Critical Theory of Intentionality

One feature of human consciousness is that mental states such as beliefs and desires are "about" other things. Fear of spiders is about spiders. My belief in freedom and justice is about freedom and justice. A thirsty person's desire for water is about water. This aboutness is considered by academic cognitive science to be one of the most difficult features of the mind to explain. This is because, along with subjective experience, it is the feature of the mind that seems most resistant to explanation in purely scientific/biological terms. Dubbed intentionality philosophy from the 20th century on has ruminated on this feature of consciousness.

Some philosophers view intentionality as a weapon in the anti-materialistic arsenal. Things in the physical world can indicate others by virtue of the causal relationship between them, so smoke may indicate fire. However, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the smoke is about the fire. The smoke doesn't have any specific representational mental content, at least on a commonsense idea of what mental representation is. This same problem arises in pretty much every other case of a causal connection between physical objects. Tree rings might indicate the age of a tree, but it doesn't quite make sense to say the rings are about the age, because naturally occurring markings on wood aren't representational in the way a mental item like a belief, or desire is.

As a result, philosophers who believe that everything about the mind is in some way physical (materialists about the mind) have moved away from these more basic causal accounts of intentionality which rely merely on the causal connection between the perceptual organs of the human body and the wider world. In their place philosophers have come to entertain teleosemantics, which says that the representational content of thoughts is a function of natural selection. Natural selection has made it advantageous (from the point of view of survival and reproduction) for bees to wiggle their buts in order to indicate the location of nectar to other bees. Similarly, it has made it advantageous for beavers to slap their tales on the ground to alert other beavers to danger.

Clearly, it's appropriate to say the butt wiggling and tale smacking are about nectar and danger respectively. On this basis philosophers have sought to explain aboutness by reference to this kind of selective function. So, one might say that my beliefs and desires are about the world because they perform the advantageous biological function of allowing me to orient myself in my wider environment. The problem here is that there is a normative dimension to aboutness where consciousness can perceive the world correctly, or incorrectly. If I come to racist conclusions on the basis of meeting a few people of other racial backgrounds whom I don't like then clearly, I'm perceiving the world incorrectly, whereas if I had stopped myself from letting my anecdotal encounters color my beliefs about a whole group of people, I would have perceived it correctly.

Teleosemantics can only account for this normative aspect of mental representation by reducing it to selective function. So correct, or incorrect perceptions are going to be a matter of which perceptions ultimately conduce to survival and reproduction for the species. However, the correctness, or incorrectness of everyday perceptions can clearly vary while survival and reproduction continue apace. Despite repression, massacre, exploitation, and oppression of human beings by others on the basis of bigoted and thereby mistaken perceptions held by one group of human beings about others, humanity has continued to survive and reproduce to a level at which we dominate the earth, and our population has reached eight billion.

It seems that reductive accounts of mental representation which try to explain it in terms of mere physical causal connections, or reproductive biological functions leave unexplained either the distinctively mental aspect of representation, or the distinctively normative aspect. Thus, some philosophers will at this point want the materialists to give up the ghost and admit that intentionality can't be physicalized. This would effectively mean admitting that the intentional dimension of mental states points to an aspect of reality fundamentally distinct from the physical, or physiological. More religiously inclined philosophers will insist that this is where even the modern scientific worldview will need to give way to traditional religious notions of the immaterial soul.

However, this immaterialist approach has its own problems. Explaining intentionality while leaving its tight association with embodied activity mysterious is simply a failure to explain it all. The thought that intentionality is a free-floating aspect of mentality wholly distinct from the function it serves for embodied agents and conscious organisms turns it into a very strange and magical entity which we would expect to have no relation to the physical relations between and within bodies. However, intentionality is precisely connected to those physical relations in performing functions that relate embodied agents and conscious organisms perceptually to their environments. This likely wouldn't be an issue for pre-modern philosophers who had only a tenth of the scientific understanding of biology and the behavior of biological and social entities that we have. However, hundreds of years of post-enlightenment science and social theory gives us a picture of mental content which is tightly related to biological functions and the social connections between individuals of social species, in particular in human beings, our ability to socially construct a sense of self related to our bodily engagement with the world. Thus, irreducible intentionality seems very magical and thereby implausible from a modern scientific and social theoretic point of view.

Further, there's an argument to be made that the problems with existing physicalist accounts of intentionality are not the result of it being in principle impossible to physicalize the intentional, but from the social relations that color our concepts of the physical and intentional. The way that the scientific establishment of bourgeois society treats human beings is in a purely descriptive mechanical manner. Social scientists have often insisted that they should be "nomothetic" in approach, meaning that they should seek to describe human relations in terms of general and impersonal regularities, rather than in terms of the normative and subjective concerns of human individuals. This approach to analyzing human beings is connected, as Frankfurt School critical theorists point out, to the "instrumental rationality" of bourgeois society. This refers to Max Weber's contention that the academic, technical, and bureaucratic institutions of modern capitalism are "rational" specifically in the sense that they are geared toward the technocratic regulation of human life. Theorists of the Frankfurt School pointed out that this instrumental rationality arises from the need of capitalist society to commodify (subject to the market) institutions, social relations, cultural activities, and scientific research.

Instrumental rationality treats human beings as mere things, rather than subjects. Thus, when bourgeois cognitive science attempts to analyze the representational nature of thought in materialist terms it does so by implausibly reducing this aspect of human subjectivity (consciousness) to purely biological functions, or mere causal contact between physical objects. Thus, on the one side immaterialist views of consciousness, for instance those connected to mind-body dualism (the view that mind and body are distinct) negate the objectivity of consciousness by disconnecting it from its biosocial context. On the other bourgeois materialist views reduce consciousness to mechanical features of the physical world such as domino like causation and biological functioning, negating the subjectivity of consciousness. A critical theory of intentionality, one that doesn't presuppose the bourgeois approach to understanding the world, can transcend the one-sided aspects of both views.

Intentionality is part of the subjective structure of the human mind. It is constituted by the way the human point of view directs itself to autonomous activity according to social norms and its embodied context. This autonomous and developing consciousness is indeed derived from natural selection as can be seen by the degree to which representational consciousness changes in functionality and complexity across the animal kingdom. However, the complex nature of human animal sociality and physiology combine to produce rational and ethical norms within human societies that differentiate correct from incorrect perception. These norms develop, like the norms of scientific investigation and rational enquiry themselves, according to the social struggles and cultural achievements which constitute human history.

During the Atlantic slave trade the supposed subhuman status of non-white peoples was considered to be perceptually justified by the religious and even scientific ideas of the day. As non-white people and their white allies forced white society to recognize the common humanity between white and non-white peoples, new social norms developed which explained how the racist perceptions of historical western culture were horribly mistaken. This critical theoretic view of intentionality highlights that a full account of consciousness requires both the rejection of mysterious free floating disembodied aspects of the mind as well as recognizing the way human biology interacts with, produces, and reproduces cognitive norms which constitute proper perception from specific points of view. It thereby points to a cognitive science that subverts bourgeois instrumental rationality by unifying the subject and object within consciousness. To fully develop such a cognitive science requires the upending of bourgeois society and its instrumental rationality in favor of a social order of mutually beneficial free association which operates through the substantive rationality of collective human agency.

Sources
Philosophy of Mind: A very Short Introduction, Montero
Philosophy of Mind: The Basics, Kind
Naturalism, Ritchie
The Argument from Consciousness, Moreland
The Argument from Reason, Reppert
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
https://iep.utm.edu/critical-theory-frankfurt-school/
https://redandblackanarchists.com.au/consciousness-and-the-limits-of-bourgois-philosophy/
Uncertainties of Knowledge, Wallerstein