Abstract
The contrast flaunted in the title of this colloquium, “Explanation and Understanding”,1 is predicated on an important assumption. This assumption is best known as Brentano’s thesis. It says, roughly, that there is an irreducible conceptual difference between two kinds of phenomena which I shall refer to as intentional and nonintentional phenomena. The non- intentional or physical phenomena are subject to explanation, the intentional ones to understanding.
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Notes
International Colloquium on Explanation and Understanding, Helsinki, 25–26 January, 1974. The present essay is a considerably enlarged version of the paper read at that Colloquium. In expanding and rewriting it, I have greatly profited from discussions with Professor Dagfinn Føllesdal and from his unpublished (as well as published) writings. He nevertheless is not responsible for my errors, the more so as he in so many words disagrees with some of my conclusions concerning Husserl. I have also profited from comments by Professor Yrjö Reenpää and from the unpublished writings of Professors Ronald McIntyre and David Smith.
Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Ducker und Humblot, Leipzig, 1874, Vol. I, Book 2, Chapter 1, sec. v., p. 85; translated in Roderick M. Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1960, p. 50.
In the sequel, I shall nevertheless argue that the sense-impressions involved in normal perception are not of this kind.
Cf. Brentano, op. cit., sec. iii.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell’s, Oxford, 1953, pp. 89-103 and passim.
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, sec. 85 (Husserliana ed., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1950, pp. 207-208; first ed., 1913, p. 171; Boyce Gibson translation, p. 226).
Husserl, op. cit., sec. 124 (Husserliana ed., p. 305; first ed., p. 257; Boyce Gibson translation, p. 320).
Cf. my books Knowledge and Belief, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1962; Models for Modalities, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1969.
Cf. Herbert Spiegelberg, ‘Der Begriff der Intentionalität in der Scholastik, bei Brentano und bei Husserl’, Philosophische Hefte (ed. by M. Beck) 5 (1936), 72-91.
Cf. L. J. Savage, The Foundations of Statistics, John Wiley, New York, 1954, pp. 9, 82-87.
What I have in mind in this qualification is seen from my paper,’ surface Semantics’, in Truth, Syntax, and Modality, Hugues Leblanc (ed.), North-Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam, 1973, pp. 128-147.
This seems to have been an instance of a deeper (and wider) tendency to think of all rational activities in goal-directed concepts. Cf. the first two chapters of my book, Knowledge and the Known, D. Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1974.
Cf. also the less striking formulations of the same point in Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, Dore Ashton (ed.), The Documents of 20th-century Art, The Viking Press, New York, 1972, pp. 27-31.
Cf. my Knowledge and the Known, p. 36.
Even more convincing evidence is obtained when it turns out that many problems concerning an artist’s activity and its objects turn out to be but special cases of general problems in the semantics of intensional concepts. The problem of the identity of the object of an artist’s creation (e.g.: Would he have created the same work of art if he had executed it differently in such-and-such respects?) is for example a special case of the more general problem of cross-identification. For a glimpse of this problem, see my ‘Quine on Quantifying in a Dialog’, in The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities, D. Reidel, Dordrecht-Boston, 1975.
Critique of Pure Reason, beginning of the Transcendental Aesthetic (A 19=B 33).
See Aristotle, Metaphysica, IX, 6, 1048b, 23-35.
W. V. Quine, World and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, p. 9.
Dagfinn F0llesdal, ‘Phenomenology’, Chapter 21 in Handbook of Perception, Vol.. 1, ed. by E. C. Carterette and M.P.Friedman, Academic Press, New York, 1974.
Cf. Ideen, sec. 85: “What forms the materials into intentional experiences and brings in the specific element of intentionality is … noesis.” The ‘materials’ in question are described by Husserl as’ sensory data’, ‘hyletic or material data’, or in older terms, “sensuelle, wohl aber sinnliche Stoffe”. (See pp. 173-174 of the original; p. 210 of the Husserliana edition; and p. 228 of the Boyce Gibson translation). Husserl’s formulation clearly presupposes that it is only through a noesis that these ‘materials’ become intentional.
Føllesdal, op. cit.
Føllesdal, op. cit.
Cf. Wolfgang Metzger, Psychologie: Die Entwicklung ihrer Grundannahmen seit der Einführung des Experiments, Dietrich Steinkopf, Darmstadt, 1954, p. 32. (Referred to and discussed by Eino Kaila, Die perzeptuellen und konzeptuellen Komponenten der Alltagserfahrung, Acta Philosophica Fennica, Vol. 13, Helsinki, 1963, pp. 65-69.) Another phenomenon which serves to illustrate my point here is the illusion of seeing three-dimensional Necker cube with the wrong orientation even when one’s touch information gives the right orientation. See, e.g., R. C. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1970, p. 40. Kaila discusses similar inversion phenomena; see op. cit., pp. 44-46.
Cf. William H. Ittelson, The Ames Demonstrations in Perception, Princeton and London, 1952.
See A. Michotte, The Perception of Causality, Methuen, London, 1963.
As is well known, Husserl goes as far as to say that for noemata “esse consists exclusively in its ‘percipi’…” (Ideen, Husserliana ed., p. 246, first ed., p. 206, Boyce Gibson tr. p. 265).
Thus for instance Quine speaks of visual impressions as “colors disposed in a spatial manifold of two dimensions” (op. cit., p. 2). This quote also illustrates the fact that on the view I am criticizing spontaneous sense-impressions need not be devoid of structure by any means. What is at issue is whether they are already impressions of definite objects (are intentional in Husserl’s sense) and whether they must be described in the same terms as these objects.
Cf. Kaila, op. cit., pp. 71-73.
Cf. Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘An Introduction to Phenomenology for Analytic Philosophers’, in Contemporary Philosophy in Scandinavia, R. E. Olson and A. M. Paul (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1972, pp. 417-429, especially p. 423.
Cf. note 23 above.
See J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1966. Most of David Katz’ writings are also relevant here. There is a brief summary of some of his assumptions in Chapter 2 of his Gestaltpsychologie, Basel 1948.
See the proceedings of the 1973 Colloquium on Perception in Helsinki in Ajatus, Yearbook of the Philosophical Society of Finland, 36 (1974).
J. J. Gibson, op. cit., especially Chapter 1 and 13.
For instance, it is emphasized that colors are not normally seen just as colors as such, but as somehow connected with the objects of perception, that is to say, as colors of objects (surface colors), film colors, colors of transparent regions of space (volume colors), colors of light sources (luminous colors), colored illuminations of objects or of empty space, etc. (See Jacob Beck, Surface Color Perception, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1972, especially Ch. 2, and David Katz, The World of Colour, Kegan Paul London, 1935.) Nor is this object-relatedness restricted to visual perception. It is perhaps even more remarkable in the sphere of touch. There are even analogues in the tactile-haptic area to several to the different modes of color perception. (See David Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, Barth, Leipzig, 1925, and J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1966, Chapter 7.)
Cf. J. J. Gibson, op. cit., Ch. 13 and passim.
Cf. here Hintikka, ‘Information, Causality, and the Logic of Perception’ (note 32 above).
Cf. here Marx Wartofsky’s contribution to the volume mentioned in note 32 above. The psychological literature on the experiential, conceptual, and cultural conditioning of perception is too vast to be surveyed here.
Further materials concerning Husserl’s views on perception are contained especially in his Phänomenologische Psychologie (Husserliana, Vol. IX), Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (Husserliana, Vol. XI), Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Husserliana, Vol. X), and Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907 (Husserliana, Vol. XVI). See also Elisabeth Ströker, ‘Zur phänomenologischen Theorie der Wahrnehmung’, forthcoming in the volume mentioned above in note 32, and Føllesdal’s comments on Aron Gurwitsch in his ‘Phenomenology’ (note 19 above).
Translation modified from Føllesdal’s; see Husserliana, Vol. XI, p. 363, lines 18-27. One problem with this passage is the Husserl is there speaking in so many words of the filling component of a perceptual noema not of sense data. Now clearly the two are related extremely closely to each other in Husserl. (Perhaps they are at bottom identical?) Yet it seems to be impossible to extract from Husserl any clear statement concerning their precise relationship. By any token, they nevertheless are sufficiently close to each other in Husserl for us to rely on the quoted passage here, presupposing of course sufficient general caution in interpreting Husserl.
Føllesdal, ‘Phenomenology’ (note 19 above).
Cf. Michael Dummett’s discussion of Frege’s principle “the concept horse is not a concept” in Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, Duckworth, London, 1973, especially pp. 210-212. Note also that Fregean senses could not operate as the references of our terms in opaque (oblique) contexts (as they do on Frege’s doctrine) if they were unsaturated.
Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892), pp. 25-50; see p. 26. Husserl’s term ‘Gegebenheitsweise’ is also highly suggestive, even though it refers only to a certain component of the noema.
Cf. my ‘Quine on Quantifying in a Dialog’ (note 15 above).
This point was emphasized particularly vigorously by Richard Montague; see Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, Richmond H. Thomason (ed.), Yale University Press, New Haven, 1974.
See my ‘On the Logic of Perception’, Ch. 8 of Models for Modalities (note 8 above).
The writings of Saul Kriple, Richard Montague, and Dana Scott offer good examples of this. Of them, Kripke has given the most sustained motivation for this view; see his ‘Naming and Necessity’, in Semantics of Natural Language, D. Davidson and G. Har-man (eds.), D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1972, pp. 253-355. Of some of the difficulties into which this treatment leads, cf. my paper, ‘On the Proper Treatment of Quantifiers in Montague Semantics’, in Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis: Essays Dedicated to Stig Ranger, Sören Stenlund fed.), D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1974, pp. 45-60.
Cf. my papers ‘Quine on Quantifying In’ (note 15 above) and ‘The Semantics of Modal Notions and the Indeterminacy of Ontology’, in Semantics of Natural Language (note 46 above), pp. 398-414, reprinted above as Chapter 2 of this volume.
David K. Lewis, ‘Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968), 113-126.
Cf. my ‘Quine on Quantifying In’ (note 15 above).
The perfectly unproblematic phenomenon of seeing double gives us an example of splitting world lines, when perception is treated ‘informationally’ along the lines indicated earlier in this paper.
As one can easily see, merging is ruled out if and only if the following formula is valid: (x)(y) (possibly (x = y) ⊃ (x=y)). In many treatments of different modal logics, it is not.
The principle says that from F (a) and a=b you can infer F (b) for any sentence F(x). Of its interpretation, see once again my ‘Quine on Quantifying In’ (note 15 above).
For the following, see my ‘On the Logic of Perception’ (note 45 above), ‘Objects of Knowledge and Belief,’ The Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 869-883, and ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance — Individuation by Acquaintance’, in Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays, David Pears (ed.), Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., 1972, pp. 52-79.
Cf. my Models for Modalities (note 8 above), pp. 97, 120-121, 141.
See also Ronald McIntyre, ‘Intentionality and de re Modality’ (preprint).
Cf. sec. 94 of the Ideen; also Logische Untersuchungen 5, xvii (Vol. 1, p. 402 of the first edition, p. 579 of the Findlay translation); 1, xii (p. 48 of the first ed., p. 288 of the translation); 5, xxxvi (pp. 472-3 of the first ed.; pp. 631-2 of the translation).
Cf. R. Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution, Pheno-menologica, Vol. 18, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970.
Cf., e.g., Ströker, op. cit. (note 38 above), sec. C, and the references given there.
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Hintikka, J. (1976). The Intentions of Intentionality. In: Manninen, J., Tuomela, R. (eds) Essays on Explanation and Understanding. Synthese Library, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1823-4_4
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