Intentionality

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INTENTIONALITY

The term "intentionality" was used by Jeremy Bentham to distinguish between actions that are intentional and those that are not. It was reintroduced by Edmund Husserl in connection with certain doctrines set forth in Franz Brentano's Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874). The word is now used primarily in this second sense.

Brentano wrote:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (and also mental) inexistence of an object, and what we would call, although not in entirely unambiguous terms, the reference to a content, a direction upon an object (by which we are not to understand a reality …), or an immanent objectivity. Each one includes something as an object within itself, although not always in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love [something is] loved, in hate [something] is hated, in desire something is desired, etc.
This intentional inexistence is exclusively characteristic of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything similar. Consequently, we can define mental phenomena by saying that they are such phenomena as include an object intentionally within themselves. (Op. cit., Vol. I, Book II, Ch. 1)

This passage contains two different theses: one, an ontological thesis about the nature of certain objects of thought and of other psychological attitudes; the other, a psychological thesis, implying that reference to an object is what distinguishes the mental or psychological from the physical. These two theses are the subject matter of the present article. It should be noted, however, that "intentionality" is also used in connection with certain other related theses of phenomenology and existentialism.

Intentional Inexistence

The problem that gave rise to the ontological thesis of intentional inexistence may be suggested by asking what is involved in having thoughts, beliefs, desires, purposes, or other intentional attitudes, which are directed upon objects that do not exist. There is a distinction between a man who is thinking about a unicorn and a man who is thinking about nothing; in the former case, the man is intentionally related to an object, but in the latter case he is not. What, then, is the status of this object? It cannot be an actual unicorn, since there are no unicorns. According to the doctrine of intentional inexistence, the object of the thought about a unicorn is a unicorn, but a unicorn with a mode of being (intentional inexistence, immanent objectivity, or existence in the understanding) that is short of actuality but more than nothingness and that, according to most versions of the doctrine, lasts for just the length of time that the unicorn is thought about.

early theories

St. Anselm's ontological argument was thus based upon the assumption that, if God is thought about, he thereby "exists in the understanding." Anselm then proceeded to contrast the perfections of that which "exists in the understanding alone" with that which "exists in reality." Peter Aureol and William of Ockham contrasted the intentional existence of the objects of thought with the subjective existence of the thoughts themselves. The term "objective existence," referring to the existence of something as an object of thought, was used by medieval philosophers and by René Descartes as a synonym for "intentional existence"; Descartes thus contrasted the formal, or subjective, existence of actual objects with the objective existence in the mind of objects that are merely thought about. The terms objective and subjective, in these uses, had connotations quite different from those that they have now; that which was said to have objective existence (for instance, a unicorn as an object of thought), unlike that which had subjective existence (the idea of a unicorn, for instance), need not exist in fact.

Advantage of the doctrine

The doctrine of intentional existence, or, as Brentano called it, intentional inexistence, had at least the advantage of providing a literal interpretation for the dictum that truth consists in a kind of correspondence between mind and thing: an affirmative judgment is true if the properties of the intentional object are the same as those of the actual object. The very statement of this advantage, however, betrays the fact that the judgment is directed, not upon the intentional object, but upon the actual object, in which case, as Pierre Gassendi pointed out, the intentional object would seem to be superfluous.

Intentional reference

The difficulty of the apparent superfluity of the intentional object may be traced, in part, to the fact that the phenomenon of intentionality has two sides. Our intentional attitudes may be directed upon objects that do not exist (Diogenes looked for an honest man), but they may also be directed upon objects that do exist (there is a certain dishonest man whom the police happen to be looking for). The object of the latter quest, obviously, is not a thing having only immanent or intentional existence. But this is also true, as Brentano was later to point out, of the object of the former quest: Diogenes was not looking for an immanent object (for, if the doctrine of intentional inexistence were true, he already had one in his mind); he was looking for an actual, existing honest man, despite the fact that, as we may suppose, no such man exists. Thus, Brentano said, "If we think about a horse, the object of our contemplation is a horse and not a contemplated horse."

In the expression of the ontological thesis of intentionality, "intentional" may be said to refer to a mode of being within the mind; but in the expression of the psychological thesis of intentionality, "intentional" is used to describe the direction upon objects that may exist outside the mind. It is not inaccurate to say that intentional entities were posited in the attempt to account for intentional reference, but precisely because they were intentional, the attempt did not succeed. Husserl said, in the fifth of his Logische Untersuchungen, that the objects of our intentional experiences are never immanent—never intentional objects—but are always transcendent.

brentano's later views

Thus, for various reasons Brentano abandoned the ontological part of his doctrine of intentionality. In his later writings, he said that "unicorn" in the sentence "John is thinking about a unicorn" has no referential function; a contemplated unicorn is not a type of unicorn. "Unicorn," in such sentences, is used syncate-gorematically to contribute to the description of the person who is said to have a unicorn as the object of his thought. But this conclusion seems to leave us with our problem. The statement "John is thinking about a unicorn" does not describe John as a unicorn; how, then, does "unicorn" serve to contribute to his description?

The ontological problem, therefore, may be said to survive in the question, "How are we using 'unicorn' in 'John believes that there are unicorns'?" There is a temptation to say that the use of "unicorn" in such sentences has no connection at all with the use it would have in "There are unicorns." That this would be false, however, may be seen by noting that "John believes that there are unicorns" and "All of John's beliefs are true" together imply "There are unicorns." Thus, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked:

One may have the feeling that in the sentence "I expect he is coming" one is using the words "he is coming" in a different sense from the one they have in the assertion "He is coming." But if it were so, how could I say that my expectation had been fulfilled? If I wanted to explain the words "he" and "is coming," say by means of ostensive definitions, the same definitions of these words would go for both sentences. (Philosophical Investigations, p. 130e)

carnap's theory

In the Logical Syntax of Language (London, 1937), Rudolf Carnap suggested that linguistic entities are the objects of our intentional attitudes. "Charles thinks (asserts, believes, wonders about) A," he said, might be translated as "Charles thinks 'A.'" Taken literally, this suggestion would imply, falsely, that a man who wonders whether there are unicorns is a man who wonders whether there is the word unicorns.

inscriptional theory

A closely related view has been developed by W. V. Quine and Israel Scheffler. These authors, however, instead of saying that our intentional attitudes have linguistic entities as their objects, suggest instead that certain sentences, which relate people to words or to other linguistic entities, might be used to perform all of the functions of intentional sentences; if this view were adequate, the problem of the status of the intentional object might be avoided. Thus, "John believes-true a Socrates-is-mortal inscription" may be interpreted as a sentence affirming a certain relation to hold between John and a linguistic entity or "inscription," but a relation that is true only under the conditions under which "John believes that Socrates is mortal" is true; hence, if we use the former sentence instead of the latter, we relate John only to inscriptions.

However, it may be held (1) that the plausibility of this approach depends upon the assumption that there are certain semantic sentences (for instance, "The German sentence 'Sokrates ist sterblich ' means that Socrates is mortal") that are true of certain inscriptions and (2) that these semantic sentences are abbreviations for intentional sentences that leave us with our original problem (for instance, "German-speaking people use 'Sokrates ist sterblich ' to express and convey the belief that Socrates is mortal").

This inscriptional approach, moreover, fails to distinguish between such sentences as "Someone is looking for a horse" and "There is a horse that someone is looking for"; these two types of sentence, as noted above, reflect the two different sides of the phenomenon of intentionality. It has been suggested that sentences of the latter sort may be illegitimate, on the ground that they quantify, in effect, into contexts that are referentially opaque, in a sense explained below. To say that such intentional sentences are illegitimate is to imply that the mind is incapable of referring to objects that exist and, hence, that we cannot "get outside the circle of our own ideas."

response theory

There have been still other approaches to the problem of the intentional object. Some of the American New Realists proposed, behavioristically, that to think about a unicorn might merely be to "put one's unicorn responses in readiness." The thinker, instead of relating himself to unicorns, disposes himself to behave in just those ways in which he would behave if there were unicorns. Other psychological attitudes were treated analogously. It would seem, however, that "unicorn responses" cannot be adequately specified except by reference to beliefs and desires that are directed upon unicorns, since the ways in which a man would respond to a unicorn would be, in part, a function of what he otherwise perceives, desires, and believes. More recent revivals of the specific-response theory seem to be subject to similar difficulties.

church's view

Alonzo Church, in his Introduction to Mathematical Logic (Princeton, NJ, 1956), proposed that the sentence "Schliemann sought the site of Troy" asserts that a certain relation holds between Schliemann and the concept of the site of Troy; Church said, negatively, that the relation is "not quite like that of having sought," but he did not say more positively what it is. This view suggests a return to the medieval doctrine, at least to the extent of viewing the objects of our intentional attitudes as beings of reason.

analogical theory

Thomas Aquinas seems to have held that "unicorn," in such sentences as "John is thinking about a unicorn," is used analogically (De Potentia 7c; Summa Theologiae 1, 13, 10). There is ground for questioning whether the doctrine of analogical predication is itself sufficiently illuminating to throw light upon the problem of intentionality, but the fact that we can understand the use of "unicorn" and cannot say just what function the word there performs may, on the other hand, throw some light upon the doctrine.

The most plausible defense of the doctrine of intentional inexistence, therefore, would seem to be that this doctrine, unlike most of its alternatives, does provide us with a straightforward account of the use of "unicorn" in "John is thinking about a unicorn": The word is being used simply to designate a unicorn.

Psychological Thesis of Intentionality

According to Brentano's second thesis, intentionality is peculiar to psychological phenomena and thus provides a criterion by means of which the mental may be distinguished from the nonmental. The problem for the proponent of this second thesis is not so much that of showing that mental phenomena are intentional as it is that of showing that physical phenomena are not intentional. Some now believe that the thesis can be defended by reference to the language we use in describing psychological phenomena—that the sentences we must use in describing psychological phenomena have certain logical properties that are not shared by any of the sentences we must use in describing nonpsychological phenomena, and that these properties are correctly called intentional. If this view is true, then the basic thesis of physicalism and the unity of science is false. Can we find, then, a logical criterion of the intentional, one that we may then use to distinguish the mental from the physical?

unsatisfactory criteria of intentionality

It has been suggested that failure of existential generalization yields a logical criterion of the intentional. The intentional "John is thinking about a horse," unlike the nonintentional "John is riding on a horse," does not imply that there are horses. However, existential generalization also fails in application to some of the terms in the following statements that describe physical phenomena: "New Zealand is devoid of unicorns," "That lady resembles a mermaid," and "The dam is high enough to prevent any future floods."

Nonextensional occurrence has also been proposed as a possible criterion of the intentional. A phrase, p, may be said to occur nonextensionally in a sentence, s, provided that the result of replacing p in s by any phrase having the same truth value as p will be a sentence having the same truth value as s. Thus, "Johnson is Kennedy's successor" may replace "Socrates was a philosopher" in "Either Socrates was a god or Socrates was a philosopher," without altering the truth value of the whole, whereas similar replacement is not possible in "Plato believed that Socrates was a philosopher." Nonextensional occurrence, however, is not peculiar to sentences that are intentional; compare "It is necessarily true that if Socrates was a member of the class of philosophers, then Socrates was a philosopher."

Referential opacity has also been proposed as a criterion of the intentional. The occurrence of a substantival expression in a sentence, s (for instance, "Truman's successor" in "Joe Martin believed that Dewey would be Truman's successor"), is referentially opaque if its replacement in s by another substantival expression (such as "Eisenhower") designating the same individual may result in a sentence having a truth value different from that of s. However, referential opacity is not peculiar to the intentional; we may assert "It is necessarily true that if Dewey was Truman's successor, then Dewey was Truman's successor," but not "It is necessarily true that if Dewey was Truman's successor, then Dewey was Eisenhower."

satisfactory criteria

The failure of nonextensional occurrence and referential opacity has led some to believe that there are no logical characteristics peculiar to intentional statements. However, there are other criteria that do seem to be satisfied only by intentional statements. We may mention two.

Let us refine upon ordinary English in the following way: instead of writing propositional clauses as "that" clauses, we will eliminate the "that" and put the remainder of the clause in parentheses; for example, instead of writing "John believes that there are men," we will write "John believes (there are men)." A simple sentence prefix may be said to be an expression that contains no proper part that is logically equivalent to a sentence or to a sentence function and that is such that the result of prefixing it to a sentence in parentheses is another sentence. We may say that a simple sentence prefix, M, is intentional if, for every sentence p, M (p ) is logically contingent. Thus, "it is impossible" is not intentional, since when prefixed to "(some squares are circles)," it yields a sentence that is necessary and therefore not contingent; "it is right" is not intentional since, when prefixed to "(there is not anything of which it can be truly said that it is right)," it yields a sentence that is contradictory and therefore not logically contingent.

However, every sentence, whether it is itself contingent or not, is such that the result of thus prefixing it by "John believes" is contingent. Similar observations apply to "John questions," "John desires," and to other prefixes referring to intentional attitudes. Thus, we might say that the psychological differs from the nonpsychological in this respect: an adequate description of the psychological requires the use of intentional prefixes.

It may also be argued that some intentional prefixes (for instance, "John believes") are such that the possible ways of inserting them into a universally quantified sentence (for instance, into "For every x, x is material") and into the corresponding existentially quantified sentence ("There exists an x such that x is material") yield four statements ("John believes that, for every x, x is material"; "For every x, John believes that x is material"; "John believes that there exists an x such that x is material"; and "There exists an x such that John believes that x is material") that are logically related in ways in which no corresponding sentences with nonintentional prefixes are related. Thus, it may be said of the four sentences just cited: Neither the first nor the third implies any of the others; the second implies all but the first; the fourth implies the third but does not imply either the first or the second; and there is no nonintentional prefix that will yield four sentences that are similarly related. This contention, to the extent that it applies to "John believes," is based upon the assumptions that in believing a thing to have certain properties, one thereby believes that the thing exists; that one may believe falsely, of some nonuniversal set of things (some set comprising less than everything there is), that it comprises everything there is; and that one may believe falsely, of a universal set of things, that it does not comprise everything there is.

There are other psychological sentences—for instance, "He is in pain" and "He is thinking about Jupiter"—that may not satisfy the above criteria of intentionality. The first of these sentences, however, might be said to be intentional if, as some believe, one cannot be in pain if one is not aware that one is in pain; or if one does not believe that one is in pain; or if, at any one instant, one does not remember the pain of previous instants; and analogously for the second quoted sentence. Another possible view, however, is to say that intentionality is at least a sufficient if not a necessary condition of the psychological.

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Encyclopedia of Philosophy