STRUCTURE OF PHENOMENALLY INTENTIONAL STATES

Philosophy of mind has been concerned, one might even say dwell, with the mind – body problem since the ancient times. Although, present-day, we speak of the mind – brain problem, consciousness studies within philosophy are still mostly engaged within this debate. However, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness does not yield and remains to be hard. On the other hand, it still is the problem our attention should be focused on. How does one reconcile this imbalance? Perhaps with a slight shift in methodology. Put the discussion of the structure of the relation between phenomenological and physical in the background and focus on the structure of phenomenology itself. This dissertation is precisely an attempt at that – it concerns the structure of phenomenally intentional mental states. These are mental states that exhibit, primarily, the phenomenal consciousness, the felt, subjective, or ‘what it is like’ (Nagel, 1974) aspect of mental life. They also exhibit the intentional directedness; they are directed or “of” something. Until recently these two features were for the most part unreconciled. Paradigmatically intentional mental states, such as beliefs and thoughts, were not considered to be phenomenal. Vice versa – paradigmatically phenomenal mental states, such as feeling and sensations, were not considered to be intentional (although perception is possibly the one exception, being a mental state that is traditionally seen as phenomenal and intentional), were not considered to be intentional. I advocate a view according to which all intentional mental states are phenomenal, or at least, partly depend on phenomenology. There are, I believe, five marks of the mental (in no particular order): consciousness, intentionality, phenomenology, subjectivity, and temporality. I discuss each of them in this dissertation. As is evident by now and which I aim to further clarify, I do not take these terms necessarily to refer to the same underlying phenomena. My aim in this dissertation is to touch upon each of the five ‘marks of the mental’. The dissertation, formed as a collection of papers, starts by introducing a novel theory of modes or attitudes in ‘Intentional Primitivism of Modes’. Here I defend the idea that phenomenally intentional mental states, as defined above, are not individuated only by content, but also by mode. Both variables need to be fixed in order to fix the nature of a conscious mental state. My theory differs from other intentional primitivist theories of modes in that the modes are intrinsically differentiated, as opposed to relational (Crane, 2001; 2003) or simply qualitative (Block, 1978; 1994; 2007). That is to say, modes do not get their intentional character through relational properties to the intentional object, nor are they simply qualitatively defined as such mode as opposed to another. Rather modes are inherently intentional. I distinguish two ways of experiencing modes; a coarse-grained and a fine-grained, and put forward a new metaphysical model, the modifiers model, based on non-representational features of mental states that make a difference to how the occurrent mental state is given to us in experience. I explain the relation between mode and modifier as a genus – specie relation. For example, desperately desiring is composed of the property of desire, the mode, and an independent modifier of desperation. This, as a result, makes my theory adverbialist, however only at a single level, namely, at the level of modes or attitudes, and as such I avoid the main issues of adverbialism. Lastly, I give the metaphysical underpinning of modes in terms of trope theory of modes. However, this is not to say that all modes or attitudes are per se intentional. Hence, in the second paper ‘Composition of Phenomenally Intentional States’, I analyze the relationship between modes and contents. Here, there are two outstanding questions. The first one is, after examining the explanandum metaphysically and positing certain modes as primitive, the taxonomy of modes or attitudes, i.e., which are reducible to others. Furthermore, some modes are to be eliminated at modes and given a different classification. The second question is a more straightforward question of relation: once we individuate mode and content, how are they combined? Depending on the answer to the first question, I look more closely at possible metaphysical relations between modes and contents and give necessary conditions for the options, e.g. fusion, emergence, composition etc. The second part of the dissertation deals with differentiating conditions when is a mental state rightly said to be conscious, as opposed to unconscious and what are the consequences for intentionality and phenomenology. Here, I turn, in the third paper ‘Pure Content View of the Unconscious’, on the structure of unconsciousness itself. I defend Intentional Realism about unconscious or the thesis that unconscious mental states are genuinely intentional. Simply put, mental states that are paradigmatically considered intentional whilst conscious are intentional as well whilst unconscious. I defend this view by putting forward a two-dimensional intentional model of unconscious states. The structure of intentionality is usually conceived in a three-dimensional manner - that of subject, content and attitude. Most argue that conscious states are indeterminate with respect to content (Quine, 1960; Davidson 1973; Putnam 1975, 1980; Searle 1991). I agree with the indeterminacy thesis, however not with content indeterminacy. My argument proceeds by unpacking the indeterminacy argument for conscious content, applying it to conscious attitude while arguing it is an equally plausible alternative that the indeterminacy is in the attitudinal component, rather than the content one when it comes to unconscious mental states. This is a view of the unconscious that calls into question the standard model in analytic philosophy. On such a view, only desires are determinate, while other mental attitudes are not. This is essentially a Freudian view of the unconscious (2005, first published 1915). The fourth paper, ‘Against Unconscious Belief’ discusses propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, when unconscious. For example, I hold a belief ‘that J.J. Abrams is the worst thing that happened to Sci-Fi genre in the last 50 or so years’ unconsciously. Someone asks me, knowing I am a Sci-Fi fan, what do I think of contemporary genre. Without a second thought I express my unconscious belief of J.J. Abrams. We use the terminology of dispositional belief when it comes to the unconscious one and occurrent when it comes to conscious one. However, we have been taking for granted that beliefs are propositional attitudes, even while unconscious, while, at the same time, remaining committed to certain asymmetry between the conscious and the unconscious. As a result, unconscious beliefs are on par with conscious ones as propositional attitudes, which is in in tension to the presupposed asymmetry. The novelty of my account is that it vindicates the asymmetry thesis without positing a difference in intentional content, but rather saying that the difference is in intentional structure, as stated in the previous paper on the nature of the unconscious in general. My dissertation ends with an analysis of temporal and subjective dimension of experiences in ‘The Subject of Temporal Experience’. This paper is written in collaboration with Giuliano Torrengo and I thank him for his kindness in allowing me to include it in the dissertation. Most, if not every, mental state we undergo has a subjective structure of being to me or me-ness. We do not undergo experiences of a subject (at least not in the substantial term) of being to me, but rather the mental state as being to me. I argue that the same structure holds with respect to the temporal dimension, i.e. being present to one now or presentness. In other words, most, if not every, mental state we undergo is being present to me now. We experience these features as simply accompanying our experiences of content and attitudes towards those contents. Arguably, these are the only features of our experiences that are of this nature. I argue that this is not a simple correlation but rather there is a stronger metaphysical relation between them. Next, I analyze this relation. Contents nor attitudes we are experiencing do not give us the temporal or subjective dimension. Rather, my suggestion is that me-ness and presentness arise from the same structural characteristic of experience. There is much more to be said on the topic of the structure of phenomenally intentional states. This is another reason why I chose this research. Creatures are conscious in different manners. For example, me and my dog might share some features of experiences, e.g. we both have sensory-visual conscious experience; but differ in other, e.g. a belief that the sensory-visual conscious experience is of cats as opposed to undetached-cat-parts. Although our global conscious features differ, we do share some local similarities, e.g. we see the same shape. What differs is our subjective perspective on them and how we use such features to guide our action and cognition. Consequently, the question are there objective measurable structures of some elements of phenomenally intentional states is, in my opinion, a valuable direction of research in consciousness studies.