Intentionality

Intentionality is a philosophical concept defined as 'the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs'. The idea fell out of discussion with the end of the medieval scholastic period, but in recent times was resurrected by Franz Brentano and later adopted by Edmund Husserl. Today, intentionality is a live concern among philosophers of mind and language. The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with St. Anselm'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.Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), 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. Intentionality is a philosophical concept defined as 'the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs'. The idea fell out of discussion with the end of the medieval scholastic period, but in recent times was resurrected by Franz Brentano and later adopted by Edmund Husserl. Today, intentionality is a live concern among philosophers of mind and language. The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with St. Anselm'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 concept of intentionality was reintroduced in 19th-century contemporary philosophy by Franz Brentano (a German philosopher and psychologist who is generally regarded as the founder of act psychology, also called intentionalism) in his work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness that are thus 'psychical' or 'mental' phenomena, by which they may be set apart from 'physical' or 'natural' phenomena. 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' (Jacquette 2004, p. 102), while others are more cautious, stating: 'It is not clear whether in 1874 this ... was intended to carry any ontological commitment' (Chrudzimski and Smith 2004, p. 205). A major problem within discourse on intentionality 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 (see below) 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, what is meant by 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 the concept of intentionality more widespread attention, both in continental and analytic philosophy. In contrast to Brentano's view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness) identified intentionality with consciousness, stating that the two were indistinguishable. German philosopher Martin Heidegger (Being and Time), defined intentionality as 'care' (Sorge), a sentient condition where an individual's existence, facticity, and being in the world identifies their ontological significance, in contrast to that which is merely ontic ('thinghood'). 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 insisted 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 that the idea of pure consciousness is that it is nothing. (Sartre also referred to 'consciousness' as '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. 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: