2.2—
Intentionality

Since the publication of Franz Brentano's Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt in 1874, intentionality has come to be a topic of increasing importance in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. While Brentano's own views on intentionality have not proven to be of enduring interest in their own right, his reintroduction of the Scholastic notion of intentionality into philosophy has had far-reaching ramifications. Brentano's pupil Edmund Husserl ([1900] 1970, [1913] 1931, [1950] 1960, [1954] 1970) made intentionality the central theme of his transcendental phenomenology, and the work of subsequent European philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault has been articulated in large measure against Husserl's views about the intentionality of mind and language. In the English-speaking world, problems about intentionality have been introduced into analytic philosophy by Roderick Chisholm (1957, 1968, 1983, 1984a, 1984b), who translated and commented upon much of Brentano's work, and Wilfred Sellars (1956), who studied under Husserl's pupil Martin Farber.^[1]

Several of the principal aspects of Brentano's problematic have been preserved in subsequent discussions of intentionality. Brentano's characterization of the directedness and content of some mental states has been adopted wholesale by later writers, as has his recognition that such states form a natural domain for psychological investigation and need to be distinguished both from qualia and from brute objects.^[2] Recently, moreover, there has been a strong resurgence of interest in the relationship between what Brentano called "descriptive" (i.e., intentional) and

"genetic" (i.e., causal, nomological) psychology. Brentano had originally thought that genetic psychology would eventually subsume and explain descriptive psychology, but subsequently concluded that intentionality was in fact an irreducible property of the mental and could not be accounted for in nonintentional and nonmental terms. This position is sometimes described as "Brentano's thesis." This discussion in Brentano is thus a direct forebear of current discussions of the possibility of naturalizing intentionality, with Brentano's mature position represented by writers such as Searle (1983, 1993).

On the other hand, later discussions have placed an increasing emphasis on several aspects of intentionality that are either given inadequate treatment in Brentano's account or missing from it altogether. Notable among these are a concern for relating intuitions about the intentional nature of mental states to other philosophical difficulties, such as psychophysical causation and the mind-body problem, and a conviction that intentionality is a property of language as well as of thought, accompanied by a corresponding interest in the relationship between the intentionality of language and the intentionality of mental states. This interest in the "intentionality of language" has taken two forms. On the one hand, writers such as Husserl (1900) and Searle (1983) have taken interest in how utterances and inscriptions come to be about things by virtue of being expressions of intentional states. On the other hand, Chisholm (1957) has coined a usage of the word 'intentional' that applies to linguistic tokens employed in ascriptions of intentional states.^[3] This widespread conviction that language as well as thought is in some sense intentional has been paralleled by a similar conviction that some mental states can be evaluated in the same semantic terms as some expressions in natural and technical languages. Notably, it is widely assumed that notions such as meaning, reference, and truth value can be applied both (a ) to occurrent states such as explicit judgments and (b ) to tacit states such as beliefs that are not consciously entertained, in much the fashion that these semantic notions are applied to linguistic entities such as words, sentences, assertions, and propositions. Providing some sort of account of the intentionality and semantics of mental states is thus widely viewed to be an important component of any purported "theory of mind."