A Merleau-Pontyian critique of Husserl's and Searle's representationalist accounts of action

Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society

Volumn 100, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 287-302

  Dreyfus, Hubert L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 60949385425     PISSN: 00667374     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00017.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (15)

1. For a clear statement of Husserl's representationalist account of intentionality, see Dagfinn Føllesdal's classic paper, 'Husserl's Notion of Noema', in Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science, Hubert L. Dreyfus, editor (Cambridge Ma. : MIT Press. First edition out of print; second edition forthcoming).
2. John R. Searle, 'Neither Phenomenological Description nor Rational Reconstruction', La Revue Internationale de Philosophie, to appear in 2001.
3. Kevin Mulligan, 'Perception', in B. Smith and D. Woodruff Smith (eds. ) The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), footnote 54. Mulligan cites Hua XXVIII,A §§13-16.
4. John R. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90. Searle notes on page 5 that 'intending and intentions are just one form of Intentionality among others. . . [so]. . . to keep the distinction clear I will capitalize the technical sense of "Intentional" and "Intentionality". '
5. John R. Searle, 'The Limits of Phenomenology', Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume Two (Cambridge Ma. : MIT Press, 2000).
6. John R. Searle, Intentionality, 123.
7. John R. Searle, 'Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science', Behavior and Brain Sciences (1990) 13:4, 603, 604.
8. John R. Searle, 'Response: The Background of Intentionality and Action', in John Searle and his Critics, 293.
9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Humanities Press, 1979), 139. (My italics. )
10. John Searle and his Critics, 293.
11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 103. It's important to note that Merleau-Ponty uses 'magical' in two ways. In discussing how the mind can control movement he says, 'We still need to understand by what magical process the representation of a movement causes precisely that movement to be made by the body. ' And he adds, 'The problem can be solved provided that we cease to draw a distinction between the body as a mechanism in itself and consciousness as being for itself'. (139) Here he is using the term magical pejoratively to mean that a causal claim is based on an ontology that makes it impossible to account for how it could be implemented. In the case just cited, however, Merleau-Ponty uses 'magical' to mean that there is no currently conceivable way to cash out the causal claim that absorbed coping is directed towards a goal without representing that goal.
12. Walter J. Freeman, 'The Physiology of Perception', Scientific American, 264: 78-85, 1991a
13. and W. J. Freeman and K. A. Grajski, 'Relation of olfactory EEG to behavior: Factor Analysis', Behavioral Neuroscience, 101: 766-777, 1987.
14. For the detailed argument, see Chapter 5 of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge Ma. : MIT Press, 1991).
15. I would like to thank Jerry Wakefield for first formulating Merleau-Ponty's account of action in terms of tension reduction. See our paper, 'Intentionality and the Phenomenology of Action', in John Searle and his Critics, E. Lepore & R. Van Gulick, eds. , (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), and Mark Wrathall for his helpful comments. I also want especially to thank Sean Kelly, whose criticisms and suggestions in response to many drafts of this paper have transformed and improved it so much that it now barely resembles the original version.