The span of a thinking being is the span of a single thought.

November 16, 2007 12:41 AM

A case against "starring*" and "looking-glassing^LG" in philosophy: G. Strawson on intentionality and experience. In a very engaging and stimulating paper, Galen Strawson takes contemporary philosophy of mind to task on certain supposed terminological subreptions and conceptual reductions (pdf). You, like others, may of course not find G. Strawson's views fully convincing. (G. Strawson previously on Metafilter here and here.)

As an interesting side-discussion, it seems one of the important questions Strawson raises in this essay concerns the relationship between so-called analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy, as could be reflected in the post and ensuing comments here.

posted by rudster (12 comments total)

It is rather sad to see someone advocating willful ignorance of their own field's history.
posted by oddman at 1:19 AM on November 16, 2007

looking-glassing

I was hoping he was going to address the production of a sound epistimological basis for giving somebody a glassing when you catch them looking at your bird. If Althusser had developed his ideas in this direction based on his reading of Lacan, instead of waffling on about 'ideological interpellation' then not only would his work still have value, he might have ended up as the kind of man who defends his wife from unwanted attention, rather than the type who strangles her to death.

I wouldn't mind but he was almost there. When he goes on about the process of ideological interpellation or 'hailing', in which ideology calls to us like 'a shout in the street', what he's missing is the fact that that shout is saying, 'See you, Louis? Somebody's looking at your bird.'

Hopefully, Strawman's ideas on pan-psychoism will lead to further exciting developments of this area of work.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:43 AM on November 16, 2007 [6 favorites]

I definitely agree with his premise, and I'm definitely going to slog through the whole piece. He's right in that a lot of the supposed "distinctions" and "problems" posed by older work in the field has been neatly obliterated by recent scientific discoveries, and that we're often caught by old and meaningless terminology. As he notes on p.3, Descartes "mental" vs. "physical" don't categorize anything meaningfully.
posted by mek at 1:44 AM on November 16, 2007

I don't find Strawson engaging at all: the supercilious tone, the rhetoric, the insistence that he alone is in step, the resort to mere assertion, the way he labels and misrepresents opponents.

Perhaps I'm missing something good: I haven't read the whole thing yet. The reasons I feel that working through the whole heap is such a chore can perhaps be made clear by looking at section 3.

He says, rightly, that most philosophers attribute 'intentionality' to things like books and pictures as well as to thinking beings (like dogs and people). He suggests that this is 'extremely startling' to anyone unfamilliar with the debate. Actually anyone unfamilliar with the debate will be unfamilliar with the word 'intentionality' itself, once it's explained that (to everyone but Strawson, apparently) it means 'aboutness', no-one will be startled by the assertion that books as well as thoughts can be about things.

He talks as though he alone had noticed the distinction between the intentionality of books and the intentionality of minds: but in fact this is the well-known and much-discussed distinction between original and derived intentionality. The implication of that standard terminology is that thoughts are really about things, while books are made to be about things by the author or reader. Strawson isn't going to adopt that silly-billy usage just because everyone else (even those who deny the distinction) finds it useful, though: he proposes instead to reserve 'intentionality' for what the rest of us are calling original intentionality. Oh and he's also going to reserve it for things that are experiential. Just a terminological choice. But having made that choice, it's surely now clear that dispositions are not intentional? No, I'm afraid I think you owe us at least one argument of some kind there, Galen.

That sort of thing is why I find picking my way through this kind of stuff a hard task. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, rudster, but if I work my way through to the end and find, as I rather suspect, that I have been sorting through shit, I may be less than fully gruntled.
posted by Phanx at 3:20 AM on November 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

Oh and he's also going to reserve it for things that are experiential. Just a terminological choice. But having made that choice, it's surely now clear that dispositions are not intentional?

I didn't have any trouble with this. If you accept that intentionality, or specifically "original intentionality," is by definition experiential, then dispositions are not intentional, because they aren't experiential (are you contesting this last part?). Of course this isn't to say they don't have derived intentionality.

Talking about dispositions is difficult and seems to me, to be somewhat silly... it seems to me that a disposition to act in a certain way, a disposition to feel a certain way, a disposition to experience some particular color, etc etc, none of these are necessarily any particular thing: they may be a large set of possible things, or no possible thing at all. I could answer "yes" to a question for a large number of reasons, the state of being disposed to answer "yes" could therefore be any number of states, depending on which reasons I am thinking of when I answer "yes." Given that, a hypothetical disposition seems to define nothing at all. A disposition might include an experiential state, but it might not. At any rate, the topic is a bit of a tangent.
posted by mek at 4:41 AM on November 16, 2007

I really liked that, a lot more than I expected to. It seems to me the two most important points are that 1. Intentionality can only be ascribed to mental states and 2. that beliefs are dispositions, that cannot be treated as propositions, and that beliefs are not mental states.

Just a terminological choice. But having made that choice, it's surely now clear that dispositions are not intentional? No, I'm afraid I think you owe us at least one argument of some kind there, Galen.

Using your terminology, he would say that dispostions have "derived intentionality," while in fact many philosophers treat beliefs as if they have "original intentionality." Is this not true?
posted by afu at 5:57 AM on November 16, 2007

Just to be clear, intentionality is only 'by Strawson's definition' experiential. Beliefs are pretty typical examples of intentionality in the normal sense, and I don't think they're experiential. Unless Strawson means something different from the rest of us by 'experiential', too.

I don't think it's self-evidently absurd to suggest that some dispositions are experiential. It seems prima facie tenable that an experience might consist of the occurence of certain mental dispositions. Not that I'm asserting either view, but you can't have the contrary conclusions without supplying an argument for them.

I think these dispositions would have to be complex and specific. A disposition to say yes when asked if you've seen a red apple might be a tiny part of the experience of seeing a red apple, together with a slight disposition to eat, a disposition to talk about Adam and Eve, and thousands more in complex conjunction.

But I ought to shut up and read the rest of the paper.
posted by Phanx at 6:03 AM on November 16, 2007

As he notes on p.3, Descartes "mental" vs. "physical" don't categorize anything meaningfully.

I had to go look at the paper briefly just to see this claim. Mek, his claim is not that "mental" and "physical" cannot categorize anything meaningfully. He claims that "mental" and "physical" cannot be used as mutually exclusive terms by a physicalist. But even this is not exactly true. He says of 'experience' or 'explicit consciousness' that "there is nothing more certain in philosophy or life"; so he accepts precisely the epistemological distinction between certain knowledge (our knowledge of our mental goings-on) and contingent knowledge (our knowledge of the actual world) that grounds Descartes' entire philosophy. He just doesn't think this distinction can usefully be extended into an ontological distinction by physicalists, which is quite trivially true. But purely in terms of our access and our level of certainty 'mental' and 'physical' remains not only a meaningful distinction but a useful one. Even if everything is physical, certain things are still mental, and our knowledge of them as physical is quite different from our knowledge of them as mental.
posted by creasy boy at 7:02 AM on November 16, 2007

I haven't read the links yet, but I'm not sure there is a difference between the 'intentionality' of minds and the 'intentionality' of a book. Books and minds are both information contained in a physical object (the physical book and a brain). One can make the argument that a book doesn't act (at least directly -- though some certainly cause actions-- The Communist Manifesto). Replace book with software on a computer though, in which case you have information which directly causes actions.
posted by empath at 9:04 AM on November 16, 2007

I'll go over this at lunch and get back to you.
posted by koeselitz at 9:36 AM on November 16, 2007

Those are the sorts of lunches philosophers should have.
posted by bonaldi at 7:27 PM on November 16, 2007

Creasy, I agree, but the terms are just so muddled at this point they definitely need to be tossed or treated with suspicion at the least.

I haven't read the links yet, but I'm not sure there is a difference between the 'intentionality' of minds and the 'intentionality' of a book.

Physically, no difference. Philosophically, a massive enormous earth-shattering difference. Unless you're a strict materialist...
posted by mek at 10:52 AM on November 17, 2007