James, Intentionality and Analysis*

1. Introduction: Prototypes and Philosophical Analysis

William James was always interested in the problem of how our thoughts come to be about the world, and the account of intentionality (or "knowing") he eventually developed plays a central role in motivating his views on truth. [1] Nevertheless, James' account of intentionality has appeared to many to face obvious counterexamples. However, this appearance stems from the fact that James' approach to analyzing a phenomenon is very different from that which philosophers have found natural when providing such analyses. [2] In particular, philosophers and non-philosophers alike often understand phenomena in terms of the concepts by which they are designated, and think of these concepts as having sharp boundaries. They thus picture an adequate analysis of a phenomenon as providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the corresponding concept's satisfaction. Consequently, they assume that one can criticize another's analysis of a phenomenon by showing that the resulting conceptual criteria includes things that the term doesn't apply to, or fails to include things to which it does. [3]

If one treats James as trying to provide such an analysis of intentionality (i.e., as trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a thought's being about an object), counterexamples to his account will be easy to find. However, rather than trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for every case of a thought's being about an object, James focused his analysis on the core/prototypical/paradigmatic cases. This analysis of the core could then be supplemented with additional remarks about how the less prototypical cases could be understood in terms of their relations to the paradigm. [4] If one analyzes a concept in this way, marginal cases do not count as 'counterexamples' simply because they lack properties that are prominent in the analysis of the prototypical ones. Their lack of these properties merely explains why they are marginal rather than prototypical. James claims to be interested in the "originals and prototypes" of the connection between our ideas and the world, and that other types of intentional relations can be understood in terms of their relation to the prototypical cases (PR 99).

His pursuing this kind of analysis doesn't represent any lack of rigor on James' part. Recent studies of human categorization provide strong evidence that many, if not most, of our categories shouldn't be understood in terms of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. [5] There simply may be no set of properties that all and only the things that fall within a category possess.

Concepts were traditionally viewed as including all and only those objects that possessed all the properties characteristic of them. Every object either was, or was not, within the concept, and no members were any more central to it than any others. The following example from traditional Dyirbal (an aboriginal language of Australia) should make clear some of the limitations of the traditional model. [6] In particular, Dyirbal classifies every object in the world into one of four categories, bayi, balan, balam, bala. The members of the four categories include the following:

1. Bayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc.

 

2. Balan: women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc.

 

3. Balam: all edible fruit and plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake.

 

4. Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wend, yamsticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises and language, etc.

Instead of being determined by possession of a fixed group of properties, class membership is Dyirbal has the following characteristics:

Centrality: Categories have certain central members. For Balan the central members are (human) females, water, fire, and fighting. (Stinging vines, gar fish and the hairy mary grub are less central).

 

Chaining: Complex categories are structured by chains incorporating specific knowledge. Birds, for instance, even though they are animals, fall into category 2 because they are believed to house the spirits of dead females. Women are also mythologically linked to the sun, which is linked to sunburn, which is linked to the hairy mary grub (which produces a painful rash that feels much like sunburn). It is by virtue of such a chain that the hairy mary grub is in the same category as women. [7]

 

No Common Properties: Categories on the whole need not be defined by common properties. This is most clearly the case with the fourth category, Bala: which seems to simply include everything not in the other classes.

Now Dyirbal classification may be an unusually vivid case, but these basic phenomena of centrality, chaining, and lack of common properties are widespread and reflected in James' account of intentionality. Perceptual cases provide the prototype, and other cases are understood in terms of their relation to the prototype even if they lack properties that are crucial to the prototypical cases. [8]

2. James's basic account [9]

James wanted to explain how one piece of "flat content [with] no self-transcendency about it" came to be 'about' something else. [10] James' method was to look at the clearest cases where we treat our thoughts as being about the world, and analyze what is going on in them. [11] For James, like many, the most basic cases of our thoughts being about the world are found in perception. [12] As he puts it, in perception "[t]he external and the internal, the extended and the not extended fuse and make an indissoluble marriage" (ERE 265). [13]

James extends the paradigm of perceptual reference by arguing that one's ideas can know objects outside of one's perceptual field by leading one through a series of experiences that terminate in an actual percept of the object referred to. For instance, James' "Memorial Hall" idea may just be a dim image in his mind, but if this image allows James to go to the Hall and recognize it, then "we may freely say that we had the terminal object 'in mind' from the outset, even altho at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about it" (ERE 29). Our ideas about objects outside of our perceptual field need not share all of properties with the core cases of perception, but they bear a 'chaining' relation to them: they are ideas that lead one to the actual percept. Indeed, such cases are the 'prototype' of non-perceptual (conceptual) reference for James. [14]

James' account of the intentionality of our concepts, in which our ideas are about objects because they lead us into perceptual contact with those objects, faces a number of problems if viewed as a conceptual analysis of the form: P's idea x is about object O if and only if x leads P to come into perceptual contact with O. Among such problems are:

1. It suggests that one can't have thoughts about objects until one has actually tracked them down.

 

2. It ignores the 'social' character of language and cognition, and suggests that I couldn't have thoughts about things that I couldn't recognize.

 

3. It would seem to make reference to unobservable entities impossible.

 

4. By making non-perceptual cognition dependent upon how we track things down in the future, it suggests that we couldn't have thoughts about the past.

However, all of these problems are manageable once we realize that James typically keeps his discussion close to the core of the concept, and that while these problem cases don't fit the prototype, they can still be understood in terms of it.

3. Virtual Knowing and the potentially verified

For instance, an apparent problem with James' account is that while it allows my idea of Memorial Hall to have always referred to the hall once it actually leads me to it, common sense suggests that our idea refers to the hall before this happens, or even if I never track the hall down. Indeed, a large and significant portion of my thoughts seem outside James' initial extension of the prototype to non-perceptual cases. I can think about, say, the Eiffel Tower, but that idea may never reach the stage of 'face-to-face' verification.

James is aware of this, and he claims that in such cases we 'virtually' refer to the objects of our thoughts.

The key to this difficulty lies in the distinction between knowing as verified and completed, and the same knowing as in transit and on its way. To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when our idea of the hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know 'for certain' that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of that. Until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing anything, could still be doubted; and yet the knowing really was there, as the result now shows. We were virtual knowers of the hall long before we were certified to have been its actual knowers, by the percept's retroactive validating power. [15]

James goes on to claim that while "the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. to continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense" (ERE 34). As long as this 'virtual knowing' could be cashed out whenever it needs to be, there would be no practical difference between a theory which says that we are only virtually referring in such cases and one that claims that we are actually referring in them. Since virtual knowing plays the same practical role as actualized knowing in most cases, it is justifiable to extend our concept of intentionality to those cases that remain virtual.

However, these 'virtual' cases are still understood in terms of their relation to the non-virtual prototype. It is precisely in virtue of their potential to become like the prototype that the ideas in question count as 'knowing' the objects that they do. Virtual knowing is still a type of knowing, and with it, James' account of intentionality expands from the most central cases of verification to the broader notion of verifiability. The verification-processes are still, as James puts it, what truth and intentionality mean "essentially," [16] but this is only to say that we couldn't understand verifiability independently of verification.

4. The social character of language

James is frequently criticized for missing out on the social character of language and cognition, and we can see how one might get such an impression from his account. Prototypical cases of intentionality such as perception are non-social for James. However, even if the analysis of the perceptual prototype is individualistic, the extended cases of non-perceptual reference allow more room for social contributions.

Such social contribution seems essential to our intuitive conception of what we can refer to. If left entirely to my own devices, the beliefs and recognitional capacities I have at my disposal would wildly underdetermine the referents of many of my terms. In the core cases of intentionality we are always able to, on our own, recognize what we were referring to. Consequently, if one takes all the characteristics of the core to be essential, it can seem that to refer to something, one must at least be able to locate or recognize it on one's own. [17]

Nevertheless, James' account can accommodate such cases in virtue of its stressing that knowing an object involves being led to it "through a context which the world provides." [18] My ability to locate, say, my computer is based largely on the fact that it is the only one sitting on my desk, rather than my knowledge of perceptual features that distinguish it from all other computers. [19] Our being embedded in particular contexts is thus essential to our ability to think about various objects. However, if to know an object is to be lead "to it through a context which the world provides" there seems little reason to think that such an account can't be extended by including one's social context as well. After all, I couldn't find Memorial Hall on my own, but given my social context, I would have no trouble locating Memorial Hall if I were placed in Cambridge. I would only need to consult a map of the city, or ask people around me until I found someone who was able to lead me to it.

I refer to what I do by many of my technical terms because, given my social context, the experts I rely on would lead me to a particular set of objects. If I were in a different social context, many of my ideas would be cognitive of different things. How a term is used in one's social surrounding can thus affect what one's own ideas are about. [20] I am treated as referring to elms by "elm" even if I cannot uniquely pick them out myself, because I can rely on others to do so for me. As long as somebody can be relied upon to know just what elms are, the system works. [21]

These cases are important, but it should be clear why they are outside of the prototype. I can refer to Memorial Hall in virtue of my reliance on others who have been acquainted with Memorial Hall in the prototypical fashion. Indeed, it is a sign of how far such cases stray from the prototype that the claim that we are thinking about the purported objects of our thoughts become more and more tendentious as our ability to locate the referent becomes more and more dependent upon our social context.

4.Unobservables

This brings us to the case of 'unobservables', those items which we could not, perhaps even in principle, have perceptual contact with (quarks, another's thoughts, etc.). Such cases obviously present at least prima facie problems for an account of intentionality that tries to explain it in terms of perceptual contact with the objects referred to.

However, if our ideas can lead us to the environment of these objects, James claims that there is a sense in which we can know them 'virtually' as well. Earlier cases of virtual knowing involve a thought's being about something even though no perceptual contact is never actually made, and such cases bear an important relation to some cases of "knowing" where perceptual contact could not even possibly be made. After all, James characterizes virtual cases for observables as follows:

Just as we here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there, because it works to do so, everything we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering, we assume that thing to be a clock. We use it as a clock, regulating the length of our lecture by it. The verification of the assumption here means its leading to no frustrations or contradiction. Verifiability of wheels and weights and pendulum is as good as verification. For one truth-process completed there are a million in our lives that function in this state of nascency. They turn towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the objects they envisage; and then, if everything turns out harmoniously, we are so sure that verification is possible that we omit it, and are usually justified by all that happens. (PR 99-100)

Non-actualized cases of virtual knowledge thus "lead to no frustration or contradiction" and to "the surroundings of the objects." Both of these characteristics could be shared by our thought about unobservables. Standard cases of virtual knowledge count as 'knowing' in virtue of having the potential to become like the prototype; reference to unobservables counts as 'knowing' in virtue of sharing the evidential characteristics of the virtual cases. [22] Once we admit the standard cases of virtual reference and allow that "to continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense" (ERE 34), reference to unobservables can be admitted as well. This further extension of the prototype takes us quite far from the original, and thus it is not surprising that some have found our actually being able to refer in such cases problematic.

5. Thinking about the past

However, even extended this way, James's account of perceptual and non-perceptual intentionality seems to remain forward-looking, and this raise potential problems for providing an account of our thoughts about the past. [23] Indeed, its purported inability to account for thoughts about the past is frequently taken to be the most serious problem with James's account. [24] We typically understand ourselves as being able to refer to historical figures like Caesar, but how is this to be explained on James account? Certainly not in terms of our being able to track him down, or for that matter, even being able to be led into his immediate environment. However, this will be another case where James will appeal to the fact that "to continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense" (ERE 34). While Caesar and his immediate environment are not available, other items associated with Caesar can be experienced, and other speakers have, at some point in time, experienced Caesar himself. [25] Reference to objects in the past can be understood as an extension of the concept of virtual reference produced by extending one's notion of the type of environment and linguistic cooperation involved. This is why, once again, there is a sense in which our thoughts about the distant past have struck some as more 'marginal' than those about items closer to the core. [26]

6. Conclusion

In general, James account is more plausible than frequently assumed. It will suggest that certain cases of reference (unobservables, things we can't identify on our own, items in the distant past) will be more marginal than others. This is, however, a virtue of his account since it explains why our intuitions about such cases are less certain, and often disputed.

Notes

*James' works are abbreviated as follows. "PR" for Pragmatism, "MT" for The Meaning of Truth, "ERE" for Essays in Radical Empiricism, and "ME&N" for Manuscript Essays and Notes. All are cited from the Harvard editions.

1 For a discussion of this connection, see my [1].

2 For a discussion of how James attitudes towards concetpts in general differed from those of his contemporaries see my [2].

3 Hence the importance of the "counterexample" in much philosophical argumentation.

4 For a discussion of James' general lack of interest in providing necessary and sufficient conditions, see Richard Gale, The Divided Self of William James, New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998.

5 See, for instance, Rosch and Mervis "Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories", and George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Both the classically conceptual and prototype-centered analyses of categories can, in some sense, be understood as trying to get at what is 'essential' to a category/phenomenon, but each has a different conception of what being essential involves. In the former case, the essential properties must be shared by all. In the latter, the essential properties need not be possessed by everything which falls under the term, but the intelligibility of the category depends upon the essential cases in that the peripheral cases are understood as members of the category in virtue of their relation to the more basic ones. The latter allows one to get at what is essential to a range of phenomena without committing oneself to any 'essentialism' about it.

6 This example adapted from George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, 96. The data for this example was actually taken from the 1960's, and the language has decayed considerably since then.

7 The chains are here mythologicaly motivated (women to the sun), causally motivated (the sun to sunburn), or experientially connected (sunburn to hairy mary grub). In none of these cases are common objective properties being picked out by both instances of the term. We see similar chaining effects producing a lack of common properties in an English world like "healthy." People are healthy; a diet, on the other hand, is not healthy because it shares any properties with healthy people, but rather because it is taken to produce healthy people. A complexion is healthy because it is taken to be produced by a healthy person. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. (Erwin trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985, Austin, J.L. Philosophical Papers, Oxford: OUP, 1961.

8 This may have some affinities to Wittgenstein's point that sementic terms like meaning or reference are 'family resemblance' terms (see Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, third edition. Oxford: Blackwell).

9 This section is brief, and much of the material is discussed in more detail in my [1].

10 ME&N 17.

11 He hoped to give an account of this relation that was naturalistic, and was willing to describe his account of intentionality as a type of "descriptive psychology."

We are not to ask, "How is self-transcendence possible?" We are only to ask, "How comes it that common sense has assigned a number of cases in which it is assumed not only to be possible but actual? And what are the marks used by common sense to distinguish those cases from the rest?" In short, our inquiry is a chapter in descriptive psychology. (MT 14)

12 The cornerstone of James' account of perception is the picture of the relation between perception and its objects associated with his radical empiricism (in particular, what he refers to as his "doctrine of pure experience"). As James puts it, to perceive an object, or to know it immediately, "is for mental content and object to be identical." (MT 36. See also MT 35, 61-2.)

13 Even if one is not fond of the details of James' account of perceptual reference itself, the basic idea that our perceptual contact with the world can serve as type of paradigm for how our ideas come to be about it is extremely plausible. The idea that thoughts associated with perceptual demonstratives are 'strongly de re' (see, for instance, Evans, The Varieties of Reference, (Oxford, OUP 1982)) is a contemporary manifestation of this thought.

14 "Following our mental image of a house along the cow-path, we actually come to see the house; we get the image's full verification. Such simply and fully verified leadings are certainly the originals and prototypes of the truth-process. Experience offers indeed other forms of truth-process, but they are all conceivable as being verifications arrested, multiplied or substituted one for another." (PR 99, italics James')

15 ERE p. 34. See also, "A stone in one field may 'fit', we say, a hole in another field. But the relation of 'fitting,' so long as no one carries the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the fact that such an act may happen. Similarly with knowing It is only an anticipatory name for further associative and terminative process that may occur." (MT 34.)

16"We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If truth means verification-processes essentially, ought we then to call such unverified truths as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial is sufficient, we can go without eye-witnessing." (PR 99-100)

17 James actually seems to bite this bullett in his discussion of Memorial Hall in ERE p. 28.

18 MT 35, original in italics. See also MT 21.

19 For a related discussion, see Evans, G. The Varieties of Reference, New York: OUP, 1982.

20 James' account is thus able to accommodate the type of phenomena discussed by Burge in his "Individualism and the Mental" (in Midwest Studies in Philosophy IV: Studies in Metaphysics, Minnesota UP, 1979), and James picture of our 'trading truths' with others brings to mind, of course, Putnam's conception of the "division of linguistic labor" (in his "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." In his Mind Language and Reality, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.)

21 "Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other's truth. But beliefs verified concretely by somebody are posts of the whole superstructure." (PR 100 (see also PR 103, MT 91))

22 As James puts it elswhere: "The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification." (PR 103.) James compares 'standard' cases of virtual knowledge with knowledge of unobservables in MT 67.

23 Specifically, the distant past that we never experienced. James' thinks that reference to things from our own past is relatively unproblematic. James thinks that in cases where we have had past perceptual contact with an object, we can always succeed in referring to it in a retrospective way: "We think we see our past feelings directly, and know what they refer to without appeal. At the worst, we can always fix the intention of our present feeling and make it refer to the same reality to which any one of our past feelings may have referred. So we need no 'operating' here." (MT 26)

24 Such a view is shared by early critics of James such as Royce and Bradley and contemporary (sympathetic) expositors of James such as Putnam and Gale.

25 "Caesar had and my statement has, effects; and if these effects in any way run together, a concrete medium is provided for the determinate cognitive relation, which, as pure actio in distans, seemed to float too vaguely and unintelligibly. The real Caesar, for example, wrote a manuscript of which I see a real reprint and say 'the Caesar I mean is the author of that.'" (MT 121)

"The untrammeled flowing of the leading-process, its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verification; but all roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experience somewhere, which somebody's ideas have copied." (PR 103.)

26 See, for instance, the papers in Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth, 1978.