Intentionality and Aboutness
Intentionality is the directedness or aboutness of mental states. A belief may be about tomorrow's weather, a fear about an approaching dog, and a hope about an event that never occurs. Thoughts can concern distant, abstract, fictional, and impossible objects, and they can represent their subject matter incorrectly. The central problem is to explain how a state of one physical organism acquires this world-directed and norm-governed character.
Intentionality is not intention in the ordinary sense of planning an action. Intentions are one intentional kind alongside belief, desire, perception, memory, imagination, and fear. Nor is intentionality identical with consciousness. Much representation is unconscious, while a diffuse mood may have a vivid character without a determinate object. A theory of mind needs both notions even if it ultimately connects them.
Brentano's mark of the mental
Franz Brentano proposed intentionality as the mark of the mental. Every mental phenomenon is directed toward an object or content: in judgment something is affirmed, in love something is loved, in presentation something is presented. Physical phenomena, he argued, lack this directedness.
Brentano described the object's intentional inexistence within the act. This did not straightforwardly mean that every object literally exists inside the mind. It marked a peculiar feature: one can think of Pegasus whether or not Pegasus exists. The thought's being about Pegasus cannot require an ordinary relation to an existing horse.
The proposal faces pressure in both directions. Pains and undirected moods may be mental without clearly being about anything. Maps, sentences, neural signals, and computer states may represent without themselves being minds. A defender can say that the artifacts possess only derived intentionality, conferred by minded users, while pains represent bodily disturbance. Both replies turn the mark into a research program: derived and original content, and the alleged content of bodily feeling, must be explained rather than stipulated.
Relation or relational-looking?
Ordinary relations require relata. If Alice is taller than Bob, both Alice and Bob must exist. Intentionality appears not to obey this requirement:
may be true while Pegasus does not exist. Three broad responses are available.
- Object theories accept unusual relata: nonexistent objects, abstract contents, or representations that mediate thought.
- Content theories say the state has conditions of correctness without standing in an ordinary relation to the represented object.
- Adverbial or act theories treat thinking Pegasus-wise as a modification of the subject's activity, requiring no object corresponding to the grammatical noun phrase.
The ontological options are surveyed through fictional and intentional objects in Ontology. Philosophy of mind inherits the explanatory remainder: if aboutness is not a simple relation, what gives a state its content and correctness conditions?
Content and object
The object of a thought is what it is about; its content is how that object or possibility is presented. Oedipus can believe that Jocasta is nearby without believing that his mother is nearby, although Jocasta is his mother. Co-reference therefore does not guarantee sameness of mental content.
Content has an aspectual shape. A subject thinks of one thing under a mode of presentation, description, concept, or perspective. This explains why substitution of co-referring terms can fail in belief reports:
does not entail
The same problem motivates Frege's distinction between sense and reference in public language, discussed in Semantics and the Theory of Meaning. Here the issue is psychological: how contents organise inference and action for a subject.
Intentional opacity
Belief, desire, and imagination create intensional or opaque contexts. Replacing an expression with a co-referential one can change truth value, and existential generalisation can fail. From "Mira is searching for the fountain of youth" one cannot infer that something exists which Mira is searching for.
Opacity shows that intentional states cannot be individuated only by their external referents. It does not show that content is wholly internal. The way a subject presents an object may depend on causal history, environment, and social practice. The later internalism/externalism dispute concerns which of these factors partly constitute content rather than merely cause it.
Misrepresentation
A representation can be wrong. A frog may strike at a dark moving object that is not a fly; a subject may see a straight stick as bent; a map may place a bridge where none exists. This possibility of error distinguishes representation from mere covariance.
Smoke correlates with fire but does not falsely represent fire when generated by a smoke machine unless an interpreting practice gives it that role. A natural sign simply occurs under certain conditions. An intentional state has correctness conditions: the world can fail to be as the state presents it.
Misrepresentation is therefore a central test for naturalistic theories. If a neural state means whatever normally causes it, an unusual cause changes or broadens the meaning rather than producing error. A successful account must fix content independently enough that the state can token in abnormal conditions and be false.
Satisfaction and direction of fit
Intentional states differ not only in content but in their direction of fit.
- Beliefs and perceptions aim to fit the world. When mismatch occurs, the state should change.
- Desires and intentions aim for the world to fit the state. When mismatch occurs, action should change the world.
A shopping list and a detective's record may contain the same items while serving opposite normative roles. This distinction helps explain why content alone does not identify a mental kind. Believing that the window is open and wanting it open share a proposition but differ in inferential, motivational, and correctness conditions.
Some states have mixed or disputed directions. Imagination need not aim at truth or realisation; emotion can represent and motivate. A theory of intentionality must explain both the represented content and the attitude taken toward it.
Propositional and non-propositional content
Beliefs are commonly modelled as attitudes toward propositions, which can be true or false. Perception and motor representation may have richer or non-conceptual content. An infant can visually represent depth without possessing a proposition about distance; a motor system can represent a grip trajectory without asserting that the hand will move so.
Forcing every content into sentence-like form risks intellectualising animal and subpersonal cognition. Denying propositional structure entirely makes systematic inference and compositional thought difficult to explain. Different representational formats may coexist: maps, magnitudes, images, predictive models, and language-like structures can each support distinct operations.
The general problem of content is therefore not equivalent to choosing a sentence in the head. It asks what makes any format answerable to something beyond itself.
About nonexistent and impossible objects
Thought about Vulcan, Sherlock Holmes, or a round square shows that causal contact with an existing referent is not required for every content. A content theory can assign conditions involving no actual object: the state represents there being a planet of a certain kind or an object satisfying a description.
This handles failed reference at the cost of making content less object-dependent. Proper-name thought seems sometimes to concern a particular individual rather than any descriptive condition. Causal-historical theories explain successful cases through chains to the object, while empty names require pretence, descriptive fallback, or a different semantic mechanism.
Impossible contents add another pressure. A person can think that a square circle exists even though no possible world satisfies the thought. Identifying propositions with sets of possible worlds then makes all impossible thoughts equivalent. Fine-grained or structured content is needed to preserve their different cognitive roles.
Intentionality and consciousness
Intentionality and phenomenal consciousness come apart conceptually:
- unconscious perception and implicit memory appear representational without being experienced;
- a diffuse mood or undirected pain may be experienced without a specific object;
- two states can represent the same scene while differing in phenomenal mode;
- two experiences can feel alike while differing in wide environmental content.
Phenomenal intentionality theories argue that original content is grounded in conscious character. Separatist theories naturalise content through causal, functional, or biological relations independently of experience. The question is taken up later in this folder after those accounts are available.
The explanatory tasks
An adequate theory of intentionality should explain:
- determination: why a state has this content rather than another;
- error: how it can misrepresent;
- aspect: why co-referential presentations guide thought differently;
- absence: how thought concerns what does not exist;
- normativity: why content supports standards of correctness and inference;
- causal role: how what a state means helps explain action;
- shareability: how different subjects can think the same thing.
No major theory handles all seven without auxiliary commitments. Causal and informational theories excel at world-linking; teleosemantics at error; inferential-role accounts at normativity; externalism at social and environmental dependence; phenomenal-intentionality views at original aboutness. The rest of the folder compares their costs rather than treating "representation" as an unexplained primitive.
Selected references
- Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874).
- Crane, Tim. The Objects of Thought (2013).
- Searle, John R. Intentionality (1983).
- Smith, David Woodruff and Ronald McIntyre. Husserl and Intentionality (1982).