Another interesting suggestion made by Pacholik-Żuromska concerns the relationship between intentionality and intersubjectivity. She claims that “[i]ntentionality is a relation between minds and the world” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 5), thus subscribing to an externalist conception of intentionality (which I share), and goes on to characterize it as “a social phenomenon, developed and practiced through interactions with other minds” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 5). Pacholik-Żuromska refers to Tomasello, Rakoczy, and Davidson in this connection, but (her ascription to Husserl of the thesis that subjects can “live a solitary life” notwithstanding, which I regard as a misreading; this collection, p. 8) she could also have referred to Husserl here. In the second volume of his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Ideas II), Husserl presents a detailed analysis of the intersubjective, reciprocal constitution of intentional objects that belong to a “communicative environment” and are thus immediately perceivable as valuable heating material, for example:
Kohle z.B. sehe ich als Heizmaterial; ich erkenne es und erkenne es als dienlich und dienend zum Heizen, als dazu geeignet und dazu bestimmt Wärme zu erzeugen. […] Ich kann [den brennbaren Gegenstand] als Brennmaterial benutzen, […] er ist mir wert mit Beziehung darauf, daß ich Erwärmung eines Raumes und dadurch angenehme Wärmeempfindungen für mich und andere erzeugen kann. […] [A]uch andere fassen ihn so auf, und er erhält einen intersubjektiven Nutzwert, ist im sozialen Verbande geschätzt und schätzenswert als so Dienliches, als den Menschen Nützliches usw. So wird er nun unmittelbar 'angesehen' […].[3] (Husserl 1952, p. 187)
Notice that near the end of this passage from § 50 of Ideas II Husserl observes how intersubjective agreement in the form of reciprocally shared emotional valuings, and accordingly motivated evaluations (evaluative judgments), add a social dimension to the constitution of the environment. In this way, the personal environment of an individual subject acquires the significance of a social environment equipped with common objects possessing intersubjectively shared values—in the case at hand: shared use-values, to be perceived immediately (e.g., as a piece of heating material). In the following section, §51, entitled “The person in personal associations,” Husserl generalizes these observations. He claims that the social environment is relative to persons who are able to “communicate” with one another, i.e., to “determine one another” by performing actions with the intention of motivating the other to display “certain personal modes of behavior” on his grasping that very communicative intention (Husserl 1989, p. 202). If an attempted piece of communication such as this, also called a “social act” (Husserl 1989, p. 204), is successful, then certain “relations of mutual understanding (Beziehungen des Einverständnisses)” are formed (Husserl 1989, p. 202):
[A]uf die Rede folgt Antwort, auf die theoretische, wertende, praktische Zumutung, die der Eine dem Anderen macht, folgt die gleichsam antwortende Rückwendung, die Zustimmung (das Einverstanden) oder Ablehnung (das Nicht-einverstanden), ev. ein Gegenvorschlag usw. In diesen Beziehungen des Einverständnisses ist […] eine einheitliche Beziehung derselben zur gemeinsamen Umwelt hergestellt.[4] (Husserl 1952, pp. 192-193)
A few lines later, Husserl even claims that relations of mutual understanding help determine the common surrounding world for a group of persons; the world as constituted this way is called a “communicative environment.” On his view, the world of experience is partly structured by the outcomes of communicative acts. If it is structured this way, then there will be meaningful environmental “stimuli,” or solicitations (to use a more recent terminology), which motivate a given subject to display personal behaviour that consists in his reacting upon such environmental stimuli; where the notion of motivation is to be understood as follows:
[W]ie komme ich darauf, was hat mich dazu gebracht? Daß man so fragen kann, charakterisiert alle Motivation überhaupt.[5] (Husserl 1952, p. 222)
I regard this Husserlian conception of the structures underlying our being-in-the-world as highly plausible. So Pacholik-Żuromska kicks at an open door when she stresses the importance of (what is nowadays called) embedded cognition and dynamic mind-world interaction for an adequate conception of intentionality.[6]