The Intelligent Mind

On the Genesis and Constitution of Discursive Thought

Richard Dien Winfield

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137549327
• eBook ISBN: 9781137549334
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Lingüística

The Intelligent Mind conceives the psychological reality of thought and language, explaining how intelligence develops from intuition to representation and then to linguistic interaction and thinking. Overcoming the prevailing dogmas regarding how discursive reason emerges, this book secures the psychological possibility of the philosophy of mind.

1

Theoretical Intelligence as Cognition

1.1 Theoretical intelligence

Theorizing cannot be engaged in by mind if it is restricted to either a psyche or consciousness. To theorize requires that mind be aware of its mental content as both a product of the mind’s activity and about something objective. Only then can that content comprise a theory, a mental construct that mind comprehends to be of its own making as well as laying hold of objectivity. The self-feeling activity of the psyche may allow mind to commune with its own sentiments, but it provides no way of treating them as true representations; that is, as subjective modifications corresponding to an opposing objectivity. Although consciousness treats its mental contents as determinations of an objectivity it confronts, it cannot at the same time apprehend these mental contents to be products of mind that conform to that objectivity. Only a further reflection can make these mental contents a psychological object of conscious awareness, but this consciousness does not therein confront the mental content it employs to perceive that object. Once more, a further reflection, whose own act remains unnoticed by itself, is needed. Hence consciousness never theorizes but only has awareness of objects, which may be natural things, psychological phenomena, artifacts, living organisms, other conscious selves, or the reflection of itself in its interaction with others.

Intelligence first makes theorizing possible by enabling mind to be aware that its mental content is both its own subjective product and a determination of something objective to which mind’s products refer. In so doing, intelligence comprises cognition, engaging in theory rather than practice. This undertaking is theoretical because the correspondence between mental content and what it is about is achieved by a mental determination in the subject rather than by a practical modification of objects confronting the knower.

Such a cognitive, theorizing character applies to all forms that intelligence can take before undertaking the practical engagements that presuppose them. Intuition, representation, and thought all involve cognition and some sort of theorizing to the degree that they each produce a type of mental content that mind apprehends to be both subjective and objective. This dual character is reflected in how the terms identifying intuition, representation, and thought indicate a type of intentional mental content just as much as a type of mental activity.

In intuiting, mind cognizes immediately what it finds immediately given, apprehending that its intuition is at once a modification of its own mind and a determination of some object it directly confronts. In representing, mind produces images – first recollecting intuitions, then imagining images of its own fabrication, and finally making signs that themselves get recollected by verbal memory. All of these different forms of representation retain a meaning relating them to some object. Once more, theorizing is present to the extent that mind cognizes something real or imaginary, relating what it knows to be the product of its imagination yet representing something else. Finally, in thinking, intelligence employs signs to apprehend universal contents irreducible to any image yet still having reference to a conceivable objectivity. Here theorizing transcends intuition and representation to take the conceptual form providing the psychological activity necessary for undertaking any philosophy of mind.

1.2 Theoretical intelligence as cognition, the certitude of reason

The cognition at hand in intuition, representation, and thought involves rationality because theoretical intelligence always occupies itself with mental contents it knows to be at once subjective and objective. The defining assumption of rationality is that mind is rational insofar as its mental content is at one with what is objective and thereby has a universal validity shared by every other rational mind. Theoretical intelligence counts as rational insofar as what intelligence knows has no other content but mind’s own, yet that content equally has objectivity, whose independence no longer comprises something alien. Cognition here overcomes the opposition of consciousness in that the object of intelligence is not fundamentally external to mind or beyond its grasp but is intrinsically related to and in identity with intelligence.¹

Intelligence can therefore aim at a truth going beyond the correctness to which consciousness is confined. Consciousness may have a mental content correctly conforming to the phenomena it confronts. Yet due to the extrinsic relation of subject and object in consciousness, conscious mind cannot certify the independent objectivity of the phenomena and secure a true identity of subjectivity and objectivity.² The mental content of consciousness may correspond to the phenomena confronting it, but this cannot insure that the phenomena are genuinely objective and not just what appears to mind. The intrinsic identity of subjective and objective aspects, however, is generic to reason insofar as reason aims at genuine cognition, in which true correspondence, not just correctness, is achieved. Nonetheless, by engaging in cognition, where mental modifications are made to conform to objectivity rather than mere phenomena, theoretical intelligence comprises the still subjective realization of reason, bringing about correspondence within mind rather than in objectivity.³

In so doing, theoretical intelligence has reason for its object, apprehending that its intuitions, representations, and thoughts are, as subjective, no less conformable to objectivity. By recognizing this identity of its mental modifications and the objectivity they are about, intelligence has at least the certainty of its own rationality, promising the possibility of cognition. Certainty, however, is not equivalent to truth. The certainty of intelligence is, to begin with, indeterminate, acknowledging intuitively only that subject and object coincide, rather than determinately cognizing what about the object is rational.⁴ The truth of intelligence is thus at the start just as ungrounded as the immediately given intuitions with which intelligence first grasps the identity of subject and object.

It is inevitable that the initial form of intelligence should have this limitation. Rationality may attain its fullest theoretical development in linguistic conceptual intelligence, where mind can obtain conceptual knowledge that its object is thinkable and its concept is objective.⁵ Yet to the extent that discursive intelligence depends upon intuition and imagination, intelligence cannot help but have prelinguistic forms in which mind exhibits a more rudimentary rationality restricted to intuitions and images.⁶

These nondiscursive types of intelligence are exhibited wherever learning, as opposed to habituation, first takes place. The psyche is sufficient for habituation to occur, since the repetition of similar feelings and associated behavior automatically engenders habit. Learning, however, requires intelligence, though not initially language or thought. Individuals can learn without possessing linguistic competence so long as they intuit objects, recollect their intuitions, compare their recollected images, and make connections enabling them to learn objective relationships that are not immediately intuitable. Words and concepts need not enter in, as is evident from the learning that dumb animals and preverbal children accomplish.⁷ Nonetheless, intelligence must be at work, for learning requires that a prospective learner apprehend successive representations, recognizing them to be recollections that, however reproduced and associated by imagination, nonetheless impart knowledge of objectivity. In so doing, the learning individual engages in the distinguishing activity of theoretical intelligence, transforming what is given to mind into something mental produced by mind while making what is mental into something objective and true.⁸

1.3 Preliminary differentiation of the stages of theoretical intelligence: intuition, representation, and thought

Theoretical intelligence develops in three stages, which are distinguished by the type of object and mental activity figuring within their respective apprehensions of reason, of mental determinations that are both subjective and objective. These stages comprise intuition, representation, and thought. They have a necessary ordering in virtue of how they are constitutively related. Intuition comes first because it can operate without representation and thought. Insofar as representation depends upon intuition and thought depends upon representation, representation follows upon intuition and thought follows upon representation in both theory and reality.

The development of the stages of intelligence is different in form from the development of the shapes of consciousness. Consciousness relates to mental content as just a determination of an object confronting it. Consequently, the moves, for example, from sense certainty to perception and from perception to understanding appear to consciousness as encounters with different aspects of objectivity independently opposing mind. Sense certainty confronts the immediate being of objects, to which it refers without interpretation or discrimination. Perception addresses objects as things with properties, apprehending sensuous features as belonging to an underlying entity that immediately has them. Understanding confronts objects as dynamically determined, exhibiting a play of forces governed by laws of appearance. By contrast, intelligence relates to its object as something conforming to a mental content that mind has produced. For this reason, the moves from one type of object to another appear to intelligence as products of mental activity. Whereas consciousness simply confronts things and the forces and laws that govern their dynamic relationships as different given aspects of objectivity, intelligence is well aware that intuitions are results of intuiting, images and signs are products of imagination, and concepts are creations of thinking.⁹

To begin with, intuition immediately takes in a mental content that is immediately about something given. Therefore, intuition is not mediated by any further intelligent activity, although contents deriving from representation and thought can subsequently be intuited by being immediately apprehended.

Representation internalizes intuitions by rendering them images which then get recollected, modified, or rendered symbols or signs of some other meaning. Hence, representation follows upon intuition, without which it cannot exist. In this respect, representation, unlike intuition, relates to its subjective-objective content as something not merely found but mediated by mind.¹⁰

Thought, for its part, cannot be expressed without language, and language cannot operate unless representation provides images and signs by which sense and meaning can be psychologically realized. Even though thinking eventually dispenses with imagery to develop a purely conceptual content, it can never do this without employing the semiotic and generalized results of representation.

Accordingly, individual minds can possess intuition without representation and thought or possess intuition and representation without thought due to phylogenetic and ontogenetic limitations or congenital handicaps, disease, or injury. Some animal species may be endowed with an intelligence restricted to intuition,¹¹ while others may have an intelligence limited to intuition and preverbal representation. Alternately, individuals of a species with no such limitations may early in life have only intuitions, then develop representations of different sorts, and only later develop the psychological capacity to think and speak. Or individuals may possess only intuitions or just intuitions and representations due to impairments of their normal species being and maturation potential. Whatever the case, representation will always be accompanied by intuition, just as thought will always be accompanied by intuition and representation.

In order to confirm these relationships and the differentiation they involve, it is necessary to account for the different way stations in the development of intelligence, making sure that each shape has had all its psychological conditions provided for in the antecedent development. By strictly following this formative developmental order, philosophical psychology can unfold the structural constitution of the different spheres of intelligent mind and thereby certify the completeness of each division in the theory of intelligence. Here, before that development has unfolded, one can provide only a promissory indication of what is to come. In this respect, the following sketch will serve at best to set the stage for a proper investigation of what here is merely an assertion.

First, intuition relates initially to an immediate single object, combining the self-feeling of the psyche with consciousness’s sensation of an immediate given. Distinguishing this object from mind’s own intuiting by paying attention, intuiting intelligence apprehends the intuited object as something in space and time.

Representation, through recollection, imagination, and verbal memory, relates to an inwardized material, withdrawn from the external givenness of intuition, and thereby reflected into mind’s own mental domain. In so doing, intelligence withdraws from the immediate relation in which it confronts the immediate singularity of the object, setting it as an image into a time and space of mind’s own making. Through the imagination’s successive and contiguous associations of images, mind now is able to relate the object to something universal. The universal in question figures first as an image, then as a generalized representation, and finally as a recollected repeatable sign, in each case still referring to objects as immediately intuited.

Finally, in thought, intelligence has an object that is both subjective and objective,¹² comprising an objectification of reason. In distinction from the objects of intuition and representation, the object of thought confronts intelligence as something thoroughly conceptually determined. To cognize this, its defining object, objective reason, intelligence must conceive the concrete universal nature of the object. The universal that thought thinks to this end is concrete in that it is not just a common mark extracted from various images but a unity that pervades the object, making its differentiations conceivable rather than just intuitable or imaginable. Thereby, thinking intelligence exercises a theorizing cognition whose subjective thought has objectivity and whose object is intrinsically conceptually determined.¹³ Although thought does initially reflect upon intuited and imagined contents, it proceeds to overcome its dependence upon pictorial, nondiscursive content. In so doing, intelligence becomes less and less limited by extraneous content given to it and more and more identical with its object.¹⁴ In passing through its several forms, distinguished by how thoroughly the object of thought is exhaustively conceptualizable, thinking intelligence provides the psychological resources for moving from empirical to philosophical psychology.

1.4 Questions raised by the division of the stages of theoretical intelligence

These anticipatory divisions of theoretical intelligence raise the question of why thought should involv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Theoretical Intelligence as Cognition
• 2  Intelligence as Intuition
• 3  Intelligence as Representation
• 4  The Constitution of Linguistic Intelligence
• 5  The Psychology of Thinking
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index