Page 135 - Contribution To Phenomenology

128 TOMNENON

as mental events which we are directly aware of, lies the experience of
something "that is a substrate with simple, sensually graspable qualities
to which there is always a pathway of possible interpretation." (§ 12)^^
Why "interpretation"? Precisely because it must be posited if we are
going to explain those things that are founded upon it, but it does not
share with the paradigmatically mental the characteristic of being
completely and directly accessible to reflection.^* So if we divide up the
world into the mental as that which is directly accessible to consciousness
and the non-mental as that which is not, then it turns out that we would
have to assign dispositions to the realm of the non-mentaP^; but when we
consider the role they play in motivating consciousness and the syntactic

^^ It appears that Husserl is actually talking about two different kinds of phenomena
here, one involving the implicit directedness towards the individual objects given in sense
perception that Husserl is positing as the basis for all predicative judgments, and the other
being the results of experience as a whole which underlie our actions. Both share the
quality of not being the direct objects of consciousness, but each in different ways. The
case that I am making for dispositions applies more appropriately for the second sense
of habitualities listed above, but a case could be made for pattern recognitions in a
prepredicative grasp of objects as they present themselves to us in experience as well.
^* In another paper, I have tried to exhibit the dilemma in which Husserl finds
himself when he establishes a direct connection between the will and one's actions. In this
case, it seems that Husserl is committed to the possibility of mental states which may not
necessarily be accessible to the agent through reflection, in spite of his contention in other
passages that the mental is always at least potentially directly given to consciousness itself
("Husserl on Willing and Acting," Man and World 2A (1992): 301-309. That paper
suggested (even though it did not assert) that Husserl should have abandoned the second
claim. In this paper, what I am suggesting is rather that Husserl can maintain the second
claim as long as he is willing to countenance a class of objects (like dispositions) that are
not mental in the paradigmatic sense of those states that are envisaged in the second
thesis, but only in virtue of their role in producing those states—"protomental states" one
might call them.
^^ In "Leaping to Conclusions: Connectionism, Consciousness, and the Computa-
tional Mind" (Tienson and Horgan 1991, 444-459), Dan Lloyd uses this dichotomy to
assign dispositions and the unconscious generally as non-mental ("non-cognitive" is his
term) almost automatically to the realm of the physical underpinnings of a cognitive
system, thereby providing a causal link between the physical and the mental (the cognitive
and the non-cognitive) that he sees as a confirmation of identity theory. To me, Lloyd
seems to proceed too hastily in his conclusion that this must be biological since it is not
paradigmatically cognitive. It seems to me that one could take a different route, positing
a constellation in a physical apparatus that is not properly describable in physical terms
but only in terms of what it leads to in the cognitive realm, thus a proto-cognitive realm
that, when described in terms of its function, is closer to the cognitive than the merely
physical.