Brian’s Mind

§1 Introduction

Edmund Husserl and John Searle, despite coming from different philosophical backgrounds, each developed a conception of intentionality, an important feature of consciousness, with many similarities. There were differences, however, in both accounts that lead to an expanded understanding of intentionality, and show the connection of intentionality to the background abilities and presuppositions of experience. I will begin with a basic explanation of intentionality and its importance, followed by the accounts given by Husserl and Searle, and finally the connection between intentionality and the background in both Husserl and Searle.

§2 Intentionality: What it is and why it is important

Intentionality is a primary feature of consciousness; it is the aboutness or the directedness of consciousness. The use of the word intentional is different than its normal usage, as in intending to perform an action. Intending in the normal sense is one particular type of intentionality. Conscious states such as seeing, believing, intending, wanting, fearing, etc. are always intentional in that they have to do with an object of consciousness. When you see, you see something; when you believe, you believe something; when you intend, you intend to do something. That “something” is what the conscious state is about or directed at. These states must, as intentional states, always be about or directed at something. It does not make sense for someone to say they believe without having something they believe, or that they desire without having something they desire. This illustrates the basic concept of intentionality.

The importance of intentionality is in its close relationship to consciousness. Much of consciousness is intentional, so in order to have an adequate understanding of consciousness, the concept of intentionality must be included. Intentionality also seems to be a unique feature of the world in that it requires a first person perspective and aboutness does not seem to be a feature of objects in the world that are not conscious, or only have a kind of third person reality. A full description and explanation of the features intrinsic to an unconscious object in the world can be given with no reference to aboutness, without leaving anything out, but a description and explanation of a person, for example, must include intentionality to be complete. Husserl attempts to give an account of intentionality, however, independent of, at least at first, reference to the true existence of an objective world.

§3 Husserl’s conception of intentionality

Husserl’s account of intentionality comes from within a broader desire for an account of the structure of first person experience, which is his project of phenomenology. He characterized phenomenology as an endeavor to discover the general governing laws of experience through intuition¹, or as a “science of consciousness”². Intuition is spoken of here, not with any kind of mystical connotations, but as a kind of self-evidence in experience. This is not to say that, as a science of consciousness, it is a description of experience as it relates to biological explanations of the mind based on the brain, for example, but as a science of pure first person experience, independent of possible naturalistic causes. Phenomenology was to be an account of experience independent of any scientific or metaphysical theories about the nature or actual existence of the world or the objects posited within.³ This is not intended to express that Husserl seriously doubts or means to discredit science or other philosophical endeavors, but that phenomenology is foundational to these efforts. The main aim of Husserl was, in the Logical Investigations, to delineate and clarify the eidetic, or the abstractable universal, laws of experience, specifically the experiences of judging and knowing, so that a critical analysis of the foundations of pure logic could take place⁴. The concept of intentionality as that feature of consciousness that is always directed at something comes out of this type of investigation.

One aspect of intentionality that comes out of reading Husserl is the basic, general structure. A distinction can be generally made between the type of intentionality and the object of that intentional relation. Husserl expresses this distinction with varying terms throughout his writing. One such way is distinguishing between contents and acts.⁵ The content of intentional experience is the object of that experience, or the “something” of the intentional relation. Husserl discusses perception as an example in illustrating this point. He describes the perceptual content as the presentative sensation. This is the auditory sensation that is experienced when hearing a tone, for example. The act is the type of intentional relation, in this case, the hearing of the tone. The intentional act is the interpretive intention, which interprets the sensation. (Husserl refers to intentional experiences as intentional acts because of the historical and continued use of the word “acts” in reference to mental experiences⁶, so he is not referring to actual actions.) Husserl also calls the content of the act, the matter, and the type of intentional act, the act-quality.⁷ He stresses the interchangeability of the quality and matter of an intentional act. Husserl demonstrates different qualities with parallel examples of intentional relations with “intelligent beings on Mars” as the matter. One can have a belief that intelligent beings are on Mars, one can wonder if there are intelligent beings on Mars, and one can wish there were intelligent beings on Mars. In each case, with the same content, the type of intentional act is varied, from believing to wondering to wishing. There is also, of course, a parallel interchangeability of content with a single act-quality. Husserl has yet a third way of referring to the type and content, which are noesis and noema, respectively.⁸ The content of the intentional experience is the noematic content or noema, while the mental process, or act, is the noesis. This distinction between content of and type of intentionality does not mean, however, that one can be experienced without the other. For the example of hearing a tone, Husserl addressed an objection that the hearing of the tone and the tone heard could not be separated in experience⁹. Husserl says that this is entirely true; there must be an act associated with a content, and vice versa, but it does not follow that because of this that these two aspects of intentional experience cannot be distinguished. This distinction can still be observed and abstracted out of experience. A way in which to analyze these intentional experiences is through reflection, or making the content of experience the previously experienced intentional relation. In summary, Husserl delineates two independent components to an intentional experience: content (or matter, or noema) and act-type (or quality, or noesis), but according to Husserl, this does not cover the entirety of the intentional experience.

In addition to the content and type of an intentional relation, there is another aspect of intentional experience, specifically of the content, which must be described. There is a way in which two intentional experiences can be of the same type and directed to the same content, but still be qualitatively different. Husserl calls this the semantic essence of the act, as opposed to the intentional essence composed of the content and the act-type.¹⁰ The semantic essence is the kind of meaning associated with the content of the experience. This is a difference in the aspect under which the content is experienced, such as the perspective or amount of clarity associated with the experience. An example that Husserl gives is thinking of either an equilateral triangle or an equiangular triangle.¹¹ In both cases the type of act is the same (thinking of) and the object of the intentional relation is the same (the triangle), but the meaning of the triangle as having sides of equal length or as having angles of equal degree is different in experience. One meaning can be focused on without thinking of the other. Another example would be seeing a black desk with books and papers cluttered over it and without, seeing the desk from the floor at a lower angle, or seeing it in a positive light as a place of learning or in a negative light as a place of tortuous work. These are differences of perspective or meaning, while the basic intentional essence is the same in each case. A related aspect of intentional experience is its relation to attention.

According to Husserl, there is a fundamental relation between attention and intentionality: attention is a modification of the intentional relation.¹² This means that every intentional experience has a certain degree or varying degrees of attention associated with it, much like there is a semantic essence in addition to the intentional essence. Attention actually seems to be a part of the semantic essence as it was one way Husserl characterized the semantic essence (in the example of the equilateral triangle above). The object of an intentional relation can be in a mode of primary attention or paid attention to only secondarily or even completely unnoticed¹³, in which case it would seem to be non-intentional, but still conscious. An example of this last case would be that while driving, I may not be paying any particular attention to the turn signal light of the car ahead and to the right of me, but I am still conscious of it; it is still in my conscious field. If the turn signal were to start flashing, I would notice it, and my attention would be directed there, which would bring about an intentional relation of seeing the turn signal. Husserl makes this point about the non-intentionality of some experience. He states, “Any piece of a sensed visual field…is an experience containing many part-contents, which are neither referred to, nor intentionally objective, in the whole.”¹⁴ Degrees of attention are also illustrated in Husserl’s discussion of internal time consciousness where, while little attention may be placed on the immediate past of a temporal object, like when watching a bird fly across the sky, there is still consciousness of those prior positions of the bird as part of one temporal object.¹⁵ Another example of this connection is when I am looking for a brown shirt in my closet. When looking at the group of shirts and other clothing, the brown articles of clothing, especially the brown shirts, stick out, while the other shirts have a lesser amount of attention associated with them. This example shows how the character of an intentional experience changes with what aspect of the object, the group of shirts, is focused upon. Husserl also stresses that these attentional changes in the intentional experience are not additions, but modifications.¹⁶ The total experience is different, while the attentional differences are abstracted out of these experiences.

Some types of intentionality are more complex than others in that they are based on other more fundamental, constituent intentional relations. Intentional feelings based on presentations are a group of intentional acts of this type that Husserl discusses.¹⁷ Intentional feelings (or feeling-acts) such as pleasure, for example, are based upon presentative intentions, such as perception. In experiencing pleasure from hearing a tone, there are at least two intentional relations. The foundational, presentative intention is the hearing of the tone. This intention is necessary for the higher order intentional relation, the pleasure in hearing the tone. The pleasure is an intentional-feeling because the experience is directed at the tone. Husserl also makes it clear that this is not a relation of causation. The pleasure intention does not necessarily have to occur with the presentative, hearing intention. Pleasure may be aroused by the tone, but so may displeasure, or some neutral feeling as well. He also brings up this idea of intentional acts built upon other intentional acts in his discussion of noesis and noema.¹⁸ In valuing, for example, there must be at least a judgment about a state of affairs that the valuing must be founded upon. Husserl distinguishes between complex acts and parallel acts, where the complex act must require the presence of its constituent acts and the parallel acts must be able to be experienced independently.¹⁹ The distinction is also made between feeling-acts and non-intentional feeling-sensations.

Feeling-sensations, according to Husserl, should be understood differently from feeling-acts because they need not refer to a content. The example that Husserl gives is a feeling of joy that remains after a joyful experience, even after the intentional experience has passed²⁰. This joy felt is a general feeling that has no content. Other examples would be general, undirected feelings of anxiety or depression. These are simply moods that permeate experience, but are not necessarily directed towards any object. This is another instance showing that not all aspects of consciousness are intentional.

As has been mentioned above, Husserl’s exploration of intentionality was carried out independently of the judgments of a really existing world that experience corresponds to, which marks an important difference in Searle’s conception of intentionality. Searle fully accepts the “natural attitude,” as Husserl would put it, of the findings of science and the assumption of a really existing world in his analysis of intentionality. There are many important similarities, which should be the case, since both are inquiring into the same area. The natural attitude is integral in Searle’s account, however, and certain aspects of intentionality are emphasized as a result, which were not in Husserl’s account.

§4 Searle’s conception of intentionality

Searle’s analysis of intentionality shows the same basic intentional type/content dichotomy as Husserl, with the object of the intentional state as the representational content and the type as the psychological mode.²¹ He does not refer to these intentional experiences as acts, but rather as states to distinguish between mental states and actual mental activity such as the process of imagining or performing a computation.²² One significant difference is the assertion by Searle that intentional contents are either propositional in form or composed, at least in part, from intentional states with contents that are propositional.²³ An intentional state such as seeing a glass of water, however, does not seem to contain a propositional content. If the type of intentionality is seeing, then the content seems to be “a glass of water” which is hardly propositional. But I do not just have a visual experience of a glass of water; I see the water as on the desk or a small distance away from me or in relation to other items on the desk, or simply as present. The intentional state then could be more accurately described as “I have a visual experience that there is a glass of water present.” The same can be said of an intentional state such as desire. “I desire a glass of water” can be restated as “I desire that I have (or drink) a glass of water.” I want a state of affairs, not simply an object. If I want an object, I want a state of affairs such that I have an object. This content is then propositional, but the proposition need not be explicated in linguistic terms when having the experience. I think this is phenomenologically verified as well. When I see the glass of water, I see it as present, or as situated against a background from a perspective. These additional aspects to the content give it a propositional form. Husserl did not state, as far as I am aware, this requirement of intentional contents. However, he recognized some of these characteristics of intentional experience in his discussion of semantic essence. Another aspect of intentionality discussed by Searle is the direction of fit.

Intentionality can be described as the directedness of consciousness to the world and there can be a direction to this relation. Searle calls this direction, the direction of fit, and distinguishes some types of intentionality with this term. He describes direction of fit metaphorically as the “obligation” the world or the mind has to fitting the other.²⁴ A belief, for example, has a mind-to-world direction of fit, since it is the “responsibility” of the belief to match the actual state of affairs of the world. If I believe that it is raining outside, my belief should match the fact of whether or not it is truly raining to be a true belief. A desire has a world-to-mind direction of fit since the world must be altered or is desired to be altered to fit the mind. If I desire a glass of water, I desire the state of affairs of the world to be altered such that I have a glass of water. Intentional states such as perception or belief would be mind-to-world, while states such as desire, wishing, or intending (as in intending to perform an action) would be world-to-mind. To the best of my knowledge, this is an aspect of intentionality that Husserl leaves out completely, while it seems to be an eidetic property of at least some intentional states. The direction of fit relates closely to Searle’s idea of conditions of satisfaction, which he believes are crucial to understanding intentionality.

Conditions of satisfaction are represented in the intentional state by the content of the intention as long as there is a direction of fit.²⁵ They are the conditions that must be met for the intentional state to be satisfied. The relevance of the direction of fit is that the conditions are fulfilled in that direction. An example Searle uses is a belief that it is raining. In order for this intentional state (this belief) to be satisfied, the proposition that it is raining must actually be true. The conditions of satisfaction are also following the mind-to-world direction of fit, since the mind (the belief) must match the world (the state of the weather). The conditions may or may not be satisfied depending on whether the belief is true, but the state would not be a belief without this condition of satisfaction present. Wishing for the sun to shine would be an example in the other direction, with the conditions of satisfaction of the wish being a change in the state of affairs of the world to the sun shining, conforming to the wish of the mind. These conditions of satisfaction and directions of fit point to a direction of intentional causation, which Searle discusses, and which I will discuss below. Husserl did not make note of these aspects of intentionality, however, I believe that conditions of satisfaction can be abstracted out of intentional experience as Searle has done. There are some types of intentionality, according to Searle, that do not have conditions of satisfaction.

Intentional relations that do not have a content in propositional form have a null direction of fit, and therefore, no conditions of satisfaction.²⁶ These types of intentionality are founded upon intentional relations which are propositional in content, much like Husserl’s discussion of complex acts founded upon others. If Joe loves Amanda, there is a content to which the love is directed at (Amanda), but that content is not propositional. Love is based upon certain beliefs about that person, and certain desires pertaining to the person and love in general. These higher order intentional relations are not simply reducible, as Husserl discussed as well, to beliefs and desires, because happiness about a state of affairs is also founded upon beliefs and desires. There is more to the overall intentional relation than the constituent beliefs and desires. Another similarity to Husserl is Searle’s discussion of the aspectual shape of experience.

Searle states that “all intentionality is aspectual”; that, for example, all perception is perspectival.²⁷ This coincides with Husserl’s semantic essence. This aspectual shape not only comes from the position from which the object is perceived in perception, but also from the categories with which one views a state of affairs and what meaning comes out of those categories. An example that Searle uses is that one can believe the Eiffel Tower is located in Paris or that the “tallest iron structure built in France before 1900 is located in the French capital”, and these are two different intentional experiences with different meanings, even if both refer to the same object.²⁸ Searle also writes of aspectual shape as it relates to attention. In an example of perceptual attention where a single drawing can look like a rabbit or a duck, Searle mentions that depending on which image we are looking for, the experience will change, while the intentional object remains the same.²⁹ This discussion shows how aspectual shape and specifically the meaning and attention associated with intentional experience can affect the way one experiences the world.

Another issue that both Husserl and Searle confront is what an intentional relation is not. Searle says that he subscribes to a kind of naïve realism, where in perception for example, the object causes the visual experience for the perceiver.³⁰ He states that intentionality and his use of the phrase, representational content, does not imply a representative theory of perception, where the perceiver sees a datum which resembles the actual object.³¹ This theory breaks down because if the actual object is invisible, and only the datum is visible, the idea of resemblance between the two becomes unintelligible. Searle’s view is also not one of phenomenalism where the perceiver only experiences the sense datum, where all experience is private. This view reduces to solipsism since all that is experienced are the private data, which is a reduction to absurdity for Searle³². The problem in both cases is that the intentional content is taken as the object of the perceptual experience, so that one perceives the perceptual experience rather than the actual object. The perceptual experience is the perceiving. This applies to all types of intentional relations. Husserl says in agreement with this point that the representation, if it were a separate object from the actual object, could not be considered an image of the object based on similarity, because two objects which are similar are not necessarily images of one another.³³ In addition to this, Husserl states that this type of model of intentionality would lead to an infinite regress of intentional relations to immanent objects.³⁴ Searle introduces the concept of intentional causation as the way in which consciousness and the world interact to produce these intentional experiences.³⁵

Intentional causation is always causally self-referential, according to Searle, and the direction of causation is opposite to the direction of fit.³⁶ Not every intentional state involves intentional causation, but two that do are perception and intentional action. Perception has a direction of fit of mind-to-world because the visual experience is to match the state of affairs of the world. Its direction of causation is world-to-mind because the state of affairs of the world is causing the perceptual experience. The effect (the visual experience) is a presentation of its cause (the state of affairs of the world).³⁷ For intentional action, there is a world-to-mind direction of fit and a mind-to-world causation. The actor is effecting a change in the state of affairs of the world, so the cause (the intention) is a representation of the effect (the intended state of affairs following the action).³⁸ What intentional causation does is show that part of the experience of at least some intentional states is that there is some interaction with an objective world, or an independently existing world. When I see the glass of water on the desk, part of the experience is that the glass of water is causing the visual experience that I am having rather passively. I may be able to alter the experience by focusing upon certain aspects of the glass rather than others, but there is a basic passiveness of the overall experience that remains. I can also experience cause in a more active form when I intend to raise my arm and succeed. Through performing intentional actions, I can have an experience of effecting change in the world. As Searle remarks, Husserl seemed to see causality as a non-intentional relation of the natural world.³⁹ To the best of my knowledge, Husserl did not involve any causal relation with the concept of intentionality. It is these experiences of causation, however, which are our connection with the world through intentionality. There may be objections that hypotheses about the existence of causation and an independent world cannot be verified, so we cannot hold these beliefs, but as Searle addresses, these are not intentional relations. A kind of regularity to the world and the independent existence of that world are not hypotheses, but are pre-intentional, or already given.⁴⁰ Searle introduces the idea of the Background as a set of pre-intentional coping abilities or taken-for-granted presuppositions out of which intentionality functions.

§5 Searle’s Background and Husserl’s pregiven life-world

According to Searle, the Background is necessary to the functioning of intentionality. The conditions of satisfaction of a particular intentional state cannot be determined in isolation, and so require Background capacities.⁴¹ An example is when I intend to buy a book at a bookstore. The conditions of satisfaction, that I intentionally perform the actions necessary to purchase the book, can only be understood under the presuppositions that bookstores sell books, I am living in a market economy, the paper I have can be used as currency, the world actually exists, etc. Another example that Searle uses is that of linguistic interpretation. There needs to be an understanding beyond the literal interpretation of words, such as the command, “cut the cake”.⁴² In this situation we know that a knife is required rather than an axe or a razor blade. There is nothing in the specific word choices to bring about this information, so the understanding must come from elsewhere, such as the Background. The presuppositions which are a part of the Background are not propositions held as beliefs, although some may be made into propositions, but we are committed to the truth of these presuppositions through our intentional behavior.⁴³ Among these presuppositions are the existence of a type of causal regularity to the world, and that there is a world that is independent of our thoughts of it. In any kind of normal intentional activity of action and perception, these presuppositions are present and accepted, at least implicitly. Searle also made a distinction between Background presuppositions and abilities which are deep, or shared among the entire human race, and those which are cultural, or local. He saw rationality, a commitment to causal regularity and to an independent world as part of the deep Background.⁴⁴ Because of the presupposition of external realism as part of the Background, no proof can be made for it. Any debate about the nature of reality presupposes it.⁴⁵ Husserl also recognized the need for pre-intentional capacities in his discussion of the pregiven life-world.

The pregiven life-world is the world in which the living body exists among other bodies. This is the world we live in most of our normal, practical daily lives, and the world that scientific investigation takes place in. The life-world is a world of certainty in experience and a world made meaningful by our experiences, values, and relations to it.⁴⁶ Husserl describes the lived body as the “kinesthetic-sensual total situation”⁴⁷, referring to the way in which our body is always in our perception and how this perception and our perception of the world constantly interact with our intentional movements. This is similar to Searle’s discussion of perception and intentional action in regard to intentional causation. Husserl, of course, does not bring causation into the description. In the life-world, there are constant presuppositions, such as the existence of the world. He also makes the point that questioning and correcting of opinion presupposes the existence of the world.⁴⁸ These presuppositions form an area of the subjective that has yet to be studied, “functioning in all experiencing, all thinking, all life, thus everywhere inseparably involved”⁴⁹. Husserl writes that “there must be a systematic disclosure of the intentionality which…is sedimented in this ground”⁵⁰. This realm of subjectivity which is the pregiven life-world seems to be very similar to Searle’s Background as a pre-intentional ground of intentionality.

The transcendental epoche, or what he previously termed the phenomenological reduction, is an attempt to study experience itself apart from other suppositions about experience from other areas, including science. It can also be viewed as a suspension of the carrying out of the logical judgments, values, etc. encountered in experience and only studying their structure as experienced. This does not imply, however, that these judgments, etc. must not ultimately be taken as valid, only not in this investigation. If we are to have any intuitive knowledge, then these clarified intuitions must be taken as valid in any other field of investigation. Husserl’s phenomenological investigations into logic and knowledge, for example, can be seen roughly, I believe, as separating out and clarifying that deep Background, in Searle’s terms, that all of humanity lives founded upon. The phenomenological reduction may be useful in clarifying which intuitions are based in only the more local part of the Background, rather than the deeper. This may prove useful in studying the experience of value-judgments to clarify which if any are part of that deep Background or have a more epistemically objective validity and which are only based in our cultural upbringing for example. Searle describes Background capacities as being realized neurobiologically⁵¹, but this cannot be their fundamental reality if they are to be valid. Rationality, if it is to be true in some objective way, must be true independent of our brain structures, otherwise, accounting for it only neurobiologically commits the fallacy of psychologism. This would be a circular argument in saying that the rules of logic for example are psychological, or biological, while the knowledge gained that forms the fields of psychology and biology utilized logical principles. In essence, rationality is being used to explain biology which is then being used to explain rationality. This is the kind of psychologism that Husserl correctly argued against.⁵² Rationality may be realized in the Background neurobiologically, but this cannot be the fundamental ground; it must be valid independently as well.

§6 Conclusion

The analyses of intentionality by both Husserl and Searle, philosophers from different philosophical traditions, brought to the fore many similar features of experience. The consistent aspects of the accounts should demonstrate the viability of a science of pure consciousness that Husserl desired, derived from many concurring subjective accounts. The differences in the account introduced by Searle, specifically intentional causation and conditions of satisfaction, led to an acceptance of external realism which had to be presupposed, however, Husserl at least began to realize the importance of this Background with his discussion of the pregiven life-world. Intentionality is an important aspect of consciousness, and any complete account of humans and their relations must include this concept. The accounts of these two philosophers taken as a whole led to a greater understanding of intentionality and its importance in understanding the basis of human experience.

Bibliography

Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology Reader. Dermot Moran & Timothy Mooney, ed.
London: Routledge, 2002. pp. 65-174.

Searle, John R. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Searle, John R. Mind, Language, and Society. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Searle, John R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

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