Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarsian Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of Intentionality

Abstract

In a recent article Sachs (2014a) suggests that the concept of somatic intentionality is the key to understanding how the conceptual order is externally constrained by something outside itself which is nonetheless fully intentional in nature. Sachs claims that his proposal fares better than Sellars’ view on the issue of how our experience can so much as be about objective reality. In this paper, I shall argue that this is not the case because Sellars’ view is in crucial respects misdescribed. Sachs suggests that Sellars’ view is problematic because 1) conceptual intentionality cannot objectively constrain the conceptual order due to its essential discursive form, and 2) a non-intentional consciousness cannot provide an objective worldly constraint on conceptual intentionality because it is not world-directed. However neither of these points succeeds in capturing Sellars’ actual position. Further I will suggest the deepest problem which phenomenological views of a Merleau-Pontyan stripe face in their attempt to account for the radically nondiscursive and world-involving character of perceptual experience while staying firmly within the sphere of intentionality is that they do not properly distinguish between two different kinds of objective/external constraint within consciousness, namely between what I shall call ‘i-p’ (internal-phenomenological)-constraint and ‘ep’ (extra-phenomenological)-constraint.