Page 77 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

The term 'intentionality' derives from Scholastic philo- sophers' use of 'intentional' to mean mental or exist- ing in orfor the mind or having an essence consisting in appearance. Franz Brentano, who revived the term in his Psychologic vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), characterized intentionality somewhat unclearly as a property, possessed by mental phenomena, of having 'reference to a content, a direction upon an object (by which we are not to understand a reality in this case).' Given the parenthesis, it seems that Brentano meant to exclude the property of direction upon a real object. In recent philosophy, intentionality has been seen as a family of properties distinctive of representations in general, that is, of public representations (words, pictures, diagrams, sculptures, as well as mental phenomena (perceptions, judgments, beliefs).Modern usage treats intentionality as representationality. This wide category includes mental and linguistic semantic properties such as reference, sense, and intension. The topic is intimately connected with recent theories of language; if there is a 'language of thought,' then the tools developed for studying natural languages will surely help to shed light upon its properties.
1. Aboutness
There are several senses in which a representation may be said to be 'about' an object. If a person visually hallucinates a pink elephant, or judges that there is a pink elephant in front of him, his visual experience or judgment is in a sense directed upon a pink elephant, even if no pink elephant is present. This 'subjective aboutness' was probably Brentano's main concern, and it has also been much studied within the tradition of phenomenology. The ability to represent non- existent things is also possessed by pictures and sen- tences; it is not unique to mental phenomena.
If a subject correctly perceives or judges that there is an apple in front of him, his mental act is directed upon a real apple. Real aboutness is also not unique to mental phenomena. In such cases, it may be sug- gested that the representation has two objects, a real object and an intentional object. If the perception or judgment had not been veridical, it would have lacked a real object but it still would have been subjectively about an apple. This insight lies behind all attempts to study pure intentionality without looking at the external world.
Another distinction exists between a rep- resentation's being of a particular and a rep- resentation's being about any member of a class. The sentence 'Tom thinks that a man is in the kitchen' could be interpreted as meaning that there is a par-
ticular man, say Jim, whom Tom thinks is in the kitchen, or as meaning that Tom thinks that some man or other is in the kitchen. In fact, the idea of 'direction upon an object' runs together a host of issues that modern theories of reference try to separate.
2. Content
Representations of all sorts also have content, sense, or meaning. A perception or a judgment, but equally a sentence, a picture or a diagram, can represent an object as having a property, or as being of a certain kind. Some, but not all representations have prepo- sitional contents: they represent that something is the case. Having a content is, perhaps, more essential than having an object. Some representations (e.g., the belief that it is raining) are not 'directed upon an object,' yet they have contents. However, recent work in the philosophy of mind has unearthed many kinds of content, and several distinct notions of it. Here too, the topic of intentionality fragments.
Many philosophers accept that mental inten- tionality has primacy. The meaningfulness of pictures and words depends upon their being interpreted as meaningful by their producers and consumers, whereas mental states have contents for their pos- sessors regardless of whether anyone actually ascribes contents to them. The central problem of inten- tionality is to explain mental content and mental aboutness. Other items derive their content and about- ness from the original mental intentionality of their human makers and users.
3. IntentionalityandIntensionality
A caveat must be issued concerning intensionality. This term refers to a cluster of semantic peculiarities exhibited by certain types of sentences, including sen- tences with modal operators, sentences used to state causal and other explanations, and sentences used to report prepositional attitudes. Such sentences are concerned to get across information about attributes, aspects, or points of view. The rationale for construing prepositional attitude reports intensionally is con- nected to the fact that such reports are second-order representations. They are linguistic representations, they have prepositional contents, but they are about mental representations which have contents in their own right. The report must not be confused with that which is reported. The mental state ascribed by an intensional sentence is not itself intensional.
This article is not concerned with the semantics of prepositional attitude sentences. It is hard to theorize
Intentionality A. Woodfield
Intentionality
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