Phenomenal intentionality is supposed to be a kind of directedness of the mind onto the world that is grounded in the conscious feel of mental life. This book of new essays explores a number of issues raised by the notion of phenomenal intentionality.

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, and, (...) though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

Phenomenal intentionality is a kind of intentionality, or aboutness, that is grounded in phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, experiential feature of certain mental states. The phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), is a theory of intentionality according to which there is phenomenal intentionality, and all other kinds of intentionality at least partly derive from it. In recent years, PIT has increasingly been seen as one of the main approaches to intentionality.

Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C. I. Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions. In doing so, he sheds new light on Sellars’s influential arguments concerning the ‘Myth of the Given’ and shows how we can build a productive discourse between American (...) pragmatism, analytical philosophy and European phenomenology. (shrink)

‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist’.1 Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl’s phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano’s: that intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano’s originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the (...) terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts or intentiones.2 Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it’.3 This is Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. Despite the centrality of the concept of intentionality in contemporary philosophy of mind, and despite the customary homage paid to Brentano as the one who revived the terminology and placed the concept at the centre of philosophy, Brentano’s thesis is widely rejected by contemporary philosophers of mind. What is more, its rejection is not something which is thought to require substantial philosophical argument. Rather, the falsity of the thesis is taken as a starting-point in many contemporary discussions of intentionality, something so obvious that it only needs to be stated to be recognised as true. Consider, for instance, these remarks from the opening pages of Searle’s Intentionality: Some, not all, mental states and events have Intentionality. Beliefs, fears, hopes and desires are Intentional; but there are forms of nervousness, elation and undirected anxiety that are not Intentional.... My beliefs and desires must always be about something. But my nervousness and undirected anxiety need not in that way be about anything.4 Searle takes this as obvious, so obvious that it is not in need of further argument or elucidation.. (shrink)

Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by the philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher's word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives (...) from the verb intendere, which means being directed towards some goal or thing. The entry falls into eleven sections. (shrink)

This paper compares tracking and phenomenal intentionality theories of intentionality with respect to the issue of naturalism. Tracking theories explicitly aim to naturalize intentionality, while phenomenal intentionality theories generally do not. It might seem that considerations of naturalism count in favor of tracking theories. We survey key considerations relevant to this claim, including some motivations for and objections to the two kinds of theories. We conclude by suggesting that naturalistic considerations may in fact support phenomenal (...) class='Hi'>intentionality theories over tracking theories. (shrink)

Moods and emotions are sometimes thought to be counterexamples to intentionalism, the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are exhausted by its representational features. The problem is that moods and emotions are accompanied by phenomenal experiences that do not seem to be adequately accounted for by any of their plausibly represented contents. This paper develops and defends an intentionalist view of the phenomenal character of moods and emotions on which emotions and some moods represent intentional objects as having sui (...) generis affective properties, which happen to be uninstantiated, and at least some moods represent affective properties not bound to any objects. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review (...) recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has brought with it a robust debate about whether these machines know what they are talking about, or whether they are just bullshitting. Answering this question requires wrestling with the problem of intentionality: what are the conditions for our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments to be about the world? How can we differentiate a model that says the right thing from one that understands what it is saying? This article addresses the intentionality (...) of LLMs by revisiting Haugeland’s storied team, “the Intentionality All-Stars.” I lay out four major approaches to intentionality that are regularly applied to explain LLMs behavior—as well as their failures. Spelling out the different positions, in turn, shows that there are multiple conditions that must be met for an LLM to know what it is talking about—and the numerous ways current models fall short. (shrink)

This dialogue explores the question of whether intentionality—the “ofness”, “aboutness”, or “directedness” of mental states—is a relation. We explore three views: the Naive View, on which intentionality is a relation to ordinary, everyday objects, facts, and other such items; the Abstract Contents View, on which intentionality is a relation to mind-independent abstract entities that are our contents; and the Aspect View, on which intentionality is a matter of having intentional states with particular (non-relational) aspects that are (...) our contents. We consider the challenges facing these views, which include empirical challenges in accounting for all the contents our intentional states can represent, metaphysical challenges in making sense of how contents can be entertained or otherwise represented by us and how they can play a psychological role in the mental economy, and challenges in making sense of how intentionality connects us to the world—if at all. Along the way, we consider the question of how consciousness is related to intentionality and how this affects one’s choice of views. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have defended the idea of phenomenal intentionality : the intrinsic directedness of certain conscious mental events which is inseparable from these events’ phenomenal character. On this conception, phenomenology is usually conceived as narrow, that is, as supervening on the internal states of subjects, and hence phenomenal intentionality is a form of narrow intentionality. However, defenders of this idea usually maintain that there is another kind of, externalistic intentionality, which depends on factors (...) external to the subject. We may ask whether this concession to content externalism is obligatory. In this paper, I shall argue that it isn’t. I shall suggest that if one is convinced that narrow phenomenal intentionality is legitimate, there is nothing stopping one from claiming that all intentionality is narrow. (shrink)

According to intentionalism, phenomenal properties are identical to, supervenient on, or determined by representational properties. Intentionalism faces a special challenge when it comes to accounting for the phenomenal character of moods. First, it seems that no intentionalist treatment of moods can capture their apparently undirected phenomenology. Second, it seems that even if we can come up with a viable intentionalist account of moods, we would not be able to motivate it in some of the same kinds of ways that intentionalism (...) about other kinds of states can be motivated. In this article, I respond to both challenges: First, I propose a novel intentionalist treatment of moods on which they represent unbound affective properties. Then, I argue that this view is indirectly supported by the same kinds of considerations that directly support intentionalism about other mental states. (shrink)

IT IS SHOWN IN DETAIL THAT RECENT ACCOUNTS FAIL TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INTENTIONALITY AND MERELY CAUSALLY DISPOSITIONAL STATES OF INORGANIC PHYSICAL OBJECTS—A QUICK ROAD TO PANPSYCHISM. THE CLEAR NEED TO MAKE SUCH A DISTINCTION GIVES DIRECTION FOR FUTURE WORK. A BEGINNING IS MADE TOWARD PROVIDING SUCH AN ACCOUNT.

This text addresses a problem that is not sufficiently dealt with in most of the recent literature on emotion and feeling. The problem is a general underestimation of the extent to which affective intentionality is essentially bodily. Affective intentionality is the sui generis type of world-directedness that most affective states – most clearly the emotions – display. Many theorists of emotion overlook the extent to which intentional feelings are essentially bodily feelings. The important but quite often overlooked fact (...) is that the bodily feelings in question are not the regularly treated, non-intentional bodily sensations (known from Jamesian accounts of emotion), but rather crucial carriers of world-directed intentionality. Consequently, most theories of human emotions and feelings recently advocated are deficient in terms of phenomenological adequacy. This text tries to make up for this deficit and develops a catalogue of five central features of intentional bodily feelings. In addition, Jesse Prinz’s embodied appraisal theory is criticized as an exemplary case of the misconstrual of the bodily nature of affective experience in naturalistic philosophy of mind. (shrink)

David Pitt's The Quality of Thought defends a hardcore version of phenomenal intentionalism, the view that at least the most basic kind of intentionality is nothing over and above phenomenal consciousness. The book is focused on the case of thought, advancing the view, roughly, that thoughts' contents are identical to their phenomenal characters. But the view is meant to apply more broadly to all intentional states: for Pitt, the content of any intentional state is identical to its phenomenal character. (...) One of the most pressing challenges facing phenomenal intentionalism is that of accounting for allegedly intentional unconscious mental states. In response to this challenge, many phenomenal intentionalists develop a two-tiered picture of intentionality, maintaining that the most basic kind of intentionality, original intentionality, is nothing over and above phenomenal consciousness but that mental states can have another, less basic, kind of intentionality, derived intentionality, which is derived in some way from actual or possible originally intentional states. Pitt rejects this derivativist picture and maintains a hard-line position on which non-phenomenal states cannot have any kind of intentionality. In this symposium contribution, I consider Pitt's arguments against derivativist pictures of intentionality, arguing that the derivativist has a ready response. I suggest that even if derived intentionality belongs to a different natural kind than original intentionality, it plays an important role in the mind. (shrink)

One of Brian Loar’s most central contributions to contemporary philosophy of mind is the notion of phenomenal intentionality: a kind of intentional directedness fully grounded in phenomenal character. Proponents of phenomenal intentionality typically also endorse the idea of cognitive phenomenology: a sui generis phenomenal character of cognitive states such as thoughts and judgments that grounds these states’ intentional directedness. This combination creates a challenge, though: namely, how to account for the manifest phenomenological difference between perception and cognition. In (...) this paper, I argue that there is in fact no obvious account of this difference. I consider three main approaches: in terms of high-level vs. low-level contents, of conceptual vs. nonconceptual content, and of propositional vs. objectual content. After arguing against each, I conclude by considering the phenomenal-intentionalist’s options moving forward. (shrink)

It is often assumed thatconsciousness and intentionality are twomutually independent aspects of mental life.When the assumption is denounced, it usuallygives way to the claim that consciousness issomehow dependent upon intentionality. Thepossibility that intentionality may bedependent upon consciousness is rarelyentertained. Recently, however, John Searle andColin McGinn have argued for just suchdependence. In this paper, I reconstruct andevaluate their argumentation. I am in sympathyboth with their view and with the lines ofargument they employ in its defense. UnlikeSearle and McGinn, (...) however, I am quite attachedto a naturalist approach to intentionality. Itwill turn out to be somewhat difficult toreconcile naturalism with the notion thatintentionality is dependent upon consciousness,although, perhaps surprisingly, I will arguethat McGinn's case for such dependence iscompatible with naturalism. (shrink)

This book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting. The author's main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for (...) an intentional mental state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational, but also that is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content. Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

We elaborate and defend the claim that human affective states are, among other things, self-disclosing. We will show why affective intentionality has to be considered in order to understand human self-consciousness. One specific class of affective states, so-called existential feelings, although often neglected in philosophical treatments of emotions, will prove central. These feelings importantly pre-structure affective and other intentional relations to the world. Our main thesis is that existential feelings are an important manifestation of self-consciousness and figure prominently in (...) human self-understanding. We offer an ordering of four levels of existential feelings and also give considerations in favour of the essential bodily nature of these feelings. (shrink)

Intentionality is a mark of the mental, as Brentano (1874) noted. Any representation or conception of anything has the feature of intentionality, which informally put, is the feature of being about something that may or may not exist. Visual artworks are about something, whether something literal or abstract. The artwork is a mentalized physical object. Aesthetic experience of the artwork illustrates the nature of intentionality as we focus attention on the phenomenology of the sensory exemplar. This focus (...) of attention on the exemplar in aesthetic experience simultaneously exhibits what the intentional object is like and what our conception of it is like. The exemplar is Janus-faced, looking in one direction outward toward the objects conceived and in the other direction inward toward our conceiving of them. It shows us what intentionality is like and how we know it. (shrink)

In Lying and Insincerity, Andreas Stokke argues that bald-faced lies are genuine lies, and that lies are always assertions. Since bald-faced lies seem not to be aimed at convincing addressees of their contents, Stokke concludes that assertions needn’t have this aim. This conflicts with a traditional version of intentionalism, originally due to Grice, on which asserting something is a matter of communicatively intending for one’s addressee to believe it. I argue that Stokke’s own account of bald-faced lies faces serious problems (...) and give several responses on behalf of intentionalism. Some bald-faced lies are best understood as irrational attempts to deceive. Others are best understood as indirect speech acts of various kinds. Still, others are best understood as conventional speech acts, which differ from communicative acts like assertion in the ways that they must be embedded in social institutions or practices. An overarching theme of this essay is that we should not make theoretical decisions about how to classify speech acts by consulting ordinary usage. (shrink)

The central and defining characteristic of thoughts is that they have objects. The object of a thought is what the thought concerns, or what it is about. Since there cannot be thoughts which are not about anything, or which do not concern anything, there cannot be thoughts without objects. Mental states or events or processes which have objects in this sense are traditionally called ‘intentional,’ and ‘intentionality’ is for this reason the general term for this defining characteristic of thought. (...) Under the heading of ‘thought’ we can include many different kinds of mental apprehension of an object—including relatively temporary episodes of contemplating or scrutinising, as well as persisting states like beliefs and hopes which are not similarly episodic in character. These are all ways of thinking about an object. But even construing ‘thought’ in this broad way, it is clear that not all mental states and events are thoughts: sensations, emotions and perceptual experiences are not thoughts, but they are also paradigmatically mental. Do these mental states and events have objects too? Or are there mental states and events which have no objects? 1 The view that all mental phenomena have objects is sometimes called ‘Brentano’s thesis’ or the thesis that intentionality is the ‘mark’ of the mental.1 Sometimes the name ‘Brentano’s thesis’ is given to certain other views too: for example, to the view that only mental phenomena are intentional, or that all and only mental phenomena are intentional, or that nothing physical is intentional. These views are, however, distinct from the view that all mental phenomena are intentional. For holding that all mental phenomena are intentional does not imply that nothing nonmental is.2 And holding that all mental phenomena are intentional does not imply (pace Dennett 1969) that nothing physical is intentional; since if physicalism were true, then the mental itself would be physical. What I am concerned with here, however, is the idea that all mental states are intentional, regardless of whether anything else is, or whether anything physical is. In recent years there has been considerable debate over whether all mental states are intentional; in particular, over whether all conscious mental states are intentional or entirely intentional. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a special issue on the history of phenomenal intentionality.

How can philosophy or science claim to discover objective truth when their arguments originate from subjective beings? In _Intentionality and Semiotics_, John Deely offers a controversial solution to the problem of subjectivity in inquiry. He creates an interface between semiotics and the concept of intentionality, as it appears in Aquinas’s work, to demonstrate that every sign is irrevocably linked to the reality of relations. In the process, Deely builds a bridge between classical thinkers such as Aristotle and modernists such (...) as Heidegger and Peirce in this innovative volume. (shrink)

Pain may appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory. After categorizing versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an 'objectivist' and 'non-mentalist' version is the most promising, if it can withstand two objections concerning (a) what we say when in pain, and (b) the distinctiveness of pain. I rebut these objections, in a way available to both opponents of and (...) adherents to the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between phenomenal properties and intentional properties. In recent years a number of philosophers have argued that intentional properties are sometimes necessitated by phenomenal properties, but have not explained why or how. Exceptions can be found in the work of Katalin Farkas and Farid Masrour, who develop versions of reductionism regarding phenomenally-necessitated intentionality (or "phenomenal intentionality"). I raise two objections to reductive theories of the sort they develop. Then I propose a version of primitivism (...) regarding phenomenal intentionality. I argue that primitivism avoids the pitfalls of reductionism while promising broad explanatory payoffs. (shrink)

This paper has three aims. First, I aim to stress the importance of the issue of the dispositional/categorical distinction in the light of the evident failure of the traditional formulation, which is in terms of conditional entailment. Second, I consider one radical new alternative on offer from Ullin Place: intentionality as the mark of the dispositional. I explain the appeal of physical intentionality, but show it ultimately to be unacceptable. Finally, I suggest what would be a better theory. (...) If we take disposition ascriptions to be functional characterizations of properties, then we can explain all that was appealing about the new alternative without the unacceptable consequences. (shrink)

There are important structural similarities in the way that animals and humans engage in unreflective activities, including unreflective social interactions in the case of higher animals. Firstly, it is a form of unreflective embodied intelligence that is ‘motivated’ by the situation. Secondly, both humans and non-human animals are responsive to ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979); to possibilities for action offered by an environment. Thirdly, both humans and animals are selectively responsive to one affordance rather than another. Social affordances are a subcategory of (...) affordances, namely possibilities for social interaction offered by an environment: a friend’s sad face invites comforting behavior, a person waiting for a coffee machine can afford a conversation, and an extended hand affords a handshake. I will review recent insights in the nature of the bodily intentionality characteristic of unreflective action. Such ‘motor intentionality’ can be characterized as “our direct bodily inclination to act in a situated, environmental context” (Kelly 2005, p. 106). Standard interpretations of bodily intentionality see grasping an object as the paradigmatic example of motor intentionality. I will discuss the implications of another, novel perspective that emphasizes the importance of unreflective switches from one activity to another (Rietveld 2004) and understands bodily intentionality in terms of adequate responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. In the final section I will discuss some implications for cognitive neuroscientists who use empirical findings related to the ‘mirror neuron system’ as a starting point for a theory of motor intentionality and social cognition. (shrink)

According to the phenomenal intentionality research program, a state’s intentional content is fixed by its phenomenal character. Defenders of this view have little to say about just how this grounding is accomplished. I argue that without a robust account of representation, the research program promises too little. Unfortunately, most of the well-developed accounts of representation – asymmetric dependence, teleosemantics, and the like – ground representation in external relations such as causation. Such accounts are inconsistent with the core of the (...) phenomenal intentionality program. I argue that, however counter-intuitive it may seem, the best prospect for explaining how phenomenal character represents appeals to resemblance. (shrink)

This book is a critical and analytical survey of the major attempts, in modern philosophy, to deal with the phenomenon of intentionality—those of Descartes, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Frege, Russell, Bergmann, Chisholm, and Sellars. By coordinating the semantical approaches to the phenomenon, Dr. Aquila undertakes to provide a basis for dialogue among philosophers of different persuasions. "Intentionality" has become, since Franz Brentano revived its original medieval use, the standard term describing the mind's apparently paradoxical capacity to relate itself to (...) objects existing in the world. One approach to the phenomenon emphasizes the mental act. The author argues that the most adequate account involves elements of both approaches. Contemporary treatments tend to formulate problems of intentionality primarily in terms of logic and semantics rather than those of metaphysics and phenomenology. Dr. Aquila's effort to coordinate these approaches will make his book useful to students both of analytical philosophy of mind and also of phenomenology. (shrink)

This article responds to two unresolved and crucial problems of cognitive science: (1) What is actually accomplished by functions of the nervous system that we ordinarily describe in the intentional idiom? and (2) What makes the information processing involved in these functions semantic? It is argued that, contrary to the assumptions of many cognitive theorists, the computational approach does not provide coherent answers to these problems, and that a more promising start would be to fall back on mathematical communication theory (...) and, with the help of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology, to attempt a characterization of the adaptive processes involved in visual perception. Visual representations are explained as patterns of cortical activity that are enabled to focus on objects in the changing visual environment by constantly adjusting to maintain levels of mutual information between pattern and object that are adequate for continuing perceptual control. In these terms, the answer proposed to (1) is that the intentional functions of vision are those involved in the establishment and maintenance of such representations, and to (2) that semantic features are added to the information processes of vision with the focus on objects that these representations accomplish. The article concludes with proposals for extending this account of intentionality to the higher domains of conceptualization and reason, and with speculation about how semantic information-processing might be achieved in mechanical systems. (shrink)

Martin and Pfeifer (1986) have claimed "that the most typical characterizations of intentionality... all fail to distinguish... mental states from... dispositional physical states." The evidence they present in support of this thesis is examined in the light of the possibility that what it shows is that intentionality is the mark, not of the mental, but of the dispositional. Of the five marks of intentionality they discuss a critical examination shows that three of them, Brentano's (1874) inexistence of (...) the intentional object, Searle's (1983) directedness and Anscombe's (1965) indeterminacy, are features which distinguish T-intenTional/dispositional states, both mental and non-mental (physical), from non-dispositional "categorical" states. The other two are either, as in the case of Chisholm's (1957) permissible falsity of a propositional attitude ascription, a feature of linguistic utterances too restricted in its scope to be of interest, or, as in the case of Frege's (1892) indirect reference/Quine's (1953) referential opacity, evidence that the S-intenSional locution is a quotation either of what someone has said in the past or might be expected to say, if the question were to arise at some time in the future. (shrink)

Through an investigation of Husserl's concept of horizontal intentionality, the article basically argues that the horizon is intrinsically intersubjective, and that it entails an implicit reference to the intentions of possible Others. Against this background it is argued that our perceptual experience of an embodied Other, our factual encounter with the Other, is not the most basic and fundamental type of intersubjectivity. On the contrary, it presupposes a type of intersubjectivity which belongs a priori to the structure of constituting (...) subjectivity. (shrink)

Crane believes it is a mistake to aim for a general and reductive explanation of intentionality; intentionality is simply an essential and intrinsic feature of mental states like thoughts. I argue, first, that this is compatible with reductionism—indeed, it is the physicalist who can best do justice to the idea that intentional mental states have their intentionality intrinsically and essentially. Second, I argue that the real reason intentionality seems so mysterious is because we want it to (...) play two incompatible roles: to be an essential and intrinsic feature of mental states, and to be the means by which our minds are connected to the world. I suggest that we should abandon the widely held assumption that there is only one kind of ‘aboutness’, an assumption which appears in the literature in the form of a conflation between intentionality and representation. Instead, we should recognise two kinds of aboutness: intentional aboutness, which is an intrinsic and essential feature of mental states, and representational aboutness, which is the means by which our minds are connected to the world. (shrink)

This book argues that words and thoughts are typically about whatever they are about necessarily rather than contingently. The argument proceeds by articulating a requisite modal background and then bringing this background to bear on cognitive matters, notably the intentionality of cognitive episodes and states. The modal picture that emerges from the first two chapters is a strongly particularist one whereby possibilities reduce to possibilities for particular things (or pluralities thereof) where the latter are determined by the natures of (...) the particular things (or pluralities) involved. The next three chapters are devoted to the aboutness of referring terms in language and thought. The approach espoused is, again, strongly particularist in allotting explanatory priority to cognitive episodes and states regarding particular things (aka de re attitudes). (shrink)

The Physical Intentionality Thesis claims that dispositions share the marks of psychological intentionality; therefore, intentionality is not exclusively a mental phenomenon. Beyond the standard five marks, Alexander Bird introduces two additional marks of intentionality that he argues dispositions do not satisfy: first, thoughts are extrinsic; second, the direction of causation is that objects cause thoughts, not vice versa. In response, this paper identifies two relevant conceptions of extrinsicness, arguing that dispositions show deep parallels to thoughts on (...) both conceptions. Then, it shows that Bird’s discussion of direction of causation overlooks complexities of dispositionality and intentionality that problematize apparent differences between thoughts and dispositions. The paper ends with a discussion of why we find these parallels between thoughts and dispositions. (shrink)

This paper defends hedonic intentionalism, the view that all pleasures, including bodily pleasures, are directed towards objects distinct from themselves. Brentano is the leading proponent of this view. My goal here is to disentangle his significant proposals from the more disputable ones so as to arrive at a hopefully promising version of hedonic intentionalism. I mainly focus on bodily pleasures, which constitute the main troublemakers for hedonic intentionalism. Section 1 introduces the problem raised by bodily pleasures for hedonic intentionalism and (...) some of the main reactions to it. Sections 2 and 3 rebut two main approaches equating bodily pleasures with non- intentional episodes. More precisely, section 2 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be purely non-intentional self-conscious feelings, by relying on Brentano’s objection to Hamilton’s theory of pleasure. Section 3 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be non-intentional sensory qualities by relying on Brentano’s objections to Stumpf’s theory of pleasure. Section 4 develops a brentanian view of the intentionality of bodily pleasures by claiming bodily pleasures are directed at a sui generis class of sensory qualities. Section 5 presents an objection to Brentano’s later theory of pleasure according to which all sensory pleasures are directed at sensing acts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Suppose I say, ‘That is my dog’ and manage to refer to my dog, Fido. According to intentionalism, my intention to refer to Fido is part of the explanation of the way that the demonstrative gets Fido as its referent. A natural corollary is that the speaker is, to some extent, in control of this semantic fact. In this paper, we argue that intentionalism must give up the claim that the speaker is always in control, and thus, that intentions (...) are always the mental states that do the semantic work: we provide new examples where reference is successful but the speaker either lacks the intention to refer, or does not know how to refer; in all of these cases, the speaker is not in control of reference. We argue that these cases provide better objections against classical intentionalism than the ones offered by conventionalists (for example, Stojnić, Stone, and Lepore 2013; Stojnić 2021) and also that our discussion has as notable consequence that referring is not an essentially intentional action. Finally, we put forward our own view, which gives up claims of control but retains from intentionalism the importance of the speaker’s mental states. (shrink)

Intentionality is characteristic of many psychological phenomena. It is commonly held by philosophers that intentionality cannot be ascribed to purely physical systems. This view does not merely deny that psychological language can be reduced to physiological language. It also claims that the appropriateness of some psychological explanation excludes the possibility of any underlying physiological or causal account adequate to explain intentional behavior. This is a thesis which I do not accept. I shall argue that physical systems of a (...) specific sort will show the characteristic features of intentionality. Psychological subjects are, under an alternative description, purely physical systems of a certain sort. The intentional description and the physical description are logically distinct, and are not intertranslatable. Nevertheless, the features of intentionality may be explained by a purely causal account, in the sense that they may be shown to be totally dependent upon physical processes. (shrink)

It has long been a truism of the history of philosophy that intentionality is an invention of the medieval period, and within this standard narrative, the central place of Arabic philosophy has always been acknowledged. Yet there are many misconceptions surrounding the theories of intentionality advanced by the two main Arabic thinkers whose works were available to the West, Avicenna and Averroes. In the first part of this paper I offer an overview of the general accounts of (...) class='Hi'>intentionality and intentional being found in the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna and Averroes, and I trace the terminology of “intentions” to a neglected passage from Avicenna’s logic. In the second part of the paper I examine the way that Avicenna and Averroes apply their general theories of intentionality to the realm of sense perception. I offer an explanation of why Avicenna might have chosen to denominate the objects of the internal sense faculty of estimation as “intentions”, and I explore the implications of Averroes’s decision to attribute intentionality to the external senses and the media of perception. (shrink)

Two features are often assumed about emotions: they are intentional states and they are experiences. However, there are important reasons to consider some affective responses that are not experienced or only partly experienced as emotions. But the existence of these affective responses does not sit well with the intentionality of conscious emotions which are somehow geared towards their object. We therefore face a trilemma: either these latter affective responses do not have intentional objects and we should renounce intentionality (...) as a defining feature of emotions; or we have to explain how they actually have intentional, though unconscious, objects; or after all we must deny that they are really emotions. I suggest that the second option is the correct one: we can provide an account of the intentionality of unconscious emotions and its relation to the intentionality of conscious emotions. To do this, I rely on neuropsychological studies that distinguish two kinds of attention: salience as enriched treatment, and focus as a way of turning our attention. Then, given that only salience is always present in unconscious emotional phenomena, I suggest that emotions are intentional because they involve an object being made salient. I further argue that this feature of emotions explains why unconscious and conscious emotions can be taken as organized around their object. Finally, I defend this account against several objections, showing that the account can be applied whatever the cognitive base of the emotions may be and is not falsified by the fact that attentional aspects of emotions may vary in other dimensions. (shrink)

Despite increasing interest in the work of Tetsuro Watsuji, his discussion of intentionality remains underexplored. I here develop an interpretation and application of his view. First, I unpack Watsuji’s arguments for the inherently social character of intentionality, consider how they connect with his more general discussion of embodiment and betweenness, and then situate his view alongside phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Next, I argue that Watsuji’s characterization of the social character of intentionality is relevant to current (...) discussions in phenomenological psychopathology. I consider how it can help illuminate the character and structure of some anomalous experiences in schizophrenia. I argue further that this application can enrich existing attempts to connect Watsuji and psychopathology, such as those found in the work of the psychiatrist Bin Kimura. (shrink)

Efficient prospective motor control, evident in human activity from birth, reveals an adaptive intentionality of a primary, pre-reflective, and pre-conceptual nature that we identify here as sensorimotor intentionality. We identify a structural continuity between the emergence of this earliest form of prospective movement and the structure of mental states as intentional or content-directed in more advanced forms. We base our proposal on motor control studies, from foetal observations through infancy. These studies reveal movements are guided by anticipations of (...) future effects, even from before birth. This implies that these movements, even if they are simple and discrete, are the actions of an intentional agent. We develop this notion to present a theory of the developing organisation of a core feature of cognition as embodied agent action, from early single actions with proximal prospectivity to the complex serial ordering of actions into projects to reach distal goals. We claim the prospective structural continuity from early and simple actions to later complex projects of serially-ordered actions confirms the existence of an ontogenetically primary form of content–directedness that is a driver for learning and development. Its implications for understanding autism are discussed. (shrink)

I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case of Schneider in his arguments for the existence of non-conconceptual and non-representational motor intentionality contains a problematic methodological ambiguity. Motor intentionality is both to be revealed by its perspicuous preservation and by its contrastive impairment in one and the same case. To resolve the resulting contradiction I suggest we emphasize the second of Merleau-Ponty’s two lines of argument. I argue that this interpretation is the one in best accordance both with (...) Merleau-Ponty’s general methodology and with the empirical case of Schneider as it was described by Gelb and Goldstein. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on collective action and intention, and their relation to conventions, status functions, norms, institutions, and shared attitudes more generally. Collective action and shared intention play a foundational role in our understanding of the social. -/- The three central questions in the study of collective intentionality are: -/- (1) What is the ontology of collective intentionality? In particular, are groups per se intentional agents, as opposed to just their individual members? (2) What is the (...) psychology of collective intentionality? Do groups per se have psychological states, in particular propositional attitudes? What is the psychology of the individuals who participate in collective intentional behavior? What is special about their participatory intentions, their we-intentions, as they are called (Tuomela and Miller 1988), as opposed to their I-intentions? (3) How is collective intentionality implicated in the construction of social reality? In particular, how does the content of we-intentions and the intentional activity of individual agents create social institutions, practices and structures? -/- We first discuss collective action and shared intention in informal groups. Next we discuss mechanisms for constructing institutional structures out of the conceptual and psychological resources made available by our understanding of informal joint intentional action. Then we extend the discussion of collective action and intention to institutional groups, such as the Supreme Court, and explain how concepts of such organizations are constructed out of the concepts of a rule, convention, and status function. Finally we discuss collective attitudes beyond intention. (shrink)

One of the most enduring elements of Davidson’s legacy is the idea that intentionality is inherently normative. The normativity of intentionality means different things to different people and in different contexts, however. A subsidiary goal of this paper is to get clear on the sense in which Davidson means the thesis that intentionality is inherently normative. The central goal of the paper is to consider whether the thesis is true, in light of recent work on intentionality (...) that insists on an intimate connection between intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. According to several recent authors, there is a kind of intentionality – “phenomenal intentionality” – that is fully constituted by the phenomenal character of conscious experiences. I will argue that although Davidson’s thesis, when correctly understood, is compelling for most intentionality, it is false of phenomenal intentionality. I start, in §1, with an explication of the notion of phenomenal intentionality; in §2, I elucidate Davidson’s thesis and his case for it; in §3, I argue that the case does not extend to phenomenal intentionality; I close, in §4, with some objections and replies. (shrink)

Intentionality is usually defined as the directedness of the mind toward something other than itself. My desire for a cold beer is directed at the cold beer in front of me. Much of consciousness is intentional, my conscious experiences are usually directed at something. However, conscious experiences typically have a phenomenal character: there is something it is like for me to see the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean and to feel the warm water lapping over my feet, and (...) to smell the briny breeze. An important question to answer concerning the relationship between intentionality and consciousness is whether all conscious states are intentional? Another question concerns the explanatory priority of intentionality and phenomenal character: Can phenomenal character be explained in terms of intentionality? Or is it the case that intentionality should be understood in terms of phenomenology? Philosophers from the analytic, phenomenological, and naturalistic traditions have all made important contributions to our understanding of intentionality and consciousness. Some philosophers, such as Dretske, think that our phenomenology is intentionally structured. Others, such as Horgan and Tienson think that intentionality is fundamentally determined by our phenomenology. This looks like an impasse; however it may well be resolved by a combination of contemporary accounts of representation combined with an embodied phenomenology. (shrink)