Intentionality - Intentionality And Its History, Two Mistaken Theories Of Intentionality, The Relation Of Intentionality To Consciousness
desire belief intending
Intentionality is that feature of many mental states by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world. So, for example, if I have a belief, it must be a belief that such and such is the case. If I have a desire, it must be the desire that such and such should be the case. If I have an intention, it must be the intention that I do something. Intentionality is a technical term not to be confused with the ordinary English words intend and intentional. Intending in the sense of intending to do something
is just one kind of intentionality, along with hunger, thirst, belief, desire, fear, hope, pride, shame, love, hate, perception, memory, and so on.
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The concept of "intentionality" in this modern sense was reintroduced into philosophy by Franz Brentano (1874), who took the notion from the medieval scholastics. Brentano used the German expression Intentionalität, derived from the medieval Latin intentio, which meant what we nowadays call an intension or concept and which comes from the classical Latin tendere, meaning to aim …
A second error is to suppose that there is some essential connection between intentionality with a "t" and intensionality with an "s." Intensionality with an "s" is a property of sentences by which they fail certain tests for extensionality. The most famous test is called "Leibnitz's law" or the "substitutability of identicals.&…
Every intentional state is mental, but not every conscious mental state is intentional. For example, one may have feelings of anxiety that do not have any intentional content. One is not anxious about any particular thing; one just has a general undirected feeling of anxiety. Such a state is conscious and therefore mental without being intentional. If Brentano was wrong that intentionality is the …
For philosophers who reject dualism, intentionality, like consciousness, has always been an embarrassment. How is it possible in a purely physical world, in a world composed of physical particles in fields of force, that there could be such a thing as mental aboutness or directedness? Many philosophers think it is impossible, and they have made various efforts to reduce intentionality to some mate…
Four concepts are essential for understanding the structure and functioning of intentionality (Searle, 1983). First, the distinction between intentional content and psychological mode; second, the notion of direction of fit; third, the notions of conditions of satisfaction; and fourth, the holistic network of intentionality. Every intentional state consists of an intentional content in a certain p…
Parallel to the question of how intentionality is possible at all is the question: How is it possible that intentional states have the particular content that they do? What makes my belief that in 2004 George W. Bush was president about George W. Bush, for example, and not about his brother, Jeb, or his father, George H. W. Bush, also named "George Bush," or about anything else? Ther…
Explanations of human behavior rely essentially on the causal functioning of intentionality. When we say "Jones voted for the Republicans because he wanted lower taxes and believed the Republican candidate would produce lower taxes," we are giving a causal explanation in terms of the intentionality of desire and belief. This form of causal explanation is important not only in practic…
Armstrong, D. M. A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London: Routledge, 1993. Brentano, Franz Clemens. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Leipzig: Dunker and Humblot, 1874. Published in English as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Excerpted in Chalmers, 2002. Burge, T. "Individualism and the Mental." In Midwest Studies in Philosophy. …
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