Intentionality, as Brentano originally introduced the term in modern philosophy, was meant to provide a distinctive characteristic definitively separating the mental from the physical. Mental states have an intrinsic relationship to an object, to that which they are about. Physical entities just are what they are, they cannot, by their very essence, refer to anything, they have no outreach, as one might put it. Mental states have, as it were, an incomplete essence, they cannot exist at all unless they are completed by something other than themselves, their object. Brentanos position is opposed to all theories which represent the mental as only extrinsically related to the world, that is, to all theories in which mental states are themselves self-sufficient for their own existence and only secondarily relate to the world by means of something external to their nature, e.g., neurological causation, divine intervention, or pre-established harmony. In these later cases, any mental act whatsoever could be related to any object, or indeed to none, for the relation is external to the nature of the act, it is superimposed on it by outside forces. Brentanos point is that a mental act has, by its very essence, an Intentional object without which it would not be a mental act. It would therefore appear that since causality is an external relationship which could in principle relate any two things regardless of their nature, the Intentional relation between an act and its object cannot be a causal relation. Husserl borrowed Brentanos concept of Intentionality, but used it in a transcendental scheme: Intentionality is a process of constitution, of meaning-giving, and so must be radically distinguished from that which has been given meaning, the object. Physical things, objects of nature, and causal processes, as constituted entities, are dependent for their meaning on a transcendental Intentionality which cannot therefore, on pain of circularity, be reduced to, or explained by, any physical process. Transcendentalism, then, involves a dualism (though not a dualism of substance) between Intentionality on the one hand and nature and causality on the other. It is this dichotomy that any attempt at a naturalistic theory of Intentionality must overcome. John Searle attempts, in Intentionality, to develop such a naturalistic theory. In what follows I will present briefly the central points of his theory of Intentionality. In my discussion of the theory, I will look at three issues: The nature of the mental state to which Searle attributes Intentionality; his notion of Intentional causation by which he hopes to bridge the transcendentalist gap between the Intentional and the causal; and the relationship of the mental structures of Intentionality to the physical structures of the brain, a relationship that Searle understands as causal.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 17:03:22 +0000
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