Brentano: The Hallmarks of Mental Phenomena

Brentano: The Hallmarks of Mental Phenomena (22-Jan-2003)

Reading : Western Philosophy III.9 "The Hallmarks of Mental Phenomena"

Brentano accepts the dualist view, i.e. there is a fundamental distinction between thinking substance and material substance, but was concerned with finding a way to distinguish between the two. Descartes said that a fundamental distinction was the property of extension: all corporeal substance is extended, i.e. it is located somewhere in, and extends into, space, while thinking substance has no extension.

Brentano quotes this view, but casts doubt on it because "many physical phenomena appear to be without extension". The examples he gives are not particularly convincing - e.g. sounds and smells (p174), but perhaps a modern cosmologist would say that before the big bang there was just a "singularity" which had no extension (because there was no space for it to extend into) - but presumably wasn't thinking substance either.

Brentano also suggests that some mental phenomena do have extension, in that certain sensations we have appear to be associated with particular locations in space (e.g. my arm itches). However, this seems a bit weak too: the fact I feel sensations to be present in a particular part of my body may just be a trick of my brain to help me deal with it, with the mental image of my body having been arrived at only through the aggregate of all my past sensations.

Brentano thinks that a better way to characterise the unique nature of mental experience is using the idea of "intention". The word "intention" comes from the latin "intendere", meaning "to point to", and refers to the way that we can have a thought which is about something. He says that

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) in-existence of an object and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, the reference to a content, a direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or an immanent objectivity. Each mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.

This intentional in-existence is characteristic exlusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves..." (p175)

So Brentano is saying that

intentionality involves reference to an object
all mental phenomena exhibit intentionality
no physical phenomena exhibits intentionality

The question arises, is the intentional object a mental thing or an external thing? E.g. when we wish for a thing "X", do we wish for the thing, or for a mental picture of the thing? This relates to the ideas of realism and idealism: a realist holds that the material world exists independently of human thought, and that our ideas relate to actual physical things in the world. An idealist believes that the things which seem to exist in the material world are somehow constructed from our own ideas about it. In either case we have an apparent problem:

If intentional objects are external things, then how do we explain beliefs, thoughts, wishes about things which do not exist, e.g. unicorns?

but if intentional objects are internal things, then it would seem that no two people can ever refer to the same object

There is also the problem of "co-relation": If A has relationship X to B and B is the same thing as C, then A has relationship X to C. E.g. if I am sitting on a chair, and the chair is the only piece of furniture in the room, then I am sitting on the only piece of furniture in the room. But this doesn't work with intentional relations. For example, if I see a sandwich and want to eat it, but unknown to me the sandwich is mouldy, it doesn't follow that I want to eat a mouldy sandwich.

Regardless of these issues, there are grounds for challenging Brentano's position:

Not all mental phenomena are intentional. For example, moods such as anxiety, depression, elation may not be about anything in particular
Some non-mental things could be argued to be intentional. For example, a computer simulation of a power station is about the power station. A painting is about its subject. However, this "about-ness" is arguably not the same as "intention".
Whenever we described something in the physical world as being "about" something, e.g. a painting, it is usually (always?) something which has been created by a person and is in some way an imperfect representation. For example, we might describe paintings, sculptures, and stories as being "about" their subjects, but we don't say photographs, photocopies, duplicate keys etc. are "about" the things from which they are copied.

Notes From Seminar

Brentano is trying to come up with a distinction between "mental" and "physical" phenomena. He says that with mental phenomena there is a fundamental difference between the act of something being presented to me, and that which is being presented. E.g:

Mental Physical

feeling the cold the cold itself

seeing a chair the chair

dreaming about pink elephants pink elephants

Note this breaks things down further than Descartes - e.g. presumably for him, a dream about pink elephants is a mental thing for Descartes, and by his criterion, the pink elephants themselves are presumably physical (not sure what they are in Descartes view - an aspect of the dream, so something mental as well?).

A problem with this definition would be that it doesn't explain moods such as elation, depression, which don't seem to be *about* anything.

See the article on Intentionality in the online version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

weekly paragraph

Mind and World page

Mental	Physical
feeling the cold	the cold itself
seeing a chair	the chair
dreaming about pink elephants	pink elephants