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Yay! Steve gave us an example to work with. I have a hunch that – at least as
far as this example goes – Ross would grant Steve his interpretation. Nick
and I would disagree. Steve said: “A simple but profound (to me) example, I
have already given. Lying in the grass on a lazy summer day "intending" to
get up and not being able to actually "act"on the up-getting until "I" (that
ever-present illusion of unique-selfness) quit "intending" and some other
magical mechanism kicked in and viola! I am UP!”
To begin, I will state that Freud’s major contribution to
psychology was convincing people that a trained professional could know a
person’s mind better than its owner could. Freud thought that the trained
professional could do this by observing very large swaths of behavior. For
example, at the dinner table you may tell me that you never get enough food,
and that your stealing food off your sister’s plate merely represents
intention
to eat more food. However, if I observe your behavior and find that your
food-stealing-behavior does not end after some amount is eaten, but rather ends
when your sister starts crying, I have authority to say “Actually, your real
intention
is to make your sister cry”. -- The entire notion of insight during
psychotherapy is that you can come to know your own intentions better than you
knew them before. (“I know see that my striving for more money isn’t about
making me happy, its about making my long dead mother happy”, “I now see
that I
seek out abusive relationships because my father abused me and all I ever
wanted was his affection”, etc.) In other words, by definition, to “have an
intention” is to “have your behavior oriented towards a given goal (or set
of
goals)”. Tolman, or rat maze fame, phrased it slightly differently, claiming
that intentionality was a “continuing until”.
With that in mind, I assert that at the start of Steve’s
story, though he professed that he intended to get up, and might have believed
he intended to do so (leaving aside exactly what that would mean), he clearly
had no intention to do so. If he had intended to do so, he would have, nothing
was stopping him. In fact, he was even nice enough to put scare quotes around
the word for us, does this maybe indicate that he knew something was amiss in
his verbal report? As much as Steve would like to think that he intended to get
up, observing his own behavior (from that weird third-person perspective from
which he watches himself) he to could see that what he really intended to do
was to continue basking in the sun. At some point, some combination of
environmental and physiological changes happened, Steve’s intention changed,
and he stood up. From the weird third-person perspective, it was like magic.
If you grant that it is possible to not know your own
intentions, and that some third party watching you could know your intentions
by observing your behavior, and that said third party could point out to you
how you are acting, and that then you could see that your intentions were not
what you thought they were…. well, then we should all be in agreement. As, I
assert, all of us have been both first-person and third-person parties to such
interactions, we should all be in agreement. Among the things we should agree
on: 1) There is nothing privileged about the first-person position, except
perhaps that you are around yourself more than other people are around you. 2)
To
accurately know what someone intends you need to see them do a lot, and you
need to know how they act in various circumstances. 3) It is at least plausible
that many, if not all, other so-called mental terms are really macro-behavioral
terms. 4) Though say other things in strange conversations about “what
exactly”
intentionality is, the definition suggested here is in complete agreement with
normal linguistic uses of the words – that is, lay sentences make sense if we
define intentionality in this way.
I believe the rest of Steve’s email largely demonstrates an
agreement with the above points. Steve argued, for example, that if the rest of
the list knew the larger context of his actions in various circumstances, they
would not have mistaken his talk of recursion as a criticism. He also seems
implicitly to admit that under some circumstances the list members observations
could have lead him to see that he really was intending criticism, even when he
did not think that was his intention.
Eric
P.S. Steve’s metaphor with preparing food is excellent!
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