Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

28 Pages·2008·2.79 MB·English

The Inaugural Address: Brentano's Thesis
Author(s): Dermot Moran
Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 70 (1996), pp. 1-
27
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Aristotelian Society
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The InauguralA ddress
BRENTANO'ST HESIS
Dermot Moran
t seems appropriatien an Addresst o the JointS essiono f the
Aristotelian Society and Mind Association to revisit Franz
Brentano's much-quoted and oft-misunderstood account of
intentionality, particularly since Brentano himself refers to
Aristotle as his source and since intentionalityi s now a corner-
stone of much contemporaryp hilosophy of mind.1
Intentionality, 'directedness' or 'aboutness', refers to the
mannerm ental states purportedlyr elate beyond themselves; take
objects which may or not exist; carry semantic content. In the
currentl iteratureB, rentanoi s creditedw ith many differentc laims:
the mind has an intrinsic and unique power to refer; mental
properties are irreducible to physical properties, and hence
materialismi s false; thati ntentionalityi s a mysteriousn on-natural
property; intentionality puts people in relation to propositions.
Thus Hilary Putnami nterprets' Brentano'st hesis' as the view that
'intentionalityw on't be reduced and won't go away.'2 For D. M.
Armstrong: 'Brentano held that intentionality set the mind
3
completely apartf rom matter.' Also in this vein, HartryF ield sees
1. Brentano refers to Aristotle's De Anima: 'Aristotle himself spoke of this mental
in-existence',P sychologyfroma n EmpiricalS tandpoint,e d. OskarK raus,E nglishe d. Linda
L. McAlister,t rans.A .C. Rancurello,D .B. Terrella nd L.L. McAlister (London:R outledge,
1973; 2nd English Editionw ith introductionb y PeterS imons, 1995), p. 88 note t. [Hereafter
PES]. Elsewhere he cites Metaphysics Book 5, ch. 15, 1021a29, which speaks of certain
things whose naturei ncludes a referencet o somethinge lse, see F. Brentano,T he Origin of
OurK nowledgeo fRighta nd Wrongt, rans.R . Chisholma ndE lizabethS chneewind( London:
Routledgea nd Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 14. [HereafterR W].
The first 1874 edition of PES contained only the first two books out of six originally
planned( including a book on the relationb etween mind and body, PES, p. xxvii). In 1911
Brentano revised and reissued the second book separately, under the title On the
Classificationo f Mental Phenomena.O skarK rausp ublisheda revised posthumouse dition
of the whole of PES with supplementarye ssays from the Nachlass in 1924 and 1925, and
this is the basis of the English translation.B rentano'sv iews changedc ontinually,t houghi t
is not always clear how to characteriset hese changes, especially as he claimed his later
formulationsw ere what he had intendeda ll along.
2. Hilary Putnam,R epresentationa nd Reality (Cambridge,M a: MIT Press, 1988), p. 1.
3. D. M. Armstrong,' The CausalT heoryo f the Mind', in William G. Lycan, ed., Minda nd
Cognition.A Reader (Oxford:B lackwell, 1991), p. 43.
2 DERMOMT ORAN
'Brentano's problem' as that of giving a 'materialistically
adequatea ccount of believing, desiring and so forth'. According
to Field:
The... problemr,a isedb y Brentanois, thep roblemo f intentionality.
Many mental properties-believing,d esiring,a nd so forth-
appeart o be relationapl ropertiesm: orep reciselyt, hey appeart o
relatep eoplet o non-linguistiecn titiesc alledp ropositionsS. o any
materialiswt ho takesb elievinga nd desiringa t face value-any
materialiswt ho admitst hatb eliefa ndd esirea rer elationbs etween
peoplea ndp ropositions-anys uchm aterialismt usts howt hatt he
relationsin questiona ren ot irreduciblmy entalB. rentanofe lt that
this couldn otb e done;a nds inceh e saw no alternativteo viewing
belief and desirea s relationst o propositionsh, e concludedt hat
materialismm ustb e false.4
These interpretationso f Brentanoh ave wide currency,a lmost to
the extent of constitutinga n orthodoxy,b ut they do not accurately
convey the actual views of the historical Brentano. Rather ther
arise mainly from Roderick Chisholm's influential account,
according to which Brentano 'discovered' intentionality as the
characteristicf eature or mark of the mental, which, due to its
ineliminability,d emonstratest he irreducibilityo f the mental, thus
refuting physicalism. According to Chisholm, Brentano's chal-
lenge to contemporaryp hilosophy is the question:i f intentionality
is a real, irreduciblef eatureo f mentall ife, how can the naturalistic
programme of bringing mental events within the limits of
scientific explanatione ver be completed?
Since I believe there is philosophical value in getting things
right historically, it is worthwhile returningt o Brentano's own
conception in its original setting with a view to unpackingi ts key
elements. We shall see that Brentano'sv ersion of intentionalityi s
deeply embedded in a complex of broadly Cartesian,i nternalist
and-though one must be very careful-introspectionalist
assumptions.H e did accept the reality of psychological states and
theire vident nature,t hey are as they appeart o be, psychology does
4. HartryF ield, 'Mental Representation',i n Stephen P. Stich and Ted A. Warfield, eds,
Mental RepresentationA. Reader (Oxford:B lackwell, 1994), p. 34.
5. Roderick Chisholm, 'Sentences About Believing', Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society LVI (1955-56), pp. 125-48. See also the Chisholm-Sellars correspondence
publisheda s 'Intentionalitya nd the Mental', in H. Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell, eds,
MinnesotaS tudies in the Philosophy of Science Volume Two (Minneapolis:U niversity of
MinnesotaP ress, 1958), pp. 507-39.
BRENTANO'S THESIS 3
reveal our mental naturalk inds. But, I shall argue,B rentanon ever
held that mental events were ontologically irreducible to the
physical; or that materialism was false; or that intentionality
related people to propositions. Nor did he claim to have
'discovered' intentionality.F or him, intentionalitym erely served
as the most satisfactoryc riterion( among several otherc andidates,
such as non-spatialitya nd inwardness)f or initially identifying the
domain of the mental, indeed a criterion to which, in his view,
traditional philosophy (i.e., Aristotle-Aquinas-Descartes) sub-
scribed.B rentanod id claim thata ll and-less emphatically-only
mental states were intentional.H e did see intentionalitya s the best
'marko f the mental', but it is not at all clear, as we shall see, just
what is being markedo ff from what. In particularh, is definitiono f
the physical refers only to a certainp henomenalp ropertieso f our
conscious states, and his understanding of the psychical is
precisely that which is grasped reflexively in inner perception.
Thus understood,t he distinction between the 'physical' and the
'psychical'i n Brentano'st ermsc annotb e coherentlym appedo nto
the distinctionb etween the mentala nd the physical as deployed by
currentp hilosophy of mind in its discussion of physicalism and
materialism,u nless that discussion is alreadyc ommittedt o a type
of phenomenalism.B rentano cannot be recruitedo n one side or
the other in the broad debate concerning materialism and
reductionism.F urthermoreB, rentanoc oncentratedo n classifying
and describing various kinds of psychic acts in terms of their
intentional modes, but it was never his intention to offer an
explanation of intentionality,i .e., just how intentionality itself
comes about (in terms of accountsi n the brain,e volution, theories
of reference,o r whatever).W e shouldn'ti nfer from this, however,
that he held intentionalityt o be something mysterious, or that he
ruled out such an explanation,r atherh e simply did not see it as the
function of his 'empirical'o r 'descriptivep sychology' to provide
such an explanation. He consciously restricted himself to what
could be gained by precise description carried out by 'inner
perception', confident that inner perception could empirically
discover fundamentala priorit ruthsa bout the mental.
The exploration of concepts of intentionality independent of
Brentano'sf ormulationsi s outside the scope of this paper, but I
believe that, given the frequencyw ith which Brentanoi s cited in
4 DERMOTM ORAN
most of these discussions, a considerationo f his own views may
be helpful. Brentanoi s most accuratelyu nderstoodi n the rather
restricted context of a historically late, nuanced Scholastico-
Cartesianv iew of the mind, as indeed his earlieri nterpreters( e.g.
Husserl) clearly recognised but which Chisholm's reformulation
masks. In what follows, I shall highlight some of Brentano'sm ore
problematica nd most Cartesiana ssumptions.I shall isolate and
review in turnt he main conceptualc omponentso f his account of
intentionality and some difficulties which have been raised
regarding them. In short, I shall be largely agreeing with
Brentano's earlier critics such as Twardowski and Husserl, and
arguing that the current version of his contemporaryr evival is
misplaced.B y clarifyingh is actualv iews, I hope also to be able to
absolve Brentano of at least of some of the popular sins with
which contemporaryp hilosophy of mind has creditedh im.
I
Brentano'sT hesis. In an oft-quotedp aragrapho f Psychologyf rom
an Empirical Standpoint (1874, hereafter PES), offered as a
positive criterionf or identifying mental states:
Every mental phenomenoni s characterizedb y what the
Scholasticso f the MiddleA ges calledt he intentiona(lo r mental)
inexistenceo f an object, and what we might call, thoughn ot
whollyu nambiguouslrye, ferencet o a content,d irectiont owards
an object( whichi s nott o be understoohde rea s meaninga thing),
or immanento bjectivity.E very mental phenomenonin cludes
somethinga s objectw ithini tself,a lthoughth eyd o nota ll do so in
the samew ay.I np resentatiosno methingis presentedi,n j udgment
somethingis affirmedo r denied,i n love loved, in hateh ated,i n
desired esireda nds o on. (PES8 8)
Brentano'si nfluencew as such that, twenty years lateri n 1894, his
studentK asimirT wardowski( 1866-1938) could enthuse:
It is one of the best known positions of psychology,h ardly
contestedb y anyone,t hate very mentalp henomenonin tendsa n
immanent object. The existence of such a relation is a
characteristfieca tureo f mentapl henomenwa hicha reb y meanso f
it distinguishefdr omt hep hysicalp henomena.6
6. Kasimir Twardowski, On the Content and Object of Presentations. A Psychological
Investigation,t rans.R . Grossmann( The Hague:N ijhoff, 1977), p. 1.
BRENTANO'S THESIS 5
Brentanoh imself never used the term 'intentionality';7h e spoke
rathero f 'intentionali nexistence' (intentionaleI nexistenz)a nd of
the 'intentional relation' (die intentionale Beziehung, RW 14).
From the passage quoted above we see that Brentano employed
two different formulations-between which he never dis-
tinguished:( i) directednesst owardsa n object (die Richtunga ufein
Objekt),a nd (ii) 'relation to a content' (die Beziehung auf einen
Inhalt).8H e never separatedh is account of the intentionalo bject
from the notion of intentionalitya s a relation.T hey expresst he one
notion. In fact, if anything,h is account of the intentionalr elation
tends to collapse into his account of the intentionalo bject.
The first formulation, directedness towards an object which
may or may not actually exist but which possesses 'mental' or
'intentionali nexistence', may be given differente mphases.O n the
one hand, one can focus on the mind's referentialp ower, perhaps
interpreteda s a magical 'noetic ray'. Consciousness-like an
arrow9-strikes its target. On the other hand, the focus can be
placed on what guaranteest he very success of this power to refer.
Consciousness's success in 'lassoing' its objects (as McGinn puts
it)10 invites an ontological account which aims at explainingj ust
how these rays or arrowsa lways reach their targets.T hus Alexius
Meinong endeavoured to explain how thought is guaranteed
success in reaching its objects by postulatingb aroquet ypologies
of objects. This, in turn, provoked Brentano-and Russell-to
develop various logical and linguistic techniques for dispelling
embarrassingo ntological commitment. For the later Brentano,
apparenta ffirmationso f non-existento bjects should be rephrased
as existential denials. 'Perceiving a lack of money' really means:
'denying money'. Brentanoa lso developed a distinctionb etween
direct and oblique modes of reference, a distinctionm eant to sort
7. The technical term 'intentionalitas'd id have currencyi n the late Middle Ages, used to
refer to the charactero f the logical distinctionb etweenp rima and secunda intentio,b ut the
modem use of the term 'intentionality'o wes to Husserl not Brentano.
8. Theodore De Boer, The Development of Husserl's Philosophy (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1978), p. 6, agrees with my contentiont hatB rentanoi dentified the mentalr elationw ith the
act's directednesst owardst he object.
9. G. E. M. Anscombe, 'The Intentionalityo f Sensation:A GrammaticalF eature',i n R.J.
Butler, ed., Analytical Philosophy (Oxford:B lackwell, 1968), p. 160, traces the medieval
meaningo f intentiot o intenderea rcum in, 'to aim an arrowa t'.
10. The image comes from Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 37.
6 DERMOTM ORAN
out the problem of the apparentp ositing of intentionalo bjects as
somehow having real existence. Modes of reference, for the later
Brentano,d o not have ontological commitment:w hen I think of
someone who loves flowers, the person is presented directly in
modo recto and the flowers are presented indirectly in modo
obliquo (PES 374). Neither the direct nor the oblique mode here
imply an existing object. Similarlyt hinkinga bout someone in the
past or future is thinking under a special mode, a non-positing
mode.
Brentano'sg raduala cknowledgemento f the misleading role of
linguistic form foreshadows Russell's view that: 'logical
constructionsa re to be preferredt o inferrede ntities'. Statements
concerning non-existent objects are to be reformulateds o their
logical form is clearly distinguished from their misleading
grammaticalf orm. In Ryle's phrase, the later Brentano'ss trategy
is one of 'systematic denominalisation', shifting the emphasis
from the subject to the predicate place.11 Whereas Meinong
sought to turn all nominatives into objects, the later Brentano
adopted what has been called the 'adverbial view' of the
intentionalr elation, a direct descendanto f the Scholastic way of
handling intentionalo bjects, whereby their modus essendi is that
of inhering in substance as accidents rather than existing
separatelyi n their own right.
Brentano's earlier formulations do seem to posit a range of
intermediary objects between the mind and external things.
Althought he early Brentanoo ften speaks of the intentionalo bject
as a non-thing( Nicht-Reales),o r as 'insubstantial'( unwesenhaft),
he also refersa mbiguouslyt o 'some internalo bject-liket hing' (ein
innerlich Gegensttindliches), something 'in-dwelling' (inwohn-
endes),12m entally immanent( geistiges inhaben,D P 155), which
'need not correspondt o anything outside' (DP 24). Twardowski
interprets Brentano's 'intentional inexistence' as 'phenomenal
existence'l3 a propertya ttachingt o an object in consciousness, but
Brentano's earlier formulations do not adequately distinguish
between the thing that appearsa nd the appearanceo f the thing.
11. GilbertR yle, 'Intentionality-Theorya nd the Natureo f Thinking',i n Rudolf Haller,e d,
Jenseitsv on Sein undNichtsein( Graz:A kademischeD ruck-u ndV erlagsanstalt1, 972), p. 12.
12. Franz Brentano, Descriptive Psychology, trans and ed. Benito Miiller (London:
Routledge, 1995), p. 24. [HereafterD P]
13. Twardowski,o p. cit., p. 22.
BRENTANO'TS HESIS 7
Brentano's student, Alexius Meinong, sought to explain
thought'sa bility to refert o all kinds of things from actualt hings to
non-existent( gold mountains),i deal (numbers)o r even impossible
objects (squarec ircles), by positing these entitiesa s having various
special kinds of being distinct from actual existence.14B rentano
reacteda gainstM einongb y emphaticallyd enying any special kind
of being to the intentionalo bject.A s he conceded in 1911: 'I am no
longer of the opiniont hatm entalr elationc an have somethingo ther
thana thing as its object'( PES xxvi). 15W hen one thinkso f a horse,
it is an actual horse one thinks about and not the 'thought about
horse' (gedachtes Pferd).16W hen I promise to marrys omeone, it
is a real person that I promise to marrya nd not an ens rationis.17
According to Brentano's later reism 'nothing is ever made an
object of thinking but a real thing'. Only concrete individuals
(realia) exist, and the intentionalo bject is now construeda s a part
or accidento f an individuals ubstance.T his substancem ay be only
a temporarya ccidentalu nity,a 'kooky object' as GarethM atthews
calls it.19 Leaving aside this later reism, in most of Brentano's
formulations, including the later, a certain terminological
indecisiveness prevails, the term 'object' (Objekt)c an refer either
to the content of the act or to the external object. Consider the
following passage from 1905, for example:
But by an object of a thoughtI meant what it is that the thoughti s
about, whether or not there is anything outside the mind
correspondintgo the thoughtI. t has neverb een my view thatt he
immanenotb jecti s identicawl ith 'objecto f thought('v orgestelltes
Objekt)W. hatw e thinka bouti s the objecto r thinga nd not the
'objecto f thought'.20
14. Alexius Meinong, 'The Theory of Objects', trans.b y R. Chisholm in Realism and the
Backgroundo f Phenomenology (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1960), p. 83. See also R.
Chisholm, 'Beyond Being and Nonbeing', in Rudolf Haller, ed, Jenseits von Sein und
Nichtsein (Graz:A kademischeD ruck-u nd Verlagsanstalt,1 972), pp. 25-36.
15. See Forewordt o the 1911 Edition of the second book of PES.
16. Lettert o Anton Marty 17 March 1905, in Brentano,T he True and the Evident,e d. R.
Chisholm (New York: HumanitiesP ress, 1966), p. 78.
17. Lettert o Oscar Kraus 14 September1 909, quotedb y KrausP ES 385.
18. Lettert o Oscar Kraus 14 September1 909, quotedb y Kraus,P ES 385.
19. GarethB . Matthews, 'Commentaryo n Caston', in John J. Cleary and W. Wians, eds,
Proceedings of the BostonA rea Colloquiumi nA ncient Philosophy VolumeI X (1993) (New
York:U niversityP resso fAmerica, 1995), pp. 246-54. See also BarryS mith, 'The Substance
of Brentano'sO ntology', Topoi6 (1987), pp. 39-49.
20. Lettert o Anton Marty 17 March 1905, in Brentano,T he Truea nd the Evident,o p. cit.,
p. 77.
8 DERMOTM ORAN
Rather than making a distinction between object and content,
Brentano's strategy for handling this ambiguity of the term
'object' was to declare that terms like 'object' gain their meaning
from their position in the sentence and have no meaning on their
own, what Brentano in his late works calls, borrowing the term
from Anton Marty, 'synsemantic' (PES 322 n.2 and 332) as
opposed to an 'autosemantic't erm whose meaning remains fixed
in all contexts.
At the root of the Meinongian temptation lies Brentano's
employment of the misleading term 'inexistence'. In fact,
'inexistence' was understoodb y him in the Scholastic sense of
inesse, 'indwelling', the mode of being of an accident in a
substance.L ateri n his 1911 edition of PES Brentanoa dmittedh is
earlier account was ambiguous (PES 180 note), saying he had
consideredr eplacingt he term 'intentional'w ith that of 'objective'
but this would have given rise to more misunderstandingbs y those
who did not appreciatet he Scholastic meaningo f esse objectivum,
the manneri n which things are 'objectively' in the mind. The later
Brentanor epeatedlye mphasisedt hat the intentionalo bject is best
describedn ot as a special object with 'inexistence' but as the real
object as thought by the mind. Frequently Brentano refers to
Descartes' distinction between objective and formal reality in
explanationo f the statuso f the intentionalo bject. In fact Brentano
is replayinga debate which took place between Descartes and his
Thomist critic, Fr. Caterus, a debate between the Scotistic and
Thomistic interpretations of realitas objectiva. Indeed, the
terminological similarities between Brentano and Descartes
strikingly demonstrates Brentano's debt to what I call the
Scholastico-Cartesiant radition.
As is well known, Descartes had vacillated between a view of
ideas as some kind of intermediaryo bject, an inner picture, and a
more refined view whereby an idea is a mental mode, a
modificationo f the thinking process. In the First Objections, the
LouvainT homist, Fr. Caterus,u nderstandst houghts imply as 'the
determinationo f an act of the intellect by means of an object'21
such thatt he relationo f thinkert o the object is merely an 'extrinsic
21. Oeuvresd e Descartes VII, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery( Paris:V rin, 1983), p. 92. The
Philosophical Writingso f Descartes, Volume II trans.J . Cottingham,R . Stoothoff, and D.
Murdoch( Cambridge:C ambridgeU niversityP ress, 1984), pp. 66-67.
BRENTANO'S THESIS 9
denomination' and not a real property of that thing. Caterus
therefored enies that 'objectiver eality'i n the mind is anythingr eal
possessing formal reality and hence not anything requiring a
causal explanation.C ateruss tressed that no intentionalo bject sat
between the externalt hing and the mind. Thinkingo f 'nothing'i s
not apprehendinga n object which is not itself nothing,r atheri t is
not thinkinga t all, for Caterus.O pposingh im, Descartes adopts a
Scotist stance whereby the 'objective reality' of an idea is
somethingp osited between the mind and the real thing, something
whose content requires a causal explanation.F or Descartes, the
thought of nothing is 'not nothing', though it is of course 'less
perfect' than the thing itself. The early Brentano's concept of
immanento bjectivity agrees closely with the Cartesiano r Scotist
view. His later position mirrorst hat of Caterust he Thomist, who
held that thoughts have no ontological status at all. But the point
is: Brentano did not progress beyond the concepts or even the
language of this seventeenth-centuryd ispute. As Gilbert Ryle
remarked,B rentanoo ffered merely 'a psychologist's amendment
to the "way of ideas"'.22
Brentano'sm aturev iew is that,i n an intentionala ct, the thinker
is modified 'objectually', as it were-the mind is modified
adverbially. Mental entities do not have some kind of
'inexistence', they are modifications of the intending mind.
Speakingo f mental entities as existing in themselves, for the later
Brentano,i s merely a convenient linguistic fiction (PES 388) akin
to the manner in which mathematicianse ffortlessly talk about
different kinds of number, e.g., negative or imaginary numbers
(PES 386), without any ontological commitment.B rentanoi n fact
combines certain linguistic redescriptions which dissolve the
embarrassingo ntological superfluities,w ith a reist version of a
more classical Aristoteliana ccount where thoughtsa re accidental
states of a substance,t he thinker.
Brentano'sl inguistic settlement of the ontological issue, what
we might call his 'adverbialv iew', is not withouti ts own daunting
problems, however. Briefly, if intentional objects are to be
construed adverbially in this manner,t he danger is that all acts
would be quite distinct from each other in kind, infinitely
multiplying mental acts, an objection which has been well
22. GilberRt yle,' Intentionality-Theaonrydt heN atureo f Thinking'p, . 10.