Bringing Philosophy Back: 4e Cognition and the Argument from Phenomenology

Bringing Philosophy Back: 4e Cognition and the Argument from Phenomenology Mark Rowlands Abstract: It is common to assume that the case for 4e cognition stands or falls on its compatibility with cognitive science. If the science is willing to allow that cognition can be embodied, embedded, enacted and/or extended then cognition is, or can be, some or all of these things. If it is not willing allow this, then they cannot. This paper, in contrast, develops a philosophical argument for extended mental processes that does not depend on actual or anticipated developments in cognitive science. The argument is inspired by work in the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and is grounded in a picture of intentionality. Intentionality, it will be argued, is disclosing activity. And mental processes are extended because such activity, often – not always, not necessarily, straddles – neural processes, non-cranial bodily processes, and things a subject does in and to its environment. 1. The view The view I shall defend in this paper is this: some (not all, by any means, but some) mental processes are partly (not exclusively, obviously) made up of processes whereby an individual manipulates, transforms, and/or exploits structures in its environment. These structures carry information that is relevant to the cognitive task in which the individual is engaged, and the processes are ones that transform this information from information that is merely present to information that is available to the individual. This was a common theme of all my ruminations on this topic, all the way back to the mid 1990s (Rowlands 1995, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2010). It is not entirely clear where this view sits in the burgeoning literature on 4e cognition. Properly understood, it subsumes the idea that some mental processes are 1 embodied, and also that they are extended. It also, quite centrally, involves the enactivist theme of mental processes being, at least sometimes, a transaction between individuals and their environments. It is stronger than, but compatible with, the claim that mental processes are often embedded in environmental scaffolding. The embedding claim is one of causation: the ability of an individual to engage in a cognitive process or complete a cognitive task is often causally facilitated by his, her or its reliance on external information-bearing structures. The claim I defend is one of constitution or composition, not causation: some – note some, not all – mental processes are partly – note partly, never exclusively – constituted by, or composed of, actions performed on the world. Claims that mental processes are embodied, enacted or extended have become interpreted in so many different ways that it is, perhaps, no longer advisable to define one’s view in terms of them. Moreover, there are elements of, or interpretations of, each of these views that I would not endorse. The constraints of this chapter do not permit the sort of extensive disambiguation required to make the relation between the view I want to defend and these other views clearer useful. So, I shall simply leave the view as defined above, and not worry about under which other rubrics it may be subsumed.1 2. The argument Many arguments for the different varieties of 4e cognition have been functionalist ones. The general idea has been that, from the functionalist perspective, if something walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it is a duck – a duck, in this case, generally being a cognitive process. It doesn’t matter how it walks and talks like a duck, and nor does it 1 If one likes labels, one might, in deference to the central role it accords an individual’s action on the world, refer to it as actionism – though, to my ears, that is so ugly I can’t quite bring myself to use it. 2 matter where. If something plays the defining functional role of a cognitive state or process then it qualifies as that state or process – irrespective of what it is or where it is. If, for example, a sentence in a notebook plays the functional role of a belief, then it is a belief. If the functional role definitive of a given cognitive process is realized, in part by a dynamic pattern of interaction between an organism and environment, then this pattern of interaction is part of the process. This emphasis on functionalism, however, has engendered certain problems. First, it means that arguments for the various versions of 4e cognition are unlikely to convince anyone not wedded to functionalism. Second, it threatens the overall theoretical coherence of these anti-Cartesian ways of thinking about the mind. This is because not all of them are equally enthusiastic about the same form of functionalism. For example, it is common to think – largely due to some influential arguments of Andy Clark (2008) – that the theses of embodied and extended cognition are dubiously compatible at best. The thesis of extended cognition, it is thought, is predicated on a fairly liberal version of functionalism, a version that the thesis of embodied cognition is committed to denying. Third, it means that arguments for these various anti-Cartesian views are most obviously applicable to states or processes that are, or are thought to be, functionally definable. This explains the literature’s heavy emphasis on cognition. The application of these arguments to states that are less obviously functionally definable – phenomenal consciousness, affective states such as moods and emotions, and so on – is, therefore, unclear. The arguments I shall develop for the view stated in the previous section are not functionalist ones. They, therefore, they are immune to the doubts of the functionalist- 3 phobic, are able to reunite anti-Cartesian themes driven asunder by a reliance on functionalism, and apply to cognitive, phenomenal and affective states equally. The argument I shall develop is based on an account of intentionality: of what it is for a mental act to be intentionally directed towards the world. Intentionality, I shall argue, is essentially revealing activity. The view I want defend emerges quickly and easily from this account of intentionality. 3. The methodology So, mental processes: exclusively intra-cranial or not? How do we even approach this question? To what disciplinary kind does it belong? Is it a question of philosophy? Or does it belong to cognitive science? Or is it a question in the philosophy of cognitive science? As a way of getting a grip on the differences between these questions, and why they matter, consider what many think of as the ‘early years’ of the debate over the intracraniality, or lack thereof, of cognition. 2 Clark and Chalmers (henceforth, C&C) prosecuted their case for extended cognition by way of an imaginative thought experiment – the case of Otto. This case provided much of the focus of ensuing discussions of extended cognition – both for and against. That the case of Otto was an imaginative thought experiment grounded in what is ultimately a philosophical view of 2 This is tendentious, of course. Some seem to think that the thesis of extended cognition was born with Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ paper, “The extended mind,” instead of having a lineage that could be traced back through, to name but a few Ed Hutchins, Merlin Donald, James Gibson, back at least as far as Heidegger. I don't endorse this historical myopia, of course. Indeed, even Andy Clark was writing about the extended mind long before “The extended mind.” By early days, I refer to the historically myopic understanding if this idea. That is ‘the early days’ refers to days of “The extended mind” and its aftermath, up to Rob Rupert’s (2004) paper, “Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition.” 4 the nature of mental kinds – functionalism – might have suggested that the case for extended cognition was grounded in traditional philosophical fare: intuitions, thought experiments, analysis of concepts, and so on. However, in the responses to this paper, a new trend began to emerge. Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa (henceforth A&A) objected to C&C’s view on two grounds (Adams and Aizawa 2001). First, there was an argument from original or nonderived intentionality. The sentences in Otto’s notebook do not possess original intentionality. Therefore, they do not qualify as mental. Since beliefs are mental entities the sentences, therefore, do not qualify as beliefs. This is still traditional philosophical fare – resting on a criterion of the mental as intentionality associated with Brentano and the phenomenological tradition. Their second objection, however, was rather different. Accepting the thesis of extended cognition would have unfortunate consequences for the future development of cognitive science. The kinds this enterprise invoked would be messy, unruly ones, and no genuine science could be constructed on their basis. This argument is rooted firmly in the philosophy of cognitive science. That is, it is based on a conception of what cognitive science does or is supposed to do. In subsequent work A&A (2009) arguably moved further away from traditional philosophical analysis by relocating the original intentionality argument as a thesis in the philosophy of cognitive science: thus transmuted, it became a thesis about how cognitive science is committed to a rules and representations (henceforth, R&R) meta-model of cognitive processes (and the idea of original intentionality became part and parcel of the second R). 5 This refocusing of the debate as one in the philosophy of cognitive science has been a consistent theme of Rob Rupert’s work. He sets out his stall in the early pages of his (2004) as follows: If HEC [the hypothesis of extended cognition] does not provide a promising framework for the pursuit of cognitive science (as it attempts to understand actual mental states), the radical theses of extended mind and extended self lose much of their current appeal. (2004, 392-3) And, in a recent review of my book, The New Science of the Mind (2010), he writes: What scientific utility might there be to the inclusion of all of this as part of cognition? … Attempts to reinterpret cognitive science so as to draw the boundary somewhere else strike me as gratuitous; from the standpoint of philosophy of science, they would seem to amount to an unnecessary reinterpretation or remapping of current practices. (Rupert 2011) I leave the reader to interpolate the content of expression ‘all of this’. The idea, pretty clearly, is this: the thesis of extended cognition stands or falls on its implications for cognitive science. I am, however, simply not playing the game A&A and Rupert believe me to be playing, or would like me to be playing. The view I defend – advertised in section 1 – is a thesis that emerges not from what we think cognitive science is or should be doing but from philosophical analysis, broadly construed. At stake is, of course, the issue of the status of philosophy in this debate. Can philosophy make any distinctive contribution to 6 the debate over embodied/extended cognition? Or is its contribution limited to reflection on the practices of cognitive scientists? I shall try to show that philosophy can play a distinctive role in shaping this debate, and its role is not merely that of commentator on cognitive science. To see what the distinctive role of philosophy might be, consider, for example, the book Rupert was actually reviewing in the preceding quotation. The central argument for this book was cognition is revealing activity that conforms to the mark of the cognitive. As such, the argument divides into two strands: (a) a picture of intentionality as revealing activity, and (b) an analysis of cognition – the ‘mark of the cognitive’ (MOTC). The distinctive contribution philosophy can make to this debate is in providing either (i) organizing pictures of or (ii) analyses of certain (poorly understood) phenomena. The mark of the cognitive I identified and defended is an analysis of cognition as this features in contemporary cognitive science. I don’t really care that much about the mark of the cognitive – which makes it somewhat ironic that most of the commentators on and reviewers of that book have focused almost exclusively on it. Essentially, it was a piece of rope on which my opponents were supposed to conveniently hang themselves. That is, its principal aim was tactical: to provide a criterion of cognition that my opponents would have to accept (because it was so bland, traditional and inclusive) and then show that extended cognition still follows. In my more optimistic moments, however, I do suspect that it provides a sufficient condition for cognition. For the record, here is the analysis: A process P is a cognitive process if: 7 (1) P involves information processing—the manipulation and transformation of information-bearing structures. (2) This information processing has the proper function of making available either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations information that was, prior to this processing, unavailable. (3) This information is made available by way of the production, in the subject of P, of a representational state. (4) P is a process that belongs to the subject of that representational state (2010, 110-11). These conditions are presented, precisely, as an analysis (incomplete – since they only provide a sufficient condition – but an analysis nonetheless) of cognition, as this features in at least some strands of contemporary cognitive science. The idea that philosophical analysis can make any distinctive contribution to the debate concerning 4e cognition is has been resisted, and on grounds that are not entirely clear, and never made explicit. However, one common theme, voiced on many occasions by A&A, is that the issue is not whether embodied/extended cognition is possible but whether it is actual. A similar sentiment can, perhaps, be detected in Rupert’s use of the word ‘actual’ in the first passage cited above: The hypothesis of extended cognition must provide a promising framework for the pursuit of cognitive science ‘as it attempts to understand actual mental states’. Similarly, Andreas Elpidorou (2012), in a generally useful and perceptive critique of The New Science of the Mind (and earlier work of mine), argues that I have shown only that extended cognition is possible, and not that it is actual. 8 I find this charge puzzling, since, in that book, I gave various (actual) examples of extended cognition. Let us agree: that cognition might possibly extend beyond the skull is neither here nor there. The issue is whether it actually thus extends. Few, I think, would argue with this quotidian claim. (Certainly I would not.) However, it would be a mistake to suppose that philosophical or conceptual analysis is restricted to showing the possibility of cognition extending beyond the skull. That would be a naïve mistake. There is a range of conclusions that might be established by conceptual analysis. It might show, for example, that phenomenon P1 is compatible with P2. It might show that P1 makes P2 more likely. It might show that P1 necessitates P2. One reason why conceptual analysis can establish a range of conclusions is that it does not occur in a vacuum but only in conjunction with relevant empirical facts. Consider, for example, C&C’s case for extended cognition. Their argument is based on analysis: a functionalist analysis of mental state types. This analysis is then combined with relevant empirical facts: brain-world couplings are common. This yields an inference: it is likely that that defining functional roles of some mental state types can be filled by these coupled states as well as by neural states alone. And from this we get a conclusion: extended cognition is not merely possible but likely. Or, consider the case for non-cranial cognition, as developed in my (2010). It is based on a picture of intentionality – to which I shall turn in a moment – and the aforementioned analysis of cognition. Intentionality is, I argued, revealing activity, and there are four conditions whose satisfaction is collectively sufficient for a process to count as cognitive. Both picture and 9 analysis are then combined with relevant facts: disclosing activity is often – not always, not necessarily, but often – realized by actions performed on relevant structures in the environment. This yields a conclusion: non-cranial cognition (i.e. cognition that is partly but not entirely composed of neural processes) is not merely possible but very likely indeed. The idea that an approach based on philosophical analysis is confined to demonstrating the possibility of non-cranial cognition rests on a simple mistake. A philosophical approach that has analysis as one of its core elements is never restricted to demonstrations of possibility because such analysis can always be combined with relevant empirical facts. There are, in addition, two other misconceptions concerning philosophical analysis that should be dispelled. First, philosophical analysis is not, in general, something that can be done from the armchair. Suppose the phenomenon one wishes to address is a theoretical one – for example, the understanding of cognition as it figures in contemporary cognitive science. Then one had better be prepared to familiarize oneself with the relevant theories (in this case, prominent models of cognitive processes). One will get nowhere sitting in an armchair examining what one intuitively thinks about cognition. The idea that philosophical analysis amounts to sitting in a chair examining ones intuitions is, of course, a parody. It is rather strange that so many people seem to believe it. Second, and relatedly, conceptual analysis is not the analysis of concepts. Everyone thinks it is, but it is not. Conceptual analysis is the analysis of things – conceptually. That is, in the expression, ‘conceptual analysis’ the term ‘conceptual’ 10 functions as an adverb, and denotes a method of analysis rather than an object of analysis. When Socrates asked questions such as ‘What is justice?’ he was asking a question about justice itself. To analyze something conceptually is to analyze a thing – but to do it conceptually, as opposed to physically, chemically, functionally, algorithmically computationally, and so on.3 Putting these two points together: the analysis I offered of cognition was not gleaned from intuitions identified in some mythical armchair. Rather, it was gleaned from examination of models of cognition in recent cognitive science. The analysis is not an analysis of the concept of cognition: it is an analysis of cognition – of a phenomenon that is analyzed conceptually. The contribution that philosophy can make is – mercifully – not confined to providing analyses of given phenomena. Philosophy, as Wittgenstein once pointed out, can provide us with pictures of poorly understood phenomena. These pictures are extraordinarily abstract but can play a crucial role in organizing the way we think about, and investigate, a given phenomenon. At the heart of The New Science of the Mind is a picture of intentionality. It is not an analysis – if it were it would be obviously either circular or question begging. Rather, it is a picture: a way of thinking about the sort of thing intentionality is. Pictures of a given phenomenon, p, are logically and methodologically prior to any analysis of p. The analysis will be predicated on the picture, and is essentially the sort of mopping up operation – the dotting of ‘i’s and the crossing of ‘t’s – that can be attempted only when the picture is in place. I am rather fond 3 The question of what makes an analysis conceptual is a good one, but not one that can be addressed here. 11 of this picture of intentionality. I can take or leave the mark of the cognitive. But you will have to pry the picture of intentionality from my cold dead fingers. 4. And finally, some philosophy: the hard problem of intentionality There is a hard problem of intentionality, just as there is a hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of intentionality is, I suspect, much worse. The hard problem of consciousness is a problem of understanding how one thing – phenomenal consciousness, what it is like to have or undergo a conscious experience – could be produced or constituted by another thing – neural activity – when the two things seem so essentially disparate. We know or strongly suspect that brain activity produces or constitutes phenomenal consciousness, but we are at a loss to understand how. The hard problem assumes that phenomenal consciousness is an object of awareness: roughly, it is something of which I can become aware if I suitably direct my attention. So too, of course, is neural activity. Ordinarily, I am not aware of what is going on in my brain, certainly not under that description, but I can become aware of this if, for example, if I were placed in an fMRI and allowed to view the resulting images in real time. Let us call things that are actual or potential objects of consciousness empirical items. This is a roughly Kantian sense of ‘empirical,’ that opposes empirical items to the transcendental – understood as conditions of possibility of empirical items. Put in these terms, the hard problem of consciousness is a problem of understanding how one 12 empirical item could produce or constitute another when the two items seem so essentially different. That is a hard problem, admittedly. But it pales in comparison to the hard problem of intentionality. When we try to teach the concept of intentionality to students, it will often be by way of drawing on a board, with a poorly drawn head and an arrow pointing to some equally poorly drawn object in the world (or maybe that is just me). The attempt is, thus, to make intentionality into an object of the student’s scrutiny. The problem with this strategy, however, is that intentionality is the directedness of a mental act towards the world. And if we want to understand the intentionality – the directedness – of an act, we will look in vain to objects of this directedness. The hard problem of intentionality is the problem of understanding intentionality as directedness towards the world rather than as an object of that directedness. But the only way we can think about, or understand, something, it seems, is by making it into an object of a mental act (of thought, understanding, apprehension, critical scrutiny etc.) How do we understand intentionality from the inside, so to speak – as the directedness of a mental act, rather than an object of a mental act? This is what the picture of intentionality is, in effect, all about. It is a picture constructed from materials that date back to a time when the idea that intentionality had an inside as well as an outside was taken a little more seriously – when it was the sort of idea that might, for example, be made the foundation of one’s philosophical system.4 5. The Picture of Intentionality: Frege and Husserl 4 I am, of course, adverting to the phenomenological tradition, which I shall discuss soon (rather than Frege, whom I shall discuss next). 13 As a way of understanding the picture of intentionality, consider Frege’s struggles to clarify his notion of sense (Sinn). As many commentators have noted, there is a pronounced tension in Frege’s account. He wants to attribute two distinct types of feature or function to senses or thoughts (Gedanken). On the one hand, Frege claims that senses can be objects of mental acts in a way akin – although not identical – to that in which physical objects can be the objects of mental acts (Harnish 2000). Physical objects can be perceived; senses or thoughts (that is, the sense of a declarative sentence) can be apprehended. Moreover, when a thought is apprehended, Frege claims, “something in [the thinker’s] consciousness must be aimed at the thought” (Frege 1918/1994, 34-5). In one of its guises, therefore, a sense is an intentional object of an act of apprehension. However, according to Frege, senses also have the role of fixing reference. Although senses can be objects of reference, that is not their only, or even typical, role. In its second guise, the function of sense is to direct the speaker or hearer’s thinking not to the sense itself but to the object picked out by that sense. In this case, senses do not figure as intentional objects of mental acts, but as items in virtue of which a mental act can have an object. In their customary role, senses are determinants of reference: they are what fix reference rather than objects of reference. The tension between these two conceptions of sense lies in the fact when sense is playing the role described in the first characterization, it cannot also play the role described in the second, and vice versa. This inability to play both roles simultaneously shows itself in a certain non-eliminability that attaches to sense in its referencedetermining role. 14 In its first guise, a sense is an object of apprehension: an intentional object of a mental act. But the second characterization of sense tells us that whenever there is an intentional object of a mental act, there is also a sense that fixes reference to this object. If we combine these characterizations, therefore, it seems we must conclude that whenever sense exists as an intentional object of a mental act of apprehension, there must, in that act, be another sense that allows it to exist in this way. And if this latter sense were also to exist as an intentional object of a mental act, there would have to be yet another sense that allowed it to do so. Sense in its reference-determining guise, therefore, has a non-eliminable status within any intentional act. In any intentional act, there is always a sense that is not, and in that act cannot be, an intentional object. Therefore, the concept of sense, as employed by Frege, admits of what we might call empirical and transcendental interpretations. Empirically, sense is an intentional object of an act of apprehension. Transcendentally, it is that in virtue of which any intentional act can refer to – or have – an object. Sense, as transcendental, occupies a non-eliminable position in any intentional act: whenever there is a referent, there is a sense in virtue of which this referent is picked out as falling under an empirical mode of presentation. It is the second way of thinking about sense, sense as determinant of reference, which underwrites the familiar idea that Fregean sense is inexpressible: as something that can be shown but not said. As Dummett puts it: “even when Frege is purporting to give the sense of a word or symbol, what he actually states is what its reference is” (1973, 227). This inexpressibility is an inevitable consequence of the noneliminability of sense. 15 A similar pattern of thought can be identified in Husserl’s (early) attempts to explain the nature of what he called Auffassungsinn and also in his (later) attempts to explain the distinction between noesis and noema. I shall focus on the latter. There are two ways of interpreting this distinction, which have become known as the ‘East Coast’ and ‘West Coast’ interpretations. According to the former, the distinction between noesis and noema is intended to track the distinction between transcendental and empirical interpretations of sense (Sokolowski 1987). On this interpretation, noesis corresponds to sense understood transcendentally as a determinant of reference; noema corresponds to sense understood empirically, as an object of reference. Thus, on the East Coast interpretation, when Husserl introduces the distinction between noesis and noema, he is simply recording the systematic ambiguity of the notion of sense and effecting an appropriate disambiguation. The West Coast interpretation relates the noesis/noema to Husserl’s antipsychologism (Føllesdal 1969). Husserl, like Frege, was insistent that senses should be understood as (i) objective, in the sense that they exist independently of the mental activity of any subject, and (ii) ideal, in the sense that they are neither spatial nor temporal entities. The transcendental notion of sense would threaten this antipsychologism. Understood empirically, senses are extrinsic objects of mental acts of apprehension – and one is at liberty to understand them as objective, ideal entities. However, as transcendental, they are not extrinsic to the mental act at all. The worry is that if sense are so intimately connected to mental acts as to be determinants of their reference then it would seem they should be the same sort of things as mental acts – subjective, spatial, temporal, dated, concrete particulars. 16 According to the West Coast interpretation, Husserl’s solution to this problem builds on his earlier distinction, made in the Logical Investigations, between the real and ideal content of a mental act. Real content is specific to a particular mental act, whereas ideal content can be shared by different acts – in effect, the latter is a universal that can be instantiated by different acts.5 What, in Ideas I, Husserl calls the noema is the intentional act individuated by its ideal content. The noesis would be the same act individuated according to its real content. On the West Coast interpretation, therefore, the noesis/noema distinction does not map as neatly onto the transcendental/empirical distinction as it does in its Eastern counterpart. Nevertheless, the former distinction is still motivated by the latter. The noesis/noema distinction is, on the East Coast interpretation, motivated by Husserl’s desire to safeguard the objectivity of sense, but to do so precisely in the face of the problem that sense has a transcendental as well as an empirical interpretation. The possibility of a transcendental interpretation of sense entails that sense is more closely connected to mental acts than being merely an extrinsic object grasped by such acts. Husserl’s suggestion is that the experiential noema is an ideal reference-determining content, whereas the noesis is the real, concrete, psychic counterpart to this ideal particular. 6. Intentionality as disclosure The themes found in Frege and Husserl can be woven together into a general argument. Suppose we think of examples of intentional states as possessing a tripartite structure 5 By the time of Ideas I, Husserl understands this as a trope – an abstract particular – rather than a universal. 17 comprising act, object, and mode of presentation. Despite some lean years (c. 19702000), this way of thinking of intentionality is still sufficiently widely accepted to be dubbed the standard model. The mode of presentation connects act and object, but the precise way in which it does this can be left open. On one influential way of explaining this connection, for example, the act has a certain content, expressible in the form of a description, and the mode of presentation is that in virtue of which the object satisfies that description. This description-theoretic explanation is, however, entirely optional. Nothing in the tripartite model itself entails that the act’s content can be expressed in the form of a description. The core argument begins by showing that the idea of a mode of presentation (the generalized form of sense, Auffassungsinn, or noesis/noema) is ambiguous. In any intentional act, we find two different sorts of mode of presentation. Empirical modes of presentation (aspects): Often, indeed typically, the notion of a mode of presentation is understood as the way objects appear to subjects. If a tomato appears red and shiny, then redness and shininess is the mode of presentation of the tomato. In this sense, the mode of presentation is an intentional object – it is the sort of thing of which I can become aware if my attention is suitably engaged. I can attend not only to the tomato, but also to its redness and shininess. An empirical mode of presentation is an intentional object. As such, it is identical with what is sometimes called an aspect of an object. Transcendental modes of presentation: The standard mode of intentionality has a clear, if curiously overlooked, implication. In any intentional act, there must be more than an 18 empirical mode of presentation. There must also be a transcendental mode of presentation. The reason is that the mode of presentation is supposedly what fixes reference – determines the intentional object of a mental act. So, if the object of an intentional act is an empirical mode of presentation (for example, the redness and shininess of the tomato), there must be another mode of presentation – a transcendental mode of presentation – that fixes reference to the empirical mode of presentation. The transcendental mode of presentation is that component of the intentional act that permits the object of the act to appear under empirical modes of presentation (or aspects). If we want to understand the intentionality – the directedness – of an act, we will look in vain to the objects of this directedness (i.e. objects or empirical modes of presentation of those objects). The directedness of an intentional act towards the world consists in its transcendental mode of presentation. The transcendental mode of presentation is the intentional core of an act. That is, the directedness of an intentional act consists in its permitting objects to appear under aspects. Therefore, in this sense, intentional directedness is a form of revealing or disclosing activity: activity that reveals objects as falling under aspects or empirical modes of presentation. That, in its most abstract form, is what intentional directedness is. It is possible to distinguish two forms of disclosing activity: causal and constitutive. Constitutive disclosure takes the form of a logically sufficient condition for the world to fall under an empirical mode of presentation. For example, what it is like to have an experience provides a logically sufficient condition for the world to fall under an empirical mode of presentation. If I have an experience with qualitative character, c, this 19 is logically sufficient for the world – an object in the world if the experience is a perception or illusion, a region of the world if it is a hallucination – to appear as c. If I think that p, this is logically sufficient for the world to appear to me, in thought, as p. We might also recognize the category of causal disclosure, where this takes the form of a physically sufficient condition for the world to fall under an empirical mode of presentation. Cognitive vehicles typically supply only a physically sufficient condition for the world to fall under an empirical mode of presentation. For example, if correct, David Marr’s account of the computational processes that progressively transform the retinal image into a 3D object representation would provide a physically, but not logically, sufficient condition for an object to appear a certain way. Constitutive disclosure is disclosure by way of content. Causal disclosure is disclosure by way of vehicles of content. It is causal disclosure that is relevant to the various theses of 4e cognition (since these are theses about cognitive vehicles). 7. From intentionality to the 4e mind The various versions of 4e cognition are usually taken to be recherché doctrines, radically at odds with common sense. However, given the picture of intentionality as revealing or disclosing activity, various versions of the 4e view of cognition emerge as natural, obvious – perhaps even mundane – consequences. In particular, the ‘view’ advertised in the opening section emerges as precisely such a consequence. The activity whereby an object is disclosed as falling under a given aspect or empirical mode of presentation often – not always, certainly not necessarily, but often – 20 straddles neural processes, bodily processes, and processes of manipulating or transforming environmental structures. This is why the vehicles of cognitive processes are often amalgamations of all three. We might give flesh to this rather abstract characterization using a familiar (indeed, by now, perhaps rather hackneyed) example. According to a common interpretation of Clark and Chalmers’s famous case of Otto, the sentences in Otto’s notebook are identical with a subset to his beliefs. I do not endorse this claim. Indeed, I reject it. Nevertheless, I do endorse the claim that Otto’s manipulation of his notebook can form part of a cognitive process – in this case, the process of remembering. The activity of manipulating the book is part of the means whereby, in the case of memory, Otto’s intentional directedness toward the world is brought about. The manipulation of the book is, in part, that in virtue of which a certain object in the world – a museum – is disclosed to Otto as falling under a specific empirical mode of presentation: that of being located on 53rd Street. Consider another example, suppose I am asked, a la Yarbus (1967), to look at a picture and identify certain information contained in it. For example, suppose I am asked to determine the approximate age of the picture’s central figure. To accomplish this task, my eyes engage in a certain saccadic scan path. This scan path is part of the visual causal disclosure of the world as containing an object – a painted figure – that falls under a given empirical mode of presentation: for example as being a depiction of someone roughly forty years old, or as someone not seen by the others for many years. As such, the saccadic eye movements are part of the means by which an object in the world is 21 revealed to me as falling under an empirical mode of presentation. The saccadic eye movements are, therefore, among of the vehicles of intentional directedness. Often – by no means always, certainly not necessarily, but often – the vehicles of intentional directedness subsume (in these sorts of ways) both bodily and wider environmental processes. That is why, fundamentally, mental processes often subsume both bodily and wider environmental processes. There are many other possible examples of the same general phenomenon. When the subject moves, and thus – à la Gibson – manipulates the optic array, invariant information is obtained or appropriated: information that can be identified only in the transformation from one optic array to another. In virtue of this information, in part, an object may be subsumed under one or another perceptual mode of presentation: as being the same size as, or as being a different size from, another object. The kind of sensorimotor probing that enactivists have (rightly) emphasized (see Noë 2004) is another example of revealing activity. Casting one’s attention at will to any part of the visually presented world, or having one’s attention automatically drawn to a visual transient are examples of probing or exploratory activity. They are activities in virtue of which an object in the world can be presented as falling under one or another perceptual mode of presentation. Thus, it is partly in virtue of such activity that a wall can be subsumed under the mode of presentation ‘wall of Marilyns’ rather than the alternative ‘wall of indeterminate shapes.’6 6 I discuss this example in my 2010, 204‐5. The idea is that only a small portion of Warhol’s wall of Marilyns will fall within the range of foveal vision. Parafoveal vision is incapable of discriminating images of Marilyn from indeterminate shapes. The slack, on the sensorimotor account, is taken up by 22 8. Conclusion There are, essentially, two ways of thinking about experiences and other intentional states. The first is to think of them as items of which one is aware. This way of thinking about intentional states is not so much false as misleading. It is, of course, true, that I can attend to my intentional states and their various properties. I might attend to a particular thought that I have, and I might do so because, for example, I find it troubling. Therefore, intentional states (and their properties) can be items of which I am aware. However these sorts of situations where I have reflective consciousness of my intentional states are far from the norm. Most of the time, my intentional states are simply things I have without attending to them. Typically, my intentional states are not items of which I am aware but items with which I am aware. That is, they are items that make me aware of other things: objects (broadly construed) or states-of-affairs (depending on one’s preferred view of the objects of intentional directedness). An intentional state is an item in virtue of which I become aware of its intentional object. Suppose we think of intentional states as items of which we are aware. If we do this, we are almost ineluctably led to a certain way of thinking about intentional directedness. We will think of this directedness as an empirical item, in the sense introduced earlier: as an item of which I am, or can become, aware if my attention is suitably engaged. The intentional state itself is empirical in this sense – an object of my introspective gaze or grasp – and so too will be the state’s intentional object. Then, we postulate that there is some relation between the intentional state and its object in virtue my ability to direct my attention at will to any part of the wall – and my anticipation that I will encounter more Marilyns when I do so. See also Dennett 1991. 23 of which the former is about the latter. If we can understand this relation, we will have understood intentional directedness. This is to think of intentionality from the outside: as an object of intentional directedness. Since the two relata are both empirical, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the relation between them has the same status also. Most contemporary treatments of intentionality conform to this general profile. Suppose, on the other hand, we think of mental states as, fundamentally, items with which we are aware: as items that make us aware of their intentional objects. Then, we can eschew the above way of thinking of intentionality in favor of a quite different picture. Here, we begin with the intentional object, as it appears to the subject, and work backwards from this to identify the features of the act in virtue of which it can appear this way. To do this is to understand intentionality from the inside: as directedness towards the world rather than an item directed upon – as transcendental rather than empirical. This, in broad outline, is the method of, and rationale for, phenomenology. There is, I have argued, an abstract, general picture of intentionality that emerges from this approach: intentionality is, fundamentally, revealing or disclosing activity. Intentional directedness consists in the disclosing of an object, x, as falling under an empirical mode of presentation, P. Wittgenstein once said that philosophy is useful only against philosophers – and the philosopher in us. We are all philosophers, and what we regard as our common sense in reality embodies various philosophical pictures, assumptions, and often confusions. The various 4e understandings of the mental – mental processes as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended – fall out of the picture of intentionality I have defended in this 24 paper: they emerge from it as obvious, even banal, consequences. Certainly, the view advertised at the beginning of this paper – the claim that some mental processes are partly made up of processes in which an individual manipulates, transforms, and/or exploits structures in its environment – is a mundane consequence of this picture of intentionality. Intentionality is revealing activity, and this revealing activity will often – not always, not necessarily, but often – straddle processes occurring in the brain, processes occurring in the body and processes whereby an individual manipulates, exploits and transforms relevant structures in its environment. The idea that mental items are not confined to the skull or skin is usually regarded as a recherché doctrine, radically at odds with common sense. If this is so, it can only be because common sense embodies a picture of intentionality. I have argued that this picture is defective. References Adams, Fred and Aizawa, Ken (2001) ‘The bounds of cognition’, Philosophical Psychology 14: 43-64. Adams, Fred and Aizawa, Ken (2009) The Bounds of Cognition (New York: Blackwell) Clark, Andy (2008) ‘Pressing the flesh: a tension in the study of the embodied, embedded mind’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76, 37-59. 25 Clark, Andy and Chalmers, David (1998) ‘The extended mind’, Analysis 58, 7-19. Frege, Gottlob (1918/1994) ‘The thought: a logical inquiry’ in Basic Topics in the Philosophy of Language ed., R. Harnish (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall). Dennett, Daniel (1991) Consciousness Explained (New York: Little Brown) Dummett, Michael (1973) Frege’s Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth). Elpidorou, Andreas (2012) ‘Where’s my mind? Mark Rowlands on the vehicles of cognition’ Avant: the journal of philosophical-interdisciplinary vanguard, 3 (1): 145160. Føllesdal, Dagfinn (1969) ‘Husserls’ notion of noema’, Journal of Philosophy 66: 68087. Harnish, Robert (2000) ‘Grasping modes of presentation: Frege versus Fodor and Schweizer’, Acta Analytica 15: 19-46. Husserl, Edmund (1900) 1973. Logical Investigations trans. J. Findlay (London: Routledge) 26 Husserl, Edmund (1913) 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff) Noë, Alva (2004) Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Rowlands, Mark (1995) ‘Against methodological solipsism: the ecological approach’, Philosophical Psychology 8: 5-24. Rowlands, Mark (1999) The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rowlands, Mark (2003) Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again (London: Acumen). Rowlands, Mark (2006) Body Language: Representation in Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Rowlands, Mark (2010) The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Rupert, Robert (1994) ‘Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition’, Journal of Philosophy 101: 389-428. 27 Rupert, Robert (2011) ‘Review of Mark Rowlands: The New Science of the Mind’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, November 2011. Sokolowski, Robert (1987) ‘Husserl and Frege’, Journal of Philosophy 84: 521-28. 28