The Life of the Mind

An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism

Gregory McCulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415266222
• eBook ISBN: 9781134501090
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

The Life of the Mind presents an original and striking conception of the mind and its place in nature. In a spirited and rigorous attack on most of the orthodox positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, McCulloch connects three of the orthodoxy's central themes - externalism, phenomenology and the relation between science and common-sense psychology - in a defence of a throughly anti-Cartesian conception of mental life.

McCulloch argues that the life of the mind will never be understood until we properly understand the subject's essential embodiment and immersion in the world, until we give up the idea that intentionality and phenomenology must be understood separately. The product of over twenty years' thinking on these issues, McCulloch's book is a bold and significant contribution to philosophy.

Part I
MIND AND WORLD

1
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL

Even the lobsters got a nip out of it.

Derek and Clive, ‘Derek and Clive Live’

1 The mind’s objects

The aim in this chapter is to introduce my first big theme – the phenomenological – and to display some of its links with the notion of content or intentionality. This makes possible a small move in the direction of the epistemological Real Distinction. The main argument is heavily indebted to a reading of Nagel, and is a very important part of the case for phenomenological externalism.

To talk about the phenomenological is to enter a minefield. But according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a phenomenon is, in philosophers’ usage, ‘the object of a person’s perception; what the senses or the mind notice’. Phenomenology is either ‘the science or the description and classification’ of phenomena (note that these need not be the same thing). And the phenomenological is thus whatever pertains to objects of perception, to what the senses or the mind notice. Of course, these words are often encountered in philosophical discussions, but there is a lot of variety, if not confusion, involved in their use. This is partly because the interpretation of ‘object of perception’ and ‘what the mind notices’ can vary with the theory of mind or perception assumed. It is also partly because the very idea of the phenomenological is associated with others – consciousness, experience, (raw) feeling, sensation, qualia, ‘what it is like’, ‘in the head’, the subjective, introspection, reflection – whose interpretations also vary with background assumptions. However, talk of the mind ‘noticing’ things and having ‘objects’ is at least reminiscent of the doctrine that episodes of thinking and other aspects of cognition such as beliefs and perceivings are contentful, are directed at (normally) extramental things and/or states of affairs. Thus, one may think that snow is white, see a bonfire, see that it is raining. Could the ‘objects’ in the dictionary definition be intentional objects?

There are two immediate reasons for saying ‘no’. One is the rough thought, mentioned in the Introduction, that the phenomenological is all to do with the sub- jective, how it is in people’s minds from their own point of view, whereas talk of intentional objects brings in, however indirectly, objective things such as snow and bonfires. The subjective, the thought continues, excludes the objective, and whereas the phenomenological is to do with the former, intentionality relates to the latter. In reply to this, we are going to see at length that it is incorrect to exclude the objective from the subjective as proposed: this is a consequence of the arguments of the present chapter, and the one following, and it will be explored in Chapter 3, and put to work in Part II.

The second impediment to treating the mind’s phenomenological objects as intentional objects arises because arguably not all states of mind are intentional or contentful in the relevant sense – for example, having a toothache, feeling an itch in the foot – even though, arguably again, they do have objects ‘which the mind notices’: namely aches and itches. Of course, people usually think that they have aches or itches if and only if they do, so that the states of aching or itching, if not the aches and itches themselves, can be the intentional objects of states of mind. But it is contentious that this exhausts the phenomenological nature of aches and itches. One may think of aching or itching as involving the inner perception, or Feel, of states or properties of the body, and hence as involving intentionality in that way. But this too is contentious. More recently, there have been other attempts to account for the distinctive nature of the phenomenological, including sensations like aches and itches, exclusively in terms of the theory of content (thus Lycan 1996, Tye 1995). But I shall not discuss that matter here, and instead shall describe the likes of aches and itches neutrally as sensational objects. In this usage, sensational objects are putative bodily occurrences which are, in some way, left open here, ‘noticed’ by the mind. Even if we reject the idea that aches and itches are entities, the basic point can be retained if we talk of the achey or itchy property of the states of aching or itching. Note, though, a restriction which will be important later. There is no presumption that the notion of sensational object can be extended beyond the domain of putative bodily occurrences such as aches and itches.

The existence of sensational objects may be one reason for doubting that talk of content, intentional objects, is the whole story if one wants to capture the very idea of the phenomenological. But some proceed as though content itself is nothing to do with the phenomenological, properly so-called, which is said instead to be an aspect of mind over and above matters to do with the theory of content. This passage from Armstrong can be representative:

If we consider such mental states as purposes and intentions, their ‘transparency’ is a rather conspicuous feature. It is notorious that introspection cannot differentiate such states except in terms of their different objects. It is not so immediately obvious, however, that perception has this transparent character. Perception involves the experience of colour and of visual extension; touch the experience of the whole obscure range of tactual properties, including tactual extension; hearing, taste and smell the experience of sounds, tastes and smells. These phenomenal properties, it may be argued, endow different perceptions with different qualities.

(1981: 45)

Armstrong suggests that what he here calls phenomenal qualities are involved ‘in the case of bodily sensations’ too, and also, with reservation, that there are ‘special emotion qualities’ (ibid.). Others suggest that imaging or picturing to oneself involves phenomenal qualities (cf. Block 1983: 582–3). Where Armstrong speaks of phenomenal qualities others variously mention qualia, (raw) feels, subjective character, qualitative content etc. And the idea that it is such allegedly non-intentional aspects of perceptual states which comprise the phenomenological domain is frequently encountered. On this view, the ‘objects’ of the mind mentioned in the dictionary definition of ‘phenomenon’ are not intentional objects, and to be an intentional object cannot be to figure in the phenomenological domain. I shall call this view Anti-intentionalism, and use the phrase ‘purely qualitative’ to describe the alleged non-intentional aspects of phenomenology posited by Anti-intentionalists (and I make no commitment to the idea that the purely qualitative, if it exists, does so in the head). Anti-intentionalism is thus a theory about what constitutes the phenomenological, and comprises the two claims:

(a) intentional objects do not figure in the phenomenological domain

and

(b) there are purely qualitative aspects of mind in the phenomenological domain.

Someone who denies (a) is an Intentionalist; and if they deny (b) too they are a Strong Intentionalist. Those who try to account for all aspects of the phenomenological, including the sensational, in terms of content thus count as Strong Intentionalists.

There is a well-known vagueness or ambiguity hereabouts, since some authors speak of the purely qualitative as characterizing the objects of perception (e.g. colours) while others speak of it as comprising properties of experiential states (some even slide between the two). It is even possible to speak of it as a non-phenomenological notion (thus Clark 2000: passim). But, for present purposes, I am taking it that talk of the purely qualitative is talk of putative, phenomenologically available properties of experiences. The first idea, that the purely qualitative comprises properties of the objects of perception, such as colours, is no threat to Intentionalism, since no Intentionalist should deny that we encounter the colours etc. of the intentional objects of experience.

I want to propose Intentionalism, and remain largely neutral with respect to its strong variety: although I shall suggest below that the idea of the purely qualitative is highly problematic, or worse, in the visual case. So, consider first the example of visual perceptual states, adduced by Armstrong as examples of states involving the purely qualitative. In one sense, it is trivial that the objects of perception are extra-mental things or states of affairs. One can see a bonfire, or see that it is raining. Very many content-specifying sentences which can make a truth by being inserted in the gap of ‘thinks that . . .’ can do the same by being inserted in ‘sees that . . .’. Then if we take literally the dictionary definition of a phenomenon as ‘the object of a person’s perception; what the senses . . . notice’, we get the Intentionalist conclusion that ordinary intentional objects like bonfires and rain figure in the phenomenological domain in virtue of the fact that they are seen. Of course, we should ignore the success aspect of verbs like ‘to see’. For although one cannot see a bonfire which is not there, or see that it is raining when it is not, one can certainly misperceive or hallucinate, and so take oneself either to see a bonfire when none is present, or to see that it is raining when it is not. All of this is naturally covered by saying that seeings have content, just like episodes of thinking, which can be false of the relevant scene. Then we can say that someone is in a perceptual state with such a content, without prejudice to whether this is a case of veridical perception, by saying that they are ‘having a visual experience as of a bonfire’, or ‘having a visual experience with the content that it is raining’. However, if we deal with the objects of perception in this way, then they are still just the same intentional objects as are involved in some episodes of thinking. Just as I can think (truly or otherwise) that the bonfire has gone out, so I can have a visual experience (veridical or otherwise) with the content that the bonfire has gone out: and in the latter case, as in the former, the bonfire seems to be the object ‘noticed’ by the mind. In sum, if we take literally the dictionary definition of ‘phenomenon’, it is evidently false to suggest that to serve as an intentional object cannot be to figure in the phenomenological domain. On the contrary, serving as intentional object to a visual experience as of this or that just is a way of so figuring. It is, in John McDowell’s words, ‘the most conspicuous phenomenological fact there is . . . that experience, conceived of from its own point of view, is not blank or blind, but purports to be revelatory of the world we live in’ (McDowell 1986: 152). Claim (a) of Anti-intentionalism seems quite straightforwardly false.

That victory may look too easy, and there are two natural replies available to Anti-intentionalists (they are quite closely related, as we shall see towards the end of this chapter). First, Anti-intentionalists can just concede straight off that (a) is false, but insist that this only follows given a trivial notion of the phenomenological, isolable only because of the blandness of the dictionary definition. This would leave them to claim the high phenomenological ground with their claim (b), by insisting that the purely qualitative comprises a more interesting subdomain of phenomenology so blandly defined. Second, they can distinguish between the direct and indirect objects of perception, in the manner of indirect realism. On this view, even though we ordinarily say that the objects of experience are such things as bonfires and wet weather, the strict and literal objects of awareness – what the mind really ‘notices’ – are representations, sense data or whatever, which mediate between perceiving mind and thing perceived.

In the following two sections I shall rebut the first suggestion, by showing that intentional objects can figure in the phenomenological domain in a far from trivial or bland sense. We shall see that content is a phenomenological notion in both a first- and a third-person way, which is directly linked to a robust notion of interpretation. This actually renders redundant or irrelevant the second suggestion, the possibility of moving to indirect realism. But in the final two sections of the chapter I shall address it anyway, partly to drive home the implications of the phenomenological claims that I am defending, partly as a corrective to some common but very unfortunate ways of proceeding in this area. In particular, the results of this discussion will be useful in Chapter 3, where content externalism with respect to visual experiences will be considered.

2 What it is like

Analytical work on phenomenology takes as benchmark Nagel’s ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ (Nagel 1979: all page references in the present chapter are to this unless indicated otherwise). I think it suggests a correct line of argument – though not one found there by many readers. Nagel’s basic claim is that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism’ (166). This is supposed to lead to ‘a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction’ (174). Any reduction, or indeed any physicalistic account of consciousness, must fail: conscious states are such that these accounts cannot ‘exhaust their analysis’, so that something will be left out (167). And this is because the what it is like of consciousness is essentially tied to the point of view of the organism, whereas ‘it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view’ (167). To illustrate: we cannot conceive (170, 179) or imagine (168, 169, 174, 178) what it is like to use echolocation, and there are thus ‘facts of experience’ (172) which we cannot know or even form a conception of (172 n. 8). These facts ‘do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language’ (171), and thus could not consist in the truth of propositions belonging to any human physicalistic account, or indeed any reduction proposed in human language.

Essentially, there are two points here: an ontological one (there are facts of experience) and an epistemological one (they are left out or missed by physicalistic accounts). Both will be developed in what follows, but we shall ultimately see that the epistemological claim is the important one, and not because it makes trouble for physicalism as such, but because it points in the direction of the epistemological Real Distinction. The ontological claim, understood aright, is in fact quite innocuous.

But we first need to clear away some side issues. Nagel sometimes puts it like this: given our present state of knowledge, we cannot understand how physicalism could be true (166, 175, 176, 177). But then it seems we only need an extension of physical knowledge, a better understanding of what physicalism involves. Here, Nagel suggests the possibility of new concepts to expedite an ‘objective phenomenology’ (179), which may succeed in conveying what it is like from outside the attached point of view (cf. Nagel 1986: 17–37). However, this last suggestion brings at least tension with his claim that phenomenology based on echolocation is ‘beyond the reach of human concepts’, and anyway leaves intact the claim that physicalism must be incomplete, since on this approach it would have to be supplement...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: The Demonic Dilemma
• Part I: Mind and World
• Part II: Mind and Body