🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Phänomenologische Intelligenzkonzeption
The phenomenological conception of intelligence understands intelligence as the intentional act-structure of an I-pole: perceiving, judging, inferring, and remembering are acts performed by an I from the first person. At its centre stands not the performance but the structure of the act-performance and its bearer.
Husserl: Intelligence as Act-Intentionality
In the Logical Investigations (Sixth Investigation, 1901), Edmund Husserl determines cognition as an intentional act: consciousness is always consciousness of something, directed toward an object and at the same time related to an I-pole from which the act proceeds. Cognition is the fulfilment of a meaning-intention in intuition — an event that cannot be described as mere sign-processing, because it presupposes a meaning act that fulfils itself.
Edith Stein: The I-Pole of the Act
Edith Stein (Finite and Eternal Being, 1936) carries Husserl’s analysis of acts over into a doctrine of the being of the person: the intentional acts are acts of one I that lives in them and unfolds itself within them. The I-pole is not itself an object among objects, but the source from which the acts arise. With this, the first-person perspective becomes a constitutive feature of intelligence, not a subsequent addition.
Dan Zahavi (Subjectivity and Selfhood, 2005) continues this line into contemporary philosophy of consciousness: the phenomenal first-person givenness (for-me-ness) is not reducible to a third-person description of functions.
Significance for the AI Question
The phenomenological conception shares with the substance-ontological one its interest in the bearer, but takes its point of departure in the act-structure rather than in the doctrine of substance. Both are, within the ontology, equally ranked sibling conceptions alongside the computational conception — differently oriented than the latter, but not logically opposed to it: they ask after bearer and act-structure, where the computational line grasps intelligence as substrate-neutral optimisation.
For the AI question the finding is sharp: a system without an I-pole performs no acts from the first person. It can reproduce the results of intentional acts, but not the act-structure itself, because the latter presupposes a performing subject. What is missing, on the phenomenological conception, when an I-pole is missing, is not a performance but the character of performance — the difference between an act of intelligence and its functional surface.
Ontological Classification
- is a form of: Conception of Intelligence
- related to: Substance-Ontological Conception of Intelligence (shared interest in the bearer)
- equally ranked sibling conception alongside the Computational Conception of Intelligence (differently oriented, not opposed)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Husserl, Edmund: Logical Investigations, transl. J. N. Findlay. London / New York: Routledge 2001 (Sixth Investigation).
- Stein, Edith: Finite and Eternal Being. An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, transl. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications 2002.
- Zahavi, Dan: Subjectivity and Selfhood. Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2005.