The School of Alexius Meinong

Liliana Albertazzi, Dale Jacquette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351882255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book presents an historical and conceptual reconstruction of the theories developed by Meinong and a group of philosophers and experimental psychologists in Graz at the turn of the 19th century. Adhering closely to original texts, the contributors explore Meinong's roots in the school of Brentano, complex theories such as the theory of intentional reference and direct reference, and ways of developing philosophy which are closely bound up with the sciences, particularly psychology. Providing a faithful reconstruction of both Meinong's contributions to science and the school that arose from his thought, this book shows how the theories of the Graz school raise the possibility of engaging in the scientific metaphysics and ontology that for so long have been considered off limits.

Part I

Introduction

1 Meinong in His and Our Times

LILIANA ALBERTAZZI, DALE JACQUETTE and ROBERTO POLI

Onset

Various considerations prompted the idea of undertaking this historical and conceptual reconstruction of the theories developed in Graz at the turn of the nineteenth century by a group of philosophers and experimental psychologists led by Alexius Meinong. The majority of the contributions to this book adhere closely to the original texts in order to provide a reliable account of difficult and complex themes, while also seeking to reconstruct their vocabulary and conceptual framework. Nevertheless, the purpose of the work is mainly theoretical, not historical.

The intention is, firstly, to propose for contemporary debate a way of ‘doing’ philosophy which was closely bound up with the sciences of its time, and in particular with psychology. Secondly, the aim is to present conceptions developed in Brentano’s theory of intentional reference today viewed mainly as the analytic reduction of a semantic theory of intention-ality.¹ Thirdly, the book starts from the conviction that a theory of direct reference, in its variants developed by Brentano’s pupils and today put forward by certain sectors of the cognitive sciences and research in artificial intelligence,² finds substantial matter for reflection in the theories developed by Meinong’s school in Graz.³

The affinities between the exigencies and problems of the contemporary cognitive sciences and the intellectual climate at the beginning of the last century amount to much more than mere cultural resemblance. At the end of the 1900s, for psychology and philosophy, laboratories of experimental psychology constituted something similar to what those of the contemporary cognitive sciences constitute for psychophysics and theory of mind. Then as now, science and philosophy have an essential feature in common: the interest in cognitive processes distinctive of theory of mind, episte-mology, and theory of language. At the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, concepts such as ‘evidence,’ ‘content,’ ‘act’ or ‘object’ were discussed in epistemology, in ontology, in logic and in psychology, given that the dichotomy between theory of knowledge and formal (or better, formalized) theory had not yet arisen. Subsequently, following the ‘turn’ of the 1930s, the more strictly psychological aspects of both philosophical and scientific reflection disappeared from the majority of disciplines, and they have only reappeared in the last twenty years with the growth of the cognitive sciences.⁴

Fourthly, the theories of the Graz school again raise the possibility of engaging in the scientific metaphysics and ontology that for so long have been considered ‘off limits;’ and this in itself constitutes a major intellectual challenge.

But what was it that happened a hundred years ago in a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was of such interest and singularity that it arouses the interest of contemporary reflection? And why does Meinong’s school constitute such a fundamental passage in the development of the theory of intentional reference?

Intentional Reference

When in 1874 Brentano introduced the notion of intentional reference (intentionale Beziehung) in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he could not have foreseen all the consequences that would ensue from that particular, and so ambiguous, passage in his book. And yet it sparked a surprising intellectual debate that would involve Brentano himself for the rest of his life, many of his contemporaries, and especially the best of his pupils who inherited his intellectual legacy.⁵

All subsequent developments of Brentano’s descriptive psychology—in Stumpfs eidetics, Marty’s conceptual semantics, Husserlian phenomenology, Meinong’s theory of objects, the logico-philosophical school of Lvov-Warsaw, the two branches of Gestalt—centred, in fact, on one key concept, that of intentional presentation (intentionale Vorstellung). In other words, one can re-read ‘Brentano’s school’ in its entirety as a painstaking endeavor to construct a variety of modern realism from essentially cognitive phenomena (presentations, judgements, feelings).⁶

But what was it that induced a neo-Aristotelian like Brentano, who had devoted his early works to reinterpreting Aristotle’s metaphysics and theory of categories, to concern himself with questions debated by the psychologists of the time, and even by experimental psychologists?

Brentano’s re-reading of Aristotle’s table of categories, mediated by the Aristotelian theory of sensation,⁷ had confronted him with the problem of founding a realist metaphysics. He started by addressing the following questions: What is the role of imagery (phantasia) in the construction of empirical reality? Are the objects of sensation external or internal to the representation? And, specifically, how does the concept of ‘object’ develop out of the structure of the perceptive or representational continuum?

When analyzing Aristotle’s doctrine of common faculty (koinè aîsthe-sis), Brentano reached the conclusion that the objects of the senses are internal objects. He writes in his book The Psychology of Aristotle as follows:

External objects (Objecte) are not its [of the common faculty] object (Gegenstand). Because the differences among sensations stand in a relation analogous to the differences among objects, then necessarily apparent in the differences among the former are also the differences among the latter, with the consequence that the distinction among heterogeneous objects of sense can be related to the faculty of that sense… None of the contradictions that this assumption may generate are really produced by it; the assumption does not in fact entail either that the sense which distinguishes among heterogeneous objects shares the same proper object with the other senses, or that more than one proper object pertains to it. Its proper object is solely sensations, just as colours are the proper object of sight; but perceiving that we see whiteness and taste sweetness, and distinguishing these sensations, teaches us at the same time the analogous difference between whiteness and sweetness themselves.⁸

Thus, Brentano’s re-reading of Aristotle’s classic texts brought him to the problem of psychophysics, which in those years was subject to experimental analysis by, amongst others, J. Müller, Wundt, Weber, and Fechner.

In particular, Miiller’s theory of specific energies stated that it is not external stimuli that are perceived but the contents of the nerve fibers, these being signs of transcendent objects. Brentano went a step further by considering the physiological content of the fibres to be psychologically modified in the structure of intentional reference as an attribute of the subject. In this way he offered a new interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of inherence, and asserted that psychic phenomena could not be reduced to physiological factors alone.

Brentano was also one of the first critics of the Weber-Fechner law, according to which the intensity of sensations was a function of the intensity of their stimuli. He pointed out that the law did not resolve a fundamental problem of psychophysics, namely that the difference among sensations did not coincide with the perception of that difference. As to the latter he asked whether it was quantitative in nature (like the difference between the extensions of two surfaces) or qualitative (like the difference between two shades of red). Moreover, was the perception of difference relative (i) to the underlying processes of apprehension or (ii) to their contents! Did it relate, that is to say, to the ‘seeing’ or to what is ‘seen,’ i.e. to the correlates ‘red,’ ‘dark,’ ‘tall,’ and so on? Brentano finally observed that the Weber-Fechner law did not define the actual nature of sensations: did they belong to the physiological level, to the phenomenal level, and/or to both? And he also inquired whether sensations were phenomenally wholly devoid of cognitive integrations and representative elements.⁹

These questions provided the grounding for Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, a first attempt to construct a theory of direct reference without it being necessary to postulate reductionist hypotheses, or in other words, without having to relate psychic phenomena to physical or physiological ones. Set in this context, Brentano’s work, despite its eminently theoretical character, can also be read as a contribution to the psychophysical debate of the time.

In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, after specifying the nature of psychic phenomena or presentations (Vorstellungen) as acts of psychic energy (which may originate either in sensation or in the fantasy, both of which are internal presentations), Brentano identified their essential characteristic as directedness towards an object of some kind. As he writes in the celebrated passage mentioned earlier:

Every psychic phenomenon is characterized by what the medieval scholastics termed the intentional (i.e. mental) in/existence of an object and which I shall call, albeit using expressions not devoid of ambiguity, reference to a content, directedness towards an object (Objectum) (which should not be taken to be real), or immanent objectivity. Every psychic phenomenon contains something in itself as an object (Gegenstand), although each of them does not do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is accepted or rejected, in love something is loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, etc.¹⁰

Brentano was aware from the outset of an intrinsic ambiguity in this formulation which was exacerbated by the medieval implications of the term ‘intentional.’¹¹ In fact, in 1874 the act of presentation is simultaneously defined as:

1. reference to a content (Inhalt)’,
2. directedness to an object (Objectum) or immanent objectuality, which may not necessarily be effectively existent;
3. containing something in itself as an object (Gegenstand).

Although his theory underwent subsequent developments, Brentano always preserved its assumption that psychic phenomena, like a seeing, a feeling, a hearing, an imagining, and so on, besides possessing intentional existence in the sense that they are mentally directed towards an object, are really, effectively (wirklich) existent, and that it is this feature that essentially distinguishes them from physical phenomena, which for Brentano are mediated, and not evident, contents.

Besides their reference to something as object, psychic phenomena are also characterized by the fact that:

1. they lack spatial extension (in the physical sense);
2. they are governed solely by inner perception’,
3. they are always perceived as units (though not elementary ones);
4. they are evident.

Turning to physical phenomena (like a heard sound, a seen colour, an imagined something, etc.), Brentano maintained that these can be considered solely as contents (and not as objects) of psychic phenomena. Consequently, the authentic objects of psychology are only psychic phenomena in the sense of acts of presentation or effective states.

On these premises, according to Brentano, representation is wholly internal, although it is based on acts of real perception of the physical world. The acts of intentional presentation indicate that ‘something (etwas) manifests itself psychologically’ to consciousness and has an ontological ground, like the elements that underpin particular s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title page
• Copy Right Page
• Content Page
• Foreword
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Mates and Pupils
• Part III: Topics in Meinongian Philosophy
• Index of Names