Imagining Itself (part XIII: Intentionality and Intention)

It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist. -Jean-Paul Sartre,

Whilst examining the differences between photographs, caricatures and mental images, Sartre writes:

The material of the mental image is more difficult to determine. Can it exist outside the intention? […] In our opinion, it is not only the mental image which needs an intention to be constructed: an external object functioning as an image cannot exercise that function without an intention which interprets it as such.

Here Sartre is drawing upon the earlier work of influential German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano who held the view that all mental states exhibit an intentionality or ‘aboutness’ i.e. they are directed towards an object, albeit one that is “inexistent”. This same notion of intentionality has also been a popular reference point in theories of representation – though its popularity seems to have waned in recent decades  - and it is clear from the above quote that Sartre conceived of representations in the same way: as things that can only function through interpretation. As we have already seen a more thorough theorization of representational strategies provides a far more illuminating means to understand and examine representations.

So why bother with intentionality? The main reason for addressing the idea of intentionality in a discussion of imagination is because intentionality is widely regarded as fundamental to the phenomenon we call “mental imagery”. Nigel Thomas makes this very point in his detailed entry for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the subject of Mental Imagery. There is certainly no need to hold back the tide of opinion on this matter but what we must do is establish a clear distinction between intentionality on the one hand and intention on the other. For the purposes of this discussion we will take an intention to be a mental state directed towards a goal as a necessary component in purposeful action. It will also be necessary to determine whether the notion of intentionality applies universally, not necessarily to mental states but to behavior, much of which we take to be the consequence of cognitive - though not necessarily conscious - processes.

For a 2011 book-chapter entitled “Evolutionary Emergence of Intentionality and Imagination” philosopher Dale Jacquette discusses intentionality as a cognitive activity directed towards (or ‘about’) an object:

For a living thing to sense or perceive is for it to sense or perceive something, to be directed in psychological occurrence towards the object intended by the sensation of perception.

Jacquette outlines an example of a mollusk on the seafloor snapping its shell closed in response to a change in light or motion. He writes:

The internal neuronal change triggered by environmental events will accordingly have an intended object, even in so simple an organism, as a proximate cause of the neuronal state change. The cause of this neuronal state change is in turn what the change intends or is about.

This can’t possibly be right. The mollusk doesn’t have an intended object, it is simply responding to a stimulus. The response is not ‘about’ anything, it is not directed ‘towards’ any thing, it merely moves. To impute an intention to this primitive motion is to take a giant leap into error. If intentionality is directed toward any ‘thing’ in this instance it is toward the result of a movement, not an object. If we were to follow the preposterous logic of Jacquette’s argument then every smoke alarm, not to mention every mobile phone, would have some intended object as its ultimate aim.

The mistake Jacquette makes here is precisely the same as that made by Alva Noë in his assumption (already discussed) that bacteria are on a behavioural spectrum with the complex behaviours of humans. If we are to meaningfully distinguish between the sometimes highly sophisticated response systems of basic organisms and the far more complex behaviours of higher forms of life then we will need to understand the role not of intentionality but of intention.

For a behaviour to be intentional there has to be an anticipated goal towards which the behaviour is directed. If no goal is involved we would simply have movement or an advantageous response or reaction of the kind commonly exhibited by mollusks. Mollusks do not choose between contemplated options. They do not form an alternative goal and respond differentially based upon this anticipated future state. Humans on the other hand do this a great deal. In fact we form intentions and entertain actions and refrain from enacting them on a massive scale. Take for example the familiar process commonly referred to as “inner speech”. To conduct an inner monologue or silent soliloquy is, I suggest, to enact absolutely everything aside from the physical performance of speech itself.

Imagine someone unable to ‘hear’ their inner voice, someone who can only consciously think by speaking everything aloud. Such people do in fact exist. Pre-school children commonly engage in ‘private speech’ and it is only around school age that this becomes internalized or, more accurately, the speech stops but all the other associated processes continue.*

So, strange as it may seem, consciousness is not where the majority of mind-work is being done. As is already well understood, a vast majority of decisions are made long before they ever find their way to conscious awareness. What we call consciousness is in fact just the process in which we privately enact (ie: inhibit from public performance) everything but the representations themselves. If this seems hard to believe, then it might be worth considering the conscious thought processes of the congenitally deaf. Congenitally deaf people brought up to sign do not report having inner voices, they report having inner signing: they ‘feel’ and ‘see’ themselves gesturing ‘in their head’. Obviously there are no physical gestures going on in their heads, nor are there representations. What is going through their minds are the intentions to represent via signing.

Conscious thought then, understood from the perspective of intention, might be best characterized as a form of covert (i.e. unexpressed) representationally oriented action. Once again, this is not to side with those who claim that we experience inner representations. This is exactly the suggestion I have been trying assiduously to avoid throughout these discussions on imagination. The claim I am making is as follows. We are a social species and as such we have evolved a range of representational practices that allow us to communicate with one another in highly sophisticated ways. The importance of communication is so fundamental to us and the associated dispositions to represent are so thoroughly embedded that we can barely distinguish between the intention to represent something and the publicly perceptible representations we are capable of producing.

We think we imagine in words, images and propositions etc. when in fact we imagine in intentions: intentions to represent the thing or event in question. So, to speak out loud (i.e. to make verbal representations) and then to continue this speaking as an inner monologue is not to continue the representations in one’s head. It is to terminate the speaking but to continue with the intention: i.e. all of the mental actions apart from representation itself.

We might say that imagining oneself talking or humming is a series of absentions from producing the noises which would be the due words or notes to produce, if one were talking or humming aloud.” –Gilbert Ryle

*It might also be interesting to note that the practice of silent reading is also a relatively recent phenomenon. In “A History of Reading” (1996) Alberto Manguel unearths several rare descriptions of people reading silently but he points out that: “not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West.”