ThinkBlog

Roderick M. Chisholm, “Intentional Inexistence” (1957)

1.
“It would be an easy matter, of course, to invent a psychological terminology enabling us to describe perceiving, taking, and assuming in sentences which are not intentional. Instead of saying, for example, that a man takes something to be a deer, we could say `His perceptual environment is deer-inclusive.’ But in so doing, we are using technical terms…. And unless we can re-express the deer-sentence once again […] as a nonintentional sentence containing no such technical terms, [the sentence] will conform to our present version of Brentano’s thesis.”

2.
Chisholm is attempting to make a nuanced defense of Franz Brentano’s thesis that the characteristic shared by all mental phenomena, and by no physical phenomena, is intentional inexistence: that when referring to mental acts, we must refer to them as intentional, and not merely in physiological terms. Not only is behavioristic language about reinforcement and physiological processes in the mind too technical for Chisholm, it is also inaccurate because of its deficiency in explaining how perception actually works from a the standpoint of the subject to whom mental phenomena are being presented.

It seems to Chisholm that the only way around using intentional language, especially when describing something about how a person perceives an object in his or her environment, is to use needlessly complex and technical phraseology that does not capture the full meaning of what it is to perceive something. Furthermore, an explanation of perception that does not include intentionality is crippled, according to Chisholm, when explaining how we can take an efficient cause of a presentation to be something that it is not—as in a case, for instance, wherein the man mentioned above could mistake the deer for another animal.

3.
Chisholm begins his article by asking whether Brentano’s intentionality thesis with regard to mental phenomena can also be true of assumptions, and then proceeds to (at least rhetorically) attempt to disprove Brentano’s theory using other peoples’ objections and examples after explaining more fully the terminology Brentano himself was using. For Brentano, as for Chisholm, attitudes and beliefs and other sorts of mental phenomena “intentionally contain an object in themselves,” such that the object presented to consciousness need not exist in real life: I can have a belief about unicorns, or the state of a substance on Twin Earth, or a wish for something that never comes to pass. However, physical (nonpsychological, as Chisholm says) phenomena cannot intentionally contain objects: in order for me to kick a ball, there must necessarily be a ball for me to kick, and so forth.

Chisholm argues that we can talk about states of mind or psychological “directedness” by way of certain types of sentences; in this way he clarifies and re-states Brentano’s original thesis through statements such as, “We may now say that a compound declarative sentence is intentional if and only if one or more of its component sentences is intentional.” Various psychologists and philosophers have tried to re-state the ways of talking about mental phenomena apart from intentionality in various ways, one of which is exemplified by Ayer’s objection that “to think of” something is “to be conscious of the symbols which designate” that thing, but Chisholm says that even this is intentional, since by saying X is designated by Y, we posit nothing about the ontological status or nature of X. Other objections, according to Chisholm, always inevitably refer back to intentional bases, and so assumptions, being mental, must also be intentional.

The overarching point for which Chisholm is attempting to build a case is that in order to describe psychological phenomena, we must use sentences and language that is necessarily intentional, lest we confuse the issues with overly technical language, or by not capturing all there is to a mental act. We can, and according to Chisholm, should, describe physical phenomena from the standpoint of non-intentional sentences; but this is insufficient for psychological language, since intentionality is not reducible to the physical. Therefore, intentional language is the only kind of language adequate for discussing matters of psychology and of the objects of cognition.

Reference: Chisholm, R. M. (1957). “Intentional inexistence.” From Perceiving: A Philosophical Study. New York: Cornell UP.

Roderick M. Chisholm, “Intentional Inexistence” (1957)

1.
“It would be an easy matter, of course, to invent a psychological terminology enabling us to describe perceiving, taking, and assuming in sentences which are not intentional. Instead of saying, for example, that a man takes something to be a deer, we could say `His perceptual environment is deer-inclusive.’ But in so doing, we are using technical terms…. And unless we can re-express the deer-sentence once again […] as a nonintentional sentence containing no such technical terms, [the sentence] will conform to our present version of Brentano’s thesis.”

2.
Chisholm is attempting to make a nuanced defense of Franz Brentano’s thesis that the characteristic shared by all mental phenomena, and by no physical phenomena, is intentional inexistence: that when referring to mental acts, we must refer to them as intentional, and not merely in physiological terms. Not only is behavioristic language about reinforcement and physiological processes in the mind too technical for Chisholm, it is also inaccurate because of its deficiency in explaining how perception actually works from a the standpoint of the subject to whom mental phenomena are being presented.

It seems to Chisholm that the only way around using intentional language, especially when describing something about how a person perceives an object in his or her environment, is to use needlessly complex and technical phraseology that does not capture the full meaning of what it is to perceive something. Furthermore, an explanation of perception that does not include intentionality is crippled, according to Chisholm, when explaining how we can take an efficient cause of a presentation to be something that it is not—as in a case, for instance, wherein the man mentioned above could mistake the deer for another animal.

3.
Chisholm begins his article by asking whether Brentano’s intentionality thesis with regard to mental phenomena can also be true of assumptions, and then proceeds to (at least rhetorically) attempt to disprove Brentano’s theory using other peoples’ objections and examples after explaining more fully the terminology Brentano himself was using. For Brentano, as for Chisholm, attitudes and beliefs and other sorts of mental phenomena “intentionally contain an object in themselves,” such that the object presented to consciousness need not exist in real life: I can have a belief about unicorns, or the state of a substance on Twin Earth, or a wish for something that never comes to pass. However, physical (nonpsychological, as Chisholm says) phenomena cannot intentionally contain objects: in order for me to kick a ball, there must necessarily be a ball for me to kick, and so forth.

Chisholm argues that we can talk about states of mind or psychological “directedness” by way of certain types of sentences; in this way he clarifies and re-states Brentano’s original thesis through statements such as, “We may now say that a compound declarative sentence is intentional if and only if one or more of its component sentences is intentional.” Various psychologists and philosophers have tried to re-state the ways of talking about mental phenomena apart from intentionality in various ways, one of which is exemplified by Ayer’s objection that “to think of” something is “to be conscious of the symbols which designate” that thing, but Chisholm says that even this is intentional, since by saying X is designated by Y, we posit nothing about the ontological status or nature of X. Other objections, according to Chisholm, always inevitably refer back to intentional bases, and so assumptions, being mental, must also be intentional.

The overarching point for which Chisholm is attempting to build a case is that in order to describe psychological phenomena, we must use sentences and language that is necessarily intentional, lest we confuse the issues with overly technical language, or by not capturing all there is to a mental act. We can, and according to Chisholm, should, describe physical phenomena from the standpoint of non-intentional sentences; but this is insufficient for psychological language, since intentionality is not reducible to the physical. Therefore, intentional language is the only kind of language adequate for discussing matters of psychology and of the objects of cognition.

Reference: Chisholm, R. M. (1957). “Intentional inexistence.” From Perceiving: A Philosophical Study. New York: Cornell UP.