Concept
Intentionality
Overview
Intentionality is the mental ability to refer to or represent something. Sometimes regarded as the mark of the mental, it is found in mental states like perceptions, beliefs or desires. For example, the perception of a tree has intentionality because it represents a tree to the perceiver. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.
An early theory of intentionality is associated with Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for the existence of God, and with his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality. The idea fell out of discussion with the end of the medieval scholastic period, but in recent times was resurrected by empirical psychologist Franz Brentano and later adopted by contemporary phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. Today, intentionality is a live concern among philosophers of mind and language. A common dispute is between naturalism, the view that intentional properties are reducible to natural properties as studied by the natural sciences, and the phenomenal intentionality theory, the view that intentionality is grounded in consciousness.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
But if we do not thus make them objective forms of all things, there is no other way left than to make them subjective forms of our mode of intuition—external and internal; which is called sensuous, because it is not primitive, that is, is not such as gives in itself the existence of the object of the intuition (a mode of intuition which, so far as we can judge, can belong only to the Creator), but is dependent on…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Intentionality is.
For there are two kinds of poisons used among men, which cannot clearly be distinguished. There is the kind just now explicitly mentioned, which injures bodies by the use of other bodies according to a natural law; there is also another kind which persuades the more daring class that they can do injury by sorceries, and incantations, and magic knots, as they are termed, and makes others believe that they above all…
Plato, Laws
States what Intentionality is.
No matter how definite and concrete the habitual imagery of a given mind may be, the things represented appear always surrounded by their fringe of relations, and this is as integral a part of the mind's object as the things themselves are. We come, by steps with which everyone is sufficiently familiar, to think of whole classes of things as well as of single specimens; and to think of the special qualities or…
William James, Psychology
States what Intentionality is.
Philosophers who discussed Intentionality
- Je Tsongkhapa
- John Searle
- Gilbert Harman
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Tim Crane
- Martin Heidegger
- Alexius Meinong
- Robert Stalnaker
- Roderick Chisholm
- Jerry Fodor
- David Papineau
- Peter Hacker
- William Lycan
- Franz Brentano
- Edmund Husserl
- Jean-Luc Marion
- Roy Bhaskar
- Robert C. Solomon
- Ruth Millikan
- Dan Zahavi
- Stephen Neale
- Victor Reppert
- Michel Henry
- Julio Cabrera (philosopher)
Related ideas
- Gilbert Ryle
- Ned Block
- Artificial intelligence
- Philosophy
- John Searle
- Analytic philosophy
- Modal realism
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Sentience
- Being and Nothingness
- Reference
- A. J. Ayer
- Mental state
- Qualia
- Tim Crane
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Platonism
- Ontology
- Theory of forms
- Ontological argument
- Syntax
- Self-consciousness
- Indeterminacy of translation
- Semantics
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.