Husserl and Haugeland on Constitution

Both Husserl and Haugeland develop an account of constitution to address the question of how our mental episodes can be about physical objects and thus, through the intentional relation, bridge the gap between the mental and the physical. The respective theories of the two philosophers of very different background show not only how mental episodes can have empirical content, but also how this content is shaped by past experiences or a holistic background of other mental episodes. In this article I first outline and then contrast their positions in order to show how the notion of constitution can be adopted to address major problems of contemporary philosophy of mind, especially the question of how the mind can be related to its physical environment. Perception is, as Husserl puts it at the beginning of his Analyses of Passive Synthesis,1 an imposter who pretends to be what by its own nature it cannot be. Our perceptual experiences are about physical objects, even though only parts of these physical objects are actually perceived. I see a table over there, for example, even though only a part of it, the surface of the tabletop, lies in my visual field. My perceptual experience is nonetheless about the table as a whole, and not about the surface of its front. This example suggests that the content of our perceptual experience is not fully determined by our sensory input. In order to resolve this problem and explain how we can be intentionally directed towards objects, Husserl develops his theory of constitution according to which the agent constitutes the object in the very act of perceiving it. Very recently, John Haugeland has developed an account of constitution that puts forth a new understanding of the relation between mind and world. Haugeland’s theory, strongly influenced by Kant’s, is interesting for two reasons. First, he tries to give an account of how we can be directed towards objects in our mental episodes; in other words, like Husserl he uses the notion of constitution to explain intentionality. Second, he applies his account to problems that are raised in contemporary philosophy of mind. In what follows I will outline and compare Husserl’s and Haugeland’s notions of constitution. I will first outline the development of Husserl’s account of constitution in the context of the development of his overall philosophical position. Then I will discuss Haugeland’s use of the notion Synthese 137: 345–368, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.