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.