La educación como dinamizadora de la integración

4.a. First and Second-Order Essence

The Cartesian conception of the essence of consciousness that we have been looking at is that the essence of consciousness is its appearance to a subject. So, to take some concrete examples, the essence of pain is how pain appears to a subject, the essence of a particular pain is how that pain appears to its subject, and the essence of an occurrent thought is how that thought appears to its subject.

For Descartes, this essence is the essence of the mental, simpliciter. However, if a physicalist were to take this view without qualification, then it would seem to amount to the adoption of an opaque physicalism, as discussed in Chapter 2. This is because, as we said before, you can grasp physical concepts without grasping anything about appearance: you can just think about a brain state as a brain state. And so if physical essences are appearances, then our physical concepts must be radically inadequate to those essences.

This is one sort of inflationist position, but if we are to analyse inflationist and deflationist positions generally as resulting from a commitment to appearance as essential to, or the essence of, consciousness, then there must be some other way of combining this kind of essentialist presupposition with physicalism. One way is to eliminate, the thought being that since appearance would indeed be the essence of consciousness if it existed, then since physicalism is true, consciousness does not exist.

But the mainstream physicalist view, and the only option which presents any foreseeable hope for closing the explanatory gap, as we saw in Chapter 2, is to give a functional account of the mind. We said there that functionalism is in the sole position of being able to combine essentiahst intuitions about the mind with physicalism within the framework of scientific essentialism, by treating appearances as functionally defined macroproperties in need of explanation in terms of underlying structural properties. This means treating appearance as a second-order essence.^®

First-order essences are intrinsic properties, which for the scientific essentialist are microphysical properties. A physicalist who takes appearance as only a candidate to be a first-order essence, either accepts opaque physicalism, or uses this as a premise for elimination. Second-order essences, on the other hand, are extrinsic or relational properties, realised by first-order essences. Examples include macrophysical properties like liquidity, and artefact kind essences, like being a carburettor.

We can now see how functionalism can combine essentialist intuitions about the mind with the essentialist intuitions behind physicalism.*’ The former are

accommodated by the idea that appearance is a second-order essence: the essence of conscious phenomena as kinds. The latter are accommodated by the idea that first- order essences are physical, and since second-order essences are realised by first-order essences, then conscious properties must be realised by physical properties.

This also serves to further explain why, in Section 2.d., we were prepared to count functional macroproperties as essential to certain physical states, but were wont to count them as part of the essence of those states. The reason is that such a

This terminology is employed by Michael Tye; it is introduced at pp. 47-8 o f his (1995) Ten

Problems o f Consciousness.

This is not to say that physicalism is necessarily committed to essentialism, as we have already noted at Section 2.e.

macroproperty is not a constituent part of the first-order essence which realises it: it is not an intrinsic, essential property, but rather a functional, second-order essence. But nevertheless, given the instantiation of certain microphysical properties, certain functional properties are necessarily realised, and so functional properties can be essential properties of states that realise them: certain physical states (brain states for instance) cannot exist as the states that they are without realising certain functional properties.

An advantage of this way of looking at things is that it allows us to think of appearance as the essence of a conscious state, rather than just an essential property. This seems to be the intuition we have: all a pain needs in order to be a pain is that it appear to be a pain. Now this intuition (from V#2) is mitigated by physicalist intuitions (from V #l): if pain were an essence, then a disembodied pain is possible, and this does not accord with the physicalist world-view. But this is not so if pain is a second-order

essence, for then we can accommodate physicalist intuitions by saying that such an essence requires a physical réaliser.

Before moving on, we should note that most physicalists would deny that our conceptions of appearances are adequate to the second-order essences they denote. It is generally thought more plausible to count concepts of appearance as imprecise, folk conceptions of second-order essences, to be replaced by or reduced to more

theoretical second-order essences. The replacement or reduction issue is dealt with variously. Functionalists of the empirical theory or commonsensical platitudes variety, may view the situation as one of replacement because they think we are unable to elucidate fully the functional essence of mental states. In general, the empirical theorists gesture towards a fully formed account of brain functioning, and the

common-sense theorists appeal to our implicit knowledge o f the various

interconnections between mental states. This suggests that whatever the second-order essences of mental states are, they are not something captured by imprecise concepts such as concepts of appearance.

Others interpret the situation as one of reduction. The idea here is that

appearance is indeed the essence of conscious states: that property without which they could not exist as the states they are. But the property of being an appearance is discovered to be identical to a certain functional property, and since functional

properties are second-order essences, not intrinsic properties, then appearance must be a second-order essence. This is reduction rather than replacement if our mental

concepts of appearance are used to fix reference to functional properties, rather than giving or defining second-order essences in and of themselves.

4.b. Is the Mental Unified? A Taxonomv

Many philosophers would count the idea of appearance as the essence of mind too coarse grained, thinking that it glosses over the fundamental intentional /

phenomenal distinction between types of mental state. A common view would be that appearance may be an appropriate essence for conscious phenomenal states, or simply for qualia, but not for other mental states. So it has been argued that the mind is not unified, or else that it is unified by some other property. Such views challenge the Cartesian essence. Here are the principal options:

(1) All mental states are “thoughts”, in Descartes’ broad sense. This view categorises phenomenal and intentional phenomena as mental, in virtue of their being conscious states, and excludes them if they are not.

(2) The mental is unified by consciousness. This view is very close to (1), except that it acknowledges the intuitive distinction between phenomenal and intentional states, and draws them together by imposing the requirement that if an intentional state or

phenomenal state is to be counted mental, it must be conscious, or else be the sort o f state that could become conscious. This final clause lets in the unconscious states which (1) excluded.

(3) The mental is unified by intentionality. This view acknowledges the intuitive distinction between phenomenal and intentional states, but draws them together by holding that all phenomenal states are ipso fa cto intentional states. W hether a mental state is conscious, on this view, is a matter of what type of intentional state it is.

(4) The mental is not a unified notion. Some mental states have phenomenal essences, and some have intentional essences.

(1) is Descartes’ view. (2) is Searle’s updated Cartesian view, which incorporates non-occurrent intentional states, unconscious states and the like, by means of their meeting the conditions of his “Connection Principle” .*^ (3) is Intentionalism. (4) encompasses views defended by McGinn, Chalmers, and Rorty,

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amongst others. (3) and (4) jeopardise the contention that appearance is the essence of consciousness. If (3) were right, intentionality could be employed to demarcate all mental states, including conscious ones, and if this could be done without drawing on the idea of appearance, then physicalism would not necessarily have to provide an account of appearance. And if (4) were right, then depending on the degree of disunity admitted, there might be no distinctively mental essences for physicalism to account for at all, or at least all the states we classify as conscious might not have appearance as their essence.

4.C. Weak Intentionalism

Intentionalism, also known as representationalism, is, in its weakest form, the view that all mental states are intentional. Intentionality is claimed to be a necessary property of any mental state. This is the view we shall call weak intentionalism.*^ A motivation for this view is to unify the mental, by finding something in common between an apparently mixed bag of conscious, unconscious, intentional and phenomenal types of state.

The obvious objection which the intentionalist has to overcome is that though some phenomenal states are clearly also intentional, it does not look as though they all are. For instance, an occurrent desire has both intentional and phenomenal properties, since being in such a state involves a feeling, and the state is directed upon something, namely the object of the desire. Or another example is enthusiasm, which is generally about something or another, as well as feeling a certain way. Sensations can also be

This terminology derives from the distinction between a “stronger” and a “weaker” thesis of intentionalism, in Crane (1998) “Intentionality as the Mark o f the Mental”.

like this, for instance a bodily sensation of heat, which feels a certain way, whilst having heat itself, molecular motion, as its intentional object. But when it comes to the so-called “intransitive sensations”, the paradigm of which is pain, it looks as though intentionality is entirely absent. We cannot distinguish between pain and the sensation of pain, as we can between heat and the sensation of heat, for the familiar reason that there is no appearance / reality distinction to be made here. So the intentionalist must show that contrary to expectations, there really is such a distinction: the “intransitive” sensations must turn out to be transitive after all.

Armstrong’s way of doing this was to construe the apparently intransitive sensations as a type of perceiving.*"^ He analyses the pain report “I have a pain in my hand” as equivalent in meaning to “It feels to me that a certain sort of disturbance is occurring in my hand, a perception that evokes in me the peremptory desire that the perception should cease.”*^ This account yields both transitivity, and an appearance / reality distinction, just as we have in the case of the sensation of heat, and heat itself. With pain, its feeling as if there is a disturbance in the hand is the appearance, while the disturbance in the hand, if indeed there is one, is the reality.*^ O f course, there may be no correspondent reality, for this may be a phantom or a sciatic pain, and this is a consequence that bodes well for the intentionalist, since a traditional sign of an

See his (1968) A M aterialist Theory o f the Mind, chapter 14, and the parallel discussion in his

(1962) Bodily Sensations.

Armstrong (1968) A M aterialist Theory o f the Mind, p. 314.

Brentano made much the same move to intentionalise pain. He notes, in (1973) Psychology From

an Empirical Standpoint, p. 84, that “we do not say that we sense this or that phenomenon in the foot with pain; we say that we feel pain in the foot”. This conflation of the sensation with the

“phenomenon”, in Brentano's sense, is just as confused as if we were to conflate a harmonious chord with the pleasure it typically elicits.

intentional state is that the intentional object is not guaranteed to exist.*^ As Descartes would have agreed, feeling pain is no guarantee of bodily damage.

It is important to note where exactly this appearance / reality distinction lies. Though being in pain is now taken as an intentional state, Armstrong still agrees that there is “no distinction between felt pain and real pain”.^^ In other words, there is still no appearance / reality distinction to be made for the sensation itself. It is just that the sensation of pain turns out to refer beyond itself, just as the sensation of heat does.

What difference would it make to our position that appearance is the essence of consciousness, if weak intentionalism could be established? It could mean that

intentionality would comprise at least a part of the essence of any conscious state. This in turn would mean either accommodating the fact within a developed conception of appearance, or if this could not be done because of some incompatibility arising, then it might mean abandoning appearance as the essence of consciousness.

Reflecting upon how an intentionalist such as Armstrong would like to understand such an apparently paradigmatic intrinsic state as pain as an intentional state, it becomes plain that no incompatibility will arise, and that we can take the former option mentioned above, of accommodating intentionality within a conception of appearance. For counting pain as an intentional state does not involve denying that pain is nothing more than what appears to a subject. All it does involve is affirming that what appears to the subject purports to be revelatory about some state of affairs.

Admittedly, physicalists such as Armstrong will then go on to use their intentionalist analyses to affect a reduction of the mental state to some underlying

To this effect, Brentano spoke of intentionality as “quasi-relational” ; an intentional state only

purports to take an object. See the appendix to Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.

reality; this “strong” intentionalist tactic will be discussed next. However, the weak intentionalist thesis that all mental states are intentional is entirely compatible with appearance being the essence of the mental. It might turn out that intentional

appearances can be reduced to physical states, but that need not affect an account of what mental states essentially are, qua mental, so long as we make the first-order / second-order essence distinction.

In fact, there is more than compatibility here. Rather, the Cartesian conception of appearance actually presupposes weak intentionalism. The framework which Descartes sets up in the Meditations is an essentially relational conception of

experience; the meditator reflects upon the world, and seeks to expound his relation to it. Implicit in this picture is what might be called the state-specific subject / object distinction. This distinction parallels such natural linguistic distinctions as those between seer and seen, between knower and known, between experiencer and

experienced, and between believer and what is believed. What is common to each case is that subject and object are distinguished as a function of intentionality. The perceiver or thinker is classified as a subject in virtue of having mental states which are

intentionally directed upon external phenomena. And that which is thought about or perceived is classified as an intentional object in virtue of having a perception or thought directed upon it. Consequently, whether an item is a subject or an object in the state-specific sense, is determined by its position within an intentional state. The reflecting meditator takes the subject position within all of his reflections.^^

There is another commonly used metaphysical subject / object distinction, which derives from the

state-specific one. This is the distinction between that which is capable of taking the subject position

o f an intentional state, and that which is not. According to this distinction, people are subjects, and tables and chairs are objects, though people, tables and chairs can all be state-specific objects. Descartes notoriously included animals with tables and chairs, on this distinction.

Once this relational conception of experience is in place, it is easy to see why appearance should presuppose intentionality. The idea is just that for any appearance, there must be something which appears, and a subject that it appears to. Appearance is of something, to someone. The whole idea of an appearance / reality distinction, of immediate “givens”, of the world as a phenomenon for a subject: this is all part and parcel of a relational conception of experience, which has intentionality at its core. And once at least some mental states are conceived in line with the state-specific subject / object distinction, then any exceptions begin to look unstable. For if a feeling is not given to the subject as an intentional object, or is not itself an awareness of an

intentional object, or a property of such an awareness, then we are owed some account of how the subject comes to know of its presence. Even if sensations are qualia, the subject must be related to those qualia in some way: clearly a subject cannot feel a quale if it is entirely unrelated to it.

Apparent counterexamples to weak intentionalism, sensations and emotions, for which it is not obvious what the intentional object is supposed to be, create their own problems if construed as non-intentional states. For if we suppose that a sensation is just a property of a subject, an instantiation of a non-intentional quale, then we still do not know why the subject should be conscious of that particular property. The subject has many properties, not all of which are conscious. The natural answer to why the subject should be conscious of this particular property is that it has appeared within the subject’s consciousness, on account of its being given, or actively attended to. But as soon as we accept that a sensation must be given or actively attended to, we can draw a subject / object distinction: between the person and the sensation which appears

within their consciousness, between the attender and the attended to. And then we have intentionality, defined as the relation between subject and object.

The defender of sensation as entirely non-intentional may reply that a quale ju st is a conscious property, a feeling, and so needs no connection to intentionality in order