Intentionality Without Representations

Abstract

Most commentators would agree that Heidegger is what one might call an "antirepresentationalist" about intentional states, including perception.1 This is a view which Carleton B. Christensen recently has attacked.2 The attack centers on the fact that Heidegger's account of intentionality incorporates perception, which is tacitly assumed to be representational in character. In this essay, I show this assumption to be unwarranted. Heidegger's phenomenology of perception is remarkable for the precise reason that it denies that perception can, in general, be understood as a representational state in any straightforward sense. But because the terms "representation" and "representational" are notoriously obscure,3 very little is actually resolved about Heidegger's views by looking for instances where he uses those terms.4 And because it is not clear from the terms themselves what exactly is meant in calling someone a "representationalist," we will have profited very little if the conclusion of the analysis goes no further than deciding whether we should label Heidegger (or any philosopher, for that matter) a "representationalist" or "anti-representationalist." Instead of embroiling myself in such name-calling, I hope to use this essay to get clearer about the matter at hand-namely, the right way to conceive of the relationship between acting agents and the world in which they live. I will thus begin by addressing briefly one sort of consideration that has led philosophers to think of human intentionality as mediated by mental representations. I will then address Heidegger's phenomenology of perception in light of some common views of representation, and show that Heidegger's phenomenology supports a view on which the fundamental forms of intentional comportment are, at least for the most part, unmediated by mental representations. To think of perception as representational is, according to Heidegger, the result of erroneously reading the structure of those activities that are representationally mediated into the structure of human comportment as a whole. Intentionality and Representations At issue in representationalist theories of intentional states is the proper way to understand human activity. One way to account for the difference between the way we humans relate to the world around us and the way animals, plants, or inanimate objects relate to their" worlds" is to say that human receptivity to and interaction with the world has a meaningful content, while non-humans' responses to the world are purely causal in nature.5 Human comportment, in contrast to non-intentional forms of behavior, seems to be mediated in such a manner that we relate to things and the world around us in ways both narrower and broader than what could be expected given a purely causal interaction. For instance, causal relations hold regardless of the description applied to the relata. But intentional relations are "narrower" than causal relations in the sense that one can relate intentionally to things under one description but not under another. And in other cases, it is possible to relate intentionally to more than is given causally. For instance, I can have beliefs about things which not only are not present, but in fact do not even exist. Or I can relate to something as more than is, strictly speaking, present-as when I see something as a member of a class or type. In short, what distinguishes human intentional states from a non-intentional mode of reacting to the world is that they have a content-a content which is in principle independent of the state of the environing world, causally defined. It is in explaining the contentfulness of intentional states and actions that mental representations are typically introduced. Our receptivity to the world has a determinate content, according to representationalist accounts, because it is mediated or constituted by mental representations, in virtue of which an experience can refer to something outside of the experiencing agent. …