Research

Abstracts

Metalanguage and Metaconsciousness: How Formal Logic Proceeds Towards True Being.

Formal disciplines are genuine theoretical sciences that acquire cognition of the formal essence of the world. How does formal science relate to the actual existence of things? Husserl invokes model-theoretic ideas to answer this question. But appeal to model theory in Husserlian logic is not straightforward. The standard model-theoretic use of semantic ascent to a metalanguage is ruled out by Husserl’s thesis of the self-sufficiency of syntactical approaches to form. I appeal to cutting-edge semantic methods to develop a reading of Husserl’s logic in which the model-theoretic ideas have an internalistic construal that resolves the tension. Husserl’s position is that formal cognition must be supplemented by phenomenological critique. In retrospect, this position is clarified by the observation made here that the latter alone can provide the metalanguage in which metacognitions on the meaning of formal science can be expressed. This sheds light on the relation of formal to transcendental logic: the meaning of formal science is inaccessible from within the formal mode of cognition, since there is no formal metalanguage in which to express reflections on meaning. Thus pure formal science takes its place as a subsidiary stratum of accomplishment in the wider idea of logic as a collective intentionality.

Subjective Character as the Origo a Quo of Phenomenal Consciousness.

This article contributes to the debate on self-consciousness, inner awareness, and subjective character. Philosophers puzzle over whether subjective character has a monadic or a relational form. But the present article deploys formal ontology to show that this is a false dichotomy. From this vantage, a common objection to non-relational views is deflated. The common objection is that one-level, non-relational views are either unexplanatory or smuggle in resources from higher-order and/or relational views. I use an argument from formal ontology to suggest that such objections stem from a category error. The result is that first-order non-relational views need not lapse into higher order or relational views—subjective character can be a structured and intrinsic feature involved in the ontological constitution of mental acts. Ultimately, I emphasize the need to conceive of subjective character as the source of intentionality, and not the result of a prior intentional relation.

Husserl, Model Theory, and Formal Essences.

Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics, his metatheory, and his transcendental phenomenology have a sophisticated and systematic interrelation that remains relevant for questions of ontology today. It is well established that Husserl anticipated many aspects of model theory. I focus on this aspect of Husserl’s philosophy in order to argue that Thomasson’s recent pleonastic reconstruction of Husserl’s approach to essences is incompatible with Husserl’s philosophy as a whole. According to the pleonastic approach, Husserl can appeal to essences in the absence of a positive metaphysical account of their nature. I show, using central results from recent model theory, that the pleonastic approach undermines Husserl’s approach to formalization and categoricity, an effect that will ripple out from Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics into Husserl’s metatheory and transcendental phenomenology. The result is that Husserl cannot appeal to formal essences without metaphysical commitments. However, the very observations Thomasson makes about the nature of eidetic intuition in Husserl lead to a general strategy for responding to the problem. The article thus illustrates that the pleonastic and the model-theoretic routes for making Husserl relevant to present-day ontology are competing approaches, but I conclude that Husserl scholars seeking to set Husserl’s present-day relevance into sharp relief could do worse than to emphasize the model-theoretic nature of Husserl’s enterprise.

A Modal Analysis of Phenomenal Intentionality: Horizonality and Object-Directed Phenomenal Presence.

In this article I argue that phenomenal intentionality fundamentally consists in a horizonality structure, rather than in a relation to a representational content or the determination of accuracy conditions. I provide a distinctive modal model of intentionality that conceives of phenomenal intentionality as the enjoyment of a plus ultra that points beyond what is actual. The directedness of intentionality on the world, thus, consists in “pointing ahead” to possibilities. The principal difficulty for the modal model is logical: the most obvious way of implementing such a structure results in an analogue of Russell’s paradox. However, this paradox can be avoided by fine-tuning the modal logic deployed in this setting. This way of fine-tuning the logic ultimately amounts to intuitive benefits. For, it captures the intensional character of intentionality, since the way that our mental states refer to things is conception-dependent. Moreover, the way I interpret the modal model leads to a conception of intentionality as a feature of dynamic, diachronic patterns in the way that mental acts subjectively appear, rather than as a synchronic property. We ought to think of intentionality as fundamentally a temporal, subjective determination. In a generalization on Sellars’ approach to concepts, I hold that phenomenally intentional mental presentations involve modal laws and are inconceivable without them.

How to Be an Adverbialist About Phenomenal Intentionality.

Kriegel has revived adverbialism as a theory of consciousness. But recent attacks have shed doubt on the viability of the theory. To save adverbialism, I propose that the adverbialist take a stance on the nature of adverbial modification. On one leading theory, adverbial modification turns on the instantiation by a substance of a psychological type. But the resulting formulation of adverbialism turns out to be a mere notational variant on the relationalist approaches against which Kriegel dialectically situates adverbialism. By contrast, I argue that the way to be an adverbialist is to adopt an event ontology, emphasizing the active contribution of the mind to the phenomenology of experience. My close examination of the semantics of adverbial modification throws this metaphysical distinction into sharp relief. The event-based semantics overcomes recent objections in a way superior to the methods that would have been obviously available in the absence of a sophisticated semantics.

What Is it Like to Think about Oneself? De Se Thought and Phenomenal Intentionality.

In this article, I use concepts from the phenomenological tradition to extend Campbell’s theory of the perceptual origin of demonstrative concepts to the problem of de se thought, or thought about oneself as oneself. I argue that the phenomenological concept of pre-reflective self-consciousness and the field of awareness permit an explanation of de se thoughts in terms of the ways that subjects consciously attend to themselves. Therefore, a strong form of first-person persectivalness, in which the subject is capable of self-directed control of the focus of conscious attention, is required for de se thought. But no constraints on the semantic content of such thoughts are required. Hence the theory is able to respond to recent skepticism about the importance of the first-person perspective for philosophy.

Epistemic Logic, Monotonicity, and the Halbach-Welch Rapprochement Strategy.

Predicate approaches to modality have been a topic of increased interest in recent intensional logic. Halbach and Welch (Mind 118(469):71–100, 2009) have proposed a new formal technique to reduce the necessity predicate to an operator, demonstrating that predicate and operator methods are ultimately compatible. This article concerns the question of whether Halbach and Welch’s approach can provide a uniform formal treatment for intensionality. I show that the monotonicity constraint in Halbach and Welch’s proof for necessity fails for almost all possible-worlds theories of knowledge. The nonmonotonicity results demonstrate that the most obvious way of emulating Halbach and Welch’s rapprochement of the predicate and operator fails in the epistemic setting.