John Barresi Consciousness and Intentionality Abstract: My goal is to try to understand the intentionality of con- sciousness from a naturalistic perspective. My basic methodological assumption is that embodied agents, through their sensory-motor, affective, and cognitive activities directed at objects, engage in inten- tional relations with these objects. Furthermore, I assume that inten- tional relations can be viewed from a first- and a third-person perspective. What is called primary consciousness is the first-person perspective of the agent engaged in a current intentional relation. While primary consciousness posits an implicit ‘subject’ or ‘self,’ it is primarily oriented toward its ‘object.’ Acts of primary consciousness have only ephemeral existence, but when such acts are reflected upon by the agent reflexive or secondary conscious knowledge of oneself, as an embodied agent engaged in an intentional relation, is consti- tuted. I show how these ideas relate to the understanding of inten- tional relations in human development and how they make possible adult understanding of philosophical notions of intentionality. In common sense usage intentionality occurs when an individual engages in some activity or pursues a goal with some conscious inten- tion or purpose. On this view what is important about intentionality is that the actor is aware of the purpose or goal of his or her activity and represents the self as pursuing that goal. In philosophical usage intentionality refers to the ‘aboutness’ or directedness property of mental states. This is a more basic notion, and while all mental states are said to have intentionality in the philosophical sense, only some have intentionality in the manner of common sense usage. Brentano Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14, No. 1–2, 2007, pp. 77–93 Correspondence: John Barresi, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4J1, Canada. j[email protected]. Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -- not for reproduction
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John Barresi
Consciousness andIntentionality
Abstract: My goal is to try to understand the intentionality of con-
sciousness from a naturalistic perspective. My basic methodological
assumption is that embodied agents, through their sensory-motor,
affective, and cognitive activities directed at objects, engage in inten-
tional relations with these objects. Furthermore, I assume that inten-
tional relations can be viewed from a first- and a third-person
perspective. What is called primary consciousness is the first-person
perspective of the agent engaged in a current intentional relation.
While primary consciousness posits an implicit ‘subject’or ‘self,’ it is
primarily oriented toward its ‘object.’ Acts of primary consciousness
have only ephemeral existence, but when such acts are reflected upon
by the agent reflexive or secondary conscious knowledge of oneself,
as an embodied agent engaged in an intentional relation, is consti-
tuted. I show how these ideas relate to the understanding of inten-
tional relations in human development and how they make possible
adult understanding of philosophical notions of intentionality.
In common sense usage intentionality occurs when an individual
engages in some activity or pursues a goal with some conscious inten-
tion or purpose. On this view what is important about intentionality is
that the actor is aware of the purpose or goal of his or her activity and
represents the self as pursuing that goal. In philosophical usage
intentionality refers to the ‘aboutness’ or directedness property of
mental states. This is a more basic notion, and while all mental states
are said to have intentionality in the philosophical sense, only some
have intentionality in the manner of common sense usage. Brentano
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14, No. 1–2, 2007, pp. 77–93
Correspondence:John Barresi, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NovaScotia, B3H 4J1, Canada. [email protected].
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005For personal use only -- not for reproduction
(1874) suggested that intentionality in the philosophical sense is the
essential property that distinguishes mental from physical phenom-
ena. Unlike physical events, mental events refer to, or are about,
objects or states of affairs that may or may not exist. The present arti-
cle focuses on the philosophical rather than common sense under-
standing of intentionality, though the common sense usage will appear
later on.
The particular concern of this paper is how to account for our
human ability to think about mental states as intentional. How is it that
we can think of our selves as organisms with minds that are distinct
from the objects we think about? How is it that we can even think of
our selves as purely thinking beings composed entirely of a stream of
intentional mental states independent of our bodies? The answer that I
will give is a naturalistic one. My goal is to explain how organisms,
such as we are, develop an understanding of mental life in general,
which includes an understanding of how they themselves and others
have a mental life that can be distinguished from their embodied
organic involvement in the world. This story will be one of beings
with capacities that allow them to develop a view of themselves as
beings with mental states of an intentional nature. It will also be a
story of the social origins of self-understanding. But before getting
into the story we must look more closely at what we mean by
intentionality in the philosophical sense.
The philosophical notion of intentionality initiated by Brentano has
been developed in two major approaches: the logicist or linguistic
approach and the phenomenological approach. The logicist approach
focuses on the representational aspect of mental states and of sym-
bolic language, and relates the two. On this view, intentionality
involves representations (‘propositional attitudes’) with propositional
content. This approach was an outgrowth of an attempt to understand
natural language and its capacity to represent truth in terms of ‘true’
propositions. The logicist notion was initiated in the work of Frege
(1918), who tried to develop a way of converting natural language
into a logical language. Subsequent theorists including Russell (1940)
and Fodor (1975; 1981) have suggested that natural language, and
also certain mental states, can be viewed as compositional and repre-
sentational, and that there is a logical ‘language of thought’ wherein
mental states can relate to each other in a manner similar to sentences
of a language. On this view, mental states are a world of their own,
separate from, yet symbolically representing, states of the world, truly
or falsely, and/or defining conditions, the satisfaction of which would
make them true. Fodor (1980), in an article in which he pursued this
78 J. BARRESI
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representational approach to its extreme, suggested that scientific psy-
chologists should adopt ‘methodological solipsism’ when investigat-
ing mental phenomena, and avoid any attempt to develop a
naturalistic psychology of embodied agents directly engaged in the
world.
The parallels between language and thought developed in the
logicist tradition of understanding intentionality have been productive
in developing computational models of mind (mainly serial computa-
tional models). However, a problem arose in how to connect these rep-
resentational states of mind to the world - what has been called the
symbol-grounding problem (Harnad, 1990). This has led in recent
years to increased interest in embodied approaches to mind (e.g.,
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