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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME If events can be causally related only if there are laws that cover them, then the absence of psychological or psychophysical laws raises doubts about mental events’ causal efficacy An explosion of interest in mental causation as the result of discussion of the Anomalism Problem in turn led to two other problems of mental causation The Exclusion Problem, owing to the work of Jaegwon Kim, questions how mental events can be causally efficacious given the causal closure of the physical domain Given causal closure, every event or action has a fully sufficient physical cause that “excludes” other causes, such as mental causes, in bringing about the action The other problem arises from worries about externalism According to content externalism (see the extensive discussion in Chapter 10), representational states are not solely “in the head.” Rather, their content depends on social and environmental factors But if this is true, then unless we are prepared to accept some kind of spooky action at a distance, mental contents not look like they play a role in causing behavior As Yoo discusses, the last decades of the 20th century witnessed careful attention to all three of these problems In Chapter Eight, Michelle Montague takes up the notion of intentionality, i.e., the respect in which our mental states are object-directed Her discussion focuses on Franz Brentano, a philosopher whose work has been enormously influential in 20th- and 21st-century theorizing about the topic Brentano’s work aimed to establish two central claims about intentionality First, he claimed that intentionality is the “mark” of the mental, i.e., that all and only mental states are intentional Second, he claimed that consciousness and intentionality are constitutively related to one another While much of 20th-century discussion of intentionality was preoccupied with what’s often referred to as the problem of intentionality – the problem of how we can think about nonexistent objects – Montague argues that a focus on this problem obscures our understanding of Brentano’s position and leads to misinterpretations of it Montague begins with a detailed explication of Brentano’s theories of consciousness and intentionality in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, published in 1874 She then discusses the shift in his views evident in the publication of the 1911 Appendix to this work As Montague shows, Brentano moves from thinking about intentionality as involving reference to something as object to thinking of it explicitly as a relation Her discussion then moves to other philosophers who were influenced by Brentano, and she shows the impact that his work has had on subsequent philosophical discussions of intentionality She starts with Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, two students of Brentano’s who attempted to develop and improve upon their teacher’s original theory She then turns to Roderick Chisholm, the philosopher largely responsible for generating interest in Brentano’s work within contemporary analytic philosophy Chisholm’s focus on our apparent ability to think about nonexistent objects set the terms for much of the subsequent discussion about intentionality in the second half of the 20th century Montague argues that much of that discussion – and in particular, the separatist assumptions that treated intentionality and consciousness in isolation 15
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