How Should We Understand the Relation between Intentionality and Phenomenal Consciousness?

Abstract

Intentionality and phenomenal consciousness are the two traditional defining characteristics of the mental. Paradigmatically mental states have both, and both serve to anchor our basic concept of what it is for to be mental. When I have a visual experience of my office laid out before me, my mental state is clearly about or directed at in the intentional sense. My experience is an experience of my office. My experience also has a subjective phenomenal aspect; in Thomas Nagel's evocative phrase, there is something that it is like to have such a experience1. From my first person perspective as the one having or undergoing the experience, my office is present to me in a way that involves a rich array of phenomenal qualities. Thus anyone interested in offering a naturalistic account of mind, that is an account that explains how the mind fits into the natural world without any recourse to magical or unexplained processes, must be prepared to offer both a naturalist theory of intentionality and also one of phenomenal consciousness. However, among analytic philosophers there has been a somewhat schizoid attitude about the status and prospects of the two projects. Many philosophers have treated the two as independent problems and taken a optimistic attitude with regard to naturalizing intentionality while remaining profoundly pessimistic (or at best agnostic) about doing the same for phenomenal consciousness. There has been a great deal of philosophical activity directed at developing naturalistic theories of intentional content with promising results-including teleological theories2, functional role theories3, and causal theories4. At the same time, the problem of phenomenal consciousness has remained largely intractable and has been regarded by some as not susceptible to naturalistic explanation. Although this dual attitude is widespread, it is far from clear that it defines a viably consistent position. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has observed it is questionable that one can divide the project of naturalizing the mind into two independent projects dealing with intentionality and phenomenal consciousness in isolation from each other5. Given the fact that some mental states are conscious, it seems unlikely that we could account for their intentional properties without taking their phenomenal features into account. It does not seems that I could account for the content of my present visual experience as being of my office without factoring