⁂ Concepts · Mind · No. 85
Intentionality

Subject cataloguing: a profession that must fix aboutness and cannot make trained people agree.

Intentionality

The property of being about something - the way a thought, unlike a stone, is directed at what it is not.

Theme
Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition
Continental
Term fixed
1901

In plain terms

A thought is about something. A rock is not about anything. That difference is easy to state and extremely hard to account for.

It gets harder when the object does not exist. You can think about a unicorn, fear a burglary that never happens, or search for a person who turns out to be fictional. The thought has a target and there is nothing at the target end, and yet the thought is perfectly definite - it is about unicorns rather than about dragons.

So the relation cannot be an ordinary one between two things, because one of the things need not be there. Whatever aboutness is, it is not like distance or contact, and no physical relation behaves this way.

As a philosopher would put it

Brentano's thesis is that intentionality is the mark of the mental: every mental phenomenon is directed at an object, and no physical phenomenon is. Husserl separates the act from its content, and the object as intended from the object as it might be - the same object can be presented under different aspects, which is what makes error and illusion describable rather than paradoxical.

The naturalising programme is the modern project. Causal theories make a state about what reliably causes it; teleosemantic theories make it about what it is the state's biological function to track. Both have to explain misrepresentation, which is the hard case: a state that fires wrongly is still about what it fails to detect, and a purely causal story has trouble saying so.

Searle distinguishes original from derived intentionality - a map is about a city only because someone uses it that way - and argues that computation is derived all the way down, which is the Chinese Room argument's real point. Dennett's intentional stance treats aboutness as a pattern an interpreter finds rather than a property a system has, which makes the distinction between original and derived a matter of degree.

Where you meet it

Library cataloguers have a technical term for their central problem, and the term is aboutness. A subject cataloguer must decide what a book is about, and record it in a controlled vocabulary so that someone who has never seen the book can find it.

It is not a matter of what the book contains. A history of salt is about salt, and also about trade, taxation, empire and preservation, and the shelf can hold it in only one place. Two trained cataloguers working from the same rules regularly assign different subject headings, a result reproduced often enough to have its own literature - inter-indexer consistency is typically well under fifty per cent.

So a profession that must fix aboutness in writing, for millions of items, has found that it is neither arbitrary nor determinate. There is a fact about what a book is about, in that some answers are simply wrong; and there is no procedure that makes trained people converge.

What is actually disputed

Whether intentionality can be naturalised.

The optimistic view is that it will yield to some combination of causal covariance and biological function, and that misrepresentation is a solvable technical problem rather than a barrier in principle. The pessimistic view is that every such account has had to smuggle in normativity - a notion of what the state should track - and that norms are not the kind of thing causal relations supply.

Brentano's stronger claim, that intentionality marks off the mental, is separately disputed in both directions. Pains and moods appear to be mental without being about anything in particular. And books, maps and instruments are about things without being mental at all - unless, as Searle holds, their aboutness is borrowed from ours, in which case the mark holds but the account of derived intentionality has to do a great deal of work.

Commonly confused with

  • intention in the ordinary sense Intending to do something is one intentional state among many. A hope, a fear and a perception are all intentional and none of them is a plan.
  • intentional as opposed to accidental Unrelated. A slip of the tongue is unintentional and entirely intentional in this sense, because it is about something.

Defined against

  • Matter Brentano's claim is that no physical phenomenon exhibits it, which is what makes it a candidate for the mark of the mental

Philosophers

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Mind c. 450 BC · Consciousness 1641 · Meaning 1892 · Reference 1905 · Sign and symbol 1868

Brentano revived the scholastic term in 1874 and called it the mark of the mental; Husserl made it the central structure of phenomenology, and it has nothing to do with intending in the ordinary sense.