Phenomenology for the Twenty-First Century

The Integrity of Intentionality: Sketch for a Phenomenological Study Matthew Ratcliffe Introduction The aim of this chapter is to formulate a phenomenological question that I think is seldom considered, or at least seldom explicitly stated, and then to sketch the beginnings of an answer. That question is, ‘what constitutes the sense that one is in one kind of intentional state, rather than another?’ 1 In other words, in virtue of what do we experience ourselves as currently perceiving that p rather than, say, currently imagining or remembering that p? My discussion is exclusively phenomenological in emphasis. I am concerned with the experience of being in an intentional state, regardless of whether or not the relevant experience is taken to be necessary or sufficient for actually being in such a state. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus, for the most part, upon the categories ‘perceiving’, ‘imagining’, ‘remembering’, and ‘thinking’. These four modalities of intentionality are to be construed broadly; they encompass numerous subcategories that will need to be distinguished by a comprehensive phenomenological analysis. In the course of addressing my question, I also seek to indicate how a productive phenomenological research programme can be pursued by engaging with first-person accounts of anomalous experiences, such as those that arise in the context of psychiatric illness. The principal example I will consider here is ‘thought insertion’: somehow experiencing one’s own thoughts as someone else’s. I will also address the nature of certain so-called ‘hallucinations’. One might wonder whether and how an enquiry that relies on interpreting the accounts of experience offered by other people still resembles classical, first-person 1 phenomenology, as practiced by Edmund Husserl and others. Despite adopting what might be termed a ‘hermeneutic, second-person phenomenological approach’, I retain a broad stance or attitude towards the study of experience, which preserves what I take to be the essence of the ‘phenomenological reduction’. I construe the reduction in a liberal way, as something common to phenomenology as practiced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and various others, rather than as something specific to Husserlian phenomenology.2 Whenever we perceive that p, remember that q, think that r, or imagine that s, such attitudes arise in the context of an already given relationship with the world, something that is easily overlooked, even when one is reflecting philosophically upon the nature of experience. Performing the phenomenological reduction involves coming to recognize the ordinarily presupposed sense of belonging to a shared world as itself a phenomenological achievement, and striving to study its structure. As will become clear towards the end of this chapter, the question that I address here ultimately concerns this sense of belonging to a world, and cannot be adequately addressed if intentional states are conceived of in isolation from a wider phenomenological context. Indeed, the question provides us with a way into the phenomenological reduction; clarifying and then attempting to answer it involves a shift in perspective, whereby one comes to explicitly acknowledge phenomenological achievements that are more usually presupposed. In the next section, I will formulate my question as clearly as I can. Then I will sketch a potentially fruitful way of responding to it, one that opens up a substantial subject matter for future phenomenological enquiry. The Sense of Being in a Type of Intentional State I am currently looking out of the window at what appears to be a bird. I might well be mistaken about what I am looking at. Indeed, I have a degree of doubt concerning what I see. However, I have no doubt that I am seeing something or other. Even though I am not sure 2 what I see, the status of my experience as one of seeing is not in question. Furthermore, I do not have to explicitly infer that I am seeing; I have a pre-reflective, immediate, unproblematic appreciation of my experience as one of seeing. To be less specific, I take myself to be perceiving something, rather than—say—remembering it. Amongst other things, the experience of perceiving something through one or another modality involves a sense of its being ‘here’, ‘now’. In cases of externally directed perception, there is also a sense of its being distinct from and usually in close proximity to oneself.3 Let us focus on this prereflective sense that something or other is both distinct from me and also ‘here’, ‘now’. Call it the sense of ‘presence’. This may not be sufficient for a sense of perceiving, and it is certainly not sufficient for the sense of perceiving something through one sensory modality rather than another, but presence is at least necessary for the unproblematic appreciation that one is in a perceptual state in relation to p. Granted, one might have an experience of p that is somehow ambiguous in this respect, and then infer from other sources of evidence that one perceives p rather than imagines it. However, we only resort to such inferences in cases of unusual experience, which lack something that more usually distinguishes an experience as one of perceiving. An analogous point applies to other kinds of intentional state. In remembering rather than imagining or perceiving that p, we usually have an immediate, unproblematic sense of p as past, rather than present, imagined, or anticipated. And, in the case of imagining, there is a sense of p as neither past nor present. In some cases of imagining, p may be anticipated. In others, one recognizes p as counterfactual or even impossible.4 Our pre-reflective ability to distinguish the various kinds of intentionality thus implies a grasp of distinctions such as the following: ‘is here/ is elsewhere’; ‘was here/was never here’, ‘never existed/has ceased to exist/does exist/will exist’, ‘might have existed/might exist now/might come to exist’. Were we wholly unreceptive to such distinctions, we would be unable to distinguish the various 3 types of intentional state from each other. More specifically, if our experience were unreceptive to these distinctions, we would be unable to experience ourselves as in one intentional state and not another. Given that this is not the case, it is legitimate to ask what the relevant aspect of experience consists of: in virtue of what do I experience myself as perceiving, remembering, imagining, or anticipating that p, as opposed to encountering p in a different or less determinate way? 5 To make the question clearer, a distinction can be drawn between (a) actually being in an intentional state of type x, (b) having an experience that is characteristic of being in an intentional state of type x, and (c) having the sense that one is in an intentional state of type x. It is plausible to maintain that we can be mistaken about the kind of intentional state we are in. On one interpretation of dreaming, we take ourselves to perceive that p and/or to believe that p, when we in fact dream that p or imagine that p. Certain kinds of emotional state provide less contentious examples. It is arguably commonplace to take oneself to be in an emotional state of type x towards p when one is actually in an emotional state of type y. I might take myself to be happy about B’s achieving p when I am actually resentful, or I might think that I am not angry with C and later come to realize that I was.6 How should such examples be interpreted? One option is to adopt a wholly nonphenomenological account of what it is to actually be in an intentional state of one or another type. On such an account, I could have an experience that is indistinguishable from one of perceiving, but not be in a perceptual state at all, or, conversely, be in a perceptual state without experiencing it as such. Thus (a) and (b) come apart. A complete divorce between intentional states and associated experiences would be contentious, raising the sceptical worry that our experiences of perceiving, remembering, or imagining that p do not give us grounds for thinking that we really are perceiving, remembering, or imagining that p (a concern that would apply equally to one’s experience of thinking sceptical thoughts). 4 However, one could also allow for (b) in the absence of (a) by making the weaker claim that the phenomenology of perception is at least not sufficient for perception, given that a genuinely perceptual experience also requires relating to an object in an appropriate way. Alternatively, one could maintain that taking oneself to perceive p in the absence of p does not in fact involve having much the same experience but in the absence of an appropriate object. According to certain ‘disjunctivist’ approaches, the phenomenology of perception is partly or wholly constituted by actual properties of mind-independent objects that perception gives us access to. Hence, if one did not relate to an object in the required way, one could not have the relevant experience.7 Nevertheless, this would not prohibit one’s being mistaken about the kind of experience one is having. Such a scenario would involve (c) in the absence of (a) or (b). In what follows, I want to bracket, to set aside, all non-phenomenological concerns, in order to focus exclusively upon the nature of (c). Even the disjunctivist can admit the possibility of having the same sense of perceiving a table both when table p is present and when table p is absent, so long as it is granted that other aspects of the experiences differ. Both experiences incorporate the sense of encountering something in a way that differs from imagining, remembering, and so forth. We can address the question of what this sense consists of, and talk in a non-committal way of ‘perceptual experience’, while remaining agnostic over what does and does not count as a genuine case of perception, and over whether veridical experiences necessarily differ in character from non-veridical ones. So I have nothing to say about the hypothetical case where one has an unproblematic sense of encountering p as present even though p is not actually present. But I do want to consider another kind of case. Here, one does not have an unwavering, although mistaken, sense of being in intentional state x. Rather, there is an experienced lack of clarity over the nature of one’s intentional state. Again, emotions provide us with a range of potential 5 examples. It is not uncommon for people to say ‘I don’t know how I feel about p’ or ‘I don’t know what I’m feeling right now’. Sometimes, the apparent indeterminacy can be explained away in terms of uncertainty over what one should feel in a given situation, rather than what one does feel. In others, it may turn out to be a matter of language: the person struggles to describe her feelings. Other cases may involve ambivalence: two or more conflicting emotions are focused upon a common object. Nevertheless, it is plausible to maintain that there are at least some instances where a person has an emotional experience but is unsure what kind of emotional experience it is, whether she is in state x or state y with respect to p. Have I stopped caring about p, or am I just really tired? Am I angry with p, or upset about something else? Less common experiences of uncertainty regarding intentional state types involve wondering, ‘am I dreaming this?’; ‘did that just happen?’ or ‘am I remembering something that actually happened?’ If it makes sense to ask, ‘am I having an experience of a given type?’, then a distinction can be drawn between having a type of experience and having the sense that one is having a type of experience. I do not mean to suggest that the two can be neatly separated. That would be unlikely. Indeed, on some accounts of perception, it would be impossible. For instance, perception has been conceived of as an exploratory process that involves appearances unfolding in a structured fashion, in accord with one’s movements and associated expectations.8 One would not act in ways characteristic of a perceptual process unless one took oneself to be perceiving, and how one acts shapes what one then experiences. Hence, if a sense of perceiving were absent from the experience, that experience could not be preserved intact. The point applies equally to other modalities of intentionality. So, for the sake of argument, let us grant that the sense of having a certain type of experience is integral to that experience, rather than separable from it. Thus, one could not have two identical perceptual experiences, one associated with a sense of perceiving and the other with a sense 6 of imagining. Even so, there is more to the experience of a given type of intentional state than having the sense that one is in a state of that type. So we can continue to address our question, by asking what this specific aspect of the experience consists of. The answer, I will now suggest, is non-obvious. Perceiving Thoughts On one account, my question has a very simple answer: types of experience are distinguished from each other by their characteristic contents. Indeed, one could insist that experiences of all kinds are ‘transparent’: in reflecting upon any given experience, the only thing that can be discerned is its content. For instance, there is nothing more to an experience of seeing than what is seen.9 On such a view, the sense of perceiving something, and doing so visually, would amount to no more than the having of an experience with a certain, characteristic type of content, one that is specific to visual perception and distinguishes it from, for instance, visual imagination and non-visual perception. The same goes for all other modalities of intentional experience: broad categories such as imagining, remembering, and thinking are distinguished from each other by their characteristic contents. If that is right, then the question, as I have set it up, is unnecessarily complicated. There is nothing more to an experience of type x than its content, and there is nothing more to the sense of having an experience of type x than a x-specific experiential content. So a ‘type of experience’ and the ‘sense of having an experience of that type’ are not, after all, distinguishable. Once we have dealt with the former, there is nothing left to say about the latter. On such a view, one could still accept the possibility of a case where content p, which is constitutive of a type x experience, is associated with the mistaken judgment or belief that one is having a type y experience, so long as the relevant cognition -whatever it consists of- is construed as wholly 7 distinct from the relevant perceptual phenomenology, including any ‘sense of perceiving’ that might be integral to that phenomenology. Perhaps this is one reason why my question is seldom formulated. But, as I will now show, it is not a good reason. It should instead be acknowledged that perceptual experience is much more complicated than some philosophers take it to be. Let us suppose that experiences are exhausted by their contents. That being the case, it is difficult to specify what aspect of the content is altered when a person complains that everything looks unreal or dream-like, that a dream seemed especially real, or that a memory feels more like re-living an event in the present than recalling something past. This is especially so in certain cases of non-localized phenomenological changes. For instance, a person might report that everything she perceives looks exactly as it did before and yet—at the same time—profoundly different, strange, and unreal.10 So, if erosion of the sense that one is in an intentional state of type x is to be accounted for in terms of x-specific contents, it should at least be acknowledged that the relevant contents are elusive. However, I propose that certain kinds of anomalous experience are more obviously incompatible with a content-based approach. There can be a double dissociation between the sense of being in intentional state x and one’s experiencing the characteristic content of x; either can arise without the other. This is not to insist that experiential content can persist undisturbed, in isolation from the sense that one is in a kind of intentional state. As I have already acknowledged, it is unlikely that the two are neatly separable. But this admission is compatible with the view that the sense of being in an intentional state of type x is not wholly dictated by content. My position is as follows: one can have the sense of being in an intentional state of type x (or at least an intentional state that more closely resembles x than it does any other familiar state type of intentional state) while experiencing its content as more akin to that of a type y intentional state. A strange, chimerical experience thus arises, one that 8 might be interpreted and described in a range of different ways. To illustrate this, I will offer a detailed example: the phenomenon of thought insertion. Thought insertion involves experiencing thoughts while at the same time not experiencing them as one’s own.11 It is most often associated with schizophrenia, but is not exclusive to that diagnosis. Philosophical descriptions of the phenomenon are generally unclear over what exactly is experienced as inserted. On one interpretation, thought contents are experienced as having arisen from elsewhere, from someone else’s act of thinking. On another interpretation, the act of thinking is itself experienced, but both thinking and thought content are attributed to another agency. Graham adopts the latter view: ‘In thought insertion, thinking is experienced as an activity. However, although episodes of thinking are experienced as occurring in oneself (as subject), the activity itself is experienced as if conducted or engaged in by someone else (as the agent)’.12 But I think the content view is more plausible. We can make a case for it by starting from the frequently noted affinity between thought insertion and auditory verbal hallucination.13 On the misattributed-act-ofthinking view, the alleged similarity or even identity between the two is puzzling. While auditory verbal hallucination (hereafter, AVH) is generally claimed to involve confusing one’s own inner state (usually, one’s own ‘inner speech’) with externally directed perception, and thus confusing one type of intentionality with another, thought insertion (hereafter, TI) involves correctly identifying a type of intentional state but wrongly attributing a state of that type to another person rather than oneself. Now consider the content view. Suppose that the contents of our thoughts can be distinguished, at least to some degree, from the acts of thinking in the context of which they arise, in the way that seeing might be distinguished from what is seen, and an act of imagining from what is imagined. The phenomenology of ‘thinking’ therefore needs to be construed broadly, as encompassing more than just effortful, goal-directed thinking; TI is 9 equally distinguishable from random and sometimes incongruous thoughts popping into one’s mind, songs that one can’t get out of one’s head, and a range of other seemingly involuntary, effortless experiences of thought. On the content view, TI involves experiencing thought content as present but also as originating from outside one’s psychological boundaries. In other words, the experience differs from that of thinking, insofar as it incorporates something that is specific to, and also integral to, the phenomenology of externally-directed perception: a sense of encountering something distinct from oneself as present. Hence TI could just as well be construed in terms of having a (not necessarily unproblematic, unambiguous) sense of being in a perceptual state, but one with an uncharacteristic content. The connection between TI and AVH thus becomes clear: both involve a perception-like experience of thought content. It might be objected that AVH is unlike thought insertion, as it is specifically auditory in nature while inserted thoughts are not. However, AVHs are widely acknowledged to be heterogeneous in numerous respects, including their auditory character.14 Some so-called ‘auditory’ hallucinations are not so obviously auditory in nature. This is clear from firstperson descriptions of AVHs that explicitly distinguish between two different kinds of experience: auditory experiences, which are more often taken to originate in the external environment, and perception-like experiences of thought content that more often seem to originate within one’s bodily boundaries: ‘The voice inside my head sounds nothing like a real person talking to me, but rather like another person’s thoughts in my head. The other voices are to me indistinguishable from actual people talking in the same room as me.’ (#1) ‘I feel like I have other people’s thoughts in my head and also hear other people having conversations outside my head.’(#3) 10 ‘There are two kinds—one indistinguishable from actual voices or noises (I hear them like physical noises, and only the point of origin (for voices) or checking with other people who are present (for sounds) lets me know when they aren’t actually real. The second is like hearing someone else’s voice in my head, generally saying something that doesn’t “sound” like my own thoughts or interior monologue.’ (#17)15 Non-auditory cases can involve an equally pronounced sense of the relevant content as something presently occurring and non-self-produced, even when the ‘voice’ is not experienced as emanating from a source outside of one’s own body.16 So, although a simple identification between AVH and TI is not plausible, it is, I think, plausible to maintain that some reports of TI and some reports of AVH amount to different descriptions of the same phenomenon: an anomalous, quasi-perceptual experience of thought content. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by first-person accounts that describe the same experience in terms of both ‘voices’ and ‘inserted thoughts’, or blur the boundary between the two types of description: ‘The voice inside my head sounds nothing like a real person talking to me, but rather like another person’s thoughts in my head.’ (#1) ‘The voices inside my head are like thoughts, only they are not my own…’ (#2) ‘..there are things I “hear” that aren’t as much like truly hearing a voice or voices. [….] Instead, these are more like telepathy or hearing without hearing exactly, but knowing that content has been exchanged and feeling that happen.’ (#7) ‘…it definitely sounds like it is from inside my head. It’s at some kind of border between thinking and hearing.’ (#18) 11 ‘The voice is not strictly audible, does not turn my head toward a speaker, there is no real speaker, just a thinker who can make their thought known to me. I hear but I don’t hear with my ears.’ (#30) ‘The best way to describe it is telepathy, in different grades of vividness, from bearable to intrusive.’ (#33) Hence the same kind of anomalous experience can be described in terms of an audition-like, perceptual experience with an unfamiliar content and/or a thought content that is experienced in an odd, perception-like way. Of course, there is the risk of misinterpretation here. This is inevitable when engaging with and seeking to make sense of first-person testimonies, especially those relating to unusual and hard-to-describe experiences. Nevertheless, all I need is a very weak claim: at least some of those experiences that are described in terms of either TI and/or AVH involve experiencing something thought-like in content, but in a perception-like way. If even that much is right, the simple view that we identify the type of experience we are having solely in virtue of its characteristic content is to be rejected. The sense of being in an intentional state that is similar to or indistinguishable from one of type x can be associated with a content that either resembles or is indistinguishable from that of a y-type intentional state, resulting in an intrinsically peculiar experience.17 Where a content is more usually associated with y, it may well be altered to some degree by the sense that one is in an intentional state of type x, rather than y. Nevertheless, this sense of being in an x-type state does not fully constrain the content, which can remain more y-like than x-like. So we can, after all, distinguish the sense of being in an intentional state from a wider-ranging experience of being in an intentional state of that kind, where the latter also includes characteristic content.18 By reflecting upon certain anomalous experiences, such as TI, we can thus come to better appreciate that there is indeed a 12 phenomenological question to be addressed here, one that does not have an obvious answer. In the remainder of this chapter, I will sketch what I think the right answer should look like. Intentionality and Anticipation How do we account for the sense of being in an intentional state of type x, despite experiencing a y-like content? The answer, I propose, is that the experience of being in a given intentional state with respect to p involves experiencing certain characteristic types of possibility. To develop this response, I think it is also helpful to consider certain kinds of ‘hallucination’, which are described as like perceiving p and yet—at the same time—quite different from perceiving p. For example, in his first-person account of mescaline-induced hallucinations, the phenomenologist and psychiatrist J. H. van den Berg describes how, in one sense, he saw and heard nothing in addition to what he would more usually have seen or heard.19 But, even so, he really was hallucinating. It was, he says, ‘as if the hallucination offered itself in the guise of perception so that it could be communicable’, adding that such hallucinations have a kind of intentionality that ‘distinguishes them from perception and also from imagination’. His account is consistent with a wider literature on delusions and hallucinations, which draws attention to a kind of ‘double-bookkeeping’, whereby the patient speaks and acts in ways that are—to some degree—consistent with believing or perceiving that p but also speaks and acts in other ways that distinguish her attitude towards p from her ordinary perceptions and beliefs.20 In my view, the most plausible way to make sense of such tensions involves appealing to what Husserl calls the horizonal structure of experience.21 In brief, the claim is that our experience of a given entity incorporates a sense of the characteristic possibilities that it offers.22 For instance, my perceptual experience of a toothbrush includes the possibility of picking it up and turning it around to reveal its hidden side, whereas my experience of a cloud 13 does not. Now suppose that one’s perception of an entity, such as a chair, were associated with a horizonal structure more usually integral to the experience of a different entity or kind of entity, such as a hungry tiger. In one sense, the content of the experience would be unchanged. One would see a brown entity with four legs, a flat, horizontal surface, and a vertical back. At the same time, one would have the ‘feeling’ of encountering something different. The degree of tension becomes clearer if we extent Husserl’s account (in a way I think is phenomenologically accurate) by maintaining that that the horizonal structure of an entity includes not only prescriptions for manipulating it in order to further advance a perceptual process, but also various kinds of significant, practical possibility. Thus, as one encounters the chair, one does not see something for sitting on, but something that offers threat, something to flee from, something menacing. It is debatable whether an anomalous horizonal structure could be sufficiently specific to constitute the sense that what one faces is a tiger. Perhaps some further imaginative/cognitive work is needed in order to arrive at such a narrow interpretation. Nevertheless, one could at least get to the point of somehow experiencing both a chair and, at the same time, feeling that one is faced with an animate, predatory, unpredictable, and imminent threat. 23 Now, the difference between a mundane case of perceiving p and a horizonal hallucination of p does not involve a sense of being in two different kinds of intentional state with respect to p. Even in the hallucinatory case, one has the sense of being in a perceptual state, or at least a state that is more like a perceptual experience than any other familiar kind of experience. There are various possible scenarios to consider though. In the kind of case just described, one experiences the possibilities associated with p, but when one encounters q. One therefore has at least a partial sense of being in the presence of p, even though one can still see q. Alternatively, one might experience the possibilities associated with p, but without superimposing them on q. So, rather than seeing a chair as a tiger or somehow tiger-like, one 14 would have a sense of p as present, while at the same time experiencing the scene as devoid of anything with the same physical properties as p. We can also distinguish between hallucinatory experiences of types and tokens: whether one senses the possibilities associated with a particular entity or agent, or those associated with a certain type of entity. Different degrees and kinds of ‘horizonal hallucination’, which depend on the extent to which an experience involves the full spectrum of possibilities associated with p, are also to be distinguished. For instance, one might sense the presence of a particular person, but without the inclusion of significant possibilities such as actually addressing her or turning round to see her. Where the relevant horizonal structure is incomplete, the experience could take various different forms, depending on which kinds of possibility are present and which absent.24 However, in addition to all of this, there is another kind of case to consider: one does not experiences the possibilities associated with entity p in the absence of p, or in relation to q rather than p. Rather, in virtue of the possibilities that are associated with p, one takes oneself to be in intentional state x towards p, rather than intentional state y. But how should we conceive of these ‘experienced possibilities’? One option would be to maintain that they are integral to entities as experienced and thus enrich experiential content. So there is, after all, no more to the sense of having a given kind of experience than its characteristic content. The problem is just that we have under-stated the scope of content and failed to recognize the possibility of tension between two different types, or perhaps ‘aspects’, of content. It could be added that, when we set aside experiential content and seek out a wholly separate experience of the possible, there is nothing to be found—experience remains transparent. This way of thinking presupposes, from the outset, a separation between intentional attitude and content. We first split them off from each other. Then we describe experienced content. Then we set aside anything that is attributable to content, ask what is left of the attitude, and don’t find anything. However, the ‘sense of the possible’ that I am 15 appealing to here does not respect an attitude/content distinction. As Husserl observes, the possibilities we experience as integral to entities in the surrounding environment are at the same time felt as bodily dispositions, as phenomenologically accessible movement tendencies of various different kinds.25 When an entity says ‘turn me around to reveal my hidden side’; we feel drawn towards it in a specific way. It is not that we experience the possibilities and also the bodily dispositions; they are one and the same thing. The relevant dispositions are not themselves objects of experience, at least not ordinarily. It is through certain bodily dispositions that we experience possibilities as inherent in things.26 And my suggestion is that characteristic configurations of possibility contribute not only to what one experiences but also to the way in which one experiences it, the sense of what kind of intentional state one is in. To be more specific, different kinds of intentionality are associated with different anticipatory profiles. Again, it is informative to draw upon Husserl, who, in Experience and Judgment, maintains that all intentionality presupposes a more primitive sense of rootedness in a world, something comprised—at least in part—of a distinctive style of anticipation. One ordinarily anticipates things in the mode of habitual confidence or certainty, and they generally unfold in line with one’s expectations, resulting in a largely coherent, dynamic interplay between anticipation and fulfilment. This is not to suggest that we anticipate exactly what we will see next or exactly what the immediate outcome of an action will be. Rather, we have a variably determinate sense of what is coming next, which becomes progressively clearer as it unfolds in line with anticipation. For example, ‘the other side of this cup will be smooth and have one or another colour’ is consistent with then finding that ‘the other side of this cup is smooth and red’. Husserl maintains that it is only in the context of a habitual, practical, bodily sense of confidence or certainty that doubt and uncertainty become intelligible. Only against a backdrop of more general confidence can something appear 16 potentially or actually anomalous—one might be uncertain over what it is, or harbour more concrete doubts over whether it is p or q. In addition, having an explicit sense that ‘p is the case’ involves the restoration of certainty, and its intelligibility therefore depends upon the possibility of doubt. The same applies to negation, to any sense we might have that ‘p is not the case’. Hence the modalities of belief (uncertainty, doubt, negation and affirmation), and thus the attitude of belief itself, presuppose a certain kind of anticipatory profile, a sense of confidence or certainty that is more primitive than any instance of believing that p. I think it is right to maintain that the anticipatory structure of experience is essential to its integrity. Nevertheless, the relevant structure should not be thought of in terms of a singular, all-enveloping style of habitual, confident anticipation. Different kinds of intentionality have different kinds of anticipation-fulfilment profile. Indeed, to experience a characteristic type of anticipation-fulfilment profile is to have the sense of being in a certain kind of intentional state. Hence anticipatory profiles contribute to both (a) the sense that one is encountering a specific entity or type of entity and (b) the sense that one is experiencing that entity in one rather than another way. So far as I know, very little has been written on the anticipation-fulfilment profiles of different intentional states, and how they contribute to a sense of being in one or another kind of intentional state. One exception, though, is Straus, who maintains that some experiences, including certain hallucinations, ‘originate in the medium of distorted modalities’.27 Different kinds of intentionality, he observes, have different temporal structures. For instance, ‘In my recollection I can transport myself to past decades; in waking sensory experience I can only advance from present to present into the future’. When it comes to imagination, ‘I can cross the ocean in one leap; in sensory experience there are no leaps’. Hence a principal difference between perceptual experience of one’s surroundings and dreaming or imagining is that the former involves a distinctive, more tightly structured pattern of anticipation and fulfilment: ‘waking experience has its own 17 peculiar order and precision. Every moment is directed to the following one in a meaningful anticipation, and in the continuum of anticipation we grasp our wakefulness’. It is not because one experiences oneself as perceiving or imagining that experience has a certain kind of structure, involving the anticipation of some things and not others, as well as finding some things and not others anomalous. Rather, these patterns are constitutive of one’s sense of what intentional state one is in. Thus, as Straus indicates, disturbances in this aspect of experience erode the experienced modalities of intentionality. Thought Insertion and Anticipation The approach I have outlined, although admittedly schematic, is consistent with the phenomenology of TI (and the subset of AVHs that are equally describable in TI terms). There is a general emphasis in the TI literature on lack of anticipation, construed phenomenologically and/or in terms of non-conscious mechanisms.28 Shaun Gallagher proposes a phenomenological account of TI, which draws upon Husserl and appeals to the disruption of experience’s anticipatory structure.29 He takes, as a starting point, Husserl’s account of the protentional-retentional structure of experience. In brief, experience of the present is permeated by a variably determinate anticipation of what is about to happen, something that usually involves a coherent pattern of anticipation and fulfilment. As one’s anticipations are fulfilled, they continue to feature in one’s current experience but as ‘just past’, as retentions.30 Gallagher maintains that TI involves a disturbance of protention. Unruly emotions associated with certain thought contents disrupt anticipation, such that the thoughts arrive unannounced, as if from elsewhere. However, there is an alternative option. Rather, than adopting the view that experience in general has a singular, uniform, anticipatory structure, we should take into account the possibility that different kinds of intentional state have different anticipatory 18 profiles. Many people do anticipate the coming of their ‘voices’ or ‘inserted thoughts’: ‘I can feel them coming on and find it hard to focus on what I’m doing’ (#18); ‘Sometimes, it’s like a wave and then I hear them’ (#22). Furthermore, even if one does not initially anticipate their coming, the relevant contents are often elaborate and thematically coherent. As one starts to ‘hear’ an abusive ‘voice’ saying ‘you are a worthless piece of…’, one inevitably has a clear sense of what is coming next, which is arguably just as confident and determinate as one’s anticipation of thoughts that are not experienced as inserted.31 So it is not that one fails to anticipate. Instead, I suggest, one anticipates in a way that more closely resembles the structure of perceptual experience than that of thought. As Straus puts it, ‘The voices are heard, they are acoustic phenomena, but they are also quite different enough to contrast with all else that is audible. The mode of their reception is rather a being-affected, similar to hearing’.32 What could this ‘being-affected’ consist of, such that it is ‘similar to hearing’ in some respect? It is clear that hearing is not devoid of anticipation. Nevertheless, there may be certain styles of anticipation involved in perceptual experience, which are not ordinarily associated with the arrival of one’s own thought contents. One plausible candidate is anxious anticipation. Think of how one might hear a noise in the night and then wait in silence, anxiously anticipating further noises that might confirm the presence of an intruder. One anticipates the relevant events in a distinctive, affectively charged way. It is not usual to anticipate one’s own thought contents in this way. Granted, one might be anxious about a potential or actual situation that one is thinking about. But it is the state of affairs one thinks about that elicits the anxiety, rather than the ‘having of a thought about that state of affairs’. However, consider a scenario, not uncommon, where the ‘voices’ hurl abuse and feed a growing sense of inadequacy, shame, and/or guilt. In such as case, one might come to dread the arrival of thoughts with contents such as ‘you are a failure’ or ‘everyone hates you’, while 19 sensing their coming. This, I propose, could constitute a quasi-perceptual experience of thought content (at least in some cases; I concede that the relevant phenomena may turn out to be quite diverse). One anticipates one’s thoughts in an affectively charged and atypical way. This mode of anticipation is not essential to the sense that one is having a perceptual experience. All the same, it is more typical of perception, and contributes to a sense of one’s experience as perception-like rather than thought-like. Some first-person descriptions suggest something along just these lines: ‘Due to the murmuring voice experiences being so distressing with each successive occurrence however, I grew to dread ever more either whenever another experience would appear to possibly be forthcoming or, once in the midst of an actual ongoing experience, what would come next; waiting for the next shoe to drop.’ (#31) ‘It’s very difficult to describe the experience. Words seem to come into my mind from another source than through my own conscious effort. I find myself straining sometimes to make out the word or words, and my own anxiety about what I hear or many have heard makes it a fearful experience. I seem pulled into the experience and fear itself may shape some of the words I hear.’ (#32) ‘I have come to recognise the voices as expressions of anxiety, perhaps even a recognition of a fear I have about myself that I am not prepared to entertain as being part of my personality.’ (#34)33 The general approach may also apply to a range of other experiences. For instance, elsewhere, I have proposed that something similar may occur in the case post-traumatic ‘flashbacks’, memories that are experienced as strangely perception-like, more akin to reliving an event in the present than recalling something that occurred in the past.34 More 20 usually, memories are embedded in the context of a life, in relation to other relevant events and also one’s current projects, commitments and concerns—where one is heading. One thus anticipates the arrival of occurrent, episodic memories in certain, coherent ways. However, traumatic events are sometimes not integrated into a coherent, purposive sense of one’s life. So they are experienced as anomalous, as unlike other memories in their anticipationfulfilment profile. Intentionality, Self, and World In this chapter, I have sketched a phenomenological project: that of describing the various modalities of intentionality and the interconnections between them in terms of their distinctive anticipation-fulfilment profiles. Reflecting upon certain anomalous experiences gives us some grounds for thinking that this is a promising approach to take, in addressing the question of what it is to experience oneself as perceiving, imagining, remembering, and so forth. It should be added that the anticipatory profiles of an intentional state type will also include characteristic relations with other kinds of intentional state. Hence intentionality has a singular, integrated structure, rather than consisting of however many circumscribed anticipation-fulfilment structures existing in isolation from each other. I take this structure to be inextricable from our most basic sense of self, from a sense of being a singular locus of experience, occupying a place in space and time, distinct from other subjects and also from its surroundings.35 What would experience be like if one could not distinguish perceiving from imagining, remembering, anticipating, and various other kinds of intentional state? Insofar as one failed to distinguish perceiving from imagining, one would lack any sense of being spatially located, and an inability to discriminate between remembering and perceiving would amount to a loss of temporal location. If one could not identify one’s own thinking as 21 distinct from one’s perception of others’ thought contents, the distinction between self and other would be equally unsustainable. It is not clear what sense of self could remain. Hence an account of the anticipation-fulfilment structure of intentionality turns out to concern our sense of self, world, and the relationship between them. Its subject matter ultimately coincides with what the phenomenological reduction seeks to make explicit: a coherent sense of belonging to the world that we take for granted whenever we have an unproblematic experience of perceiving that p, imagining that q, or remembering that r. A comprehensive analysis of the sense of being in a given type of intentional state will equally need to address the structure of temporal experience, the distinction between self and other, and the phenomenology of the body, insofar as bodily experience relates to one’s sense of the possible. These are all familiar topics for phenomenological enquiry, but what I have tried to do here is sketch a distinctive route that we might take in seeking to address them, one that starts from a beguilingly simple question. Notes 1 I use the term ‘intentional state’ to refer to types and tokens of intentional directedness, such as ‘perceiving’ and, more specifically, ‘perceiving that p’. The term ‘state’ has certain ‘static’ connotations, which I wish to avoid. As employed here, it is a philosophically non-committal term of convenience. I could equally have used the term ‘attitude’. I similarly use the term ‘content’ in a non-committal way, where the content of an experience is synonymous with what it is that one perceives, remembers, or imagines. 2 M. Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: a Study in Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 21-3. 22 3 The proximity claim is questionable in some cases, depending on what the content of perceptual experience is taken to consist of. If we can correctly be said to ‘hear something exploding’, then we can perceive some things through audition that are a considerable distance away. Similarly, if it is right to say that we can ‘see a star or galaxy’, rather than first seeing something and then conceiving of it in those terms, vision is not a proximity sense either. In the latter case, it can be added that what we perceive need not be present, given that the light has taken millions of years to reach us. However, even if that were allowed, we experience something as present, and it is this experience of perceptual presence that concerns me here. 4 However, it is questionable whether our phenomenology is sensitive to more refined distinctions, such as that between physical, metaphysical, and logical possibility. 5 Although I have phrased the question contrastively, the relevant achievement need not take that form. It could be that I take myself to be perceiving, pure and simple. That I am ‘not remembering’ is implied by this, rather than integral to it. 6 For more general scepticism concerning the reliability of what he calls ‘introspective’ access to our own mental states, see E. Schwitzgebel, ‘The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection,’ Philosophical Review 117 (2008): 245-73. 7 For example, see M.G.F. Martin, ‘The Transparency of Experience,’ Mind & Language 17 (2002): 376-425. For a very good summary of the disjunctivist position, see also F. Macpherson, ‘The Philosophy and Psychology of Hallucination: An Introduction’, in Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology, eds. F. Macpherson and D. Platchias (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013), pp.1-38. 8 For example, see E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J.S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (London: Routledge, 1948/1973); Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer 23 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1952/1989); A. Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004); and Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression. 9 See Martin, ‘The Transparency of Experience’; M. Tye, ‘Representationalism and the Transparency of Experience,’ Noûs 36 (2002): 137-51. 10 See M. Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry, and the Sense of Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and ‘Delusional Atmosphere and the Sense of Unreality’, in One Century of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology, eds. G. Stanghellini and T. Fuchs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 229-44. 11 For example, see G.L. Stephens and G. Graham, When Self-consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000). 12 G. Graham, ‘Self-ascription: Thought Insertion,’ in The Philosophy of Psychiatry: a Companion, ed. J. Radden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp 89-105, p. 96. 13 See C. Frith, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (Hove: Psychology Press, 1992); Stephens and Graham, When Self-consciousness Breaks. 14 See T.H. Nayani and A.S. David, ‘The Auditory Hallucination: a Phenomenological Survey,’ Psychological Medicine 26 (1996): 177-89. 15 These testimonies, and others quoted in the chapter, were obtained via a 2013 questionnaire study, which I conducted with several colleagues as part of the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Hearing the Voice’ (grant number WT098455). The study received ethical approval from the Durham University Philosophy Department Research Committee. Study design was closely based on earlier work addressing the phenomenology of depression (for details, see Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression). 16 As observed by Hoffman et al., identification of a ‘voice’ as non-self-produced ‘was more important in differentiating voices from thought than either loudness or clarity of sound images’. In other words, something can be experienced as just as alien from oneself, even if it 24 lacks some of the characteristics associated with veridical auditory perceptual content (R.E. Hoffman, M. Varanko, J. Gilmore, and A.L. Mishara, ‘Experiential Features used by Patients with Schizophrenia to differentiate “Voices” from Ordinary Verbal Thought,’ Psychological Medicine 38 (2008): 1167-76, p. 1167. 17 For a more detailed defense of this view, see M. Ratcliffe and S. Wilkinson, ‘What is it to Experience One’s Own Thoughts as Someone Else’s?’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 22/11-12 (2015): 246-269. 18 My interpretation of TI complements, in certain respects, an approach to delusions suggested in G. Currie, ‘Imagination, Delusion and Hallucinations,’ in Pathologies of Belief, eds. M. Coltheart and M. Davies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 167-82; and G. Currie and J. Jureidini, ‘Delusion, Rationality, Empathy: Commentary on Davies et al.,’ Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology 8 (2001): 159-62. Delusions, they suggest, are not beliefs but imaginings that are mistaken for beliefs. One could similarly maintain that TI involves confusing thinking with perceiving. Nevertheless, it also needs to be acknowledged that what we have, phenomenologically, is an intrinsically strange experience, one that involves features of x and y, rather than non-problematic sense of being in state y when one is actually in state x. Currie and Jureidini later suggest that the distinctions between intentional state types are non-categorical, thus allowing for in between cases (‘Narrative and Coherence,’ Mind & Language 19 (2004): 409-27). If this applies equally to the relevant phenomenology, then it is more accurate, at least for the kinds of case I consider here. 19 J.H. van den Berg, ‘On Hallucinating: Critical-Historical Overview and Guidelines for Further Study,’ in. Phenomenology and Psychiatry, eds. A.J.J. Koning and F.A. Jenner (London: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 97-110, pp. 105-6. 20 See, for example, L.A. Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and L. Bortolotti and M. 25 Broome, ‘Affective Dimensions of the Phenomenon of Double Bookkeeping in Delusions,’ Emotion Review 12 (2012): 187-91. 21 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book. 22 For a detailed discussion of the horizonal structure of experience, see Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression, Chapter 2. 23 What I have suggested here complements, to some extent at least, Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on hallucination in Phenomenology of Perception (Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1945/1962), Part II, Chapter 3). Merleau-Ponty similarly maintains that a bodily sense of the possibilities associated with entity p can arise in the absence of p. For a detailed account of Merleau-Ponty on hallucination, see K. RomdenhRomluc, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Hallucination,’ European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2007): 76-90. 24 I do not wish to maintain that all of those experiences labelled ‘hallucinations’ take the form of horizonal hallucinations. It is likely that there are other, very different kinds of ‘hallucination’, where one does experience something resembling p (in one or more modalities) in a situation where p is absent. In conjunction with this, the usual horizonal structure may be partly or wholly absent, resulting in an experience of p as somehow lacking. For example, Sacks describes hallucinatory experiences that are clearly different from the kinds of case I am concerned with here and much more like veridical perceptions (O. Sacks, Hallucinations (London: Picador, 2012). Perhaps there are cases where the ‘hallucination’ is completely indistinguishable from a veridical experience. However, although philosophers routinely appeal to the in-principle possibility of these cases, I am doubtful of their psychological reality. 25 Husserl, Experience and Judgment. 26 26 For a much more detailed discussion and defence of this point, see Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression, chapters 2 and 3. 27 E.W. Straus, ‘Aesthesiology and Hallucinations,’ in Existence, eds. R. May, E. Angel, and H.F. Ellenberger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), pp. 139-69, pp. 162-4. 28 See, for example, Frith, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia; and J. Campbell, ‘Schizophrenia, the Space of Reasons, and Thinking as a Motor Process,’ The Monist 82 (1999): 609-25). 29 S. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 8. 30 E. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). 31 It may well be that some kind of non-conscious prediction or monitoring failure is implicated here. However, insofar as there is still conscious anticipation, and insofar as conscious processes are not entirely autonomous of brain processes, some kind of nonconscious prediction process must also remain in operation. Hence explanations that appeal to failure of predictive processes need to be more specific about which processes fail and which do not. 32 Straus, ‘Aesthesiology and Hallucinations,’ p. 166) 33 For a more detailed account of the relationship between verbal hallucination/thought insertion and anxiety, see also M. Ratcliffe and S. Wilkinson, ‘How Anxiety Induces Verbal Hallucinations’ Consciousness and Cognition (in press). 34 M. Ratcliffe, M. Ruddell, and B. Smith, ‘What is a Sense of Foreshortened Future? A Phenomenological Study of Trauma, Trust and Time,’ Frontiers in Psychology 5 (Article 1026) (2014): 1-11. 35 This sense of self is, it has been argued, not an additional content of experience; rather it is 27 integral to the structure of experience, relating to the “distinct manner, or how, of experiencing” (D Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 22). I am inclined to maintain that it simply is the integrity of intentionality, the sense of different kinds of intentional state as interrelated but distinct from each other (M. Ratcliffe, ‘Schizophrenia, Selfhood, and the Interpersonal Regulation of Experience’ (forthcoming). 28