9.5—
Why Phenomenology Cannot Be Naturalized

A number of kinds of arguments have been offered over the years to the effect that some one or more features of the mental cannot be naturalized—features such as subjectivity, the what-it's-like of experience, the first-person perspective, and consciousness. I shall examine some variations on arguments of this sort in this section, as well as adding one of my own at the end.

9.5.1—
The Argument from Epistemic Possibility (Cartesian Demons Revisited)

The kinds of epistemological issues involved in old-style thought experiments involving Cartesian demons stem from the phenomenological perspective on content. The Cartesian demon experiment is, if nothing else, a marvelous tool for driving a wedge between the intentional character of my mental states and all questions of their veridicality. As Descartes points out, I can be mistaken about the causes of my experiences and about whether they correspond to extramental reality, but I cannot be mistaken in the same way about what kind of ideas I am experiencing.^[8] I can be sure that I am experiencing a particular kind of perceptual gestalt, but I cannot be similarly sure, for instance, that there is indeed a cat before me.

Thought experiments involving such exotica as brains in vats and Cartesian demons do not enjoy the popularity that once they enjoyed. There are no doubt a number of factors contributing to their decline. One would probably be the shift away from epistemological interests in the philosophy of mind. Another would be a shift in interest from providing accounts involving logically necessary and sufficient conditions to finding accounts that are empirically adequate. Considerations of necessity and sufficiency do seem to be in order with accounts that purport to provide a strong naturalization, though. If mental-semantic properties are to supervene upon naturalistic properties, those naturalistic properties must provide sufficient conditions for them. And if the resulting account is to be an account of the nature or essence of mental-semantics or intentionality, it had best be necessary as well: if an object could have a property A while lacking B , then B cannot be essential to A .

Now I think that some of the traditional thought experiments are well suited to showing that naturalistic properties are neither necessary nor sufficient for intentionality or mental-semantics. Let us begin with necessity. The notions of supervenience and of instantiation analyses themselves claim nothing about the necessity of the conditions they provide. If A supervenes upon B , it does not follow that B is a necessary condition for A ; and if A is given an instantiation analysis in terms of B , it similarly does not follow that B is a necessary condition for A . But this is in some ways very misleading. When people say that the supervenience of A upon B does not involve a necessary relation from A to B , what they tend to be concerned with is the lower-order physical properties through which a mental property is realized—with the fact that it does not matter whether the underlying structure is wetware or hardware or whatever. But when people try to give a naturalistic account of intentionality, they tend not to be specifying the instantiating system at that low a level, but in terms of notions such as causal covariation, adaptational role, or information content. These notions form an intermediate level of explanation that is neutral as to underlying structure. And theorists who propose such theories generally do take it that the conditions they articulate at these intermediate levels are necessary conditions for intentionality and mental-semantics. Millikan, for example, is quite clear about this: a being that does not share our adaptational history not only does not share our particular beliefs, it does not have beliefs at all! Similarly strong views might be imputed to causal covariation theorists. In Fodor's account, it is a necessary condition for a representation of type MR to mean "P " that MR 's are sometimes caused by P 's. Similarly, with

Dretske's account, a representation cannot mean "P " if its type was never caused by a P in the learning period. So while the language of supervenience and token physicalism suggests that naturalistic explanations do not provide necessary conditions, this is belied by actual practice of theorists. Either accounts in terms of causal covariance and adaptational role are not naturalistic accounts, or the best-known contemporary naturalistic accounts of intentionality involve a commitment to providing necessary conditions . And this seems quite appropriate in a way, since such theorists claim to provide accounts of the nature or essence of mental-semantics and intentionality.

This being said, I think that there is good reason to believe that naturalistic accounts of these sorts do not succeed in providing necessary conditions, for reasons that may be developed by way of some familiar sorts of thought experiments. Consider the Cartesian scenario of a being that has experiences just like ours, not because he is in fact coming into contact with elm trees and woodchucks, but because he is being systematically deceived by a malicious demon. Such a scenario is clearly imaginable, since one cannot reach Cartesian certainty that it is not in fact an accurate description of one's own case. (There is, after all, no experiment one can perform to determine whether one's experiences are veridical or systematically misleading.) And there seems little reason to deny that such a scenario is logically possible. Now a being in such a state would be in many of the same sorts of intentional states that we are in-that is, states with the same attitude and the same phenomenological content. (Whether you have perceptual gestalts or recollections, after all, does not depend on whether you turn out to be the victim of a Cartesian demon.) But it would not share most of our naturalistic properties. In particular, the intentional states it has would not be hooked up to the world in the ways called for by a respectable naturalistic psychology. Thoughts about dogs are not caused by dogs, nor are beliefs about elm trees caused by elm trees, and the being may not even have the ancestors requisite for an adaptational history. All of his beliefs are demon-caused (although they are not about demons).

Here we have an example of a being that has meaningful intentional states but does not share the naturalistic descriptions that apply to us. A fortiori, it is possible for a being to be in a state with a mental-semantic property M while lacking naturalistic property N . Therefore N cannot be a necessary condition for M . Therefore naturalistic properties cannot be necessary conditions for mental-semantic properties.

It remains to consider sufficiency. In order for there to be an instan-

tiation analysis of some mental-semantic property M in terms of some naturalistic property N , it must be the case that N is sufficient for M . Indeed, it must be the case that someone who had an adequate understanding of N would be able to infer M from N . So if there can be cases of an entity possessing N but lacking M, N is not a sufficient condition for M , and hence one cannot have an instantiation analysis of M in terms of N .

Let us now bring some modal intuitions into play. It seems to be imaginable, and hence plausibly metaphysically possible, that there might be beings who were completely like us in physical structure and in behavioral manifestations, yet lacked the kind of interiority, or first-person perspective, that we have. When one stubs her toe, she says "Ouch!" and withdraws her foot, but she has no experience of pain. When one is asked to comment upon Shakespeare, she utters things that sound every bit as intelligent as what a randomly selected human being might say, but she never has any mental experiences of pondering a question or hitting upon an insight. If one could come up with a talented telepath, the telepath would deliver the verdict that nothing mental is going on inside this being. These beings, by stipulation, share all of our natural properties, yet they do not enter into any of the paradigm examples of mental states. Hence naturalistic properties do not provide sufficient conditions for intentional states, either.

9.5.2—
An Objection: Metaphysical and "Nomological" Sufficiency

One concern I can expect this argument to raise would be that people interested in supervenience accounts tend to view the kind of sufficiency involved not as logical or metaphysical sufficiency, as I have assumed, but as something called "nomological sufficiency." I must confess to some puzzlement about what is meant by "nomological sufficiency." It must mean something more than material sufficiency, since materially sufficient conditions may be completely unrelated to what they are conditions for. If the tallest man who ever lived was in fact married to the first woman to climb Everest, and was her only husband, then being married to the first woman to climb Everest is materially sufficient for being the tallest man who ever lived. But surely nomological sufficiency amounts to more than this. Perhaps nomological sufficiency amounts to something like "material sufficiency in all possible worlds that have the same natural laws as the actual world." But, according to the thought

experiment above, the world described is like the actual world in all physical laws. If these assured that the psychophysical relationships must be the same the way fixing your statistical mechanics fixes your thermodynamics, we should be able to derive this fact the way we can do so in the case of thermodynamics. But this seems plainly to be impossible. It seems, then, that naturalistic conditions would not be nomologically sufficient for intentionality either. But perhaps nomological sufficiency does not apply to all worlds with natural laws like our own, but only ones specified by a certain counterfactual. But which counterfactual? And how do we know that a world like the one described above does not fall within the scope of it? Indeed, how does one know that the actual world meets the desired criterion? But perhaps nomological sufficiency is material sufficiency in all worlds sharing psycho physical laws with the actual world. This stipulation, however, would be inadmissible for two reasons. First, this violates the condition of strong naturalism that the relation be metaphysically necessary and epistemically transparent. Second, we do not know that the naturalistic criteria are met in the actual world.

Finally, let us be quite clear about separating the question of logical possibility from the question of warranted belief. No one is claiming that it is reasonable to believe that one is, for example, in the clutches of a Cartesian demon. And while some people do claim that there are nonmaterial thinking beings, their use in this kind of example is not based upon the likelihood of their existence, but upon their possibility. If one has an account of what it is to be in a meaningful mental state, it had better apply to all possible beings that could have such mental states. Regardless of the likelihood of Cartesian demons or nonembodied spirits, if they are possible, then an account of the nature of intentionality had best apply to them too.

9.5.3—
The Phenomenological "What-It's-Like"

A number of writers have argued that at least some mental states (the conscious ones) have an experiential quality for the subject of the experience that is not captured in any third-person "objective" characterizations. This point now seems widely accepted with respect to qualitative states such as pain: even if we know that C-fiber firings are the physiological basis of pain, a complete knowledge of the neurology of C-fiber firings could not yield an understanding of what pain feels like . To know what pain feels like, you have to feel it. And likewise for other qualia: a blind person who knows state-of-the-art theory in electro-

magnetism, optics, and the physiology of vision will not thereby gain a knowledge of how magenta looks, and so on (see Jackson 1982). Thomas Nagel has developed this point famously in an article entitled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), in which he points out that a sensory modality like echolocation would, like vision, have its own phenomenology; and lacking this faculty, we cannot imagine what it would be like to have it.

While many writers in philosophy of mind acknowledge that there is a problem for naturalistic theories in trying to explain qualia, it is less often recognized that there is a similar problem for intentional states, which also have a phenomenology. Take perceptual experiences, like seeing a dog in the yard. There is a what-it's-like to seeing a dog in the yard, and it is different from what it's like to see a pine tree in the yard (change of content) and from what it's like to imagine a dog in the yard (change of intentional modality). And the differences here are not just differences in qualia. Suppose you are at the wax museum. You turn the corner and see a familiar face and say, "My gosh! That's Bill Clinton!" You have an intentional state of the form: VISUAL PRESENTATION [Bill Clinton]. But then you remember where you are and correct yourself. "Oh," you say, "that's just a wax replica of Bill Clinton! Boy am I a dope!" Your intentional state changes from VISUAL PRESENTATION [Bill Clinton] to VISUAL PRESENTATION [wax statue of Bill Clinton]. The qualia have not changed; it is just the content of the gestalt that has changed. But part of that gestalt is conceptual, and that conceptual part has a phenomenology. The difference between having an experience of seeing Bill Clinton and that of seeing a replica of Bill Clinton is not just a functional difference in how they relate to behavior and other mental states—they are different as experiences as well. Likewise in perceptual illusions like the Necker cube and the faces-vase illusion: the qualia remain the same while the interpretation changes; but clearly there is a difference in what it is like to see the faces and what it is like to see the vase.

The same point can be made with Nagel's bat. Perceptual modalities are among the sorts of things that have a phenomenology. But this phenomenology is not confined to individual qualia. There are ways of constituting things as objects in visual perception, in touch, in hearing; and in perception one situates oneself relative to the objects one constitutes as being in one's presence. A person lacking one of the sensory modalities is indeed unable to understand the qualia associated with that modality; but she is also unable to understand what it is like to constitute ob-

jects under that modality. For example, there are people blind from birth who have had operations that restore the integrity of the visual pathway and who, as a consequence, suddenly experience visual qualia. Many such people are already competent at identifying objects and persons by sound and touch, but this ability does not translate to the formation of visual gestalts. The person with restored visual pathways suddenly knows what visual qualia are like, but not visual perceptions . (In fact, they tend to feel quite disoriented by vivid but uninterpretable visual qualia.) Perception is characterized by a particular kind of intentional as opposed to qualitative experience that essentially involves constituting something as an object. Object experiences involving a sensory modality involve object-constituting operations that are modality-specific. Presumably the same would hold true with echolocation. We could perhaps build prosthetic devices that would duplicate the function of the bat's vocal cords and ears and surgically connect their output to some portion of the human brain. Perhaps the subject would even experience some new qualia. But this in itself would not add up to echolocation until there were also experiences corresponding to the conceptual representation of objects under particular aspects within this sensory modality. To know what it is like to be a bat, it is not enough to know what it is like to have the bat's qualia; we would also have to have the bat's experiences of constituting objects on the basis of those qualia as well.

Nagel and others urge upon us the idea that the what-it's-like of experiences cannot be accounted for in nonexperiential terms. In some cases, the argument appears to be an epistemic one: Jackson (1982), for example, appears to argue as follows:

(1) A person could know the neurophysiology of a mental state but fail to know what mental state it was.

(2) If you can give an account of P in terms of Q , then an adequate knowledge of Q should let you know you were dealing with P .

\ (3) You cannot give an account of mental states in terms of their neurophysiology.

Searle and Nagel, however, claim that their point is metaphysical as well: namely, that the phenomenological what-it's-like is a property of conscious mental states. Searle points out, for example, that some things have a what-it-feels-like while others do not, and argues further that the unit-

ing feature for those that do is consciousness:

The discussion of intentionality naturally leads into the subjective feel of our conscious states. . . . Suffice it to say here that the subjectivity necessarily involves the what-it-feels-like aspect of conscious states. So, for example, I can reasonably wonder what it feels like to be a dolphin and swim around all day, frolicking in the ocean, because I assume dolphins have conscious experiences. But I cannot in that sense wonder what it feels like to be a shingle nailed to a roof year in and year out, because in the sense in which we are using the expression, there isn't anything at all that it feels like to be a shingle, because shingles are not conscious. (Searle 1992: 131-132)

In a sense, though, the real crux of the matter is neither purely epistemological nor purely metaphysical: the real issue is whether you can give an account of the experiential what-it's-like in third-person naturalistic terms. If the kind of "account" you want is a strong naturalization, you need logical sufficiency and conceptual adequacy. And it does not look as though you are going to get either of those things. A person who did not have a commonsense notion of heat could still derive thermodynamic laws from the mechanics of particle collisions. But a person who did not know what a visual gestalt was like could not derive that from a knowledge of optics and the physiology of vision, or indeed from any list of sciences you might give. The sciences as we know them just do not seem to have the right conceptual resources to generate the necessary concepts. To be sure, the physiology of vision can explain why our phenomenological color space has some of the properties it has. (Given contingent relations between particular qualia and particular bodily states, it can explain why certain forms of color blindness occur, how color perception is affected by saturated lighting, why particular optical illusions occur and not others, etc.) Likewise, an account of the visual cascade through the visual cortex may explain why we can detect certain primitive shapes and not others and why we are subject to certain illusions. And they will hopefully tell us what brain processes are involved in the very experiences we describe in phenomenological terms. What they do not seem to have the resources to do is explain the phenomenological "feel" of those experiences. It is, of course, risky to make arguments about what cannot be done. On the other hand, it seems clear at this point that any assurance that we can derive phenomenology from neuroscience the way we can derive thermodynamics from statistical mechanics places a great deal of nonempirically based faith in the idea that

a particular paradigm of explanation can be applied universally. This kind of naturalism seems to be more ideology than well-argued position.

9.5.4—
Perspective, Subjectivity, and the Logical Resources of Natural Science

Next, let us consider two other features of intentional states that some writers think render them insusceptible to naturalization. First, Searle points out that intentional states are perspectival in character:

My conscious experiences, unlike the objects of the experiences, are always perspectival. They are always from a point of view. But the objects themselves have no point of view. . . . Noticing the perspectival character of conscious experience is a good way to remind ourselves that all intentionality is aspectual . Seeing an object from a point of view, for example, is seeing it under certain aspects and not others. . . . Every intentional state has what I call an aspectual shape . (Searle 1992: 131)

Second, an experience always involves a first-person perspective. And that first-person perspective is one of the identity conditions for the experience. You can have an experience just like mine, but you cannot have my experience. Even if you were a telepath or empath like the ones depicted in science fiction stories, you would not be experiencing my thoughts and emotions, but reproducing them in your own mind under some intentional modality distinctive to telepaths or empaths. Or, as Searle puts it, "For it to be a pain, it must be somebody's pain; and this in a much stronger sense than the sense in which a leg must be somebody's leg, for example. Leg transplants are possible; in that sense, pain transplants are not" (ibid., 94).

Here again it is possible to interpret the case in epistemic or in metaphysical terms. But here again I think the real issue lies in the possibility of explaining subjectivity and aspectual shape in third-person, "objective," naturalistic terms. And there is a weaker and a stronger variation of the case against naturalization here. First the weaker one. The project of explaining intentionality in naturalistic terms is one of uniting two bodies of discourse—the languages of two sciences, if you will. (Or, if you do not think discourse about experience is scientific, a science and a nonscience.) Let us call the language of our naturalistic discourse N and that of our phenomenological psychology P . The question is, does N have the right kind of conceptual resources for us to derive P from N

in the way, say, that we derive thermodynamics from statistical mechanics, or perhaps even the way we "derive" arithmetic from set-theoretic constructions? And there are features of aspectual shape and subjectivity that give us reason to suppose that the answer may well be no .

The reason subjectivity and aspectual shape pose problems for the would-be naturalizer is that a discourse that encompasses subjectivity and aspectual shape would seem to require logical features that do not seem to be present in the languages used for the natural sciences. This, I think, is what Searle is after when he says that "the world itself has no point of view, but my access to the world through my conscious states is always perspectival, always from my point of view" (Searle 1992: 94-95) and "my conscious experiences, unlike the objects of the experiences, are always perspectival. They are always from a point of view. But the objects themselves have no point of view" (ibid., 131). But if Searle is right about the basic issue here, he is wrong about the specific form it takes with respect to aspectual shape. It is true of course that objects themselves are nonperspectival; but it is also true that all of the sciences do represent objects under particular aspects: say, as bodies having a mass or as living beings. The problem is not in getting a perspective into our discourse, but with the fact that discourse about mental states requires that we build a second layer of perspective into that discourse: to attribute an intentional state to someone is not merely for us to represent an object under an aspect, but to represent a person as representing an object under an aspect. And it is not at all clear that the resources for this are present in the kind of discourse found in the natural sciences.

Likewise with subjectivity. The special problem here is that, in order to talk about my experience as experience, I have to talk about it as essentially mine, as experienced from a first-person perspective. And this seems to require a language that has resources for expressing first-person as well as third-person statements. But the languages of the natural sciences arguably lack such resources. As Nagel argues, a complete description of the world in third-person terms, including the person I happen to be, seems to leave out one crucial kind of fact: the fact that that person is me . I interpret Nagel to mean by this that third-person discourse, even third-person psychological discourse, lacks a way of linking itself into the first-person discourse that is vital to our description of our mental lives.

This seems to me to be a powerful objection to the project of strong naturalization. If the kinds of discourse employed in the natural sciences lack the logical and conceptual resources to generate the kind of discourse

needed to talk about subjectivity and aspectual shape, then these features of our mental lives cannot be strongly naturalized. And if these features are part and parcel of the phenomenon we call "intentionality," then intentionality cannot be strongly naturalized either.

9.5.5—
The Objective Self and the Transcendental Ego

An even more radical variation on the same sort of claim is, I think, to be found in the writings of Kant, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. These writers seem to note that every intentional thought requires an analysis that involves at least three features: (1) a thinker (the "transcendental ego"), (2) a content (meaning, or Sinn ), and (3) an object aimed at (the "intentional object"). However, it is important to note—as Kant, Wittgenstein, and Husserl do and many other writers do not—that these "features" in the analysis of intentional states do not function in experience as three things, but as aspects or features of a seamless unity . Wittgenstein expresses this as follows in the Tractatus:

Husserl similarly speaks of intentional experience as a unity encompassing subject, meaning, and object. He writes that

the experiencing Ego is still nothing that might be taken for itself and made into an object of inquiry on its own account. Apart from its "ways of being related" or "ways of behaving," it is completely empty of essential components, it has no content that could be unravelled, it is in and for itself indescribable: pure Ego and nothing further. (Ideas §80)

Kant likewise speaks of the transcendental ego only in the context of the transcendental unity of apperception—that is, the possibility of the "I think" accompanying every possible thought (Critique of Pure Reason, Sec. 2, §16, B131).

The reason this distinction seems important is that, if writers like Wittgenstein and Husserl are right, the great divide lies not so much between mental and physical objects as between discourse about the (logical) structure of experience and discourse about objects generally (including thoughts treated as objects). On this view, when one comes to a proper understanding of thinking, what one finds there are not several interrelated things (the self, the intentional state, the content, and the object-as-intended), but a single act of thinking that has a certain logical structure that involves it being (a ) the thinking of some subject (b ) aiming at some object (c ) by way of a certain content being intended under a certain modality. It is possible, of course, to perform an act of analysis whereby one directs one's attention separately to self, content, modality, and intentional object. And when one does that, each of these things comes to occupy the "object" slot of another intentional act. Indeed, from the perspective of the analysis of experience, what it is to be an object is to be a possible occupant of the object-slot of an intentional act .^[9] But if this is so, then the logical structure of intentional states is in some sense logically prior to the notion of object, and the tags 'experiencing self', 'content', and 'object', as they are applied to moments or aspects of experiencing, are not names of interrelated objects. Indeed, they are not objects and hence are not related (since relations can only relate objects).^[10]

Now if this is right, the task of relating objectival and experiential discourse becomes all the harder: relations are things that obtain between objects. If the "I" and the content that appear in experiential analysis do not appear there as objects, there can be no question of relating them to things appearing in discourse about objects. There can be no question of objectival-experiential relations, because in the experiential analysis,

the experiencing "I" and the content do not appear as objects at all. Nor is it possible to "cash out" the logical structure of intentional experience in terms of relations between objects, for reasons already described. (Or, as Husserl suggests, at least doing so necessarily involves a distortion of one's subject matter.) The only other way to bridge the Cartesian divide between mind and nature, it would seem, would be to find a way to subsume objectival discourse within experiential discourse, as Husserl tries to do in his transcendental phenomenology. I shall not pursue this possibility here, but shall point out that it seems right in at least one regard: namely, that intentional character is in a certain way conceptually anterior to the notion of an object in the world. For it is the content of an intentional state that lays down the satisfaction conditions determining what kind of object or state of affairs would have to exist in order for the state to be fulfilled. It is the content "unicorn" that specifies what criteria something would have to fulfill to be a real unicorn, and not vice versa. (It is, of course, possible simply to live with the dissatisfying result that there is an unbridgeable gap between two disparate realms of discourse. To those uneasy with such a gulf, I heartily recommend a careful consideration of the kind of combination of transcendental idealism and transcendental realism advocated by Husserl.)

9.5.6—
The Argument from the Character—Veridicality Distinction

Finally, it seems to me that there is a fairly straightforward argument to the effect that intentional character cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. Intentional character was defined in terms of the aspects of intentional states that are invariant under alternative assumptions about extramental reality. Hence, it should be clear that any analysis we might give of intentional character must not depend upon anything outside the domain of experience. Notably, it must not depend upon any presumptions about (a ) correspondence to extramental objects, (b ) the causes of the intentional states, or (c ) ontological assumptions about the mind. For having an experience with the character of, say, VISUAL PRESENTATION [unicorn on my front lawn] is compatible (a ́) with there being or not being a unicorn there, (b ́) with the experience being caused by a unicorn under normal lighting conditions, a dog under abnormal conditions, LSD, or a Cartesian demon, and (c ́) with materialism, dualism, transcendental idealism, Aristotelianism, and Middle Platonism, to name a few possibilities. And it seems to follow straightforwardly from this that

any account of intentionality that is not similarly neutral cannot serve as an account of intentional character because such an account would have to be valid for all possible instances of the phenomenon it explains. In particular, an account framed in terms of assumptions about the actual nature of physical world, including human physiology, cannot be broad enough to cover all possible cases that would share a particular intentional content. Hence one cannot have a naturalistic theory of content—at least if by a "theory of content" one means something like "an account of the essential features of intentional character" as opposed to, say, "a specification of the natural systems through which intentional character is realized."^[11]

9.5.7—
Summary of Problems for Naturalizing Phenomenology

In short, then, the prospects for strongly naturalizing the phenomenological properties of mental states appear to be rather dim. Thought experiments about brains in vats and Cartesian demons cast significant doubt on whether there could be metaphysically necessary relations between phenomenologically typed states and naturalistic states. And properties like subjectivity, perspectival character, and the "what-it's-like" alluded to by Nagel do not seem to be susceptible to conceptually adequate explanation in naturalistic terms. Moreover, typing by intentional character necessarily classifies mental states in a way that is insensitive to extramental realities, so that it is impossible for a naturalistic theory to capture the same invariants. And finally, there is the tantalizing suggestion that discourse about "the experiencing self," "the thought," and "the intentional object" is not really discourse that relates objects at all, in which case it is hard to see how naturalistic discourse could have the right sorts of logical-grammatical resources to subsume it. If the kind of "content" we wish to naturalize is the kind that is delimited along phenomenological lines, weak naturalization (i.e., mathematical description and localization) is the best we are entitled to hope for.