The New Science of the Mind

by Mark Rowlands

  Three ideas emerging from the foregoing discussion are particularly pertinent to the concerns of this chapter:

  1. The notion of Fregean sense functions in two different ways: (a) as an intentional object of a mental act of apprehension, and (b) as that which determines reference.

  determinant of reference, sense has a noneliminable role within any intentional act.

  3. This combination of (1a) and (1b) is not incoherent as long as we are willing to accept that sense is simply a manner of determining a referent, and therefore is something that can be shown but not said.

  I shall argue that clearly identifiable counterparts of these principles can be identified in recent attempts to understand consciousness: what it is like to have or undergo an experience. However, as we have seen, almost all recent discussions have been oriented around a conception of consciousness along the lines of Frege's first conception of sense: the idea of sense as an object of an act of apprehension. What it is like to have an experience is thought of as something of which we are aware in the having of that experience. What it is like to have an experience is an object of experiential apprehension. However, just as Fregean sense is more than an object of apprehension, what it is like to have an experience is more than an object of apprehension. Just as Fregean sense is that which determines reference, what it is like to have an experience is, in part, that which determines the objects of experiential acts. Its role in this regard is noneliminable in any such act.

  In other words, Frege's distinction between the two roles of linguistic sense is structurally analogous to the distinction between empirical and transcendental conceptions of experience introduced earlier. As an empirical item, sense is an object of apprehension-something that I grasp when I understand the sense of a term or sentence. As empirical, sense is something toward which a thinker's act of apprehension is directed. As a transcendental item, sense is a determinant of reference: it is that in virtue of which a term or sentence can be about something outside it. As transcendental, rather than being an object of apprehension that is grasped, sense is that in virtue of which objects of apprehension are grasped.

  In its transcendental role, sense occupies a noneliminable position in any intentional act. Any attempt to make sense into an object-and hence empirical-will require a further sense in virtue of which this transforma tion can be accomplished. Moreover, it is to sense in its noneliminable transcendental role that we must look if we want to understand the intentionality of thought-the directedness of thought toward its object.

  Similarly, it is to experience in its transcendental role that we shall have to turn if we want to understand the intentionality of experience. The intentionality of experience is commonly understood as the directing of that experience toward its intentional objects. If this is correct, focusing on those intentional objects themselves is not going to enable us to understand intentional directedness toward them. To understand this, we need to understand what it is that permits these objects to appear to subjects as the intentional objects of their experiential acts. The distinction between empirical and transcendental concepts of experience mirrors the distinction between sense as object of thought and sense as determinant of the reference of thought.

  This dialectic is not a peculiar eruption of Fregean thought. Although it has become oddly neglected in recent years, it played a pronounced role in early to mid-twentieth-century thought. Further important exemplars of this way of thinking about intentional directedness can be found in the work of Husserl and Sartre. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly for those not used to thinking of Frege in these terms, this way of thinking about intentional directedness strongly shaped the development of the phenomenological tradition. It is to an examination of this that we now turn.

  4 Husserl on Auffassungsinn, Noesis, and Noema

  As we have seen, the concept of sense, as employed by Frege, admits of both empirical and transcendental interpretations. Empirically, sense is the intentional object of an act of apprehension. Transcendentally, it is that in virtue of which any intentional act-an act of apprehension or an experiential or cognitive act more generally-can refer to, or be about, an object. Sense, as transcendental, occupies a noneliminable position in any intentional act: whenever there is a referent there is a sense that consists in the manner in which this referent is picked out. This true even when the referent of an act is also a sense: in such a case, there must be another sense-the sense in virtue of which the referent is presented in the manner in which it is presented. As a transcendental determinant of reference, sense is therefore a noneliminable component of any intentional act.

  When a "thought"-the sense of a declarative sentence-is apprehended, Frege claims, "something in [the thinker's] consciousness must be aimed at the thought" (Frege 1918/1994, 34-35). As something aimed at, therefore, the sense or thought remains an extrinsic object of an act of apprehending. Frege explains this in terms of an analogy concerning two different ways in which something might be grasped or apprehended by a hand:

  The expression "apprehend" is as metaphorical as "content of consciousness" .. . What I hold in my hand can certainly be regarded as the content of my hand but is all the same the content of my hand in a quite different way from the bones and muscle of which it is made and their tensions, and is much more extraneous to it than they are. (Ibid., 35)

  Senses or thoughts are grasped by the mind in a way (metaphorically) akin to that in which a hand grasps an object. When grasped, they are therefore "in" the mind in way that an object grasped by the hand is in the hand, and not the way in which the bones and muscles that make up the hand are in the hand. This, however, pertains only to senses as entities that are grasped or apprehended. That is, it pertains only to senses as empirical. Transcendentally, on the other hand, a sense is that in virtue of which an object is picked out as falling under a given mode of presentation. Therefore, if senses are transcendental as well as empirical, indeed, if their primary role is a transcendental one, then it seems that, as such, senses must also be more akin to the bones and muscle of the hand than an object grasped in it. The bones and muscle are precisely what allows the object to be grasped in the hand: they are that in virtue of which the hand can grasp things extrinsic to it. Similarly, as transcendental, senses are that in virtue of which a mental act can have an intentional object.

  This, however, poses an immediate problem for Frege: it seems to threaten his antipsychologism. If senses are the psychic equivalent of the bones and muscles of the hand, then they seem to be mental entities of some sort, and this undermines Frege's contention that senses are abstract entities (belonging to, as he put it, realm three) rather than psychological entities (belonging to, as he put it, realm one). This tension also insinuates itself into the work of Husserl, where we find a dialectic that parallels, in most important respects, the one we have found in Frege.

  In the Logical Investigations, Husserl assigned a central role to what he called Auffassungsinn (McIntyre 1987). For Husserl, the Auffassungsinn is the content of the mental act: it is not an object of the act, not something apprehended or otherwise intended in the act, but something in the act in virtue of which the act is a presentation of an object. In terms of Frege's analogy, the act's Auffassungsinn is less like an object grasped in the hand and more like the muscles and bone in virtue of which the hand can grasp that object. Auffassungsinn is sense understood transcendentally.

  However, the existence of Auffassungsinn or the transcendental form of sense is a potential embarrassment for Husserl; and this is so for the same reason that the transcendental conception of sense is for Frege. The reason is that it potentially conflicts with Husserl's (and Frege's) antipsychologism. Both Frege and Husserl were insistent that senses should be understood as (i) objective, in the sense that they exist independently of the mental activity of any subject, and (ii) ideal in the sense that they are neither spatial nor temporal entities. However, this idea seems to work most naturally with the empirical conception of sense, assuming
(which may not be the case) that we can understand the epistemic relation between mental acts and these objective, ideal entities: that is, assuming we can understand how a concrete, particular subject can grasp or apprehend an abstract, ideal entity (Harnish 2000). The problem with understanding the transcendental version of sense in this nonpsychologistic way is a subtly different one. As empirical, senses are extrinsic objects of mental acts-as the ball grasped by a hand is extrinsic to the hand. But as transcendental, they are not extrinsic in this sense at all. The worry, therefore, is that if senses are so intimately connected with mental acts-like the muscles and bones are connected to the hand-as to be determinants of their reference, then they must be the same sort of things as acts-subjective, spatial, temporal, dated, concrete particulars.

  In the Logical Investigations Husserl's (1900/1973) proposed answer to this problem lies in his distinction between what he called the real and the ideal content of a mental act. Real content is specific to a particular mental act, whereas ideal content can be shared by different acts, whether in the same person or others. In other words, Husserl claimed that ideal content is a universal, instantiated by particular mental acts undergone by individuals, but independent of those acts and individuals. In his later (1913/1982) work, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, volume I (henceforth, Ideas 1), Husserl developed this general idea in terms of a distinction between noesis and noema.

  There are, broadly speaking, two distinct ways of interpreting this distinction present in the literature. These have become known as the "East Coast" and "West Coast" interpretations. The former is associated with Robert Sokolowski (1987) and John Drummond (1990). The latter is associated with, among others, Dagfinn Follesdal (1969) and Ronald McIntyre (1987). According to the East Coast interpretation, the distinction between noesis and noema is intended to track the distinction between transcendental and empirical interpretations of sense. On this interpretation, noesis corresponds to sense understood transcendentally as a determinant of reference; noema corresponds to sense understood empirically, as an object of reference. In other words, when he introduces the distinction between noesis and noema Husserl is recording the systematic ambiguity of the notion of sense, and effecting an appropriate disambiguation. As such, the distinction has little to do with the worry concerning psychologism canvassed above.

  The West Coast interpretation, on the other hand, makes this worry central to the noema-noesis distinction. The distinction is still importantly connected to the distinction between empirical and transcendental conceptions of sense, but the connection is a more complex one. According to the West Coast interpretation, the distinction between noesis and noema is, in the first instance, connected to Husserl's distinction between real and ideal content. Both noesis and noema are versions of the transcendental interpretation of sense-sense as a determinant of reference rather than an object of reference. However, the noema corresponds to the transcendental conception of sense understood as belonging to an act individuated by way of its ideal content. Noesis corresponds to the transcendental conception of sense understood as belonging to an act individuated by its real content. That is, the distinction between noesis and noema tracks the distinction between real and ideal content and is, in the first instance, motivated by Husserl's desire to avoid psychologism.

  However, even on this second interpretation, it is still true that the distinction between noesis and noema is ultimately motivated by the distinction between empirical and transcendental conceptions of sense. The distinction between noesis and noema is, we might accept, the result of Husserl's desire to safeguard the objectivity of sense. But it is the desire to safeguard this objectivity precisely in the face of the problem posed by the fact that sense has a transcendental as well as an empirical interpretation. The possibility of a transcendental interpretation of sense entails that sense is more closely connected to mental acts than merely being an extrinsic object grasped by such acts. Husserl's suggestion is that the experiential noema is, whereas the experiential noesis is not, an ideal reference-determining content (one that he now, in Ideas I, understands as an ideal particular, or trope, rather than, as in the Logical Investigations, as an ideal universal). The noesis, on the other hand, is the real, concrete, psychic counterpart to this ideal particular.

  For our purposes, therefore, it is not important to endorse one of these interpretations of the noema-noesis distinction over the other: both are, in their different ways, predicated on the recognition that sense has a transcendental as well as empirical status. And what is important for our purposes is the existence of a clear, unequivocal conception of sense as a transcendental determinant of reference rather than an object of reference. In recognizing-in one way or the other-the distinction between transcendental and empirical conceptions of sense, Husserl's contribution decisively shaped the future development of phenomenology. Understood transcendentally, sense is what permits any given mental act to have or take an intentional object. As such, sense is not an object of that intentional act (although nothing has been said that precludes it from being the object of other intentional acts). Transcendentally, with respect to intentional act A, the sense of A is not an object of awareness for A's subject because this sense is what permits A to have an object. If the sense of A were to be made into an object, there would have to be another sense that allowed it to appear as such. This is not to say that there is a part of any experiential act that is hidden to the act's subject. This would follow only if we assumed that anything that is not an object of a subject's awareness is thereby hidden from that subject. The point is that the relation between a subject and the transcendental sense of her intentional acts is quite different from the relation between her and the empirical sense of her intentional acts. The latter is an object of her awareness. But the former is not like this at all. The connection between her and the transcendental sense of her intentional acts is a far more intimate one, and cannot be understood in dyadic subject-object terms. We shall, shortly, explore this point further in our discussion of Sartre.

  The idea that a mental act contains a noneliminable component that is not available to the subject of that act in the form of an intentional object is one that indelibly marked the future development of phenomenology. Those who have been presented with a facile conception of phenomenology as quasi-introspectionist enterprise concerned largely with the description of experiences transparently presented to the scrutiny of a subject might find this claim surprising. But this is not what phenomenology is or could ever be. And the reason for this lies ultimately in Husserl's realization that even if sense is an object of apprehension, it must necessarily be more than this: it must also be what allows objects to be objects of apprehension. It was this realization that effectively determined the future direction of phenomenology. Thus, although he would hate the apparatus of intentional acts and senses in terms of which I have expressed the claim, the idea that phenomenology is the uncovering of what is proximally hidden in our dealings with the world, but can in principle be uncovered, is a central plank of Heidegger's conception of the discipline. We shall examine Heidegger's important contribution to our concerns in the next chapter. For now, let us look at how essentially the same dialectic as the one we have identified plays itself out in the work of jean-Paul Sartre.

  5 Sartre on Nothingness

  Despite his repeated attempts to distance himself from Husserl, Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943/1957) provides an important development of Husserl's ideas. Understood transcendentally, sense possesses two crucial features. First, it is noneliminable. Whenever an intentional act has an object, there must be a sense that permits this. If this sense is also an object of awareness, then there must be another sense that permits this. Always we are pushed back to a sense that is not an object of awareness. This entails the second crucial feature of sense understood transcendentally. Whenever a subject is aware of some object, there must be a sense that is not an object of that subject's awareness
: this sense is not something of which the subject is aware in the having of her experience. This noneliminable aspect of consciousness that is not an object of the subject's awareness is what Sartre referred to as nothingness. Sartre's invocation of nothingness is simply a more colorful expression of Husserl's idea that the sense of an intentional act is, at least in part, irreducibly transcendental.

  According to Sartre, to say that consciousness is nothingness is equivalent to saying that it has no content. Particularly significant here is Sartre's idea that this striking claim is a straightforward, almost banal, implication of the intentionality of consciousness. He writes:

  All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness that is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no "content." (Sartre 1943/1957, 11)

  What is important here is not the claim that consciousness has no content-although that is striking enough-but that Sartre thinks this claim is a straightforward implication of the idea that all consciousness is intentional. According to Sartre, objects of consciousness, of whatever sort, are transcendent in the sense that they are not proper parts of consciousness: they are outside consciousness, what consciousness is not. To be transcendent is, in this context, quite different from being transcendental in the sense introduced earlier in this chapter. To be transcendental is, in a rough sense that will be significantly clarified in the next chapter, to be what allows something to appear as an object of consciousness. A transcendental item is, again very roughly, a condition of possibility of an empirical item. But to say that an item is transcendent, in Sartre's sense, is simply a way of saying that it is outside of, or not a proper part of, consciousness.