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to reductionists who see the hierarchy of powers as a retrograde appeal to vitalism,

I would ask them the following:
Is the act of understanding the meaning of a statement the exercise of a force? Is it a chemical reaction?  Is it a movement?  Is it a physical state?  Is it a complex combination of all of the above?  Isn't an appeal to complexity...hand-waving?

Similar questions could be asked about our focusing on a concrete goal while acting.

Another question:  is the object of understanding within the one who knows?   A similar question could be asked of the object of the intention to act.

I suppose that the reply to the last question would be that we know an inner representation.  But that's an incoherent cop-out, for we do not know the representation as a representation.  And our phenomenology of representation always involves remembering having been directly acquainted with the represented object.  I see a picture of my wife as a picture of her only inasmuch as I recall having seen her.  So it would seem that to call the immediate object of our consciousness a representation, we would naturally have had some more direct encounter with the thing represented.  Of course, that is not what is maintained.  So those who appeal to our experience as being only of representations need to give an account of how this divergence from our ordinary conception of representation could make sense.  How does it avoid falling into a phenomenalism of some sort?

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