intentionality and the theory of signs

International Phenomenological Society

Intentionality and the Theory of SignsAuthor(s): B. A. FarrellSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Jun., 1955), pp. 500-511Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2103910 .

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INTENTIONALITY AND THE THEORY OF SIGNS

In his paper with this title', Mr. Chisholm refers to the view, which he calls Brentano's thesis, that 'intentionality is peculiar to psychical phenomena' and 'affords us a criterion of the mental or psychical.' This odd sounding view suggests that we ask an odd sounding question. "Is it a necessary and sufficient condition for something, 0, to exhibit mental phenomena, or goings on, or functioning, that 0 should be aware of something or any thing?"

It can be argued that this is not a necessary condition. Thus, Jacobson claims2 that some people can be trained to achieve the condition of complete muscular relaxation, including the relaxation of the muscles of the eyes and mouth and tongue. Subjects report afterwards that when they are in this condition, they are not asleep and yet they are not thinking or imagining or recalling or noticing or being aware of anything. It is natural to talk about a Jacobson case by saying "the subject is conscious but not conscious of anything." Here then is a case of something, a human organism, exhibiting "mental phenomena" and yet apparently not being aware of anything. If we accept the reports of Jacobson's subjects as complete, we are likely to regard this as a good objection.

It can also be argued that it is not a sufficient condition that 0 should be aware of anything. Consider the work on "subliminal perception." For example, J. G. Miller has shown3 that people can discriminate E.S.P. cards when projected on to the back of a trick mirror at intensities below the limen of conscious recognition. It is quite natural to describe Miller's results by saying that "his subjects saw the cards on the mirror without being conscious of the fact that they did so;" or that "they noticed the cards without being conscious of doing so;" or that "they noticed the cards on the mirror without noticing that they were doing so." If we describe the results like this, we may then be inclined to say that Miller's subjects were aware of the cards 'out there' on the mirror, but were not conscious of the fact that they were aware of them. Here then are cases where people are aware of something or other, but where it is also correct to say that nothing mental appears to be going on. So for 0 to be aware of something is not a sufficient condition for 0 to exhibit "mental phenomena."

But, of course, it is easy to retort to this last objection. It can be argued that to say that a subject of Miller's was aware of the cards on the mirror

1 Philosophical Studies, Vol. III, No. 4, June 1952. 2 E. Jacobson, Progressive Relaxation. 3American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 52, 1939.

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INTENTIONALITY AND THE THEORY OF SIGNS 501

is quite misleading. He merely reacted to them, or discriminated them, without being aware of them. He only became aware of them when the intensity of illumination was sufficiently increased for him 'to realize that he was actually seeing a physical image on the mirror screen.' During the experiment the subject was not at all aware of the physical images on the screen. Consequently Miller's work fails to show that awareness is not a sufficient condition of mental functioning.

I think this is a useful objection because it makes plain what we have to do if we wish to maintain that awareness is a sufficient condition. We have to use the expressions "aware of anything (or something)" and "mental phenomena" in such a way that for 0 to exhibit "mental phenomena" entails that 0 is "aware of something," in the sense that 0 is aware of his awareness of something. To make this entailment hold we have to restrict the use of "awareness of something (or anything)" in such a way that for o to be aware of something or anything is to be aware of being aware of it. Likewise, we have to restrict the use of words like "notices" and "conscious of" to situations where, for 0 to notice something, is for 0 to notice that he notices it; where, if 0 is to be conscious of something, he is conscious that he is conscious of it, and so on. Then, of course, if 0 is aware of anything, in this restricted sense of the expression, this condition is sufficient by defini- tion for 0 to exhibit mental functioning.

(I shall now adopt a convenient abbreviation. When I use the word "aware" (or "awareness") in the sense of "being aware of being aware," I shall write awaree2; when I use it in the sense which is applicable, for instance, to Miller's subjects, I shall write it awaree1; when I use it indif- ferently to include either or both aware1 and 2, I shall write "aware" without subscripts. I shall treat the word "notice" and others like "hear" in the same way.)

Let us accept this restriction of "awareness" to awarenesss2" Let us also magnanimously assume that objections of the Jacobsonian sort do not hold water. It then follows that for 0 to be aware2 of something is a sufficient and necessary condition for 0 to exhibit mental phenomena. Let us now ask: should we accept this as a criterion of mental functioning? Shoul I we pick on this characteristic of mental functioning, namely that of "no- ticing2," and talk in this way?

Well, what is the value of this criterion and way of talking? Let us observe that we are not normally concerned to determine whether "O is exhibiting mental phenomena or functioning." What we do normally ask are questions like these.

"Is that a tree over there or a man? I can't quite see." "Is she asleep?" "Johnny! Are you attending to this diagram or not?"



502 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

"Did the engine driver notice the signal lights?" And so forth. We have accepted ways and means of settling these questions, and they do not appear to involve the use of any single criterion. Thus, we settle whether she is asleep or not by listening to her breathing, by talking to her to see if she replies appropriately, and, if we suspect her of shamming, by playing some trick on her, as, for example, pretending that one of the rooms downstairs is on fire. And so on. So we do not appear to make much, or any, use in everyday affairs of the awareness2 criterion. Would it help us, however, in our everyday affairs if we did employ it? Hardly. For we cannot decide at present whether a person is "noticing a noticing" any more easily than we can decide whether she is asleep. Indeed, far from being able to use the criterion of awareness2" to decide whether she is asleep, we use at present the activities she exhibits when we try to discover whether she is asleep as criteria for deciding whether she is aware2 of what is going on around her. I say "at present" because our inability to determine independently whether she is noticing a noticing appears to be a limitation of observational technique which the future may dissipate. So for everyday purposes nothing seems to be gained at present in talking in the way required by the awareness2 criterion.

Have this criterion and way of talking any value for technical purposes? Consider the most likely technicians, namely, the comparative psychologists. They are concerned with the emergence and development of mental phenomena in the phylogenetic scale. Unlike the ordinary person in his everyday affairs, they are interested to know whether, and in what way, any organism 0 is exhibiting "mental functioning" in these or those circumstances, and they ask questions like the following. "Does a rat use hypotheses in its maze running? Is the dog discriminating the color of the light or its position here? What is the covert activity that enables a racoon to solve a temporal maze? Was the animal expecting food? And if so, in what sense was it expecting it? Must we say, with Maier, that rats solve his ring stand problem by reasoning?" And so forth. Of what help is the criterion of awareness in answering these questions? It would appear to be of no help. For psychologists cannot discover at present with any confidence whether an animal is aware2 of anything. Consequently, they can hardly use aware- ness2 as a criterion to help determine, for instance, whether the rat is expecting food. In fact, of course, what they do at present is to use or lay down overt behavioral criteria for "hypotheses," "expectations," etc., criteria derived by analogy from the overt behavior humans exhibit when they use hypotheses, have expectations, etc.; and they then observe whether any particular animal under these or those circumstances con- forms to these criteria or not.

Suppose, however, that we press a comparative psychologist for a general




description of the distinction between "Life" and "Mind" (in very big capitals); or suppose we try to discover whether some general description is suggested by their work. Consider the general goings on of, say, a paramecium and of a bird. We may be tempted to say that the former's goings on are merely organic, whereas the latter's are also mental. Does psychological work suggest that we describe this distinction by saying that the paramecium is never aware2 of anything, whereas the bird often is. Or that the paramecium merely notices, whereas the bird often notices2 stimuli? I do not think that psychological work suggests that we use this general description, and I doubt whether it would occur to psychologists to offer it. The immediate reason for this is obvious. Since they do not use the awareness2 criterion to answer particular questions about the mental functioning of organisms, they are not inclined to use it to answer the general question about how to describe the distinction between organic and mental phenomena. The more important reason, perhaps, is that this criterion supposes that mental functioning is an all-or-none affair. It supposes that a sharp line can, and should, be drawn between organisms that do and those that do not exhibit mental phenomena; and also a sharp line between the occasions when an organism exhibits mental phenomena and the occasions when it does not. But this supposition runs counter to the whole emphasis and drift of psychological work, as I understand it. Psychologists look on organisms in the light of their capacity to deal with issues of a greater or less degree of difficulty; and they look on higher level, obviously mental, functioning as a development out of lower level functioning. Likewise, they look on an organism as a whole going concern, and decline to say horrific things like: "Ah! when the bird escapes from a predator it is merely behaving, but when it looks for food, it is exhibiting mental phenomena as well" (or "psychical events are now taking place also"). So, not only is the aware- ness2 criterion not suggested by psychological work as a general description of mental functioning; but it is also a positively unhelpful criterion since it runs counter to the way in which scientific workers have found it advis- able to describe mental functioning.

Though empirical work in this field does not suggest that we employ the awareness2 criterion to describe the emergence and development of mental phenomena, does it suggest any other criterion? Some psychologists and philosophers have thought it does. When we investigate the activity of a paramecium, for example, we find ourselves distinguishing between the adjustments it makes, for instance, of a tropistic sort and the adjustments, if any, it has learned to make to the presence of cramping or noxious or other stimuli. When we investigate the functioning of organisms of the low and of the higher levels, we have to distinguish between, and interrelate, the behaviors that are learned and unlearned; and to emphasize how learned




behavior is more characteristic of, and more important for, organisms at the higher levels. All this suggests that we should pick on the capacity to learn, or to profit from past experience, and that we should say (to put it roughly) that an organism exhibits mental functioning when it exhibits this capacity. Now when psychologists analyze this capacity, some of them are inclined to emphasize that feature of learning which consists of attaching the origi- nal response to a new stimulus. One way of describing this feature is to say that the organism is now responding to the new stimulus as a sign. It is then tempting to produce a criterion of mental functioning and say that for a response of an organism 0 to reveal mental functioning, one necessary condition must be fulfilled, namely, the response must be to some stimulus as a sign.

Let us waive the obvious objection that this view is plainly false on the usual use of "mental" and can only be sustained by using the word in some odd and technical sense. Let us ask instead: how useful is the criterion suggested? I think there is something to be said for it. It is in tune with much psychological work; and, unlike the awareness2 criterion, it can be used quite extensively in practice. Thus, if we wish to discover whether the paramecium can show mental functioning in this "learning" sense, or whether a cat in chasing a mouse is merely responding instinctively, or whether a dog's choice of the correct door was merely accidental-if we wish to discover points like these, we can take appropriate steps to find out. We take these by finding out in each case whether the animal's response is a learned one and hence a response to a sign stimulus.

But what is the matter with this sign criterion? There is one objection which may be produced and which will not do. Consider any example where an animal or a person is alleged to respond to a sign. For instance, a child runs into the dining room on the sound of the gong. It is now argued that the sound of the gong can only work as a sign if the child hears the sound and recognizes it for what it is. In other words, to say "the sound served as a sign for 0 on this occasion" entails saying, at the minimum, that "O is aware2 of the sound" or that "he notices2 the sound." When, therefore, we elucidate the notion of "a sign," we have to do so by means of the notion of awarenesss" or noticingg1" Hence the sign criterion of mental functioning presupposes the awareness2 criterion, which we have already rejected. Consequently, we shall have to reject the sign criterion also. Another way of putting this is to say that the notion of "awareness," (and other notions like perceiving, recognizing, looking for) are more fundamental than the notion of sign; and that no theory of signs can be erected without the aid of them. Consequently, any sign criterion for mental functioning can only lead us back to notions like those of awareness2.

Now admittedly the sign criterion may not be much good, but it is not




for this reason. Consider work of the Bruner and Postman sort on the so- called "defensive perceptions."4 Subjects are presented tachistoscopically with a series of words and are instructed to report when they recognize them. Some of these words are "unpleasant" ones like "dung" and "whore"; the otherwise comparable ones are neutral in character. It is found that subjects will report the neutral ones correctly before they report the unpleasant ones. That is, they see or recognize the neutral words before they see or recognize the unpleasant ones. How shall we describe this behavior? If one is going to talk at all about "stimuli as signs," then it is correct to say that a subject responds here to the verbal stimulus as a sign of something to be avoided, before he is aware2 of the stimulus to which he is responding. That is, the visual stimulus serves as a sign for a subject without the subject being aware2 of the stimulus. Now it certainly is the case that to say that something is a sign for 0 in some situations implies that 0 is aware2 of what he is responding to. But it does not entail this consequence. No doubt it is usually the case that when a child responds to the sound of the gong as a sign to run into the dining room, the child hears2 the sound of the gong. But it is quite significant to say that, when the child responds like this to the sound of the gong, he does not hear2 it but only hears, it. It is false, therefore, to argue that we have to elucidate the notion of "sign" by means of the notion of awarenesss2"

There are other laboratory studies with the same import; and there should be nothing surprising about them. For it is a matter of common ob- servation that people respond to all sorts of things as signs and are unaware of what they are responding to. My friend, J, used to wake regularly, un- aided, at 6.30 in London on working mornings, but was quite unaware of how she did it. She did not notice the noticing of her own physiological rhythms and the milkman's bottles. A chess master, playing in a simulta- neous display, may respond to a certain position at a glance without being aware of the features of the position to which he is responding. A young child may come to respond to the approach of its father, as the result of previous severe treatment, with general apprehension and avoidance behavior. But it may not notice2 that it is the approach of the father that is now the sign for avoidance, or even that it is avoiding him at all. Obviously not, since the child may not have the maturity and the repertoire to make the inner performances necessary and sufficient to enable him to "notice his own noticing." This consideration is important, since it suggests that if we try to give a general story about the learning of animals, children and men, we must do so without supposing that an organism is aware2 of what it is responds to when it learns to respond to some situation, or when it exhibits

4For a discussion see, e.g., Bruner and Postman, J. of Personality, 1949, Vol. 18, No. 1.




some learned response. If we propose to use the notion of sign in our learning theory, then it will be necessary to use it in the usual way, according to which to say that "S is a sign for 0" does not entail that 0 is aware2 of S or of his response to S, or indeed of anything at all.

Well, then, what is the matter with the sign criterion? The general objection to it is that, while this criterion is of some use, it is not of anything like sufficient use to psychologists to make them generally feel obliged or even keen to use it, and to talk in this way about mental functioning. The reasons are pretty evident.

1. When we are told that O's response exhibits mental functioning if it is the response to a sign, we are told very little indeed. At most we are being told that it is a response to a conditioned stimulus, or something of the sort. But this is relatively uninteresting to a psychologist. He wants to know the standing conditions necessary for the organism to learn this response in the first place, and then to reproduce it. To put this in Chisholm-like language, he wants 'the occasions specified upon which the appropriate fulfilments or disruptions must occur of the disposition which is set up in 0 by the sign.' Unless a psychologist is told this, he cannot make much use of the information that 0 has learned to respond to S or that S is a sign for 0.5

2. What little we are told is still a matter of discussion and dispute in psychological circles. When an organism learns to respond, shall we way that it responds to "a stimulus"? If so, is the5 stimulus to which it responds always sufficiently like the stimuli of noise or light (which are the ones normally employed), to make it useful to call them, or think of them as, "conditioned stimuli" also? Even if we do not actually talk about all such stimuli as "conditioned," we are still faced with the related question: Why concentrate on the dog-buzzer-food case as the model of all learning? Is not such concentration likely to be psychologically unhelpful? And of course it has been strenuously maintained in psychological circles that it is unhelpful. I think we should recognize that recent work in the Theory of Signs is a philosophical reaction to come contemporary work on learning and learning theory in the United States. I think we should also recognize that this work is far from complete. Consequently, any criterion of mental functioning drawn from the Theory of Signs, no matter how precisely cut, smoothed and polished by philosophers, will not be sufficiently entic- ing to seduce unromantic and 'labiparous' psychologists.

3. In spite of appearances to the contrary, this criterion resembles the awareness2 criterion in also being all-or-none in character; and is conse-

5 I think this is the useful point in Mr. Chisholm's otherwise misguided objection that the preparatory stimulus analysis of a sign requires us to specify the occasions on which the appropriate fulfillments or disruptions of dispositions occur. See Chis- holm op. cit.




quently unsuitable for describing the development of mental functioning. Thus, if O's performance is a learned one, 0 has responded to a sign, and the performance exhibits mentality; if O's response is not a response to a sign, it does not exhibit it. But how shall we now describe the difference between a rat jumping at a door on a stand at which it has learned to jump, and a human being doing something similar? Or the difference between a rat reproducing its solution of some problem in inference and a human being doing so for one in symbolic logic? These are all learned responses, and yet we want to say something to the effect that the performance of the human organism exhibits mental functioning 'at a higher level' than the performance of the rat. But we cannot use the sign criterion to describe this difference. At most we can use it to say that, as learned activities become progressively more important and characteristic of the activity of different species of animals, so we move up the scale of mental functioning. But this does not help much. For it is not enough by itself to enable us to determine the level of mental functioning of close species and groups like rats and mice, or monkeys and apes. Nor is it the mere fact that learned activity is more important for us than, say, for birds that makes us say we function at a higher level than they do. What makes us say this is that we can learn to do things that birds can never learn to do. So we cannot describe the general development of mental functioning by means of the sign criterion alone. Hence this criterion is insufficient for comparative psychologists.

It is quite misleading, therefore, to suppose that empirical work on learning suggests the sign criterion. How, then, do psychologists use the capacity to learn when they talk about mental functioning? They appear to use it. as one pointer among others. Thus, they would distinguish between the behaviors of a rat and a chicken in respect of a seen triangle by saying, for example, that the rat has the capacity to "abstract" the seen triangle from its environment and so is able to learn to respond to it; a chicken, on -the other hand, is not able to do this. They would say, perhaps, that the rat can in this sense "form a concept" which a chicken cannot form; and they would use words like "discrimination" and "generalization" (or some equivalents) to describe how the rat forms this concept. They also note that some animals exhibit, in some of their performances, the rudiments of a capacity which man exhibits much more fully, namely, the capacity for symbolic or surrogate behavior; and that with this man is able to form concepts "at a higher level of abstraction" than animals can reach. So comparative psychologists do not in fact use any one criterion of mental functioning. They use a loose cluster of vague pointers; and this enables them to talk loosely about the whole field of adaptive behavior and about the development of performances that are clearly "mental" in character.




Such vague talk is perhaps the best we can provide at present, because we do not know enough to enable us to be precise.

The fact that psychologists talk like this is suggestive in various ways. (a) For an organism to respond to a stimulus as a sign does entail in this

psychological discourse, that it discriminates, or notices or is aware1 of the stimulus. If we now say that these latter are intentional words, then of course it follows that we can only define the notion of responding to a sign by means of intentional notions. But this is an uninteresting and unwelcome result. For these intentional words are not the ones usually chosen to in- dicate the presence of mental phenomena. If we do choose them, we shall have to say that, when an organism notices, a stimulus, it exhibits mental functioning; and we shall have to say this in spite of the fact that the organism may not have experienced the stimulus, or been conscious of it, or aware2 of it-in spite of the fact, that is to say, that nothing mental in the ordinary sense of the word may have occurred at all.

But this psychological discourse is loose, and sometimes the use of words like "discriminate," differentially respond," etc. is restricted to behavior that is usually called "adaptive." In the contexts where this is done, it follows that an organism only discriminates when it exhibits learning or learned behavior. If we now talk about learning behavior as involving the response to signs, it follows that we can only elucidate words like "discriminate" by means of the word "sign"; and to say "O discriminates X" entails some statement about 0 responding to a sign. Therefore, when psychologists use words like discriminate in this way, where it is restricted to adaptive behavior, they make "sign" and "discriminate" correlative notions. On the other hand, words like "discriminate" are sometimes used more widely in psychological discourse to apply as well to tropistic responses and taxes, to instinctive and reflex behavior. When the words are used like this, it is not the case that for 0 to discriminate something entails that 0 responds to a sign. On this wide use of "discriminate" and of similar words like "notice," the notion of sign becomes less fundamental than that of "discriminate" or "notice." But if we choose this wide use of "discriminate" as a criterion of mental functioning, we obviously have various consequences thrust upon us. For example, we shall have to ascribe mental functioning to the menotaxic (or light compass) response of an ant, to the gaping of nestling thrushes, and to the eye blink; and we shall have difficulty in refusing to say that the Manchester Computer discriminates the dots and blanks on its tape of coded instructions, and so also exhibits mental functioning All of which is very awkward for those who are inclined to insist on an intentional criterion of mentality.

Moreover, the word "sign," or expressions like "sign stimulus," are sometimes used quite differently from the way we have done so far. The




word "sign" is sometimes used to refer as well to the stimuli to which an organism makes an instinctive response. When it is used like this, and when we then use "discriminate," etc. in the narrower sense where it is restricted to adaptive behavior, it follows that to say "O responds to X as a sign" does not entail that "O discriminates X." If, however, we use "discriminate" etc. widelyto include adaptive and instinctive behavior, then "sign" and "discriminate" become correlative notions once more. All this brings out that it is pointless to suggest that the notion of "a sign" is less or more fundamental than, or as fundamental as that of "discriminate," "differentially respond," and the like. These words are used in different ways in the contemporary discourse of psychologists, and there is nothing at present to oblige us or psychologists to choose one of these ways rather than another. Mr. Chisholm asked: It is possible to provide a non-intentional analysis of 'a sign'? From a psychological point of view, this question seems remote and uninteresting.

(b) The talk of psychologists suggests that we say that if an organism, 0, is aware2 of something, then 0 responds to it "as a such and such." Thus, if a dog, 0, is to be aware2 of the lighted door or the buzzer, we will say that it responds to its own response as another instance of a response to lighted doors or buzzers. It is then tempting to say that 0 can only make this "second order" response if it can compare its first order response now with other first order responses that it made in the past, and so respond to it as similar to those made in the past. But whereas 0 can compare one door with another because it can see both, it cannot compare its present first order response with any made in the past because the latter are not at present seen or heard or felt etc.-they are over and done with. Hence, we can go on to argue, it can only respond to its present first order response as like some past first order response, if the latter can be reinstated in some rudimentary, substitute form. 0 can only discriminate the stimulus pattern of its present first order response as like some past one, it if can use some -inner response or reaction as a substitute for the stimulus pattern produced by past first order responses. That is to say, 0 can only respond to its own first order response "as a such and such," as, for example, involving "a lighted door," if 0 possesses some means by which it can symbolize for itself its past responses to lighted doors; and thereby enable itself at the same time to compare its present with its past first order responses and so respond to its present one "as a such and such." Clearly, such substitute reinstatement can vary from the primitive to the highly developed. Con- sequently, at its most primitive, as in the rat or dog, the animal may use some feeble kinesthetic imagery of past first-order responses to enable it to generalize from such past responses to cover the present one. To achieve this generalization is to make its second-order response, in which presum-




ably the animal vaguely recognizes something familiar about the door. At its most developed, an educated and attentive adult may use quite effort- lessly the immense repertoire of substitute behavior he possesses to enable him to achieve immediate recognition of the present situation for what it is. Through much learning and past practice, these second-order responses of his are usually so fractional and so smoothly performed that he does not, and cannot, notice2 them. Hence the mysterious 'self-luminous' character of human consciousness.

Now all this is mere a suggestion, obscurely expressed, which is thrown up by some psychological talk and work. Further empirical work may reveal the idea of a "second-order" response to be misguided and un- necessary.6 If we accept it for the present, however, it follows that this second-order response is a necessary condition for awareness2. If we say in ordinary speech that a dog or a man sees2 or hears2 or recognizes2 something, then we imply that the dog or the man is using his capacity for symbolic behavior and his symbolic equipment to make a second-order response of the sort described. While it is false, on our present use, to say that "O recognizes2 the door" merely entails "O makes the appropriate second order response" and/or any other responses we like to mention- while it is false to say this, it is quite misguided to maintain the opposite and say that "O recognizes the, door" does not merely entail "O makes the appropriate second-order response," and/or any other responses we like to mention. But this takes us away into another issue. What is of immediate relevance is the obvious point that, if we accept this suggestion about "second-order" responses, we can only elucidate the use of awarenesss" (or "recognized" etc.) by means of the word "sign" (or some like-functioning word or expression). So any statement about awareness2 (and the like), in this loose psychological discourse, will entail some statement about signs -to express it crudely. But we have already seen that "sign" is used in this discourse in ways that can be elucidated without recourse to "aware- ness2, "see2," 'recognized" and the like. Consequently, the notion of sign is more fundamental here than these others. That is to say, it is more fundamental here than the intentional notions which are normally used as the criteria of mental functioning.

(c) At the beginning of this paper I asked an odd sounding question. "Is it a necessary and sufficient condition for something, 0, to exhibit mental functioning, that 0 should be aware of anything?" The way that

6 If, of course, we wish to be in the mode, we can use the language of "Informa- tion Theory" and express the same suggestion by distinguishing, for example, between "primary" and "secondary messages." Cf. Karl Deutsch "Mechanism Tele- ology and Mind" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XII, 1951-52, pgs. 185-223.




psychologists took at the whole topic of mental functioning serves to bring out just how silly this question is. The question implies that the capacity to exhibit mentality is a unitary, all-or-none affair. The emphasis of psychological work and thought is wholly in the opposite direction. Mental functioning, as we know it in educated adults, is a complex affair, to which different capacities make their respective contributions. When we investigate it empirically, we have "to break it down" into the co-functioning of different constituent capacities, like that of "discriminating," "forming concepts," "attaching new responses to stimuli," "behaving symbolically" and so forth. Likewise, we have to recognize that these capacities appear and function differently at different phylogenetic levels. In view of this, it is not worth while seriously asking whether one sort of performance (for example, "being aware2 of," or "responding to a sign") is a necessary and sufficient condition for mental functioning to be exhibited. It is not worth while searching for or offering any criterion. Any answer we provide will either be too narrow or too wide; and will only escape this fate by being transformed into the pointless and (perhaps) illuminating truism of a metaphysical system. The initial question which I asked undoubtedly uncovers all sorts of puzzles, doubts and queries. But we will not settle them by producing any criterion of mentality. We will only succeed in settling them, I think, when we succeed in making the question out of date through the philosophical treatment of these doubts and queries, and as a result of further development in our knowledge of the behavior of organisms.

B. A. FARRELL OXFORD UNIVERSITY, ENGLAND.



intentionality and the theory of signs

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