10.5.1—
The Pure Logical Analysis of Intentionality

The topic of intentionality has received a great deal of attention in the century or so since Brentano (1874) reintroduced it into the European philosophical milieu. Much of this attention (e.g., by writers such as Brentano, Husserl, and most of the continental tradition, and writers like Chisholm and Searle in the English-speaking world) has been devoted to the examination of what one might call the "logical structure" of intentionality—that is, of properties that intentional states have just by virtue of being intentional states, or by virtue of being intentional states of a particular sort (e.g., judgments, conjectures, perceptual gestalts). A number of such properties stand immediately to the fore.

All intentional states involve an attitude-content structure.

Every intentional state is "directed towards" something—its "intentional object"—whether anything actually exists corresponding to that object or not.

Every intentional state is the intentional state of some intending subject.

Intentional states can have other intentional states as their intentional objects.

Every intentional state presents its object in some fashion or under some description (as being thus ) and under some intentional modality (judging, hoping, desiring, etc.).

Every intentional state has properties that determine its "conditions of satisfaction"—that is, that determine what would have to be true of the world in order for that state to be felicitous. And so on.

Features such as these are features of intentionality per se, and not features of intentionality that accrue to it specifically as it occurs in some particular kind of being. So whereas, for example, the claim that all desires are realized in brains is at best a contingent truth (it seems logically possible that things with different bodies—or perhaps even no bodies—could have desires), it is a necessary (and indeed analytic) truth about desire that every desire is a desire for something. The process of clarifying such features seems to be more a kind of analysis than empirical inquiry, and seems to be in large measure concerned with what might be called the "logical form" of intentional states—that is, the fact that they have an attitude-content structure, the fact that they posit an object or state of affairs under some description, and so on.

These "logical" properties of intentionality were given some attention by Brentano, and have been more carefully developed by writers like Roderick Chisholm (1957, 1968, 1984b), John Searle (1983), and particularly Edmund Husserl (1900, 1913), who devotes several volumes to the explication of intentionality.^[10] It might be appropriate to call this kind of description of intentionality "pure logical analysis" of intentionality. Husserl's expression "pure phenomenology" is also appropriate, though it may prove misleading to readers who associate the word 'phenomenology' with things having to do with qualitative feels and not with intentional states. What is properly suggested by the term involves the claims that (1) (occurrent) intentional states are things we experience, (2) they can also become the objects of our inquiry and analysis, (3) such intentional states "have a phenomenology" in the sense that features such as the attitude-content structure of intentional states are part of the "what-it's-like" (see Nagel 1974) of intentional states, and (4) these features can be discovered by phenomenological reflection. The "what-it'slike," of course, is not a qualitative "what-it's-like" (a "what-it-feels -like") but a logical "what-it's-like" (a "what-form-it-has"). Chisholm's linguistically based approach to intentionality is an attempt to attain greater clarity about mental states by attending to the logical forms of sentences used to report them. (Popular myths to the contrary notwith-

standing, the focus of Chisholm's interest is the intentionality of mental states, and he approaches them through an analysis of the sentences used to report them because of the difficulty of addressing the topic of mental states directly. Chisholm, like Husserl, thinks that phenomenology is difficult and elusive.)

In addition to the analysis of features common to all intentional states, this kind of pure analysis could reveal features peculiar to particular kinds of intentional states.

It is part of the very nature of PERCEPTUAL experiences that they set conditions of fulfillment involving a state of affairs in which something corresponding to the intentional object actually caused the state.

It is part of the essence of states having the modality of RECOLLECTION (things that present themselves as memories) that they be founded upon previously experienced immediate experiences of PERCEPTUAL PRESENTATION or some other intentional modality, and so on.

This kind of analysis of intentionality stands in some ways prior to the kind of investigation of the mind undertaken by computational psychology and BCTM. Computer modeling and artificial intelligence might, of course, provide very useful tools in pursuing such an analysis, as computer science provides ways of talking about inference and data structures that can greatly enrich one's ability to talk about logical form and conceptual relationships. It may also be that certain ideas that have emerged out of computer science (procedural representation, to name one notable example) may provide tools for the logical analysis of intentionality that would not otherwise have been available. But by and large, it is our intuitions about our mental states that constrain our computational descriptions, and not vice versa. If computational description is useful, it is useful in furthering a project to which we are already committed when we undertake the analysis of intentionality.