Abstract
This chapter, following Franz Brentano, defines intentionality as the essential feature of the psychological, and, following Immanuel Kant, an a priori temporal–spatial format. It is argued, against Kant, that the format can be placed in the extra-mental world by making it a corollary to the second law of thermodynamics. Living beings can only exist under this law if they are regularly sustained by an outside source of energy, food in the case of animals, and it is argued that the self-initiated locomotion toward this food brings the format of intentionality into existence. It is further shown how locomotion through the interspace between organism and goal passes through four distinct phases, each of which has been the focus of a major field of psychology.
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- 1.
See Engelsted (1989).
- 2.
James (1890, p. 8).
- 3.
Leontiev (1978, p. 52).
- 4.
Ibid., p. 53.
- 5.
Every determination is negation. Spinoza’s letter of June 2, 1674 to his friend Jarig Jelles.
- 6.
In Chap. 11 we shall use the double negation to explain the arrival of the human consciousness, but here an everyday example should provide the gist of how negation and contradiction can serve as development. When your unmarried stand (A) is negated, you become married (non-A), but if your married stand is negated, you do not simply become unmarried again (A), you become divorced (non-non-A), which is something entirely different. Even when negated, the intermediate stage stays, as divorced people will happily tell you.
- 7.
Aristotle, De Anima ii, 4, 415a24–25.
- 8.
If you write the sequence as E-Activity-E′, a Marxist will recognize the structural similarly with the M-C-M′ of capitalist production. It is no accident. Capitalism is the life algorithm taking on a life of its own like the broom in the story of the Wizard’s Apprentice.
- 9.
Wittgenstein (1980, #509).
- 10.
James Gibson’s ecological psychology, for instance, is basically an environmental psychology, where the term ecology is mainly reserved for the title, while the term environment is used throughout the text.
- 11.
E.C. Tolman in his Purposive Behaviorism convincingly argues that the basic psychological concepts are grounded in patterns of behavior before they become mental and not the other way around.
- 12.
Penrose (2004, p. 366).
- 13.
References
Engelsted, N. (1989). What is the psyche and how did it get into the world. In: N. Engelsted, L. Hem, & J. Mammen (Eds.), Essays in general psychology. Seven Danish contributions (pp. 13–48). Århus: Aarhus University Press. http://engelsted.net/almenbiblio/biblioengelsted/whatispsyche.pdf
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York: Holt.
Leontiev, A. N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. https://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1978/
Mammen, J. (1983). The human sense. An essay on the domain of psychology [In Danish]. Copenhagen: Dansk psykologisk Forlag. http://engelsted.net/almenbiblio/bibliomammen/DMSheletext.pdf
Mammen, J. (2016). Using a topological model in psychology: Developing sense and choice categories. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 50, 2.
Penrose, R. (2004). The road to reality, 2004. New York, USA: Alfred A. Knopf.
Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Remarks on the philosophy of psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Engelsted, N. (2017). Intentionality. In: Catching Up With Aristotle . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51088-0_5
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