretty amusing bit, where Dreyfus tries to use Aristotle, via Heidegger, against McDowell, pointing out that general principles are not guiding phronesis and thus it cannot be permeated by rationality. Someone whose knowledge of Aristotle seems to be on a par with mine shouldn’t be challenging McDowell on that point, and McDowell immediately points out that obviously neither Aristotle—nor Heidegger—ever suggests that phronesis acts outside the domain of logos.]

Now Dreyfus’s argument is weak in that it is no longer a positive claim about what role conceptual capacities can play in coping. Rather, he is making the point that McDowell’s claim is unproven. Of course he tries to strengthen this appeal to ignorance as refutation, as the above quote suggests: (1) The fact that human beings have a conceptual capacity does not mean that it is always operative. And (2) McDowell has no grounds for claiming that it is always operative, since we cannot find conceptual capacities within the phenomenology of our absorbed coping! Two points strike me as particularly odd. First off, McDowell is clearly not insisting that any capacity that we have must always be operative—that would, indeed, be a lousy ground for the conclusion that a capacity is always operative (I have the capacity to urinate but it is, thankfully, not always operational as such). Second, Dreyfus has apparently reverted to the flaccid, though currently popular, view of phenomenology as description of surface-level phenomena as they are experienced at the time they occur.

It strikes me that McDowell has already answered these objections in the passages cited above; and this exchange makes me wonder how much clearer he would need to be for Dreyfus to admit that he’s picked the wrong fight. Perhaps the problem is that McDowell hasn’t phrased his response in phenomenological terms. So here is a brief attempt: It is true that, when we are engaged in absorbed coping, we are not explicitly aware of any conceptualization occurring. But it makes no sense to take an experience out of context: something happens after my absorbed coping as well: I reflect on it. And something happens before: I am aware, generally, of what I will be doing (though of course I need not have it planned out) and, in the past, have performed similar tasks with explicit conceptual guidance in play. Dreyfus admits this point, but he thinks that after one has gone through the learning phase, where one is guided by concepts, one transcends that stage, becomes and expert, and no longer needs concepts at all. But this is quite odd: if I needed concepts to play chess in the past, is it not reasonable to think that, as I’ve gotten better, I have lost the need to rely on keeping those concepts explicit? But how can this be evidence that they are not present? Dreyfus’s model has the Grand Master playing chess with his body alone but, as McDowell notes, this only makes sense metaphorically.

Moreover, a phenomenological account should recognize that, after my absorbed coping, I know what happened during that time. If asked why I made a certain move, I can give a reason, although I may have to think about it in order to make it explicit. No doubt I cannot explain every feature of my actions, but so what? The fact that I cannot describe every feature of a blade of grass I saw does not mean that I did not see something that fits under the concept “grass.” A correct description of coping experience is going to be misleading, precisely because it involves an attempt to describe an experience that, by definition, was not explicitly thematized at the time it occurred. But a retrospective look can bring out the conceptual features. Why, then, should we focus on the unthematized experience as authoritative, rather than the thematized reappropriation of that experience?

In fact, for someone who supposedly puts a great deal of faith in phenomenology, Dreyfus regularly makes arguments that are underdetermined by the phenomenology. He brings up the example of Chuck Knoblauch who, after thinking too much about what he was doing, lost the ability to throw the ball effortlessly. Dreyfus insists that this supports his view: that conceptualization cannot be behind the throwing, and if it is, then it can only interfere with the absorbed coping. But of course it doesn’t mean that at all. Knoblauch’s inability to throw the ball does not show that the ability relies on a lack of conceptualization, but only that it depends on a lack of explicit conceptualization. As McDowell points out: Knoblauch is now thinking about how to perform a basic action instead of simply performing it. But that does not show that performing the action correctly involves no conceptualization. Dreyfus argues that Knoblauch cannot be using the same conceptual capacities when pitching expertly and when screwing it up, because the content of his intentional states must change: “if it was the same sort of content as before reflection, there would be no way to explain why Knoblauch performs so well under one condition and so poorly in the other” (360). But isn’t it obvious that Knoblauch’s problem is not with the content, but with how he makes use of that content? The entire line of though appears misguided.

Here is the basic issue, then. Dreyfus keeps missing McDowell’s insistence that our experience must have a form that makes it suitable for conceptualization. It is in this sense that experience is permeated by rationality. And—as McDowell keeps stressing here and in Mind and World—without this suitability, it is unclear how we could articulate our experience at all, or how we could explain what we were doing when we were absorbed.

What drives the point home for me, however, is Dreyfus’s list of absorbed coping activities. Aside from Grand Master chess playing, “something similar happens to each of us when any activity from taking a walk, to being absorbed in a conversation, to giving a lecture is going really well” (373). And this looks bizarre from the start: perhaps I can take a walk without conceptual guidance (at least, this is plausible on its face), but giving a non-conceptual lecture is something only a true Master—like Avital Ronell—can pull off. (Yes, I just saw “The Examined Life”… No, I can’t get over her claim that “meaning is fascist” or whatever.)

Here is the clearest example Dreyfus gives to explain how he thinks we monitor our absorbed coping without being guided by concepts: An airport radio beacon signals a pilot if his plane is off course; but if everything is going well, if the plane is on course, the beacon is silent. But the beacon is doing something, since “the silence that accompanies being on course doesn’t mean the beacon isn’t continuing to guide the plane. Likewise, in the case of perception, the absence of tension doesn’t mean the body isn’t being constantly guided by the solicitations” (358). In other words: the body guides itself, based on past experience. Conceptualization is needed only in case something goes wrong. But this cannot be right. Consider: When I am lecturing, no matter how absorbed, I never swear, although I swear habitually over beer with friends. I do not swear during a lecture and suddenly, realizing something is wrong, snap out of my absorption. So at the very least my lecturing is conceptually guided: I am speaking in lecture mode, not in arguing with friends over beer mode. And while I need not be explicitly aware that I am lecturing in order to lecture well—while that awareness would obviously detract from my absorption, since it would involve one thought too many—it must be guiding my activity. Perhaps my body knows how to tell lecturing apart from heatedly defending a point to a friend, but if my body is so smart, what does it need me for? Our concepts become explicit during a breakdown, when things go wrong. But—and this is the key question McDowell must pose to Dreyfus—those concepts could not become explicit in a breakdown unless our experience was of the form to be conceptualized in the first place.

Continue Reading...

Beyond Belief

I never know what to make of philosophical historiography. Charles Taylor new Templeton book, A Secular Age, is such a work. In a recent post at Immanent Frame, Taylor picks up on a distinction made in his new book between 'porours' and 'buffered' selves. A buffered self is like you and me, selves for whom there is a discrete frontier between itself and the world, between the mental and all else. A porous self is one for whom this discrete border does not exist. (I wonder what Taylor would make of the extended mind thesis)?

Does it make sense to ask, Is this accurate? I don't think so, for a reason I'll provide in a moment. But even if I do not think that this sort of work is something that can be accurate or inaccurate, it is still possible to disagree with certain claims made in it. I have one claim in particular in mind that I'll address below, which is this: that the difference between ourselves and our ancestors has less to do with different beliefs, and more to do with different 'experiences.'

First let me register my qualifications on philosophical historiography. Taylor tells a story about how, roughly five-hundred years ago, a porous experience of self was supplanted by a buffered experience of self. As Taylor acknowledges, this account has similarities to Weber's theory of Entzauberung. For us, purposes, meanings, intentions, and values are intrinsically mental predicates, whereas for those who experienced a porous self, such things were parts of the environment as much as parts of the soul, and a world that itself embodies meaning, purpose and value is a an enchanted, zauberische world. Of course, while I detect a hint of nostalgia in Taylor's piece (he is a practicing Catholic after all), Taylor's work succeeds as admirably as any at being a fair-minded, work of descriptive philosophical historiography.

Taylor’s story is consistent with itself. We might even be able to say that it is consistent with the facts, were it not the case that in history, more often than not, the facts are decided by story we are trying to tell. Danto made this point classically: we can say, in a rather uninteresting but unassailable way, that at 7pm, just after sunset, January, in the year 49b, Julius Ceaser rode his horse across the river Rubicon--but this hardly makes for a historical fact. There is no history here at all. History requires tying earlier events to later events within a narrative framework, and that narrative framework requires ascribing psychological predicates like desires and intentions. Thus, to make the above fact interesting, we could say that Ceaser crossed the Rubicon and thereby ended the Roman republic--but this fact is unaccessible, or even meaningless, outside of the narrative about the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire. If that's the case, then I'm not sure what it would mean to call a work of philosophical historiography 'accurate.'

Nonetheless, there is one claim made in Taylor's post that is questionable regardless of whether it is accurate. He asserts that the difference between ourselves and the selves of our forebearers is not a matter of belief, but of 'experience.' He doesn't define experience, but I suspect he means something like existential mood, horizon, attunment, or what-not.

So, Taylor claims that beliefs are not at stake here. I wonder. Here is an example common both to our forebearers and many today: Heaven is a place beyond time and in heaven we will meet and enjoy company with our relatives and loved ones. 'Meet' and 'enjoy' are temporally extended predicates. It is not clear at all what it would mean to meet, or to enjoy oneself, divested of extension in time. This conjunctive belief cannot be maintained. It would not be right, in the end, to say that the belief is false; it would be better to say that it is confused. Nonetheless, it is a belief, at least in the sense that it is a proposition that, when uttered or written, a large number of people throughout history have and would assent to.

So, I want to say that while the difference between us and our ancestors is not a question of truth or falsity (ignorance vs. knowledge), it is a still question of belief; a question of whether a belief embodies a coherent concept. While it would be wrong to call our forebearers ignorant, it would be okay, I’d argue, to call them confused. Following this argument, while it is not fair to assert that our ancestors were wrong and we are right, it does make sense—I might claim—to say that we are less confused than they were, that we do not have here a mere difference in worldviews, but a normatively constrained difference wherein confusion and consistency are criterial.

As I said, I do not say that Taylor is wrong, only that his claim is questionable. I suspect that there really is something to the notion of 'experience' as Taylor uses it, but it is something that has to thought-through, not just asserted.

Continue Reading...

The Real Hard Problem (Cont'd)

In my last post I argued that Chalmers' distinction between the psychological and the phenomenal concepts of mind misses what is in fact the most peculiar feature about human mindedness, namely, that our psychology is manifest through our phenomenology. Chalmers focuses upon what are in fact aberrant cases of human wakeful consciousness (sensations like pain, or the fact that minor chords are often associated with a dour feeling, or a struck funny bone ) in order to bring out a supposedly general concept, viz., the phenomenal. The phenomenal concept of mind designates that feature of consciousness that, like pain, supervenes upon otherwise psychologically specifiable states. The hard problem in philosophy of mind is too account for this queer property.

Chalmers' phenomenalism is of course very unlike the phenomenalisms characteristic of the early twentieth century. Traditional phenomenalisms focused upon phenomena as the objects or contents of conscious states (usually confusing or conflating the distinction). Chalmers’ notion of the phenomenal is closer to Brentano’s concept of inner consciousness than it is to these theories. Brentano characterized inner consciousness as a sort of second-order awareness that accompanies all conscious acts. Brentano’s inner consciousness—like, presumably, Chalmers phenomenal awareness—is necessarily second order in that is must always accompany an object-directed act (the act’s ‘primary content’). Presumably Chalmers (like Husserl) would disagree that all mental states are intentional, for not all mental states are object-directed or object-consciousness. But this should not affect the secondary status of phenomenal consciousness, so long as we admit that there is no such as ‘pure consciousness’ (mystics to the contrary). Chalmers, Brentano and Husserl would all agree—I think—that in order for phenomenal consciousness to arise, something else must be going on as well, whether that something else is object-directed or not. 

However, from the fact that phenomenally conscious states need not be object-directed (intentional), it does not follow that object-directed states need not be phenomenal. Chalmers makes this unwarranted inference—and is not aytpical in so doing. He does so because, given different definitions of objectivity, there are different ways of accounting for intentionality (computationally, truth-semantically, informatically, etc), but the point is that none of these get at the fact that there are objects--and therefore a world--for us only insofar as we are conscious. This important blindspot has unfortunately eclipsed for many thinkers any true interest in (Husserlian) phenomenology, for lack of understanding the conceptual terrain in which it works. (NB: because of the ambiguities associated with the term phenomenal, I prefer to use the term ‘personal’: what is characteristic about human intentionality, as opposed to say either computer or dog intentionality, is that it is personal). 

What is that terrain? Above I stated that in order for phenomenal consciousness to arise, something else must be going as well (although it need not be object-oriented, contrary to Brentano). Alternatively, as I just argued, in order for there to be object-oriented consciousness for persons, this consciousness must be phenomenal—or better, personal. Notice the modal terms: must be this, must be that. There is a necessity here. Contra Chalmers—as I noted in the last post—the co-occurrence of the phenomenal and psychological in the unity of personal consciousness is not a matter of mere empirical or contingent fact, but one of necessity. The question is, what sort? 

Brentano observed that mental phenomena are characterized by a certain unity unlike that exhibited by physical phenomena. Mental phenomena—all the various contents of any given moment of consciousness—are unified internally, rather than externally; unlike the co-occurrence of physical phenomena, mental phenomena do not just happen to be next to each other (successive in Hume’s sense). This unity is supplied by the fact that all mental contents of a momentary act of consciousness are unified in one consciousness. The various contents and objects of a momentary act of consciousness (the 'specious present') don't just happen to be in the same 'place' in the way that the books and bed and desk I own just happen to be in this room with me now. The unity that underlies the contents of consciousness is tighter and more rigorous than the merely spatial co-location of items in my room. (This is of course an old point, going back at least to Kant, even Leibniz). Hume’s mistake, according to Brentano, was to believe that since there was no simple, detectable entity underlying the various presentations, there was no self. Mental phenomena do not appear to (in the dative) a self; the self is the unity of mental phenomena in one consciousness. Hume’s mistake was to confuse unity with simplicity, and Kant’s mistake was to confuse the appearance of external, material objects to a self with the presentation of a self’s own mental acts to itself (in a secondary, rather than dative manner, as discussed above).

We therefore need a way to talk about the unity of consciousness and mental phenomena—the unity of the phenomenal and the psychological in the personal—in a way that does not presuppose that his unity is a contingent matter of fact. That is to say, the unity involved here is of a logical or conceptual, rather than factual, sort. Brentano began the application of mereological concepts to the philosophy of mind, Husserl then formalized and extended this notion, putting it at the heart of his systematic phenomenology. When I claim, as I often have before, that phenomenology is a sort of formal science, it is this that I have in mind. 

A final coda: What about the fact that many aspects and ‘contents’ of conscious life seem to go unnoticed, and in that sense, are impersonal? In other words, how do Brentano and Husserl avoid the imputation that their respective sciences are introspectionist (which, by the way, both deny)?  Many have taken the results of phenomena such as change-blindness, attentional-blindness, blindsight, etc., to argue for the presence of non-conscious but nonetheless intentional contents of consciousness as a decisive refutation of the phenomenological method. While I won't go into details here, this attack is levied against a straw-man: neither Brentano nor Husserl have argued that the contents of mental phenomena were simply there waiting to be observed. Again, the argument relies upon the mereological theory of mind. Take the experience of a chord. As tone-stupid as they come, I could not begin to pull out the separate notes of any given chord. Are those separate notes present in my consciousness? Dennett takes this as proof that there are no qualia, and therefore that only heterophenomenology will be able to describe the real contents of my consciousness. Brentano takes a different line: those notes are there, but as mereological parts of the whole chord as a phenomena of consciousness. They are there, because I hear the whole chord, but they are not explicit objects of my attentional consciousness. More importantly, the whole chord is there, not as a sum of those notes, but again, as the whole that is mereologically prior to those parts. Husserl’s own phenomenology departs precisely from here, and this notion of the whole that is prior to its part is precisely what Husserl means by ‘synthetic.’ 

Continue Reading...

Phenomenology Revisited?

Last week Leiter linked favorably to a review essay on D.W. Smith’s Husserl by Sean Kelly. Kelly portrays Smith’s new book as further evidence that phenomenology is gaining credibility among main-stream analytic thinkers. Kelly himself of course has not been incidental to this development.

I’m all for the tone of this pep rally, but I might register some reservations about the message. Kelly suggests that the new (or renewed) interest in phenomenology among anglophone philosophers should thank in large part the pluralization of analytic philosophy itself. It’s as if analytic philosophy were sagging under its own weight, to the point where finally it’s either necessary or safe for anglophone thinkers to search out non-orthodox and non-canoncial sources in order to avoid theoretical suffocation. (For my part, I hope this isn’t just the result of a cohort of publishers all competing for some weird reason to get the ‘standard’ Husserl book out there.)

I’m not sure if that is right, but it sounds plausible (not that analytic philosophy has collapsed, but that the traditiontional project of analysis has—long ago—and that more recently it’s increasingly safe for ordinary philosophers to peruse a volume or two of Husserl, or even Heidegger).

But this version of things almost makes the return of phenomenology seem accidental, as if analytic philosophers simply grabbed for the nearest thing. At the very least, it neglects the fact that there were islands of phenomenology that survived the Great Deluge of post-structuralism and post-existentialism, populated with thinkers like Roderick Chisholm, Dagfinn Follesdal, Jaako Hintikka, Hubert Dreyfus and D. Smith himself. By the 1980’s, there was a dedicated group of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty scholars who were cris-crossing both fields and had the language and concepts ready for when interest finally did turn their way. (Lots of other thinkers I’m forgetting, but this is just a quick post—I’ll maybe update later).

In any case, instead of historiography, I’d like to focus on two issues raised by Kelly in the review, one positive, and one negative, both complementary. First, the negative. Kelly is among those who are impressed that analytic philosophers have finally discovered that we humans are minded, and not just linguistic, creatures. This is where the turn to phenomenology seems fortuitous. Anglophone philosophy has realized that subjective, first-person experience is an actual problem and issue, and then lo, here is a tradition nearly a century old with literally thousands and thousands of pages on the subject. A match is made.

But, if the renewed interest in phenomenology just comes down the fact that Husserl had gotten things like stereoscopic vision correct many decades before mainstream analytic philosophy, this is going to be a brief affair. To be sure, anyone would benefit from a good reading of Husserl’s analyses of internal time consciousness, but there are other reasons why phenomenology is interesting besides it’s field analyses. So, I’m taking issue with Kelly’s claim that

“the real contribution of Husserl's work is not systematic (though Husserl himself certainly had systematic ambitions); it lies rather in the careful and detailed analyses he provides of an enormous range of philosophical domains.”

If this is so, then I’m afraid that there is no real turn to phenomenology (or Husserl) in the first place. I mean, to discover something independently (say, that vision is stereoscopic, or that perception is inter-modal, or that subjective time is not in any easily determinate way a mere representation of objective time), to then discover that Husserl had some said something similar much earlier, and then to pat Husserl on the back for his prescience, is, while at least giving credit where credit is due, hardly a return to Husserl or phenomenology in general. (This is typically how these things have gone). At best, what this should suggest is that, if Husserl had gotten that right, then maybe he had other things right, and should be given a closer, second (or third, or nth) look. But I don’t see as much evidence of that happening. So, my negative point to make about Kelly’s review is his idea that phenomenology has much to contribute to contemporary philosophy of mind just because phenomenology was interested in first-person experience. This is unlikely. The danger here is that phenomenology simply becomes mis-identified as any careful scrutiny of experience from a first-person point of view, when, number one, it is not that, and number two, even if it were that is hardly its main point of interest. (And by the way, while this may be true to some extent for Husserl, how could Heidegger be read this way, as focused on first-person, subjective experience—isn’t Heidegger’s whole point to get away from this way of thinking about human being as mindedness as representations as subjective perception?)

Finally, Kelly is I’m afraid punching a bit of a straw man when it comes to analytic philosophy. As he would have it, analytic philosophy is simply the idea that all problems of philosophy are problems of langauge. But it is a bit unfair to put the idea that baldly; there was a keen insight there, which is that much of the time we simply are not clear on what exactly it is that we are asking, and by focusing on the way that we express our problems we can better focus of what is really at issue. Just as (among the giants at least) continental philosophy is rarely as disappointing as its caricature, the same is true of analytic philosophy.

But now to the positive point: Kelly does, in my estimation, correctly emphasize the unique role of description in the phenomeonlogical project, especially its uniquenes as method of inquiry to be distinguished from transcendental argumentation, deduction, empirical generalization, and so on. He does not emphasize this, but I want to. For instance, Kelly mentions that Husserl had, years before Searle, emphasized that even our run-of-the-mill perceptions of run-of-the-mill objects rely upon a ‘horizon’ or ‘background,’ a certain context. What are we to make of this horizon? Russell, as Kelly notes, had tried to make sense of it in terms of beliefs, but that is not adequate. I can see the barn façade as pointing to a backside even if I do not believe that there is a backside (Kelly’s example). Can it be explained in terms of ‘information,’ as defined by information theory? Or a set of background, pragmatic practices? Not sure, but in any case, what phenomenology at its best tries to uncover is the ‘true’ nature of experience prior to all theorizing or modelling. This may be a hopeless task, but it is the task on which phenomenology rests. It is the premise behind the descriptive method.

Finally, I would say that there is still something else important about phenomenology that Kelly does not get to. I would call the sort of ‘phenomenology’ that interests Kelly ‘phenomenology in the natural attitude.’ That is to say, he and others like him are doing phenomenology in the sense that they are striving for concepts and methods that will let us really and genuinely get at what it is like to have normal, quotidian experience. (As opposed to, say, sense-data theories that badly distort what everyday experience is like). This is a laudable and, I might venture, achievable goal. It is shared by thinkers like Alva Noë, Andy Clark and Shaun Gallagher. These thinkers are not interested per se in the epistemological projects that motivated, say, Husserl. But I think that this attitude can lend to a distortion of Husserl’s project as well. For instance, although he doesn’t put it in just this way, Kelly almost makes it seem as if Husserl’s method of reduction is intended to get at the precisely the field of experience that interests him, Kelly. But that is hardly correct. The reductions, obviously enough, have the express intention of getting the phenomenologist out of the natural attitude. And why? Because of the epistemological work Husserl hopes that opening up the phenomenological field will get right. That is to say, Husserl is not interested in just accurately describing everyday quotidian experience. He wants to understand how our knowledge about, say, arithmetic, arises out of this sort of experience. And this, for example, should be of interest to empiricists. If, for instance, what was really wrong with the early project of logical empiricism was not its logical or epistemological apparatus, but the combination and foundation of that apparatus upon a faulty and ‘phenomenologically’ inept concept of experience, perhaps a better, more sophisticated concept would save the intitial project. I think that John McDowell, for example, is doing something like this, and it just takes a brief moment of comparison to see how similar McDowell and Husserl are despite the fact that McDowell shows almost no interest in phenomenology per se (compare for example McDowell’s notion of propositionally contentful experience with Husserl’s categorial intuition.)

Alright, I’ve gone on enough, and I’m not sure that this is all coherent, but it’s my first impression on Kelly’s piece. Despite my criticisms, I really hope that Kelly’s optimism is warranted. We will find out I suspect sooner rather than later.

Continue Reading...

Agency, Endorsement, and Identity: A Case for Phenomenological Intervention

I often try—usually unsuccessfully—to push the idea that philosophy of action would benefit from a serious interaction with phenomenology. I tried to give an account of this to a well-known philosopher a few days ago but, partly because I was being overly exuberant and at the same time not entirely coherent, I got the distinct impression that he thought I was an idiot. Here I want to sketch out one place where I believe action theory needs phenomenology: on the issues of endorsement and identity. I am going to argue that a phenomenological account is needed to bring out the ways in which our agency is both creative and passive in such a way that acting on motives we do not rationally endorse may yet strengthen or at least express our agency.

In the latest incarnation of his theory of identification, Frankfurt has argued that agents can be said to identity with a first-order desire when they both have a second-order volition to act on that desire and are satisfied with that second-order volition. This account has been widely accepted, but Frankfurt’s conception of what the satisfaction comes to has come under constant fire. Frankfurt conceives of the satisfaction as something like a lack of motivation on the part of the agent to revise the second-order volition, and he admits that there are many acceptable reasons why agents might be so disinclined toward revision: for example, they might simply be bored with the self-reexamination involved; or, they might even be manipulated into the satisfaction. Most (as I understand it, Velleman, Bratman, and Ekstrom, among others) are not satisfied with this view of satisfaction. The reasons vary, but the core problem is that satisfaction alone, thus conceived, does not seem to be a sufficiently agential process.

But I think Frankfurt is on to something important: he is rejecting a standard view of agency. On this sort of standard view, agency is an active process through and through; this activity, in fact, is what differentiates agency from (supposedly) passive processes, such as perception and belief formation, or even coming to have motives (as opposed to endorsing them). And this view seems to me slightly mistaken. Its basis is an idea, expressed for example by Korsgaard, along the following lines: When we encounter a motive (such as a desire), we cannot just act on it. Because we are self-conscious, we are detached from our motives, so that we can take them or leave them. That is, we can endorse or reject them. From a first-person practical perspective, in which we must decide what reasons to act on, we are under the necessity of choosing among our motives rather than simply following whichever motives might pop up. As an account of practical reasoning in abstraction, something like this is probably right: when faced with evaluative judgments provided to us by desires, we can either use those judgments as premises in our reasoning to reach a conclusion, or we can override them with other judgments. But is this account correct of our actual deliberative processes or our typical decision-making?

I think it leaves out a rather salient feature of our phenomenology, and this is the point at which phenomenological accounts are needed as correctives to overly rationalized or intellectualized views of agency. The feature is this: We sometimes find ourselves saddled with motives that we would not endorse, on deliberation, as good motives to act on. We might, in fact, reject them on every possible grounds, from their negative consequences in our means-end reasoning to their apparent undermining of our pursuits of the things we care about. But these motives might nevertheless come with, one might say, built-in endorsement. They appear to us as agency-defining for us, individually, as the persons we are. I might, for example, believe that all sorts of things are worth sacrificing some of my pride for. And if I deliberate seriously on the question, I might in the end decide that in some cases I ought to bite the bullet and overcome my pride. But faced with a concrete situation, I find that pride-based motives appear with a certain agential authority that I have not given them through any deliberation. While I may override these motives, either through impulsive action, or though further deliberation about the benefits of doing so, I find that these deliberations smack to me of rationalization.

There is a problem in cases like these. The mechanisms of practical deliberation normally taken to be agency-bestowing appear here as the exact opposite: from the first-person practical perspective, I am distanced from my deliberation, so that while I endorse all the premises in the deliberation, I still cannot help treating the process as a rationalization, undermining the agency-laden motives of pride. I might have every (good) reason to swallow my pride here, and yet I find that every such reason undermines my sense of my own identity and my own agency. The deliberate, rationally endorsed course of action comes up against a practical identity that I do not in any obvious sense endorse, but that I experience as somehow self-endorsing. (Think of John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible bellowing, when asked why he will not sign his false confession, “Because it is my name!”)

The obvious existence of cases of this kind, I think, lends Frankfurt’s account much of its credibility. But I am not at all convinced that a view like Korsgaard’s can accommodate such cases. On her view, after all, such self-endorsing motives are necessarily agent-undermining, since they seem to involve something “acting on me or in me”. I agree that, thus described, self-endorsing motives are agent-undermining. But we can redescribe them as follows: We are complex organisms with complex mental economies. Some items in these economies are central and largely irrevisable; perhaps we could revise them with a massive amount of work, but for the most part they are likely to serve as the cornerstones in all our processes of deliberation and endorsement in such a way that attempting to revise those items would itself be a self-undermining process, a sort of conflict of the will with itself. It is precisely because those items are central to our deliberative processes and our self-conception, and not because we actively endorse them upon deliberation, that they appear to us as agency-laden rather than agency-undermining. If they appear to undermine our agency, it is because they get in the way of other things we want or care about. In other words, they seem to undermine our agency only if we think of agency as entirely unfettered to non-deliberative motives, and if we cannot accept the idea that we discover some norms within ourselves rather than coming to them through deliberation.

My claim, in other words, is that we do not fully create our wills; we also discover ourselves to have de facto irrevisable wills. Because they are de facto irrevisable but in principle revisable, the phenomenology here comes into conflict with theories of agency that reject any passive component to agency, i.e., any component that we do not actively endorse and that we cannot reject without great harm to our practical identities. And this is also a case where, I think, the phenomenology has the upper hand: faced with self-endorsing agency-laden motives, I may well be aware that I could, in principle, withhold my endorsement of them; but this thought is only an abstraction, born of a self-deceptive view of the agent as a mind fully in control of itself. But at the same time, the motives we endorse and the self-endorsing motives we encounter usually work together more or less harmoniously. Agency is, one might say, a composite of what we are and what we make of ourselves. Phenomenology is in a unique position to study the functioning of this composite. Granted, it cannot exclude the problems of exhaustion-satisfaction or manipulation-satisfaction. But this shows only that phenomenology is not sufficient for an account of agency; not that it is not central to working out such an account.

Continue Reading...

Skepticism About Phenomenology

One often finds, in certain M&E circles, a distrust of phenomenology. Or, perhaps, one might say it is a distrust of phenomenology as a study of “how things feel to us” and, by extension, a distrust of the philosophical field called phenomenology. The distrust goes something like this: It is important, when talking about the mind, to get the phenomenology right. But the phenomenology need not influence our view of the mind very much: if we come to a theory independently, and the theory turns out to be out of touch with experience, all that is needed is an added error theory, or debunking strategy, to explain why we systematically make mistakes.

One finds such a strategy, for example, in attacks on free will and, especially, in attacks on conscious will, such as that developed by Daniel Wegner. Very roughly, on this account our decisions are not conscious processes at all: they are sub-personal processes. The same processes that produce our decisions also produce our consciousness of making those decisions. So we rank our desires and motives without conscious input, and then take responsibility for doing all the work consciously, but this is an illusion, a little trick of biology. The phenomenology is important only insofar as we need to get it right in order to explain it away. A good deal of criticism of Wegner, in fact, strikes me as geared primarily not toward arguing against his view that conscious will is an illusion, but rather toward showing that he gets the phenomenology wrong. For those who make such arguments, then, the real problem isn’t that Wegner doesn’t take phenomenology seriously enough; it’s that he hasn’t gotten it right enough to eliminate it. The phenomenology is not important in itself.

And this approach seems reasonable. After all, experience is highly misleading. People often misremember things, for example, and such misrememberings may arise as a result of distorting psychological features of which the agent is not aware. We do not seem to be the best judges of our own, first-personal mental states; our friends, observing us from outside, can often understand why we act in certain ways much better than we can. And, certainly, it is possible to simply be wrong because our neuro-psychological structures are not designed to get things right. Wegner, for example, points to experiments that show structural tendencies to take responsibility for certain events over which, in fact, the subject had no control. So, the argument might go, if we cannot trust our experience to track our true responsibility conditions, we should recognize that the experience of will and responsibility is a sham. The distrust leads to the following premise: we can engage in the scientific study of consciousness without taking phenomenology into account.

This kind of distrust, however, misses the point of phenomenology, which is to study the essences and meanings of mental acts. To see phenomenology as competing with neuroscience or cognitive science is an elementary mistake: phenomenology simply isn’t the sort of method that can provide factual information about physical events. What phenomenology does, rather, is clarify what it is that neuroscience and cognitive science are talking about when they talk about our mental states. Case in point: No phenomenological analysis of memory can help me figure out whether I am currently remembering, misremembering, or simply imagining a past event. And a phenomenological analysis of responsibility, or the phenomena involved in willing, is unlikely to establish whether or not I was the agent of a movement I experienced as mine. Indeed, clever experimental set-ups can throw the mechanisms by which we normally make such determinations out of whack, and phenomenological analysis cannot prevent that from happening.

But how, without phenomenology, would we know what it is we are throwing out of whack? What cognitive system is malfunctioning? In order to be able to determine, third-personally, whether a person is remembering, misremembering, or imagining, we must already know what remembering, misremembering, and imagining are. In order to know that, in a particular instance, a person is mistakenly attributing conscious will to herself, we must know what it is to consciously will something. No scientific approach can tell us what mechanisms are involved in memory, or in willing, or in imagination without appealing to what we already know about remembering, willing, or imagining. The point of phenomenology is precisely to pin down what this appeal is an appeal to. Without that initial knowledge, we could have no means of studying mental processes; we could, at best, study physical occurrences that would explain nothing about our psychology: no amount of tinkering with the brain can tell us what neural processes are involved in remembering if we do not already have some grasp on what remembering is. A scientific study of consciousness, thus, cannot dispose with phenomenology, or leave discussion of how its findings fit (or don’t fit) with phenomenology for last. The phenomenology—explicitly or implicitly—has to come first.

Continue Reading...

Problems in Defining Phenomenology

I am going through John Davenport's massive Will as Commitment and Resolve. It’s a pretty crazy book, in an exciting but also intimidating way. Davenport’s express purpose is to update Existentialism as a viable competitor in today’s philosophical marketplace by bringing it to bear critically on contemporary ethics, action theory, and philosophy of mind, among other things. That’s the exciting part. Here’s the intimidating and slightly monstrous part: the book is 550 pages or so, plus another 100 pages of notes, of very small print, and covers theories of motivation from Plato to Frankfurt and beyond. Additionally, Davenport goes out of his way to stress that this gigantic tome is merely a preface to much grander things: accounts of normativity, liberal political theory, mind, and theology, to name just a few. I’m sure I’ll be commenting on it more in the near future. For now, I just want to take up a brief note from the preface.

Davenport points out that, while much of what he writes will be in a style familiar to Anglophone philosophers, his method will be “broadly speaking phenomenological.” Here's his explanation:

In general, by a phenomenological approach I mean one that distinguishes between the primary phenomena to be explained in some area of philosophy and the rival theoretical explanations that construe these phenomena in different ways. The phenomenological approach presumes that we usually can discern, however imperfectly, some important phenomena that serve as paradigm cases or fixed points of reference for analyzing a particular problem or concept. This evidence or experience functions as an initial clue or proleptic outline of the concept at issue. The task of theoretical explanation is then to provide as convincing an account of these phenomena and their grounds of possibility as can be given, where what counts as “convincing” is itself guided by the shape of the phenomena that present themselves more or less clearly in common human experience. Thus the first aim of theoretical explanation is to follow where the phenomena lead rather than to make them fit the mold of a metaphysics to which one is antecedently committed. This principle, which corresponds both to Husserlian eidetic science and to the Habermasian communicative ideal of reaching conclusions based solely on the force of the better argument alone, is important in my case for deciphering how we can even begin to analyze concepts such as the will, volitional identification, and freedom. (xxii)

Aside from a very quick defense of this approach against three typical criticisms, this is pretty much the whole explanation of what the phenomenological method comes to. My initial reaction to it, I confess, was one of mild disappointment. Given that Davenport’s express purpose is to provide a theory that can enter into dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy, one might hope for an explanation of the method that would make sense to practitioners of that philosophy. And by make sense, I mean not just that readers from outside phenomenology would be able to understand the words in that particular order, but that they would see this method as, well, a distinct method. I am not sure that this description does that. The crucial notion that phenomena are normative guides for theory is there, of course, but whatever is unique about the phenomenological attempt to satisfy this normative constraint seems to get lost. Here are two initial concerns.

(1) Try the following exercise: read that paragraph again, substituting “intuitions” for every occurrence of “phenomena.” If you do so, it seems to me, what you have is a fairly reasonable—though somewhat unfamiliar—account of how Anglo-American philosophy is largely practiced; it sounds much like what the x-phi people have been arguing against, in fact. Thought experiments, after all, are generally aimed at using intuitions as evidence for a particular theory. A common concern about thought experiments—one that I share—is that they are raised from within specific theoretical commitments and are often designed not so much to get at our intuitions, as to distort those intuitions; they seem to guide us into accepting a theory instead of guiding us into coming to a theory by first correctly and painstakingly assessing our intuitions. And in this sense, of course, the thought-experiment-dropping brand of philosophy is quite different from phenomenology as described here. So Davenport’s description does correctly distinguish the phenomenological use of evidence from this use of it, one that takes our intuitions as evidence for a theory rather than as a starting point for theorizing.

But what about more honest thought experiments, the sort that try to bring out our intuitions in order to explain them rather than manipulating them? Certainly there is quite a bit of that going around as well. Is that approach phenomenological? What are phenomena in the first place? Are they different from intuitions? Are intuitions just the ways in which phenomena “pre-theoretically” manifest themselves? (In a note on p. 547, Davenport, without mentioning intuitions, suggests that “folk-psychology” serves to demarcate the phenomena that need explaining.) Without an explanation of what phenomena are and how they relate to intuitions, there is not much more of a distinction to be made, though the point about uses of evidence is an important one.

(2) Perhaps because I've never been supremely confident, especially with my Gadamerian bent, about what the phenomena/theory distinction is really supposed to establish, this account seems too vague to distinguish phenomenology from much of philosophy; indeed, from norm-governed human thought as such. After all, doesn't pretty much every decent philosopher claim to be trying to develop theoretical approaches that are true to the phenomena rather than the reverse? Not in that language, to be sure, and maybe there are different conceptions of what this means, but certainly most philosophers are more likely to describe their task as “developing a theory that is close to the phenomena” than as “interpreting phenomena in such a way as to fit pre-existing theoretical commitments” (the concordance between Husserl and Habermas on this point seems to reinforce the impression that the account is overly general). Consider: gathering evidence in order to support a theory, a theory not itself grounded in evidence, is the sort of thing that gets defendants off in murder trials. The need to fit theory to evidence before searching for new evidence to support the theory seems to me to be a constitutive requirement of human rationality. No doubt one can fail to meet these norms, but someone who entirely disregards them (as, for example, when ID proponents display material “evidence” that humans and dinosaurs co-existed) is in the business of con-artistry rather than theoretical thought. But phenomenology, one might think, is not methodologically identical to correct thinking.

There are certainly many cases where it might seem like philosophers disregard the evidence of phenomena for the sake of a theory: physicalists, for example, might seem to be disregarding the evidence of conscious phenomena; relativists might likewise seem to overlook deep underlying agreements. But I doubt these examples really suggest cases where phenomena are overlooked for the sake of a theory; rather, what seems to me to be central here is the issue of what phenomena one takes most seriously. The physicalist mindset arises out of certain phenomena, such as the longstanding history of success in predicting and manipulating the works of nature. The relativistic mindset, in turn, owes much to the phenomena involved in widespread cultural difference. Faced with seemingly conflicting phenomena, rational subjects might well build their theory on the phenomena that strike them as the most compelling, attempting to explain the less compelling phenomena away. Again, then, I worry that an overly broad account of phenomenology seems to extend its methodology to all, or almost all rational theoretical thought; only the outliers—ones that clearly violate or disregard the norms of thought—seem to be excluded.

Continue Reading...

Actions, Consequences, and the Phenomenology of Responsibility

There is an all too common view according to which we can only be responsible for actions that we have chosen in some sense freely, or autonomously. If the consequences of our actions matter, it is because we were, or should have been, aware of those consequences. On this view, the consequences of our actions make a difference to our responsibility only insofar as we can or could have foreseen those consequences. This is the picture, then, on which free will or autonomy has primacy; responsibility, in turn, is grounded in it.* I want to argue for a different picture, one according to which the phenomenology of responsibility is intrinsically such that the autonomy or freedom of the agent with respect to an action depends in large part on her future estimation of the rightness or wrongness of its consequences. A deliberative decision—at the time it is made—is largely arbitrary; if it were not, deliberation would have been unnecessary. It ceases to look arbitrary only from the standpoint of one’s future self.

There are doubtless many questions to raise with regard to the condition that we must know or be able to know the consequences of our actions in advance. And there are questions, too, about the related issue of our conative attitudes—how deep must our desires go, how “wholeheartedly” need we accept them, to be held responsible for the execution of action on their basis? Something about this sort of approach certainly seems right. What I want to suggest is that what is right about it, however, is not that there is some unified entity, or even some coherent set of volitional attitudes and beliefs that constitutes the agency necessary for responsibility. That is, I want to question both the common libertarian premise about free will and the common compatibilist one. The libertarian often claims that to be responsible, an agent must directly (or indirectly) and indeterministically choose to perform an action. The compatibilist typically looks for something less demanding, namely, that the action be caused by agency-constituting features, such as rational deliberation, endorsement, cohering attitudes, or desires with which we are fully satisfied.

To say that the compatibilist approach is “less demanding”, of course, is not entirely right. It is only less demanding in the sense that it does not require us to rely on the idea that (1) some events can be caused indeterministically, (2) that the indeterminism in physical processes somehow corresponds to an indeterminism in our deliberations, and in such a way (3) that it is primarily the deliberation, and not the physical indetermistic causation that gives rise to the choice of action. This picture is likely too complicated to be true; and, moreover, it relies on assumptions about the physical world that are, given our current state of knowledge, probably false. In any case, the compatibilist has a further argument: that indeterministic decisions are necessarily arbitrary in such a way that agential responsibility is undermined.

To avoid this last problem, compatibilists typically try to fortify our choices with the aforementioned agency-constituting features. But this, too, ends up being a bit too demanding. I think psychology is slowly uncovering the unlikelihood of our actions being caused through such coherent dispositions; but here I want to pose a phenomenological challenge. It requires noticing that questions of responsibility for an action—and so the accompanying questions of whether the agent was free or autonomous in performing the action—come up only in contexts (sometimes, but not always, moral) where the rightness or wrongness of an action is at issue.

Here is an example: I am taking an exam. I am facing a particularly tough problem, where two answers strike me as possibly right, but I am not sure which one is right and don’t have the time to work it out further. I pick one on a hunch. If all goes well, and the answer is right, I may never think about it at all; or, in thinking about it, I might believe that due to my understanding of the material, my hunches tend to be good ones. But what if I end up getting the problem wrong? I will then blame myself for my stupidity, and for making a bad choice where I should have known better. Although my choice was, for all intents and purposes, arbitrary, whether I praise myself or feel guilt over the bad decision I made depends on the outcome. I would suggest that, in more or less complicated ways, the vast majority of our decisions are of exactly this kind.

A more complex example: I am largely set on graduate school. But the thought that it would be nice to have a decent life—one that has some redeeming features other than the occasional published paper—nags at me; law school becomes a competing option. We can sketch out such a conflict in any number of ways. Perhaps I have different beliefs about what would constitute a good life and different desires regarding my future. If I cannot adjudicate between these sets of beliefs and desires, then my resulting decision is—take your pick—as autonomous as it could be (given the circumstances, i.e., a lack of wholehearted identification with one of the options) and at the same time entirely arbitrary: it could have gone either way. To make this more of a challenge to compatibilist approaches: Let us say that I am wholehearted about going to graduate school; something nags at me, though, urging me to apply to law schools as well. This nagging feeling may appear to me as entirely external—as an affect that I do not identify with—but I humor it and apply anyway. If, in the end, I do not get into any decent graduate schools, but do get into a great law school, it is pretty easy to decide what to do.

So what of this situation? On what grounds can we reasonably say that the decision to go to law school was not autonomous? You will perhaps have guessed that I think there are no such grounds. Imagine that, ten years later, I am miserable with the legal world and wish I could go back and remake my decision to get into it in the first place. Why did I apply to those law schools? Why didn’t I do what my heart told me to do? Why didn’t I stick with the attitudes that defined my “real self”? On the other hand, imagine that, although I would have preferred graduate school, I quickly get into law school—I enjoy having definite problems to solve, clear rules to work with, easily demarcated rules of competition, and the high-paid lifestyle that results. And here I might be glad that I acted autonomously, followed my real self, and went to law school instead of indulging in a post-adolescent intellectualist fantasy of academia, however central that fantasy once seemed to who I am. In evaluating my responsibility for my choice, then, I now look at it not from the perspective of a conflicted self making a largely arbitrary decision, but from the standpoint of my current situation, one in which my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with my choice—its rightness or wrongness—has shaped my perception of what my real, autonomous self should have done.

I suggest, then, that the currently dominant structural theories of autonomy are largely false. There is no real self that is responsible for its decisions. The self responsible is, rather, the future self, the self that is a product of situations brought about as consequences of the initial decision. We cannot eliminate arbitrariness from our choices; we can make them autonomous only by looking back on them. One might, of course, object in the following way: this is a merely phenomenological critique. How we see or experience ourselves has, in the end, nothing to do with whether or not our choices are really the products of some coherent real self. To make this objection work, however, one would need to produce a notion of something like a real self, a coherence of our preferences, or identification with a desire that does not rest on an agent’s self-apprehension. It would be a notion of a choosing self that is understood independently of how this self experiences itself. And that such a picture could be coherent is dubious.

* Strawsonian accounts that base responsibility on our reactive attitudes are not immune from these considerations. Those reactive attitudes depend on our estimation of the agent’s intentions in performing the action for which we judge her. So even if we think that judgments of responsibility derive primarily from the framework of reactive attitudes we have toward others, these judgments still get their appropriateness from considerations about the agent's psychological profile.

Continue Reading...

Is Phenomenology Moribund? (Part II)

Alright, I finally scrunched in some time between grading logic tests to continue my argument from the previous post.

It has been argued--no, not argued really, just asserted--that phenomenology is moribund. Or at least as moribund as logical positivism. Since I work on phenomenology, I am naturally chafed by this assertion. Take that for what it's worth. I admit that phenomenology suffers from some pretty serious deficiencies, especially in questions of method ("analytic philosophy," I might interject, is not immune to this either apparently). But I also think that there's a lot to be said for it, and that many of the charges lobbed at it don't stick.

In particular, I was in the middle of arguing that phenomenology ought to be ranked along with physicalism and computational functionalism as one of the three serious approaches to the philosophy of mind. Each of these approaches models itself off a more accepted, perhaps more respectable science. Physicalism is modeled off the natural sciences (especially biology), computational functionalism off of proof-logic, computer science, robotics and AI--and phenomenology off of mathematics.

I ended the previous post by claiming that the former two, while enjoying stricter and clearer methods, are not adequate to what the mind, most likely, is. Conversely, while phenomenology suffers from a vague and discombobulated method, it is more adequate to what the mind, most likely, is. So now to that case.

Why not physicalism? Physicalism is the thesis that mental states are just states of the central nervous system. In the most radical forms (Churchlands), it is the thesis that the predicates of folk psychology are archaic left-overs from the Iron Age that will slowly drop out as we learn to talk about the brain in more precise, scientific ways. But not all physicalisms need be so radical. What they all must share is the thesis that, ultimately, to be in some 'minded' state is to be in a specifiable physical state. No mental property of a world will differ from another without a corresponding physical difference. Or, for creatures with mental states, to be in the same physical state is simply to be the same.

It should be noted that physicalism so defined is compatible with most computational functionalisms, insofar as one can be both a computational functionalist and an intentional realist. Thus to further define the physicalist theory of mind in a way which precludes its compatibility with computational functionalism, we should add the following rider: a theory is physicalist iff, per minded creatures, to be in the same physical state is simply to be the same, and physical states are not consituent.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘constituent.’ Constituency is typified by propositional states. This means that the constituent states are complex, with ‘parts’ related and defined in systematic ways. Further, these parts are solely defined by these systematic roles. If physical states are constituent, then they are constituent in just the same way that propositions are constituent. This is what computational functionalists of the intentional realist variety argue. The problem is that it does not seem remotely plausible that any physical system, qua physical (this is the important clause), could instantiate the laws of constituency. Thus, as I will shortly argue, since thoughts (the contents of the mind) are necessarily constituent, this means that it is unlikely that brain science will ever be mind science. Hence, my argument: 1) thoughts are constituent; 2) the laws of constituency violate the laws of physics, and vice versa; 3) thus, a physicalism that denies constituency a fortiori denies thoughts; 4) but there are thoughts with constituent relations; 5) hence, physicalism is false.

This sort of argument is found in Sellars, in Quine and Davidson, also in Fodor. It is the problem that Frege, Husserl and Sellars have attacked under the various banners of classical empiricism, psychologism or associationism. The primary difficulty these latter suffer is logical. When modern day physicalism stopped talk about impressions and the stream of consciousness, reverting to neurons and dendrites and so on, it no doubt got rid of some rather metaphysically dubious entities, but doing so did not at all address the logical problem that was the real issue in the first place. That issue is this: the laws of logic do not conform to the laws of physics, and any system which obeys only physical laws will not be able to respect some of the more peculiar laws of logic. For instance, physical relations can only obtain between two actually existing entities or states of affairs, but not so in logic. Another question I’ve never found a good physicalist answer to: Let’s say that there is a physical instantiation in my brain of the belief: ‘Some Roses are red’. Where is the logically equivalent belief that ‘Some roses are not nonred’? Or ‘Some red things are roses’? Or ‘Some red things are not nonRoses’? Are these logical properties of that belief really there like its physical properties, such as mass, volume, density and charge? Similarly, what about the semantic relations this belief entails. If I believe that some roses are red, I also believe that some roses are colored, that something is red, that something is extended, that some plant is red, that something that my girlfriend finds endearing when given as an unsolicited gift is red, etc. Again, are these semantic features of the belief really there along with its physical features? And where is ‘there’? That ‘something is red’ cannot be a unique feature of this belief, because it would also be a feature of the belief that ‘Some stop signs are red.’ Are both of these specific beliefs related to the more general belief which is situated elsewhere, or is the more general belief merely there in both in the same way that two different objects can enjoy the same mass? All of this just strains my credulity. I don’t see how it can be right. Physicalists may have answers to these questions, and I would love to hear them, but I haven’t found them. Of course, most physicalists would argue that while the objects of propositional attitudes are constituently structured, the physical states themselves are not. But this just seems weird to me.

Why not computational functionalism? Computational functionalism to my mind sufficiently answers the logical problems that plague the physicalist. I consider it to be phenomenology’s real rival. My problems with computational functionalism are primarily of an epistemological and semantic sort, and these, it has to be admitted, are always less surely footed. Computational functionalism is, I take it, necessarily internalist and representationalist. And there are any number of reasons why neither of these epistemological and/or semantic positions is likely correct. Here are some reasons why: 1) Following Turing, computational functionalists must argue that mental states are discrete states; one is either in that state or one is not. So let’s take an example: there’s a loud bang, and I turn my head and both see and hear a car roar off. I come to the belief ‘That was a backfire.’ I haven’t the foggiest idea what a backfire is. I just know that it is a loud, gun-like bang some cars make and which emanates from tailpipes. My mechanic, on the other hand, can no doubt say quite a bit not only about what a backfire is, but about what caused it, how to prevent it, how different car models suffer from different likelihoods of backfire, etc. Consequently, when my mechanic comes to a belief, ‘That was a backfire,’ her belief is not the same as mine. Thus, according to computational functionalists like Fodor, we have in fact different beliefs. Fodor takes observations like this as evidence against holism. I take it as evidence against computational functionalism. It seems plausible to me that I and my mechanic have the same belief, only hers is more informed, and more variegated than mine. Husserl, who allows that fufillment and truth is a function of degrees and range, can allow and account for this; computational functionalists cannot. 2) According to computational functionalism, to be in a mental state is to be in a discrete internal state. The content of that state is internally determined. This is why computational functionalists have to be representationalists. This however restricts whatever can be said about the content of that state to whatever is actually there internally. Thus, mental representations (semantically contentful internal states) can only consist of entered data and the rules (ie ‘concepts’) for manipulating that data. But consider this (a sort of example found in Noë): you reach in to a black sack and feel something hard, smooth, with some variation in texture, shaped somewhat cylindrically. After a few moments, almost spontaneously, as it were, you realize that you are feeling a lighter. Husserlians want to argue that the content of that belief ‘Here’s a lighter,’ does not exist inside the skull, nor outside in the world; it is ideal; it does not exist at all. Not so computational functionalists. Presumably the moment of realization occurs when the restricted data that I am receiving tactilely is sufficiently processed up to the point where I (whatever that is!) realize that I should access the ‘lighter’ function and compute the relevant data accordingly. I don’t think this is wrong in its basics. The disagreement is whether we need this realization to be the running of the lighter function, or the actualization of an ideal content. The represtationalist answer runs into some pretty serious difficulties. What is the relation between the representation and the object? Does this representation obtain whether I realize it or not? Then how do I know what it does obtain? What is the relation between myself and this representation? The computational functionalist has to answer these questions. Husserl, on the other hand, does not, at least not anymore than the mathematician does. Finally, the computational functionalist qua representationalist has be committed, I believe, to the experiential plenum: all content is there all at once and in full to/as the mind. But this probably not correct. In the lighter example, phenomenologist qua content externalist can argue that the content of that experience is there through the particular real (reelle) parts of my experience (the smoothness, hardness, room-temperature-ness, etc) but only the latter are really experienced; the lighter as such, the lighter, which is the real content of my experience, is there as a whole, as it were, virtually. Husserl can make sense of this phenomenological fact; the computational functionalist cannot. Hence, the argument here boils down to the following: 1) externalist and reliabilist arguments about semantic, epistemological and experiential content are probably right; 2) computational functionalism, as internalist and representationalist, is incompatible with such externalism; 3) hence, computational functionalism is probably wrong.

Let me say that I can imagine how computational functionalists would respond to these objections, and they would be good responses--unlike the physicalists. So I in no sense pretend that this is knock-down. But I do not need a knock-down argument. I don’t necessarily want to argue that phenomenology is obviously better than these other two, only that it ought to be considered as a serious, if equal, rival.

So what is the phenomenologists’ answer? The contents of the mind are ideal, exhibiting ideal relations. The same is true of mathematics. The rules of the mind exist--if that word is appropriate at all--like the rules of chess exist. Husserl’s insight, I think, was to realize that the sorts of issues he was dealing with earlier in his career--namely, how is it that the rule-like manipulation of symbols, which no ‘intuitive’ understanding need accompany or underwrite, can nonetheless express true mathematical results?--applied to the range of mental states as such, and even further, to the range of ordinary, thoughtless ‘chit-chat’. This is the phenomenon that fascinated Husserl throughout his life; it is the one constant that perdures from the very beginning through the very end and through all the changes; it is, in a sense, the one question all of phenomenology is trying to answer. And it is, finally, simply a damn good question, one that ought to be more central in philosophy of mind, and one which, more than the others, phenomenology gives a good answer for.

In a final post, I will explain more fully what phenomenology is in its own terms, and also explain why some of the more indirect arguments for its moribund status are themselves, truth be told, moribund. Stay tuned.

Continue Reading...

Is Phenomenology Moribund? (Part I)

I think not. Here’s why.

I’ll start with a bold claim: there are only three defensible approaches to the philosophy of mind on the market today: physicalism, computational functionalism, and phenomenology. All three get something quite important right, while none of the three get it all right. You probably have no problem allowing for physicalism and functionalism. You might have a problem with phenomenology. Let me make a case.

First off, I grant that phenomenology is weakest in the area where both functionalism and physicalism are strongest: method. For obvious reasons, physicalism has the benefit of a method as strong as any in the natural sciences. Computational functionalism, for the same reason, has a method as strong as any devised in computer science and proof-logic. These are more or less standardized, more or less exact. One can tell, at least in a general way, when the method has been properly, and when improperly, applied. Phenomenology, alas, has nothing of the sort. Admittedly this is to the great frustration of phenomenologists and nonphenomenologists alike. We know that the phenomenological method involves operations like bracketing, describing, reflecting, reductions, and so on, but these concepts remain vague and just how they go together is, at this point, anyone’s guess. As a friend of mine once nicely put it, the danger with phenomenology is that there doesn’t yet seem to be any recognized criteria by which to police competing descriptions. I think that this is, unfortunately, basically right, and it is something to which serious phenomenologists need to be devoting more of their time.

To say that phenomenology, as yet, enjoys no defined method is only the most drastic way of putting things. Mitigating remarks should be added. More attention needs to be paid to the fact that phenomenology, while new as a specific science, is not a new sort of science. Phenomenology was supposed to be, at least initially, like mathematics. In my opinion, this is one of Husserl’s truly original contributions to philosophy in general and philosophy of mind in particular. So far as I can tell, while a few philosophers seemed to model their philosophy of mind on mathematics (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz), Husserl was probably first to make the modeling explicit. I think when put this way Husserl looks a little less fruity, and a little less wrong. Husserl’s proposal is that we study the contents of the mind similar to how we study numbers, fields, domains, topologies, etc.

Why is this proposal--that we approach the philosophy of mind like we approach mathematics--attractive? This proposal amounts to the claim that we can study the contents of the mind like we study numbers, planes, infinities, sets, and so on. Mathematicians study numbers, topologies, functions, sets, without any clear understanding or broad agreement as to what these things, really, are, or indeed, whether they are. And yet mathematics proceeds more or less on time and in fine fashion while remaining neutral about the ontological status of the objects it studies. In other words, what’s important in mathematics is that our knowledge of these objects is exact, clear and precise, not whether, how or where they are. If Husserl’s right, then we can treat the contents of the mind--Concept and Object, Truth and Proposition, Fact and Law, etc.--in like manner.

Of course, it may be the case that the ontological status of these objects does in fact turn out to influence the integrity of our knowledge about them, but again, this is just as much, and just as little, a problem for phenomenology as it is for mathematics. And no one accuses mathematics of being ‘moribund’ just because there is as yet no general and accepted agreement as to what that status might be. Phenomenology therefore is just as weak, and just as strong, as the science it is modeling itself after, and the same could be said respectively about physicalism and computational functionalism.

In the following post, I'll argue that in fact things stand even better for phenomenology than this. For only a science like mathematics--this will be the argument--could be adequate to the sorts of things mental contents are. Thus, while physicalism and computational functionalism may have more firmly established methods, unfortunately they are of the kind which are intrinsically inadequate to the sorts of objects they purport to study, viz., mental (or 'ideal') contents. And while phenomenology, I grant, as yet does not enjoy broad agreement or acceptance about just what its method ought to be, we do know enough to say that it is the sort of method which, if developed, at least would have a chance of working.

Continue Reading...

Would Husserl Believe in Qualia?

Recently I’ve been trying to work out what Husserl might have thought about qualia. Since I work on Husserl, and since I'm congenitally put off by the notion of qualia, I’ve been trying hard to convince myself that Husserl would also have rejected the idea. I’m now pretty sure that this is right. Here’s one part of my overall case.

There are three reasons why people--both specialists and nonspecialists in Husserl--assume that Husserl was (or would have been) a believer in qualia: his commitments to 1) the irreducibility of consciousness; 2) the immanence of intentional states; and 3) the presence of nonrepresentational content--usually referred to by Husserl as ‘hyletic data’--in experience. I limit my remarks to the third reason because it is the most likely to be of interest to nonHusserlians.

Most defenders of qualia define a quale as a nonrepresentational feature intrinsic to experience and accessible to introspection. Husserl’s (early) notion of hyle seems to fall under this category. From the beginning Husserl rejected the notion that sensations (either of the Humean, or of the Moorean/Russellian sort) were primary objects of intentional consciousness. This was an essential consequence of Brentano’s discovery of intentionality: the objects of our experience go beyond those experiences themselves. (Phenomenologists refer to this as the ‘transcendence’ of intentional consciousness; it is one reason why no analysis of the actual contents or parts of a mental state, either in terms of phenomenal content--eg red patches, high tones, rough feels--or physical states--eg neural states--will ever get at the contents conscious states are conscious of--a special method is needed for that, namely phenomenology). Hence, sensations might be essential means by which I am aware of perceptual objects, but they are not themselves the objects of which I am aware. Still, in Husserl’s early theory (primarily in Logical Investigations), raw sense-data are interpreted through intentional, objectivating acts as presenting perceptual objects. This picture is broadly Kantian. When we analyze any given experience, we find that there is an intuitional, or sensory component, and then a conceptual framework which, when applied to that sensory content, ‘animates’ that content into the representation of an object. Hence, such sensory content is not by itself representational. Yet when we reflect upon our experiences the presence of such nonrepresentational content is evident. Thus, there seem to be for Husserl nonrepresentational features intrinsic to every experience and evident to introspection. Husserl calls this stuff hyle, but it seems very much like what is now referred to as qualia.

Now, qualia theories of all sorts are committed to the following proposition: there can be a change in the sensory or phenomenal features of an experience without there being any change in the representational content of that experience. For instance, as I stare at a tomato, the particular red hue of the tomato might alter some, and though this alteration is a change in my experience, I am still seeing the same tomato, Thus, despite changes in the sensory components of my experience the representational content of that experience has not changed. I suspect that when fully fleshed out, even Husserl’s earlier theory would not support this claim. That is to say, even given Husserl’s concept of hyle, I suspect that changes in hyletic data would for Husserl always signal corresponding changes, however trite, in the representational content of that experience. But this exegetical claim is not one I am interested in defending here, and that is because Husserl ends up rejecting this picture altogether and for good reason.

In Husserl’s later theories he replaces the concept of hyletic data with the concept of affective unities. Affective unities are so called because they are passive unities, aspects of an experience not constituted by ‘spontaneous’ acts. (This distinction may seem troublesome to some, but really, it is more or less just how McDowell and Sellars understand the difference between perception and judgment). Husserl began to make this switch around the time that he began to concentrate seriously on the phenomenology of time consciousness. Obviously I am not willing to go over that entire development here, though suffice it to note that an upshot of that analysis is the rejection of even the notional coherence of a discrete, isolatable, self-contained ‘now’ point; all temporal consciousness (and hence, all perceptual consciousness) essentially involves a dynamic field of retentions and protentions by means of which consciousness of the present is constituted. But if there is no discrete now, there is also no discrete sense-datum (because there is no discreteness period). Second, he argues that these affective unities are kinaesthetically (or ‘enactively’) realized. A battery of stimuli to the sense organs does not constitute perceptual experience. Perceiving the environment rather is knowing how to navigate within the environment in response to changes in that environment, and knowing what changes to expect. ‘Knowing’ in this case is obviously a sort of know-how, and can still be considered ‘passive’ only in the sense that no conscious judgments need be involved.

Back to Qualia: If the notion of affective unities in perception is coherent and correct, they make appeals to brute sense-qualities of experience (the blueness of the ocean, the sting of a needle prick) pretty incoherent. There simply is no brute, raw sense data (and hence, nothing that it is like to have such sense experiences). The kinaesthetic theory of perception, on the other hand, manages to get what one wants from a qualia theory without the qualia. Despite their mysticism, qualia theories do get right that there is an important difference between the appearing of an object and the object that appears. They then try to explain this difference by distinguishing between the representational content of an experience (the object that appears) and its phenomenal qualities (the appearing of the object). But consider this same distsinction from within the kinaesthetic framework: modes of presentation (the appearing of an object) are a function of one’s relation to the object. A coffee can appears rectangular from a direct horizontal angle, then appears circular as I raise my gaze to over top of it. As I move, I am only conscious of the same coffee can, and I do not suppose that it mysteriously morphs from rectangular to circular. This is because (to borrow a notion from Alva Noë) my experiences do not only represent objects, but they also represent my relations to objects, where I am--bodily--in respect to the object in the environment. These relations, let me iterate, are real; they really exist, and my experience really presents them. Thus, being presentational, even the features of an experience which are not part of its representational factual content are still representational. And this obviously contradicts the fundamental proposition of qualia theory: for while a change in my relative position towards an object would change the sensory content of that experience without changing the representational content, it will most certainly (by definition) affect the presentational content of my relation to that object. Thus, the kinaesthetic theory does not have any room for a change in sensory content not amounting to a change in representational content. Thus, it would be wrong to interpret the appearing of the object as opposed to the object which appears as describing qualia.

I realize of course that I have hardly made any arguments in defense of these views. But that was not my point. My point rather was only to make the case that Husserl, especially in his later works, develops a notion of experience which has no place for qualia. IF Husserl does indeed develop in the direction I claim, and IF indeed the theory in this direction both gets rid of qualia while managing to explain the single meager thing qualia theory gets right, then I have made my case. That's all.

Continue Reading...