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ENACTIVISM, INTENTIONALITY AND CONTENT

Mark Rowlands Department of Philosophy

University of Miami Coral Gables, FL 33124

USA

1. Introduction

Enactivism has, perhaps, come to mean different things to different people. The version

of enactivism that I am going to build on in this paper is that defended in my book The

New Science of the Mind (henceforth NSM). i That view is, I think, recognizably

enactivist. Others might disagree, and I myself not only characterized it in other terms but

was careful to distinguish it from other views that fall under the rubric ‘enactivist’. The

view I defended is recognizably enactivist to the extent it regards cognition as, in part,

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 Body in Mind.ii

What was new about NSM was the underlying argument for this position. I

argued that cognition is revealing activity that conforms to the mark of the cognitive. The

argument is made up of two connected strands: (a) an analysis of intentionality as

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revealing activity, and (b) the criterion of cognition. Most commentators on and

reviewers of that book focused on the mark of the cognitive and ignored the analysis of

intentionality. This is ironic. The mark of the cognitive cannot be understood

independently of the analysis of intentionality: without the analysis, the mark of the

cognitive is (and was intended to be) incomplete. More importantly, I am not in any way

wedded to the mark of the cognitive. It is a mark devised for largely strategic purposes: a

length of rope with which my opponents are supposed to conveniently hang themselves. I

can take or leave the mark of the cognitive. But I shall let go of the analysis of

intentionality only when it is pried from my cold, dead fingers.

In this paper, I shall argue for an implication of the analysis of intentionality that I

did not explicitly draw in NSM. I did not explicitly draw this implication because, in that

book, I had other fish to fry. I was arguing for a form of embodied/extended/enacted

cognition, and, as such my focus was on the vehicles of cognition rather than the content.

Nevertheless, the analysis of intentionality that provided the basis of this defense has an

unequivocal consequence: there are no mental representations. This blanket conclusion

must be qualified because the concept of mental representation is a multiply ambiguous

one. The relevant sense of mental representation is this: a mental representation is a state

or structure that bears mental content. I shall argue that there are no mental

representations in this sense because there is no such thing as mental content. There are

no bearers of mental content because there is no mental content. More precisely, if there

is mental content, we can't say very much about it. In particular, we can't say the sorts of

things we need to be able to say if we are to believe in an apparatus of mental

representations. This does not mean there is no such thing as content. There is plenty of it

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– indeed, as far as I am concerned, the world is the totality of content and not things –

and we can say much about it. It’s just that this content is not mental content.

The argument I shall present for this prima facie unlikely conclusion is grounded

in the analysis of intentionality developed in NSM and, like that argument, draws

together and systematizes certain strands of theories and arguments that can be found in

work published in diverse traditions in the first half of the twentieth century. There is the

Brentanian tradition represented, in particular, by Husserl. And there is the early analytic

tradition, represented by Frege. I shall first rehearse the analysis of intentionality that

figured in NSM. When this rehearsal is over, the focus turns to the concept of content and

the baton will be firmly taken up by Wittgenstein.

2. The Analysis of Intentionality

Describing the view I am going to defend as an analysis of intentionality would be

inaccurate. I do not offer necessary, sufficient, or necessary and sufficient conditions for

an item to count as intentional, or anything of that ilk. What I do offer is a picture of

intentionality – a sketch of the sort of thing intentional directedness is, one that highlights

its more abstract and general features. I do not claim that this sketch captures all cases of

intentional directedness, merely that it captures some of the more familiar sorts. The

sketch begins with a certain model of intentionality that has its roots both in the

phenomenological and early analytic traditions and, despite some lean years (c. 1970-

2000) is, I think, still sufficiently widely accepted to be dubbed the standard model.iii

According to this, intentionality has a tripartite structure, comprising act, object, and

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mode of presentation. The mode of presentation connects act and object. Typically, the

mode of presentation is understood in this way: the act has a content, perhaps (but not

necessarily) expressible in the form of a description, and the mode of presentation is that

in virtue of which the object, in whatever way is deemed appropriate, ‘fits’ the content

(for example, satisfies that description). Given the conclusion advertised in the previous

section, it is clear that I shall not, ultimately, endorse the standard model. I am going to

do strange, unsavory things with the standard model – things that its adherents almost

certainly would not like. The model merely provides a starting point for the picture of

intentionality I am going to defend. When the picture is completed, the problems with –

and, in particular, a certain kind of ambiguity in – the standard model will become

evident. Were I a less pedestrian philosopher, I might describe the following exercise as a

deconstruction of the standard model. This deconstruction turns on the ambiguous status

of the concept of a mode of presentation.

The picture of intentionality I defend is, in effect, a generalized and systematized

form of a certain problematic that is evident in the work of Frege, Husserl, Sartre and

others. To those, like me, who cut their teeth in the analytic tradition, Frege provides the

most familiar route into this problematic, and that is the route I shall follow here. As

many commentators have noted, there is a pronounced tension in Frege’s account of

sense (Sinn). Frege 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,

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when a thought is apprehended, Frege (1918/1994) claims, ‘something in [the thinker’s]

consciousness must be aimed at the thought.’ 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.

As many commentators have pointed out, there is a pronounced tension between

these two ways of understanding sense. It is not simply that these characterizations are

distinct. More importantly, 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 reference-determining role. 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-

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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.

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 non-eliminability of sense.

In NSM, I argued that a similar pattern of thought could 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 connection between noesis and noema.

The analysis of intentionality advanced in NSM was a generalization of this sort

of problematic. The concept of a mode of presentation (the generalized form of sense,

auffassungsinn, or noema) is, I argued, 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 the 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 (or

aspects) of an object.iv

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Transcendental modes of presentation: The standard model of intentionality has a clear,

if curiously overlooked, implication. In any intentional act, there must be more than an

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 to appear under empirical modes of presentation (or aspects).

If we want to understand the intentionality of an act – its directedness towards

objects – 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

is that in virtue of which objects can appear to a subject under aspects.

Therefore, I argued, intentional directedness is a form of revealing or disclosing

activity: activity that reveals objects as falling under aspects or empirical modes of

presentation. I distinguished 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. What it is like to have an experience

provides a logically sufficient condition for the world to fall under an empirical mode of

presentation. Causal disclosure takes the form of a physically sufficient condition for the

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world to fall under an empirical mode of presentation. Cognitive processes 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. In NSM, the focus was on the theses of

embodied, enacted and extended cognition, which are theses concerning the vehicles of

cognition. Therefore, my concern was largely with causal disclosure.

Given this account of intentional directedness, the argument for an embodied,

extended and enacted account of mental processes was a straightforward one. Revealing

activity often – not always, certainly not necessarily – straddles neural processes, bodily

processes, and processes of manipulating or transforming environmental structures. This

is why 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 of his beliefs. I do not endorse this claim. Indeed, I

reject it.v Nevertheless, I do endorse the claim that Otto’s manipulation of his notebook

can form part of a cognitive process – 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

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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. As such, the saccadic eye movements are part of the means by

which an object in the world is 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.

In NSM, the focus was, as I have mentioned, on the vehicles of cognition.

However, this picture of intentionality also puts serious pressure on commonplace

assumption that there is such a thing as the content of cognition – at least if this is

understand as specifically mental content. The concept of the content of a mental state is

ambiguous: it can be understood as a form of empirical mode of presentation or as a

transcendental mode of presentation. In the former case, content is fairly unproblematic

but, crucially, it is not mental. In the latter case, content is far more problematic: it is

ineffable or inexpressible, and not the sort of thing of which the subject can be aware. In

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either of its forms, I shall argue, it is not the sort of thing that could play the role content

is supposed to play in the apparatus of mental representations.

3. The No Content Thesis (NCT)

The argument against the idea of mental content, as I shall develop it, begins with Sartre,

and then is then taken up by Wittgenstein. It is Wittgenstein who does the heavy lifting.

As will become clear, when Sartre denies that consciousness has what he calls ‘content’,

this is a somewhat different sense of content from the one employed in the claim that

mental representations have content. Nevertheless, there are important parallels between

Sartre’s position and the one I want to defend, and I shall exploit these in the argument I

shall develop.

There are two conjoined sentences to be found in section III of the Introduction to

Being and Nothingness. The first is mundane. The second is rather startling. But even

more startling is that Sartre seems to take the second to be an obvious implication of the

first:

All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This

means that there is no consciousness that is not a positing of a transcendent

object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content’.

The first, mundane, claim is that all consciousness is intentional. The claim is, of course,

not utterly mundane: doubted by some, it nevertheless provides the starting point for

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philosophy in the Brentanian – hence phenomenological – tradition, and is also widely

accepted outside that tradition. Let us call this the Intentionality Thesis (IT). For our

purposes, it does not matter whether IT is true of all mental states. If there are mental

states that are not intentional, then they do not have intentional content, and so fall

outside the concerns of this paper. The second claim is far less mundane. Consciousness

has no ‘content’. Let us call this the No Content Thesis (NCT). This claim seems prima

facie implausible. If consciousness has no content then, it seems, there is nothing in it. If

this is correct, where, one might think, are we to locate the familiar candidates for

denizens of consciousness: thoughts, feelings, images, emotions, and so on? If they are

not in consciousness, then where, exactly, are they? However, what is really striking

about this short passage is that Sartre seems to regard NCT as a straightforward

implication of IT. Indeed, so obvious does he think is this entailment, he seems to feel

little need to support it with any (non question-begging) argument. I shall argue that a

supporting argument can be supplied. But it is an argument associated with Wittgenstein

rather than Sartre. First, however, let us render the idea underlying NCT a little more

precise. As I interpret Sartre, NCT should be understood as a thesis that applies to objects

of consciousness: items of which a subject is aware. No object of consciousness can be

part of consciousness. That is:

(NCT) Necessarily, any object of consciousness is outside consciousness.

Sartre uses the term ‘transcendent’ to refer to items that are outside consciousness. Thus,

according to NCT, necessarily, any object of consciousness is a transcendent thing.

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Acts of consciousness include things such as seeing (and perceiving more

generally), thinking, remembering, desiring, imagining, emoting, anticipating, dreading,

and so on. An object of consciousness is an item of which I am aware when I engage in

an act of consciousness. Suppose I am thinking about an object: a shiny, red tomato that

sits on the table in front of me. On the one hand there is the object of my thought: the

tomato. This is a transcendent object. But I am also thinking about the tomato in a certain

way, as falling under a given mode of presentation: as being red and shiny. This

empirical mode of presentation can also be an object of consciousness – if, for example, I

am thinking that this tomato is red and shiny. Both of these things – the object and its

mode of presentation – are, if Sartre is correct, transcendent items: things that exist of

outside my consciousness. Some may doubt the veracity of this claim, perhaps due to

certain beliefs about the nature of secondary qualities. But the claim is not particularly

outlandish. Suppose, however, that I now close my eyes and mentally picture the tomato.

I attend to the mental image I have formed. This image is now an object of my

consciousness – an object of the act of mentally imaging – and if NCT is true, is therefore

also a transcendent object, something that lies outside my consciousness. This claim is

somewhat more outlandish.

The first scenario involved an act of thinking that took the tomato (or an empirical

mode of presentation of the tomato) as an object. The second involved an act of

visualization that, supposedly, took the mental image of the tomato as its object. (I think

this is a bad way of thinking about what is going on when I visualize the tomato, and

there are well known difficulties with it. I use it only for expository purposes). NCT is

perfectly compatible with both the act of thinking and the act of visualization being parts

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of my consciousness. However, if I turn my attention from the tomato to my thinking

about it, and succeed in making the act of thinking into an object of thought, then,

according to NCT, the erstwhile act of thinking now becomes a transcendent object.

Likewise, if I attend not to the mental image of the tomato but to my imaging of it, and

succeed in turning the act of imaging into an object of my awareness – if we assume this

were possible – it too would become a transcendent object. According to NCT, all objects

of consciousness are transcendent, and this is true even when those objects were formerly

conscious acts or other seemingly mental items.

NCT is, therefore, compatible with the claim that consciousness is populated with

conscious acts: of thinking, imagining, remembering, perceiving, and so on. This may

make NCT seem less remarkable than it originally appeared. I think this is, in fact, not

the case: according to Sartre, such acts are ‘empty’. One might think of NCT as

supplying a challenge: try to point to the contents of consciousness. As you say ‘Here is

one!’ – mentally pointing to a thought, experience, feeling or sensation, for example –

this becomes an object of your consciousness and so is, if NCT is correct, precisely not a

part of your consciousness. To identify the contents of consciousness, we have to make

them into objects of consciousness, and therefore, if Sartre is correct, this makes them

transcendent objects – objects that exist outside consciousness. Conversely, if

consciousness exists only as acts of consciousness, then it is a pure directedness towards

the world, and nothing more:

All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an

object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing. All that there is of intention in

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my actual consciousness is directed toward the outside, toward the table; all my

judgments or practical activities, all my present inclinations transcend themselves:

they aim at the table and are absorbed in it (1943: 11)

If we think of the world as a collection of actual or potential objects of consciousness,

then, as Sartre puts it, the entire world is outside consciousness (1943: 17).

Consciousness is, in this sense, empty.

4. Supporting NCT: From Sartre to Wittgenstein

Sartre supplies very little in the way of positive, non-question-begging, argument in favor

of NCT, seeming to regard it as an obvious implication of IT. If we are to do justice to

the obvious nature of this implication, then the following argument suggests itself:

1. Consciousness is intentional (IT).

2. No object of consciousness can be intentional.

3. Therefore, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness (NCT).

This argument, however, is clearly not sound: premise 2 is false. We can, and often do,

use symbols to stand in, or go proxy, for other things. To avoid this problem, we need

observe the distinction between derived and non-derived – or original – intentionality.

Derived intentionality is, roughly, intentionality that derives either from the minds or

from the social conventions of intentional agents. Non-derived, or original, intentionality

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is intentionality that does not so derive. The Brentanian thesis, IT, is that consciousness is

intentional in an original, or non-derived, sense. Therefore, we should amend the

argument to the following:

1* Consciousness is intentional in an original sense

2* No object of consciousness can be intentional in an original sense

3* Therefore, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness.

The argument is valid. Premise 1* is IT – which, for the purposes of this paper, I shall

assume is true. Conclusion 3* is NCT, which is where we need to get to. It remains to

defend premise 2*.

When the object of consciousness is a non-mental one, it is pretty clear that

premise 2* is on solid ground. Rocks, clouds, trees, even bodies do not possess original

intentionality. There are, of course, obvious circumstances in which we use one object of

consciousness to stand in for another. To take the most obvious example, words are used

to stand in for objects. But this intentionality is derived. The hard work in defending

premise 2* begins when the object is a mental one. Consider, for example, something

that, prima facie, seems a very good candidate for object of consciousness with original

intentionality: a mental image. Suppose I stare at a dog. Then I close my eyes and picture

it. I form a mental image of the dog. I am aware of this image. Therefore, it is an object

of my consciousness. It is also about the dog. Therefore it certainly seems to have an

original intentional status.

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However, we can use an argument, generally associated with Wittgenstein rather

than Sartre, to show why this is not, in fact, the case. The image is, logically, just a

symbol. In itself, it can mean many things, perhaps anything. It might mean – stand in

for, be about – this particular dog or about dogs in general. It might mean ‘furry thing’,

‘thing with four legs’, ‘thing with tail’, ‘thing with cold nose’, ‘mammal’, and so on. In

itself, the image can mean many things. Therefore, it is natural to suppose, to have

specific meaning – to be about one thing rather than other things – it must be interpreted.

This is, of course, a supposition that Wittgenstein famously rejected.

This absence of original meaning or intentionality might be thought peculiar to

the choice of an image as object of consciousness. But the genius of Wittgenstein was to

show that essentially the same argument is applicable to any object of consciousness.

Anything that ‘comes before the mind’ has the logical status of a symbol, and as such is

not sufficient for meaning something by a sign. We are tempted to suppose, for example,

that an item of which we are aware can be given meaning by way of a set of rules that

specifies how that item is to be applied. But these rules are things that the sign-user must

understand. And then the question arises of the form this understanding takes. If we think

of these rules as things of which the subject is aware, then the suggestion falls victim to

Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox: any course of action can be said to be in accord

with a rule. So, there can be neither accord nor conflict here. This paradox is a graphic

way of making what is ultimately a fairly simple point: as items of which the sign-user is

aware, the rules that determine the application of a sign are themselves symbols and, as

such, stand in need of their meaning being fixed. Anything that comes before one’s mind

has the logical status of a symbol: in itself it means nothing. Interpretation, we naively

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suppose, might supply a meaning. But what could supply the interpretation? Rules for the

application of the symbol cannot supply it, for they are simply further symbols whose

meaning needs to be fixed.

Wittgenstein, therefore, rejected the interpretational conception of meaning: ‘any

interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any

support.’ (1953, §198) This is Wittgenstein’s negative conclusion. His positive proposal

was this: ‘What this shows is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an

interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going

against it” in actual cases.’ (1953, §201) In other words: ‘And hence also 'obeying a rule'

is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not

possible to obey a rule 'privately': otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be

the same thing as obeying it.’ (1953, §201) I am not concerned with the Wittgenstein’s

positive proposal.vi The key for the purposes of this paper is the negative conclusion.

Wittgenstein’s arguments for this negative conclusion are well known, and my

goal is neither to defend them nor further rehearse them here. For the purposes of this

paper, what is important is the central insight these arguments are used to defend: any

object of consciousness – whether an image, icon, sign, rule, and so on – has the logical

status of a symbol. Therefore, it does not possess original intentionality. This is not, of

course, to deny that thoughts, beliefs, mental images possess original intentionality. If we

accept the act/object apparatus, then we can allow that when conceived of as acts of

consciousness directed towards the world, then clearly they possess all the original

intentionality one could reasonably require. Indeed, more than merely possess

intentionality, they are specific instances of intentional directedness. Rather, it is to claim

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that when they are conceived of as objects of consciousness they do not have original

intentionality. When conceived of in this way they are items that ‘come before the mind’

and, in themselves, can mean nothing at all. A thought, belief, image, etc. can be

something with which I am aware, or something of which I am aware. Typically, it

functions in the first way: I am aware of the world in virtue of having thoughts, beliefs,

images, and so on about it. However, I can also become aware of these thoughts, beliefs,

and images. When I do so, if Wittgenstein is correct, they no longer have any original

intentionality or non-derived meaning. And if original intentionality is the essence of the

mental, as the Brentanian tradition claims, as objects of consciousness these items have

ceased to be mental. They are transcendent items – things of the world rather than the

mind. If this is correct, then Sartre’s unexplained inference from IT to NCT turns out to

have solid credentials – and these credentials are largely Wittgensteinian.

5. A Totality of Facts Not Things

When Sartre talked of the ‘content’ of consciousness, he did not have in mind what we do

when we now talk of mental content. The ‘content’ of consciousness, for Sartre,

comprises items such as thoughts, beliefs, images, and emotions: states that we typically

think of as being in consciousness, or as forming part of what consciousness is. Mental

content, in the sense now employed is, of course, not a mental state, but something that

(i) certain mental states possess, and that (ii) type-individuates them. Therefore, it is not

possible to make any direct inference from Sartre’s claim that consciousness has no

content to the claim that there is no such thing as mental content. The argument I am now

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going to develop does not function in this way at all. Rather, I shall argue that a parallel

argument to that of Sartre/Wittgenstein one can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the case

of mental content. At the core of this argument is the ambiguity I identified in the concept

of a mode of presentation.

I have argued that we are obliged to distinguish between empirical modes of

presentation (or aspects) and their transcendental counterparts. The former are objects of

thought (or reference more generally), the latter are what fix or determine objects of

thought. In the empirical sense, a mode of presentation is what is now generally

understood as content. When I think that the tomato is red and shiny, the object of my

thought is the tomato, and the content of my thought is that this tomato is red and shiny.vii

As such, any ambiguity in the concept of a mode of presentation is, similarly, an

ambiguity in the notion of content. Content can be understood as something of which I

am aware when I think, believe or am the subject of other content-bearing states. This is

the empirical conception of content. Or, content can be conceived of as that which

determines what I am aware of when I think, believe or am the subject of other content-

bearing states. Content, that is, admits of both an empirical and a transcendental

interpretation.

The content of mental states can be conceived of as something of which I am

aware, or as something in virtue of which I am aware. I shall argue that in the former case

– and this is the way content is typically conceived in the Anglophone tradition – I shall

argue that content is not, with suitable qualifications to be inserted shortly, mental. In the

latter case, content is something of which the subject is not aware and which that subject

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cannot express. Either conclusion, I shall argue, renders dubious the apparatus of mental

representations, at least on one very common way of understanding this apparatus.

First, let us examine this common way of understanding the idea of a mental

representation. There are three claims that, I think, collectively define the commitments

of someone who is inclined to believe in mental content, and who tries to explain the

concept of a mental representation in terms of such content. These claims are widely

accepted and have gone largely unquestioned. First:

(1) Some mental states have content.

It is an open question whether all mental states have content, but many do. The content in

question is semantic content: content that is assessable as accurate or inaccurate, correct

or incorrect. Content-bearing mental states can be attributed to subjects using a that-

clause: and the sentence that follows the ‘that’ expresses the content of the mental state.

This content, attributable to a subject by way of the attribution of a mental state, using a

that-clause is known as mental content. According to (1), therefore, at least some, and

presumably many, mental states have specifically mental content. It is not uncommon to

hold that mental content is basic, and all other content (for example, the content of words

and sentences) is derivative upon mental content. Second:

(2) A subject is aware of the content or his or her mental states.

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Indeed, the subject has a privileged access to the content of her mental states that she

does not have to the contents of the world. Even if she cannot know whether her thoughts

are true, she can, and typically does, know what she is thinking. Even those persuaded by

semantic externalist considerations have generally been at pains to safeguard the claim

that a subject has an epistemic authority over the contents of her mental states that she

does not have over the contents of the world. Finally:

(3) The intentionality of mental states is grounded in their content.

This story is usually glossed as follows. A mental state, M, possesses a certain content

that p. In virtue of its content, the mental state makes a normative claim on the world. If

the state is assertoric, for example, the world should be p. If it is imperative, the world

should be made p, and so on. On one version, of this idea, the content of an assertoric

state might be specifiable in the form of a description, and the object of the state is

whatever satisfies this description. It is in virtue of its content that a mental state can

reach out and grasp its object.

I shall argue that there is nothing that satisfies all three conditions, and any

conception of mental representation that requires this account of content should,

therefore, be rejected. Claim (2) is pivotal. Suppose I am thinking that the cat is on the

mat. What would it be for me to be aware of the content of this thought? I clearly am

aware of this content, but what form does this awareness take and what, precisely, is it

awareness of? If we want to think of this content as specifically mental content, then I

must be aware of a mental item of some sort – an item that comes before my mind when I

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consciously think this thought. But, if Wittgenstein is correct, the problems with this idea

are clear. Whatever ‘comes before the mind’ is logically just as symbol and, as such,

stands in need of its meaning being fixed. Suppose my awareness of the content of my

thought consisted in the quasi-visual apprehension of a sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’.

This sentence can, in itself, mean anything: in itself it is just squiggles before the mind

just as, in its external form, it is squiggles on paper. To have meaning it must be

interpreted. Perhaps we might add rules that specify how this sentence is to be applied?

But this simply raises the question of my understanding of these rules. If these are items

of which I am aware, then they too are merely symbols, and the question of their meaning

must be resolved.

Perhaps the sentence model is psychologically unrealistic – although many people

do claim to think in sentences, and they understand this to be a claim about the

phenomenology of their experience of thinking rather than a claim about the underlying

architecture of thought. But it does not matter what item we choose – sentence, image,

icon, rule – the same point applies: that which ‘comes before the mind’ is, logically, just

a symbol. To have meaning it must be interpreted, and nothing that comes before the

mind can supply this interpretation.

Of course, when I think that the cat is on the mat, I am aware of content. But this

content is not mental but worldly. As a first approximation, we might say that I am aware

of the state-of-affairs that the cat is on the mat. If my thought is true, this state-of-affairs

is identical with a fact: a fact is a state-of-affairs that obtains. There is nothing here that is

mental. We are dealing with straightforwardly worldly items. If my thought is true, the

content of my thought is identical with a content of the world. I can stand in different

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relationships to this worldly content. If I believe that the cat is on the mat, I entertain this

content credulously. If I desire that the cat be on the mat, I entertain this content

desirously. I can entertain one and the same content credulously, desirously, hopefully,

expectantly, happily, sadly, cheerfully, disdainfully, indifferently, and so on. But what in

each case I entertain is not a mental item but a worldly state-of-affairs. To be the subject

of a mental state is not to stand in some relation to a specifically mental content. Rather,

it is to stand in a specifically mental relationship to a content that is not, essentially,

mental.viii Therefore, condition (1) fails.

Of course, there are, relatively unusual, circumstances, in which the content of my

thoughts can be regarded as mental: this is when I am thinking about my own or someone

else’s mental states. But this is quite different from the traditional conception of mental

content. Here the mentality of the content attaches to the object of awareness and is not

what, as condition (3) claims, allows my mental state to make a normative claim on the

world. So, here, the required notion of content fails to satisfy condition (3).

The position, therefore, appears to be the following: If we assume, as condition

(2) requires, that content is something of which an individual is aware when they are the

subject of content-bearing states, then this content is not mental, and so condition (1)

must be rejected. In the circumstance in which the subject is thinking about a specifically

mental item, we can describe the content as ‘mental’, but it is not mental content of the

sort that could satisfy condition (3). Either way, it is not possible to satisfy all the three

conditions. At the root of this failure is that conditions (1) and (2) entail that the

conception of content we are working with is an empirical one: content is explicitly (as in

condition (2) or implicitly (as in condition (1)) conceived of as something of which the

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subject is or can be aware. As such, this content is not mental – it is ‘transcendent’ as

Sartre would put it.ix The conception of content presupposed in (3) is, on the other hand, a

transcendental one, and simply cannot be made to mesh with the conception of content

implicated in the first two conditions.

6. What is (and What is Not) the Case: Residual Issues

In the opening lines of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein once famously remarked: ‘The world

is everything that is the case. It is a totality of facts not things.’ The argument developed

in this paper is, in effect, an elaboration of this idea. There is no mental content, in the

sense of something that satisfies conditions (1)-(3). But there is plenty of content: indeed,

the world is the totality of it. The content of mental states – at least when this content is

understood empirically, as something of which a subject is aware – is identical with

worldly states-of-affairs. That is, empirical contents are identical with states-of-affairs,

and I am using the term ‘content’ and the expression ‘states-of-affairs’ interchangeably.

The wisdom of this usage might justifiably be questioned. I can say everything

that my position requires me to say about empirical content without using the term

‘content’ at all. One might suspect that to the extent that it naturally leads to the idea of

mental content, talk of the ‘content’ of mental states is potentially dangerous. It would be

desirable if all talk of content were replaced by talk of state-of-affairs.x In this paper, I

simply note this worry, and move on to ones that trouble me a little more.

The first worry is that the identification with content, understood empirically, and

states-of-affairs, needs to be qualified. States-of-affairs are typically individuated

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coarsely, and this makes them unsuitable for taking on the role usually assigned to mental

contents. For example, the state-of-affairs that the cat is on the mat is generally taken to

be identical with the state-of-affairs that Felix is on the mat (if the cat in question is

indeed Felix). However, if I am unaware that this cat is Felix, I can think the cat is on the

mat without thinking that Felix is on the mat. In identifying contents with coarsely

individuated states-of-affairs, therefore, we lose the intensionality of mental ascriptions.

The required response, of course, is to deny that states-of-affairs must be coarsely

individuated (which accepting, of course, that they can be thus individuated). The role

formerly assigned to mental content is taken over by states-of-affairs finely individuated:

individuated in such a way as to register the difference between the cat being on the mat

and Felix being on the mat. One might favor a revised nomenclature – perhaps adopting

John McDowell’s ‘thinkables’ to denote these fine-grained states-of-affairs. However,

this nomenclature might bring with it the danger of assuming that one is dealing with

something mental (not McDowell’s intention of course). To avoid this, one might be

satisfied with merely distinguishing C-states-of-affairs (states-of-affairs coarsely

individuated) from F-states-of-affairs (states-of-affairs finely individuated). This issue is

entirely terminological.

There is, of course, a question of what, in the absence of mental content, converts

C-states-of-affairs into F-states-of-affairs. However, the picture of intentionality I have

defended does not eschew mental content in general, but only the empirical interpretation

of that content as an object of awareness – something of which a subject is aware when

they are in a given mental state. This leaves the transcendental conception of mental

content untouched. The transcendental content of my mental acts, the content with which

  26  

I am aware rather than of which I am aware, is that which effects the fine-grained

individuation of states-of-affairs. In essence, F-states-of-affairs are C-states-of-affairs

sliced and diced by the transcendental content of experience.

The second objection is a familiar one. Some states-of-affairs (whether F- or C-)

obtain, and some do not. There are sach-ver-halte but also tatsache, the sach-ver-halte

that obtain. The most compelling case for the introduction of the idea of mental content

has always turned on how we characterize thoughts (and other intentional states) about

non-obtaining states-of-affairs. If one denudes consciousness of content, in the manner of

Sartre, then the worry is that one is going to have to correspondingly bulk up the world in

order to accommodate this. If I think that the cat is on the mat and the cat is not, in fact

on the mat, then what am I thinking? Either I am thinking a specifically mental content,

or I am thinking a non-obtaining state-of-affairs. Abandoning the idea of mental content

(in the empirical sense) seems to require embracing the idea of non-obtaining states-of-

affairs.

A defense of this embrace, of course, lies far outside the scope of this paper.

However, enough people have defended this position for the general contours of the

defense to be quite familiar – although these can, of course, vary from one case to

another. A substitutional interpretation of the existential quantifier will, of course, do no

harm. A rejection of Kant’s claim that existed is not a predicate will probably be

required. Existence is, in fact, a property that some states-of-affairs have and others lack.

It may also require acceptance of the claim that this property is a logically complex one,

displaying different properties in different contexts.xi Many will, not unreasonably, be

  27  

reluctant to countenance non-obtaining states-of-affairs. But it is not only an available

position in logical space; it is one that has attracted numerous defenders.

7. Conclusion

A brief summary of what this paper has argued and what it has not might be useful. I

have not argued that thoughts and other mental states do not have content. I have not

even argued that they do not have mental content. Thoughts and other intentional states

have content of two sorts – empirical and transcendental. The empirical content of a

mental state is not mental content – in the sense delineated by conditions (1)-(3). The

empirical content of a mental state is identical with an F-state-of-affairs (whether

obtaining or not). The transcendental content of a mental state, on the other hand, is

mental content – at least, nothing I have said suggests that it is not. However, beyond

this, little can be said about transcendental content. Understood transcendentally, content

is that in virtue of which a mental state makes a normative claim on the world, and so is

about some specific state-of-affairs. But it is possible to say little more than this. In its

transcendental role, a subject can neither be aware of this content, nor can she express

what it is. Either of these would convert the content into empirical form, and once again

push it outside the mind. Transcendental content is the something-I-know-not-what –

indeed, the something-I-cannot-know-what – in virtue of my thoughts can make

normative claims on the world and so be about that world. It is possible to say nothing

more. And, as someone or other once remarked: ‘Of that whereof one cannot speak,

thereof one must remain silent’.xii

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References

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).

Dummett, Michael (1973) Frege’s Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth).

Harnish, Robert (2000) ‘Grasping modes of presentation: Frege versus Fodor and

Schweizer’, Acta Analytica 15: 19-46.

McGinn, Colin (2003) Logical Properties: Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity,

Truth (New York: Oxford University 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 (2010) The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied

Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1943), Being and Nothingness, (Paris: Gallimard), trans. Hazel Barnes,

New York: Philosophical Library, Inc. All page numbers refer to the 1992, Washington

Square edition, 1992.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921/2001) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus trans. D. Pears and B.

McGuinness (London: Routledge).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953) Philosophical Investigations ed., E. Anscombe, R. Rhees,

and G. von Wright, trans. E. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell).

                                                                                                               i  Rowlands  (2010)  ii  Indeed,  all  the  way  back  to  Rowlands  (1995)  iii  Nothing  turns  on  whether  I  am  correct  in  this  assessment,  of  course.  If  we  can  no  longer  dub  it  the  ‘standard  model’  we  can  always  dub  it  something  else  (‘the  model  formerly  known  as  the  “standard”  model’,  for  instance).  iv  Ned  Block,  in  conversation,  objected  to  my  use  of  the  term  ‘aware’  –  when  I  talk  of  being  ‘aware  of’  modes  of  presentation  or  ‘aware  with’  modes  of  presentation  on  the  grounds  it  commits  me  to  the  view,  which  he  rejects,  that  all  intentional  acts  are  conscious.  On  the  contrary,  I  am  not  committed  to  this.  This  is  because  I  am  not  trying  to  provide  an  analysis  of  intentionality  in  the  sense  of  supplying  necessary  (or  sufficient)  conditions  of  it.  Rather,  I  am  providing  a  picture  of  what  intentional  directedness  looks  like  in  certain  familiar  cases  –  e.g.  conscious  visual  perception  and  conscious  thought.  For  the  record,  I  am  quite  happy  with  the  idea  of  non-­‐conscious  intentional  states,  and  in  NSM  I  use  the  term  ‘revelation’  or  ‘disclosure’,  which  is  a  more  general  category  that  subsumes  both  conscious  and  non-­‐conscious  forms  of  awareness.  I  am  grateful  to  Block  for  affording  me  the  opportunity  of  making  this  clarification.  v  There  are,  I  think,  two  things  wrong  with  the  identification  of  Otto’s  belief  with  a  sentence.  First,  as  others  have  also  pointed  out,  the  sentences  do  not  possess  original  intentionality.  Second,  I  have  argued  that  the  sentence-­‐token  is  simply  the  wrong  sort  of  token  to  be  identical  with  a  belief-­‐token  (see  Rowlands  2010,  pp.  64-­‐7).  vi  Although,  I  have  argued  elsewhere  (Rowlands  2006,  pp.  54-­‐6)  that  it  is  inadequate.  vii  The  object  of  my  thought  –  the  tomato  –  is  by  definition  an  empirical  item,  in  the  sense  deployed  in  this  paper  (i.e.  the  sense  that  opposes  this  idea  to  that  of  the  transcendental).  The  content  of  my  thought  that  the  tomato  is  red  and  shiny  can  be  understood  both  empirically  and  transcendentally.    

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         viii  And  to  stand  in  a  ‘specifically  mental  relationship’  is,  of  course,  to  be  the  subject  of  a  state  that  possesses  a  transcendental  mode  of  presentation  –  that  is,  a  state  that  possesses  content  in  the  transcendental  sense.  ix  To  be  transcendent  is,  of  course,  very  different  from  transcendental.  An  item  is  transcendent  if  and  only  if  it  is  outside  consciousness.  An  item  is  transcendental  if  and  only  if  it  is  a  determinant  of  reference  –  i.e.  that  in  virtue  of  which  a  state  can  make  a  normative  claim  on  the  world.  x  My  thanks  to  Dan  Hutto  for  this  point.  xi  Colin  McGinn  (2003),  for  example,  adopts  the  substitional  interpretation  of  the  quantifier,  and  the  claim  that  existence  is  a  property,  but  rejects  the  idea  that  this  property  is  a  logically  complex  one.  I  agree  with  him  on  the  first  two  points,  but  suspect  he  that  his  latter  rejection  is  mistaken.    xii  The  paper  was  first  given  at  the  2012  Annual  Meeting  of  the  British  Wittgenstein  Society,  hosted  by  the  University  of  Hertfordshire,  July  7th-­‐9th.  I  am  grateful  to  Daniele  Moyal-­‐Sharrock,  Dan  Hutto  and  the  Society  for  inviting  me  to  speak  there.  I  am  grateful  also  to  the  member  of  the  audience,  identity  unknown  (to  me  at  least)  who,  perhaps  unaware  that  non-­‐obtaining  states-­‐of-­‐affairs  have  a  track  record  rather  more  distinguished  than  I,  let  out  what  I  can  only  describe  as  an  incredulous  hiss  when  I  mentioned  that  I  was  committed  to  them.  Although  I  should,  perhaps,  point  out  that  an  incredulous  hiss  is  no  more  an  argument  than  an  incredulous  stare.