The Intentionalist Theory

3.3.1 The Intentionalist Theory and the Problem of Perception

At Level 1, the intentional theory of experience treats perceptual experience as a form of intentionality conceived of as a form of mental representation (hence it is also sometimes called the representationalist theory of experience). “Intentionality” is a term with its origins in scholastic philosophy (see Crane 1998b), but its current use derives from Brentano (1874), who introduced the term “intentional inexistence” for the “mind’s direction upon its objects”. Intentional inexistence, or intentionality, is sometimes explained as the “aboutness” of mental states (see the entries on Franz Brentano, representational theories of consciousness andintentionality). An intentional mental state is normally understood, therefore, as one which is about, or represents, something in the world.
At Level 2, this is put to work in explaining phenomenal character. Take an experience as of a churchyard covered in white snow. Why is this a case of things appearing white to one? Here the intentionalist appeals to the experience’s representation of whiteness in the environment. It is not generally true that when a representation represents something as being F, there has to actually be something which is F. Thus for the intentionalist, experience is representational in a way that contrasts with it being relational. Experience does not genuinely have an act-object structure. This is in keeping with a standard tradition in the theory of intentionality which treats it as non-relational (the tradition derives from Husserl 1900/1901; for discussion see Zahavi 2003: 13–27). So intentionalism contrasts with the sense-datum theory: since it is not of the essence of experience or its character that it is relational, it is not of its essence that it is a relation to a non-ordinary sense-datum.
The intentionalist can thus reject the argument from illusion in the form presented in §2.1 and the supplemented form presented in §3.1.1. This is because these arguments hinge on the minimal sense-datum theory, or the Phenomenal Principle which the intentional theory is an alternative to. An illusory experience in which a white wall appears yellow to one is thus not conceived of as a case in which one is aware of a yellow sense-datum. It is instead conceived of as a case in which a white wall is represented as being yellow. As we’ll see, the intentionalist can even maintain the intuitive idea that in such illusions one is aware of the ordinary objects one seems to be aware of—but that’s something we’ll come back to shortly.
What about hallucinations? Again the intentionalist can reject the supplemented form of the argument from hallucination from §3.1.1 because this version of the argument relies on the Phenomenal Principle. But what about the original form of the argument from hallucination? This argument does not rely on the Phenomenal Principle, yet its conclusion is that not even veridical experiences give us direct awareness of ordinary mind-independent objects. So how is the intentionalist to deal with this argument? The intentionalist accepts (A) but also (B) in a specific form. That is, they accept (B) where that is understood in terms of what Martin (2004, 2006) has called the Common Kind Assumption, that is:
(CKA) Whatever fundamental kind of mental event occurs when one veridically perceives, the very same kind of event could occur were one hallucinating.
Take a veridical perception of a white snow covered churchyard for what it is. The experience involved in this perception, the intentionalist thinks, is fundamentally a matter of experientially representing the presence of a white snow covered churchyard. And this fundamental kind of mental event is exactly what is present in the subjectively indistinguishable hallucinatory case, for such hallucinatory experiences have the same representational nature as their veridical counterparts.
But then doesn’t this mean that the intentionalist is saddled with the conclusion of the argument from hallucination (C)? If so, the rejection of Awareness and our ordinary conception of perceptual experience is not far off. Since if we are not perceptually aware of ordinary objects in veridical experiences, it is unclear how any form of perceptual awareness of ordinary objects can be secured.
However, the intentionalist can distinguish between two readings of the conclusion. On the first reading, we have
(C*) veridical experiences are not fundamentally cases of awareness of ordinary objects.
This is entailed by the argument as we have construed it. But what is not entailed is
(C**) veridical experiences don’t give us perceptual awareness of ordinary objects.
As long as (C**) doesn’t follow, the intentionalist can suggest, Awareness is secure. The intentionalist admits that not even veridical experiences are fundamentally cases of perceptual awareness of ordinary objects. Such experiences are fundamentally representational in a way that contrasts with them being relational. But that simply doesn’t mean that we can’t come to be perceptually aware, even directly perceptually aware, of an ordinary object by having a veridical experience. Veridical experiences may be the occasions for such awareness even if they are not themselves constituted by instances of such awareness. They can be occasions for such awareness precisely because they represent ordinary objects. In their very character they are about, directed on, the mind-independent world (in contrast to both sense-datum theories, and adverbialist theories). We come to have (direct) perceptual awareness by having such experiences when the world also plays its part: when things in the world are as they are represented to be in the experience, and when the world is hooked up to the experience in an appropriate way. This also helps us to see how even illusions can give us (direct) awareness of ordinary objects. In these cases, experience represents an ordinary object which is there to be perceived, and it is appropriately related to one’s experience, yet there is some misrepresentation of the object.
Thus the intentionalist can respond to Problem of Perception: it has solutions to both arguments which animate the Problem. And the intentionalist response secures both aspects of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. The intentionalist explains how experience satisfiesOpenness in terms of it having a certain sort of representational nature. That is, a perceptual experience involves, in its very character, the presentation of ordinary mind-independent objects to a subject precisely because it is a matter of perceptual representation of ordinary aspects of the environment. And such aspects are represented as there, present. The character of experience is immediately responsive to the character of its objects because it is constituted, at least in part, by the way those objects are represented, at the time they are experienced.

3.3.2 Sources of the Intentionalist Theory

Some of the most influential intentional theories are Anscombe (1965), Armstrong (1968), Pitcher (1970), Peacocke (1983), Harman (1990), Tye (1992, 1995), Dretske (1995), Lycan (1996); for more recent accounts, see Byrne (2001), Siegel (2010), Pautz (2010) and the entry on the contents of perception.
Within analytic philosophy, the intentionalist theory of perception is a generalisation of an idea presented by G.E.M. Anscombe (1965), and the “belief theories” of D.M. Armstrong (1968) and George Pitcher (1970). (Within the phenomenological tradition intentionality and perception had always been discussed together: see the entry on phenomenology.) Anscombe had drawn attention to the fact that perceptual verbs satisfy the tests for non-extensionality or intensionality (see the entry on intensional transitive verbs). For example, just as ‘Vladimir is thinking about Pegasus’ is an intensional context, so ‘Vladimir has an experience as of a pink elephant in the room’ is an intensional context. In neither case can we infer that there exists something Vladimir is thinking about, or that there is exists something he is experiencing. This is the typical manifestation of intensionality. Anscombe regarded the error of sense-data and naive realist theories of perception as the failure to recognise this intensionality.
Armstrong and Pitcher argued that perception is a form of belief. (More precisely, they argued that it is the acquisition of a belief, since an acquisition is a conscious event, as perceiving is; rather than a state or condition, as belief is.) Belief is an intentional state in the sense that it represents the world to be a certain way, and the way it represents the world to be is said to be its intentional content. Perception, it was argued, is similarly a representation of the world, and the way it represents the world to be is likewise its intentional content. The fact that someone can have a perceptual experience that a is F without there being any thing which is F was taken as a reason for saying that perception is just a form of belief-acquisition.
The belief theory of perception (and related theories, like the judgement theory of Craig (1976)) is a specific version of the intentional theory. But it is not the most widely accepted version (though see Glüer (2009) for a recent defence). Everyone will agree that perception does give rise to beliefs about the environment. But this does not mean that perception is simply the acquisition of belief. One obvious reason why it isn’t, discussed by Armstrong, is that one can have a perceptual illusion that things are a certain way even when one knows they are not (this phenomenon is sometimes called “the persistence of illusion”). The famous Müller-Lyer illusion presents two lines of equal length as if they were unequal. One can experience this even if one knows (and therefore believes) that the lines are the same length. If perception were simply the acquisition of belief, then this would be a case of explicitly contradictory beliefs: one believes that the lines are the same length and that they are different lengths. But this is surely not the right way to describe this situation. (Armstrong recognised this, and re-described perception as a “potential belief”; this marks a significant retreat from the original claim). The intentionalist theory is, however, not committed to the view that perceptual experience is belief; experience can be a sui generis kind of intentional state or event (see Martin 1992–3).

3.3.3 The Intentional Content of Perceptual Experience

Intentionalists hold that what is in common between perceptions and indistinguishable hallucinations is their intentional content: roughly speaking, how the world is represented as being by the experiences. Many intentionalists hold that the sameness of phenomenal character in perception and hallucination is exhausted or constituted by this sameness in content (see Tye (2000), Byrne (2001)). But this latter claim is not essential to intentionalism (see the discussion of intentionalism and qualia below). What is essential is that the intentional content of perception explains (whether wholly or partly) its phenomenal character.
The intentional content of perception is sometimes called “perceptual content” (see the entry onthe contents of perception). What is perceptual content? A standard approach to intentionality treats all intentional states as propositional attitudes: states which are ascribed by sentences of the form “S ___ that p” where ‘S’ is to be replaced by a term for a subject, ‘p’ with a sentence, and the ‘___’ with a psychological verb. The distinguishing feature of the propositional attitudes is that their content—how they represent the world to be—is something which is assessable as true or false. Hence the canonical form of ascriptions of perceptual experiences is: “S perceives/experiences that p”. Perception, on this kind of intentionalist view, is a propositional attitude (see Byrne (2001) for a recent defence of this idea, see also Siegel (2010)).
But intentionalism is not committed to the view that perception is a propositional attitude. For one thing, it is controversial whether all intentional states are propositional attitudes (see Crane (2001: Chapter 4)). Among the intentional phenomena there are relations like love and hate which do not have propositional content; and there are also non-relational states expressed by the so-called “intensional transitive” verbs like seek, fear, expect (see the entry on intensional transitive verbs). All these states of mind have contents which are not, on the face of it, assessable as true or false. If I am seeking a bottle of inexpensive Burgundy, what I am seeking—the intentional content of my seeking, or the intentional object under a certain mode of presentation—is not something true or false. Some argue that these intentional relations and intentional transitives are analysable or reducible to propositional formulations (see Larson (2003) for an attempt to defend this view of intensional transitives; and Sainsbury (2010) for a less radical defence). But the matter is controversial; and it is especially controversial where perception is concerned. For we have many ways of talking about perception which do not characterise its content in propositional terms: for example, “Vladimir sees a snail on the grass”, or “Vladimir is watching a snail on the grass” can be distinguished from the propositional formulation “Vladimir sees that there is a snail on the grass” (for an interesting recent discussion of watching, see Crowther 2009). There are those who follow Dretske (1969) in claiming that these semantical distinctions express an important distinction between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” seeing. However, the view that perceptual content is non-propositional is not the same as the view that it is “non-epistemic” in Dretske’s sense. For ascriptions of non-epistemic seeing are intended to be fully extensional in their object positions, but not all non-propositional descriptions of perception need be (for example, some have argued that “Macbeth saw a dagger before him” does not entail “there is a dagger which Macbeth saw”: cf. Anscombe (1965)). The question of whether perception has a propositional content is far from being settled, even for those who think it has intentional content (see McDowell (2008); Crane (2009))

Another debate about the content of perceptual experience—independent of the issue of whether it is propositional—is whether it is singular or general in nature (see Soteriou (2000); and for a more general discussion, see Chalmers (2006)). A singular content is one that concerns a particular object, and such that it cannot be the content of a state of mind unless that object exists. Singular contents are also called “object-dependent”. A general content is one whose ability to be the content of any intentional state is not dependent on the existence of any particular object. General contents are also called “object-independent”. Those who think (like Snowdon (1992), McDowell (1994), Brewer (2000)) that the content of perceptual experience can be expressed by a sentence containing an irreducible demonstrative pronoun (e.g., of the form “that F is G’) will also argue that the content of experience is singular; those who think (like Davies (1992) and McGinn (1989)) that the content of experience is general (e.g., of the form, “there is an F which is G”) are committed to its object-independence. It might seem that an intentionalist must say that the content of perception is wholly general. However, Burge (1991) has argued that any genuinely perceptual episode has an irreducibly singular element, even though the episode could share a component of content with a numerically distinct episode. Martin (2002) argues that the availability of this position shows that intentionalism could deny that the content of experience is wholly general.
The issue about whether the content of perceptual experience is singular or general is not simply about whether the existence of the experience entails or presupposes the existence of its object. An example will illustrate this. Suppose for the sake of argument that experience essentially involves the exercise of recognitional capacities, and I have a capacity to recognise the Queen. Let’s suppose too that this is a general capacity which presupposes her existence. It is consistent with this to say that I could be in the same intentional state when I am hallucinating the Queen, as when I am perceiving her. Although the capacity might depend for its existence on the Queen’s existence, not every exercise of the capacity need depend on the Queen’s presence. The capacity can “misfire”. Hence intentionalism can hold that experiences are the same in the hallucinatory and veridical cases, even though the existence of the involved recognitional capacity presupposes the existence of the object recognised.
The objects of intentional states are sometimes called “intentional objects” (Crane (2001: Chapter 1)). What are the intentional objects of perceptual experience, according to intentionalists? In the case of veridical perception, the answer is simple: ordinary, mind-independent objects like the churchyard, the snow (etc.) and their properties. But what should be said about the hallucinatory case? Since this case is by definition one in which there is no mind-independent object being perceived, how can we even talk about something being an “object of experience” at all here? As noted above, intentionalists say that experiences are representations; and one can represent what does not exist (see Harman (1990), Tye (1992)). This is certainly true; but isn’t there any more to be said? For how does a representation of a non-existent churchyard differ from a representation of a non-existent garbage dump, say, when one of those is hallucinated? The states seem to have different objects; but neither of these objects exist (see the entry nonexistent-objects).
One proposal is that the objects of hallucinatory experience are the properties which the hallucinated object is presented as having (Johnston (2004)). Another answer is to say that these hallucinatory states of mind have intentional objects which do not exist (Smith (2002: Chapter 9)). Intentional objects in this sense are not supposed to be entities or things of any kind. When we talk about perception and its “objects” in this context, we mean the word in the way it occurs in the phrase “object of thought” or “object of attention” and not as it occurs in the phrase “physical object”. An intentional object is always an object for a subject, and this is not a way of classifying things in reality. An intentionalist need not be committed to intentional objects in this sense; but if they are not, then they owe an account of the content of hallucinatory experiences.
How does the content of perceptual experience differ from the content of other intentional states? According to some intentionalists, one main difference is that perception has “non-conceptual” content. The basic idea is that perception involves a form of mental representation which is in certain ways less sophisticated than the representation involved in (say) belief. For example, having the belief that the churchyard is covered in snow requires that one have the concept of a churchyard. This is what it means to say that belief has conceptual content: to have the belief with the content that a is F requires that one possess the concept a and the concept F. So to say perception has non-conceptual content is to say the following: to have a perception with the content that a is F does not require that one have the concept of a and the concept F. The idea is that one’s perceptual experience can represent the world as being a certain way—the “a is F” way—even if one does not have the concepts that would be involved in believing that a is F. (For a more detailed version of this definition, see Crane (1998a) and Cussins (1990); for a different way of understanding the idea of non-conceptual content, see Heck (2000) and Speaks (2005). The idea of non-conceptual content derives from Evans (1982); there are some similar ideas in Dretske (1981); see Gunther (2002) for a collection of articles on this subject. Other support for non-conceptual content can be found in Bermúdez (1997); Peacocke (1992); Crowther (2006); for opposition see Brewer (2000) and McDowell (1994a)).

3.3.4 Objections to the Intentionalist Theory

Critics of the intentional theory have argued that it does not adequately distinguish perceptual experience from other forms of intentionality, and therefore does not manage to capture what is distinctive about experience itself. (McDowell (1994), Martin (2002), Robinson (1994: 164)).
One objection of this kind is that intentionalists can give no account of the qualitative or sensory character of perceptual experience. Experiencing something, unlike thinking about it, has a certain “feel” to it. Yet, the objection runs, intentionalism has no resources to deal with this fact, since it explains experience in terms of representation, and merely representing something need have no particular “feel” whatsoever. Believing that something is the case, for example, or hoping that something is the case, are both forms of mental representation, but neither state of mind has any “feel” or qualitative character to call its own. (Words or images may come to mind when mentally representing something in this way, but it is not obvious that these are essential to the states of mind themselves.) So the challenge is the following: if there is nothing about representation as such which explains the “feel” of an experience, how is experience supposed to be distinguished from mere thought?

There are a number of ways an intentionalist can respond. One is simply to take it as a basic fact about perceptual intentionality that it has a qualitative or phenomenal character (see Kriegel (2013)). After all, this response continues, even those who believe in qualia have to accept that some states of mind have qualia and some do not, and that at some point the distinction between mental states which are conscious/qualitative, and those which are not, just has to be accepted as a brute fact.
Another response is to say that in order to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience, we need to treat perception as involving non-intentional qualia as well as intentionality (see Peacocke (1983: Chapter 1); Shoemaker (1993); Block (1997)). There is, accordingly, a dispute between these intentionalists who accept qualia (like Block and Shoemaker) and those who don’t (like Harman (1990) or Tye (1992)). The first kind of intentionalist holds that in addition to its intentional properties, perceptual experience also involves qualia; the second kind denies this. (See the discussion of “the transparency of experience” in §1.1.3 above; and see Spener (2003)).
Consider the inverted spectrum argument (see the entry on inverted qualia). This argument is based on an ancient speculation: that it is possible that two people’s colour experience could vary massively and systematically and that this difference be undetectable from the third person perspective (see Shoemaker (1996)). For example, consider two people Alice and Bob, whose colour perceptions are inverted relative to one another. Whenever Alice sees something red, Bob sees something blue and vice versa. Yet Alice and Bob each call all the same things “red”, and arguably believe that all the same things are red (fire engines, poppies etc.). It can further be argued that the representational or intentional content of their belief that fire engines are red is derived from the representational content of their experiences of red fire engines, since this belief is a perceptual belief. What then explains their mental difference? Defenders of qualia say that what explains this is the difference in the qualia of their mental states. Alice and Bob are intentionally or representationally identical—they represent the world in the same way—they differ in the non-representational qualia of their experience. (Intentionalists who deny qualia will dispute this by saying that the difference between Alice and Bob is indeed a representational difference: see Tye (2000) and Hilbert and Kalderon (2000). For more on the inverted spectrum, see Block (2007), Egan (2006), Marcus (2006). For other arguments attempting to establish qualia, see Block (1997), (2010), Peacocke (1983)).

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The Intentionalist Theory

3.3.1 The Intentionalist Theory and the Problem of Perception

3.3.2 Sources of the Intentionalist Theory

The Intentionalist Theory :: تعاليق

3.3.3 The Intentional Content of Perceptual Experience

3.3.4 Objections to the Intentionalist Theory

The Intentionalist Theory

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