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Abstract
Brentano famously changed his mind about intentionality between the 1874 and 1911 editions of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (PES). The 1911 edition repudiates the 1874 view that to think about something is to stand in a relation to something that is within in the mind, and holds instead that intentionality is only like a relation (it is ‘quasi-relational’). Despite this, Brentano still insists that mental activity involves ‘the reference to something as an object’, much as he did in the 1874 edition of PES. The question is what Brentano might have meant by this, given that he rejects a relational account of intentionality. The present paper suggests an answer. It draws on recent work on pretence theory to provide a model of Brentano’s notion of the quasi-relational nature of mental phenomena, as well as of the notion of mental reference to an object, and argues that the model helps to explain why Brentano might have been able discern a clear continuity between the views of the 1874 and 1911 editions of PES, despite the differences.
Notes
1 The translation may be standard, but it has been challenged, for example in Kriegel (forthcoming).
2 For an account of Brentano’s transformation, see, for example, Jacquette (2004) and Chrudzimski and Smith (2004b). Biagio Tassone offers a good account of the complex history and nature of Brentano’s early phenomenalism in his ‘Brentano on Mental Phenomena and Phenomenalism’ (unpublished manuscript).
3 In the passage cited, Brentano seems to use the word ‘thing’ to denote the widest class of (genuine) entities there are (cf. his claim that for there to be a relation of cause and effect, ‘both the thing that causes and the thing that is caused must exist’).
4 Sometimes, of course, such claims can strike us as coherent. An anonymous referee mentions the following kind of case. Suppose that Jones suffers from certain hallucinations that he knows to be mere hallucinations, but where their vividness prompts him to say: ‘I know that these people don’t exist, but I still see them’. The account I am defending does not deny that Jones might make such a claim, but insists that he is merely pretending when doing so (no doubt in order to convey the vividness of his hallucinations). Notice that Jones might go on to say ‘In fact, I not only see them, but I feel them; I just know they are there’, claims that make it increasingly more obvious that we should not construe Jones’s claims fully literally or seriously.
5 Some will think that sense can be made of (F), but that what is needed is a light-weight rather than heavy-weight existential quantifier. I myself doubt the coherence of such a distinction, and the pretence route I am following rejects this approach. Brentano too rejected any such distinction for his work on intentionality (Brentano 1995, p. 274).
6 See Brentano (1995), pp. 275-6, especially his claim that ‘the mentally active subject has himself as object of secondary reference’.
7 Cf. Walton’s use of the notion of quasi-emotions as the psychological states that make it fictional (in the games of make-believe that readers engage in when reading works of fiction) that readers fear, pity, etc., the fictional objects appearing in these works.
8 Brentano’s Foreword to the 1911 edition says that he had changed his mind on the issue of whether mental relation ‘[could] have something other than a thing [Reales] as its object’, which strongly suggests that he had earlier thought that it could have had a thing as its object. For textual evidence that Brentano indeed had this view, see Tassone (2012). Tim Crane is a prominent dissenter (Crane 2006).
9 Note that I am excluding from discussion intentional relations between agents and propositions, or propositional attitudes. The problems they bring up are very different from the problems we are focusing on. Note too that while propositional attitudes are much discussed in the literature, Brentano himself seems to have rejected the category of propositional attitudes early on in favour of the view that there are at most intentional relations to objects (see Kriegel forthcoming).
10 An anonymous referee surmises that an antirealist like Uriah Kriegel can simply take these phenomenological facts to be adverbial facts. I briefly respond to this suggestion at the end of this paper.
11 Note that even though we as reporters don’t share Jones’s fear, nothing prevents us from appealing to such a thought-bound ascription of fear to explain Jones’s actions, since it is Jones’s belief in his perspective on the world that explain his actions and we are pretending to go along with Jones’s belief.
12 It is crucial to this account that ‘E has an intentional object’ is not understood in terms that involve (unrelativised) reference to, or quantification over, objects (as in, ‘E has an intentional object O iff …’ or ‘For all x, E has x as intentional object iff …’). Having an intentional object is to be understood in internalist terms as a feature delivered by the content of a thought. In my view, Brentano would have understood this, and part of my evidence for this claim is that Brentano’s editor for the 1924 edition, Oscar Kraus, shows clear signs of understanding it. See, in particular, Kraus’s insistence in Brentano (1995), p. 272, footnote 4, that Brentano should have said ‘what he has as his object does not exist at all’ rather than ‘the object of his thinking need not exist at all’ (my emphasis), where Kraus’s preferred formulation clearly marks the relativity to the agent’s thought. (Tim Crane criticises Kraus as an interpreter of Brentano’s work in Crane 2006, but his criticisms apply to Kraus’s textual comments on the 1874 edition, not the 1911 edition; in my view, textual comments such as the preceding provide insightful clarification.)
13 The present view has something in common with Tim Crane’s schematicity thesis about intentional objects, according to which intentional objects have no particular metaphysical nature qua thought-of entities (Crane 2001a, 2001b). But there are quite fundamental differences. Crane continues to think of intentional objects as objects in good standing (in some sense of good standing): indeed, he thinks they are things we can quantify over even when they don’t exist, although he strongly denies that there are any real nonexistent intentional objects (see, for example, Crane 2001a, p. 17, p. 25). This is very different from a pretence point of view, according to which there is no sense in which there are such objects as Hamlet and the golden mountain, although engaging with the drama and myth that talk of their existence requires us to imagine or pretend that there are such objects. (In Voltolini [this volume], Voltolini argues on ontological grounds that Crane’s schematicity thesis permits a category of intentional objects that are real but lack existence, contrary to Crane. While Voltolini’s argument is compelling on its own terms, note that on a pretence-theoretic point of view nonexistence is itself understood in terms of pretence (cf. Walton 1990), and hence the views of pretence theorists are not affected by such an argument.)
14 Crane approvingly cites Barry Smith at this point: the thesis that ‘every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself ‘is to be taken literally – against the grain of a seemingly unshakeable tendency to twist Brentano’s words at this point’ (Smith 1994, p. 40).
15 If so, it wouldn’t be surprising if some of these alternative understandings already intrude into the 1874 text. For evidence that the 1874 edition of PES already allowed for forms of externalist intentionality, for example, see Tassone (2012). One indirect bit of evidence is found in Brentano’s indignant claim in a letter to Anton Marty dated March 17 1905 that ‘it has never been my opinion that the immanent object = ‘object of presentation’ (vorgestelltes Objekt). The presentation does not have ‘the presented thing,’ but rather ‘the thing,’ so, for example, the presentation of a horse [has] not ‘presented horse,’ but rather ‘horse’ as (immanent, that is, the only properly so-called) object’ (Brentano 1962, pp. 87-89). For a defence of Brentano’s claim, see Mauro (2001).
16 This is not the only passage where Brentano comes tantalisingly close to committing to some kind of fictionalist view. He puts his fictionalist credentials forward in a slightly different way when, earlier in the Appendix, he shows how those who deny the existence of numbers (as he does in his new reist phase) can offer paraphrases of claims about numbers by using hypotheticals (cf. ‘Someone who says that three is less than a trillion is not positively asserting the existence of a relation. He is saying, rather, that if there is a group of three and a group of a trillion, that relation must exist between them …’ (Brentano 1973, p. 273). Husserl too explicitly adopts a view of this kind about our talk of nonexistent intentional objects in Husserl (1894/95). (I am grateful for this reference to an anonymous referee, who asks whether there might not be a hitherto unknown influence from Husserl to Brentano.) Interestingly enough, around the same time as Brentano’s second edition of PES, Meinong explicitly records how he was at one point tempted by a fictionalist view of speakers’ commitments to nonexistent objects (cf. Kroon 1992).
17 Kriegel himself argues that adverbialism does have the means to capture this phenomenology in a way that comports with Brentano’s non-relational view (see Kriegel forthcoming). I remain sceptical. (Kroon 2013 presents further reasons for adopting a pretence-invoking account of the feeling of intentional directedness.)
18 I am grateful to Rasmus Thybo Jensen and some anonymous referees for numerous helpful comments that have helped me to clarify my views.