The philosophical and cognitivist project of naturalizing the mind represents undoubtedly one of the most pressing challenges Husserl’s transcendental theory of consciousness is facing today. It is my contention that the future of Husserlian phenomenology is largely dependent on its success in contributing to the epistemological clarification of the very metaphysics underlying contemporary debates on naturalism in philosophy of mind.
Now, if there is minimal consensus within the highly diverging naturalist camps, it is the assumption that the naturalization of intentionality will in the long run provide the least troublesome or most plausible route to a full-fledged naturalistic theory of the mind. Recent attempts to naturalize intentional consciousness dominantly center upon two lines of argumentation: namely, (semantic) internalism and externalism.
In what follows I propose to face the issue of naturalizing intentionality by laying bare the common metaphysical implications of these two prima facie opposed positions from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenology. The guiding idea of my paper is that both internalistic and externalistic accounts of intentionality work on the common background assumption of scientific realism. I shall argue that Husserl’s transcendental theory of intentional consciousness undermines the metaphysical legitimacy of scientific realism and, by the very same token, the cognitivist standard opposition of internalism and externalism in view of intentional content.
Internalizing or Externalizing Intentional Content?
To begin with, there is not only a notorious discord concerning the question of how to specify the verificational-criteria for determining whether the entity to be naturalized does at all constitute an epistemologically autonomous property; even amongst those who endorse a realistic stance towards intentional states (1) there are fundamental disagreements on what a successful naturalization of intentionality would exactly amount to. Does it suffice to naturalize intentional content? If so, what would a naturalistic theory of intentional content have to explain? Or, is there actually more to the problem of naturalizing intentionality than intentional content alone?
I believe that in the context of the internalism-externalism debate the issue typically comes down to the problem of how to adresss the following two correlative concerns:
1) How is the very constitution of intentional states possible? Or to put it in the manner of intentional realism: how could the epistemic reality of intentional states possibly be captured within a naturalistic ontology, conceived as a continuous matrix of causal-fuctional interactions?
2) What determines the contents of these states? Accordingly, what (internal and/or external) properties are responsible for the individuation of intentional states?
Following common usage, roughly, what internalism holds is that the relation that intentional states entertain to their objects is determined by the internal function of the contents of these states. Thus, according to this view, the individuation of intentional states (their being about this or that specific object) is due to the intra-mentally fixed representational structure of their contents. To make things more complicated, internally construed contents are said to be narrow, if their reference to an intentional object is solely determined by the functional organization of an individual. On this picture, semantic internalism can be regarded as a position either entailing epistemological realism or anti-realism, depending on how one conceives of the relation between mental representations and external reality. One possibility is to construe this relation as merely epistemic; the other is to adhere to a logical/conceptual or a foundational/causal dependence. But in either case, internalism is intrinsically bound to hold what H. Putnam has critically labelled “methodological solipsism.” (2) Methodological solipsism is the assumption that all one need grasp in order to know the properties of the state of affairs to which an individual subject refers to is the organization of the inner mental representations mirrored on the functional level of the brain of that individual subject. Roughly, this is the view adopted by prototypical internalists like J. Fodor (3) as a heuristic research strategy for a computational modelling of the mind.
Externalism, in contrast, can be conceived in one of the two ways: first, as the view that narrow, intentional contexts are not sufficient for fixing intentional objects, for reference is essentially co-determined in the intersubjective/social process of constituting meaning. Meaning in this construal is usually termed broad content. Alternatively, one can — à la McDowell (4) — define externalism in a more radical line of interpretation (and perhaps in a way more sympathetic to a Husserlian perspective (5)) as the view that content, construed narrowly, has no functional role in determining reference whatsoever. For the radical externalist, meaning, conceived as broad content, is originally embedded in the (real) world to which it refers, just as the subject, the bearer of broad content, is embedded in the intersubjective world of which it is a constituent. Both externalist accounts of broad content imply a version of epistemological realism, couched basically in a common-sense realist ontology. In a nutshell, although meaning is intrinsically related to the divergent conceptual sets of the referring subjects (socially, environmentally, etc.), reference in terms of the extension of meaning is ontologically not dependent on the respective conceptual frameworks at a given time.
What follows from these accounts for the project of naturalizing intentionality is this: if only we can reach a purely naturalistic description of intentional content (i.e., to a description which makes no reference to the intentional idiom, be it causal, functional, teleological, etc.), then the distinctive feature of the mental, namely, its “epistemic perspectivity” (6) subsequently can be fixed in naturalistic terms.
Given this brief outline of internalism and externalism, it is clear that both ways of characterizing the role meaning plays in determining reference share the assumption that the representational content of intentional acts is key to ascribing semantically and epistemologically evaluable intentional states to an organism at all. The point I wish to highlight here is that both models of the intentionality reduce the problem of the constitution of the epistemologically relevant properties of intentional states to the question of how to spell out the representational function of intentional content. (7) The epistemological idea that lies at the heart of this reduction might thus be called representational verficationism. It is the idea of representational verificationism that overtly or covertly governs all naturalistic attempts to explain the intentional correlation between mind and world in terms of empirically determining the objective properties of reference. Yet, as far as I see, the very possibility of representational verificationism is based on the ontology of scientific realism (8) — an ontology whose legitimacy was convincingly challenged by transcendental phenomenology about a hundred years ago.
The Phenomenological Test for Naturalizing Intentionality
The general epistemological task of phenomenology is to elucidate the conditions of possibility of the very givenness of an objective entity for a subjective being. For Husserl, intentionality marks the basic first-personal epistemic structure of this givenness. Hence, intentionality is not an internal property of consciousness amongst its other cognitive properties (like, e.g., attentiveness), but the hallmark of its very phenomenal mode of being. Intentionality is the overall dispositional state or feature of consciousness as such.
On the phenomenological account — in contrast to the cognitivist paradigm — the question concerning the constitution of intentional states is not: “what makes a representation to an internal and consequently to a mental representation?” In fact, within the metaphysical framework of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, this question is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. For Husserl, the question of the constitution of intentionality cannot be a matter of determining which properties (internal or external) give consciousness the very function of referring to a transcendent object. A phenomenological theory of the constitution of intentional consciousness is not to be confused with the quasi-inductive method of explaining the constitution of intentional states by determining the representational function of intentional contents. Just as for Husserl the referential function of a meaningful expression is descriptively not deducible from any single property of consciousness other than its intrinsic intentionality, (9) so also the function of being intentional is a descriptively ultimate property of being conscious of something. In short: intentionality constitutes the openness of the mind to the world of meanings. Or more properly: intentional consciousness is nothing but the phenomenological title for this openness. The fact that the world appears to the mind means that the world bears objective sense for a subject.
Phenomenologically viewed, there are two levels to the immanence of mental states, which must be distinguished: namely, the intentional immanence of — broadly speaking — objectifying representations and the real (reell) immanence of non-representational phenomenal states. According to Husserl, when performing an intentional act or simply being in an intentional state, we are not directed to the intentional act nor to the intentional — sensual, perceptual or signitive — contents the acts bestow with objective meaning, but to the intentional object itself. (10) It is only by virtue of performing the phenomenological reflexion that the real immanent field of the noetic act-components of intentionality is unfolded. So we might well say that the “intentional stance,” that is the ability to reflect thematically on the intentional object as intended by the act, is first brought to the fore by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. However, the core of the the phenomenal aspect of intentional consciousness, the living through the experience of something functions unthematically and prereflectively in every conscious act — independently of whether we perform the reduction or not.
Thus, what has to be markedly distinguished within every intentional state is the relational mode of object directedness and the non-relational mode of performing this relational direction. The latter mode of intentional consciousness, the experiential practicing of intentionality, is an intransitive consciousness of one’s being in an intentional state. Its intrinsic subjective character cannot in principle be totally captured by a third-personal description. It is true that every consciously performed intentional act can be reflectively turned into an intentional object of a succeeding higher-order intentional act. But what is thus objectified are solely the properties of the relational contents of the act, not the phenomenal aspect of actually performing the intentional relation. (11)
The crucial mistake of both semantic internalism and externalism is to separate the two intrinsically co-relative aspects of intentional consciousness. What has to be emphasized in connection with the internalism-externalism debate is that intentional content must not be internalistically conceived as the result of a merely formal and syntactical interplay between the different “noematic levels,” (12) but rather as the result of the interplay of the experiential horizons in which the experiencing subject is constitutively embedded. (13)
In the given context, Husserl’s transcendental-idealist stance is then best captured as the epistemological position alternative to the two extremes of either – externalistically – naturalizing (14) or — internalistically — “over-intentionalizing” the phenomenal “region of sense.” (15) Husserl shows not only that the very attempt to naturalize the phenomenal level of intentionality is fundamentally flawed; he is also well aware that this does not mean that the objective space of sense in which the subject is embedded is exhaustedly characterised by being purely intentional. For, as Husserl succinctly points out: “The being of living through an experience is not the being of an object.” (16) Yet it is precisely this fine-grained phenomenological distinction that the fundamental epistemological distinction between first- and third-person-perspective is based on and which in turn represents the very test for naturalizing intentional consciousness.
To conclude, the lesson to be drawn from the phenomenological account of consciousness for the specific project of naturalizing intentionality is this: if naturalizing means to provide an explanatory framework of the relation between mind and world capable of a complete integration into the realistic ontology of the natural sciences, then the naturalization of intentional consciousness must fail in principle. One can neither naturalize consciousness by simply internalizing the properties of intentional objects nor by simply externalizing the properties of phenomenal experiences. So if there is more to the concept of intentional consciousness than what is contained inside or outside the head — that is, if there is more to intentionality than intentional content — we had better stick to results obtained by transcendental phenomenology thus far, instead of taking the project of naturalizing consciousness for granted. (†)
Notes
(1) Cf., e.g., Fodor, J., A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1990).
(2) Putnam, H., “The Meaning of Meaning” in H. Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975): 215-271.
(3) Fodor, J., Representations, Philosophical Essays on the Foundation of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1981).
(4) McDowell, J., “Putnam on Mind and Meaning” in J. McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP 1998 [1992]): 275-289.
(5) Cf. Shim, M.K., “The duality of non-conceptual content in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception” in Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 4 (2) (2005): 209-229.
(6) Cf. Burge, T., “Individualism and the Mental” in Philosophy of Mind, Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. by D. Chalmers (New York/Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979): 597-607, p. 599.
(7) Cf. Davies, M., “Externalism and Experience” in The Nature of Consciousness, ed. by N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press 1997 [1992]): 309-327.
(8) Cf. Putnam, H., “Three Kinds of Scientific Realism” in H. Putnam, Words and Life, ed. by J. Conant (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard UP, 1994).
(9) Cf. Husserl, E., Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre, Sommersemester 1908 [Husserliana XXVI] (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Nijhoff, 1987), p. 30.
(10) Cf. Husserl, E., Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, II. Teil [Husserliana XIX/2] (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1984 [1901]), p. 399.
(11) Cf. Rinofner-Kreidl, S., “Representationalism and Beyond, A Phenomenological Critique of Thomas Metzinger’s Self-Model Theory” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2) (2004): 88-108.
(12) Cf. Husserl, E., Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie [Husserliana III/1] (Den Haag: Nijhoff 1971 [1913]), §§ 100-101.
(13) Cf. Zahavi, D., “Husserl’s Noema and the Internalism/Externalism Debate” in Inquiry 47 (1) (2004): 42-66.
(14) Cf., e.g., Dretske, F., Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1995).
(15) Husserl, E., Formale und transzendentale Logik, Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft [Husserliana XVII] (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1974), § 48.
(16) Husserl, E. (1901), op. cit., p. 669.
(†) This paper is part of a research project supported by the DOC-Program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.