Intentionality is a philosophical concept defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
as "the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states
of affairs". The term refers to the ability of the mind to form representations and should
not be confused with intention. The term dates from medieval Scholastic philosophy, but was
resurrected by Franz Brentano and adopted by Edmund Husserl. The earliest theory of
intentionality is associated with St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of
God and his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and
objects that exist in reality. Intentionality should not be confused with
intensionality, a related concept from logic and semantics.
Modern overview The concept of intentionality was reintroduced
in 19th-century contemporary philosophy by the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano
in his work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic
of all acts of consciousness, "psychical" or "mental" phenomena, by which it could be
set apart from "physical" or "natural" phenomena.
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called
the intentional inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly
unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object, or immanent objectivity.
Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do
not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something
is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional
in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon
exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they
are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.
Brentano coined the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the peculiar ontological
status of the contents of mental phenomena. According to some interpreters the "in-" of
"in-existence" is to be read as locative, i.e. as indicating that "an intended object
[...] exists in or has in-existence, existing not externally but in the psychological state,",
while others are more cautious, affirming that: "It is not clear whether in 1874 this
[...] was intended to carry any ontological commitment,".
A major problem within intentionality discourse is that participants often fail to make explicit
whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, i.e. whether
it involves teleology. Dennett explicitly invokes teleological concepts in the "intentional
stance". However, most philosophers use intentionality to mean something with no teleological import.
Thus, a thought of a chair can be about a chair without any implication of an intention
or even a belief relating to the chair. For philosophers of language, intentionality is
largely an issue of how symbols can have meaning. This lack of clarity may underpin some of
the differences of view indicated below. To bear out further the diversity of sentiment
evoked from the notion of intentionality, Husserl followed on Brentano, and gave intentionality
more widespread attention, both in continental and analytic philosophy. In contrast to Brentano's
view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre identified intentionality with consciousness,
stating that the two were indistinguishable. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, defined
intentionality as "care", a sentient condition where an individual's existence, facticity,
and being in the world identifies their ontological significance, in contrast to that which is
the mere ontic. Other 20th-century philosophers such as Gilbert
Ryle and A.J. Ayer were critical of Husserl's concept of intentionality and his many layers
of consciousness, Ryle insisting that perceiving is not a process and Ayer that describing
one's knowledge is not to describe mental processes. The effect of these positions is
that consciousness is so fully intentional that the mental act has been emptied of all
content and the idea of pure consciousness is that it is nothing.
Platonist Roderick Chisholm has revived the Brentano thesis through linguistic analysis,
distinguishing two parts to Brentano's concept, the ontological aspect and the psychological
aspect. Chisholm's writings have attempted to summarize the suitable and unsuitable criteria
of the concept since the Scholastics, arriving at a criterion of intentionality identified
by the two aspects of Brentano's thesis and defined by the logical properties that distinguish
language describing psychological phenomena from language describing non-psychological
phenomena. Chisholm's criteria for the intentional use of sentences are: existence independence,
truth-value indifference, and referential opacity.
In current artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind, intentionality is sometimes linked
with questions of semantic inference with both skeptical and supportive adherents. John
Searle argued for this position with the Chinese room thought experiment, according to which
no syntactic operations that occurred in a computer would provide it with semantic content.
Others are more skeptical of the human ability to make such an assertion, arguing that the
kind of intentionality that emerges from self-organizing networks of automata will always be undecidable
because it will never be possible to make our subjective introspective experience of
intentionality and decision making coincide with our objective observation of the behavior
of a self-organizing machine. Dennett's taxonomy of current theories about
intentionality Daniel Dennett offers a taxonomy of the current
theories about intentionality in Chapter 10 of his book The Intentional Stance. Most,
if not all, current theories on intentionality accept Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility
of intentional idiom. From this thesis the following positions emerge:
intentional idiom is problematic for science; intentional idiom is not problematic for science,
which is divided into: Eliminative Materialism;
Realism; Quinean double standard which is divided into:
adherence to Normative Principle, which is divided into:
who makes an Assumption of Rationality; who follows the Principle of Charity;
adherence to Projective Principle.
Roderick Chisholm, G.E.M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, and Charles Taylor all adhere to the
former position, namely that intentional idiom is problematic and cannot be integrated with
the natural sciences. Members of this category also maintain realism in regard to intentional
objects, which may imply some kind of dualism. The latter position, which maintains the unity
of intentionality with the natural sciences, is further divided into three standpoints:
Eliminative Materialism, supported by W.V. Quine and Churchland
Realism, advocated by Jerry Fodor, as well as Burge, Dretske, Kripke, and the early Hilary
Putnam those who adhere to the Quinean double standard.
Proponents of the eliminative materialism, understand intentional idiom, such as "belief",
"desire", and the like, to be replaceable either with behavioristic language or with
the language of neuroscience. Holders of realism argue that there is a deeper
fact of the matter to both translation and belief attribution. In other words, manuals
for translating one language into another cannot be set up in different yet behaviorally
identical ways and ontologically there are intentional objects. Famously, Fodor has attempted
to ground such realist claims about intentionality in a language of thought. Dennett comments
on this issue, Fodor "attempt[s] to make these irreducible realities acceptable to the physical
sciences by grounding them in the 'syntax' of a system of physically realized mental
representations". Those who adhere to the so-called Quinean
double standard, accept Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation and
its implications, while the other positions so far mentioned do not. As Quine puts it,
indeterminacy of radical translation is the thesis that "manuals for translating one language
into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech
dispositions, yet incompatible with one another". Quine and Wilfrid Sellars both comment on
this intermediary position. One such implication would be that there is, in principle, no deeper
fact of the matter that could settle two interpretative strategies on what belief to attribute to
a physical system. In other words, the behavior of any physical system, in theory, could be
interpreted by two different predictive strategies and both would be equally warranted in their
belief attribution. This category can be seen to be a medial position between the realists
and the eliminativists since it attempts to blend attributes of both into a theory of
intentionality. Dennett, for example, argues in True Believers that intentional idiom is
a predictive strategy and if such a strategy successfully and voluminously predicts the
actions of a physical system, then that physical system can be said to have those beliefs attributed
to it. Dennett calls this predictive strategy the intentional stance.
They are further divided into two theses: adherence to the Normative Principle
adherence to the Projective Principle Advocates of the former, the Normative Principle,
argue that attributions of intentional idioms to physical systems should be the propositional
attitudes that the physical system ought to have in those circumstances. However, exponents
of this view are still further divided into those who make an Assumption of Rationality
and those who adhere to the Principle of Charity. Dennett, Cherniak, and the more recent work
of Putnam recommend the Assumption of Rationality, which unsurprisingly assumes that the physical
system in question is rational. Donald Davidson and Lewis defend the Principle of Charity.
The latter is advocated by Grandy and Stich, who maintain that attributions of intentional
idioms to any physical system should be the propositional attitude that one would suppose
one would have in the same circumstances. Basic intentionality types in Le Morvan
Working on the intentionality of vision, belief, and knowledge, Pierre Le Morvan has distinguished
between three basic kinds of intentionality that he dubs "transparent", "translucent",
and "opaque" respectively. The threefold distinction may be explained as follows. Let's call the
"intendum" what an intentional state is about, and the "intender" the subject who is in the
intentional state. An intentional state is transparent if it satisfies the following
two conditions: it is genuinely relational in that it entails the existence of not just
the intender but the intendum as well, and substitutivity of identicals applies to the
intendum. An intentional state is translucent if it satisfies but not. An intentional state
is opaque if it satisfies neither nor. Mental states without intentionality
The claim that all mental states are intentional is called intentionalism, the contrary being
anti-intentionalism. Some anti-intentionalism, such as that of
Ned Block, is based on the argument that phenomenal conscious experience or qualia is also a vital
component of consciousness, and that it is not intentional.
Another form of anti-intentionalism associated with John Searle regards phenomenality itself
as the "mark of the mental" and sidelines intentionality.
A further form argues that some unusual states of consciousness are non-intentional, although
an individual might live a lifetime without experiencing them. Robert K.C. Forman argues
that some of the unusual states of consciousness typical of mystical experience are Pure Consciousness
Events in which awareness exists, but has no object, is not awareness "of" anything.
Intentionality and self-consciousness Several authors have attempted to construct
philosophical models describing how intentionality relates to the human capacity to be self-conscious.
Cedric Evans contributed greatly to the discussion with his "The Subject of Self-Consciousness"
in 1970. He centered his model on the idea that executive attention need not be propositional
in form. See also
References
Further reading Brentano, Franz Psychologie vom empirischen
Standpunkte Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot Chisholm, Roderick M.. "Intentionality" in
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-02-894990-1
Chisholm, Roderick M.. "Notes on the Logic of Believing" in Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research. Vol. 24: p. 195-201. Reprinted in Marras, Ausonio. Ed. Intentionality, mind,
and language. ISBN 0-252-00211-3 Chisholm, Roderick M.. Perceiving: A Philosophical
Study. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-0077-3 Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz and Barry Smith "Brentano’s
Ontology: from Conceptualism to Reism" in Jacquette The Cambridge Companion to Brentano
ISBN 0-521-00765-8 Davidson, Donald. "Truth and Meaning". Synthese,
XVII, pp. 304–23. 1967. Dennett, Daniel C.. The Intentional Stance.
The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-54053-7 Dreyfus, Georges. "Is Perception Intentional?."
2006. Fodor, J. "The Language of Thought". Harvard
University Press. 1980. ISBN 0-674-51030-5 Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction
to Pure Phenomenology. Collier Books. ISBN 978-0-415-29544-4
Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. ISBN 978-1-57392-866-3
Jacquette, Dale "Brentano’s Concept of Intentionality" in Jacquette The Cambridge Companion to Brentano
ISBN 0-521-00765-8 Le Morvan, Pierre. "Intentionality: Transparent,
Translucent, and Opaque". The Journal of Philosophical Research, 30, p. 283-302.
Malle, B. F., Moses, L. J., & Baldwin, D. A.. Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations
of Social Cognition. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63267-6. Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. The Concept of Intentionality:
A Critical Study. St. Louis, MO: Warren H. Green, 1972. ISBN 978-0-87527-115-6
Quine, W.V.. Word and Object. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-67001-2.
Sajama, Seppo & Kamppinen, Matti. Historical Introduction to Phenomenology. New York, NY:
Croom Helm, 1987. ISBN 0-7099-4443-8 Stich, Stephen. "Relativism, Rationality,
and the Limits of Intentional Description". Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly, 65, pp. 211–35. 1984.
Williford, Kenneth. "The Intentionality of Consciousness and Consciousness of Intentionality.
In G. Forrai and G. Kampis, eds., Intentionality: Past and Future. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 143–156.
2005. ISBN 90-420-1817-8 Беляев И. А. Интенциональность
целостного мироотношения Вестник Оренбургского
государственного университета. — 2007. — № 1. — С. 29-35.
External links Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Intentionality Consciousness and Intentionality
Ancient Theories of Intentionality
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Intentionality
Collective Intentionality