LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY'

Franz Brentano's thesis that the mental is characterised by a peculiar

directedness towards an object or by intentionahty, has been recognised, in
contemporary philosophy, by a large body of philosophers of widely differ-
ing persuasions. Those who have come to terms with this phenomenon have
found a place for it within their larger philosophical positions: this affects
the way they understand the nature and role of intentionahty. In this essay,
I will distinguish four types of theories of intentionahtyeach of which is
characterized by a certain understanding of its nature and function, an
understanding which derives from the overall philosophical framework
within which the phenomenon of intentionahty is situated. These are the
naturalistic-causal, the descriptive psychological, the existential, and the
transcendental-constitutive theories. I review them in that order, as
representing four levels of our understanding of intentionahty. For all four,
Brentano's thesis remains the "neutral" and indispensable starting point.

If one is impressed by the irreducible uniqueness of mental life, and yet

happens to be a naturalist, or even a physicalist, one would want to carve
out a niche within the heart of one's naturalism in order to find a place
secure enough for the intentional. It does not matter if you are a metaphysi-
cian or not. If you are not, you would still want to find within the larger
framework of physicalistic, truth-functionally regimented language, a
secure place for intentional discourse. Yet how is this niche, this sanctuary,
to be related to the larger structurethe oasis to the surrounding desert?
I will consider three representative opinionsthose of Wilfrid Sellars,
Fred Dretske and John Searle. Sellars's view is, in the first place, that our
concepts about intentionahty of thoughts are derived from concepts about
meaningful speech.1 This way of putting the matter betrays an effort not to
reduce thought itself to language. But, in effect, Sellars's position never-
theless is that while in order of knowing language is prior to thought, in
order of being what is fundamental is the animal representational system. A
representational state is defined as "a state of an organism" which is "the
manifestation of a system of dispositions and propensities by virtue of
which the organism constructs maps of itself in its environment, and locates
506 J. N. MOHANTY

itself and its behavior on the map." 2 Such representative systems can be
brought about by natural selection and then transmitted genetically.3 Fur-
thermore, in every representational systemanimal or humanthe sym-
bols constituting the system stand for objects which are represented, and
there is besides a counterpart character <j>* (or a counterpart relation R*) cor-
relative to the character <>/ (or the relation R) in terms of which that object (or
those objects) is being represented.4 This structural similarity, though
necessary, is not however sufficient for making the system into a map in
which the animal locates itself and its object. The organism must be a
perceiving-remembering-wanting-acting creature, with a strategy for
finding the appropriate sorts of objects, so that the representational system
is so structured, i.e., is such a complex system of representational systems,
that these latter together constitute a strategy for finding the appropriate
object. With this Sellars succeeds in incorporating intentionality into a
biologically and behavioristically conceived concept of animal representa-
tional system which, in the order of being, is firsteven if our overt speech
acts are first in the order of our knowledge.
Turning now to Dretske, we see that whereas Sellars finds the on-
tological basis of (human) intentionality in the animal representational
system, Dretske extends the notion of intentionality beyond even the
biological, to a much larger area of nature, namely, to a large number of
purely physical systems.5 For Dretske, "intentionality, rather than being a
'mark of the mental', is a pervasive feature of all realitymental and
physical." He can say this, just because he understands intentionality in
terms of the idea of information. There is a flow of information from one
point to another on his account, if there is a set of conditional probabilities
relating events at the two ends. There must be a lawful dependence,
statistical or deterministic, between events at those points. Dretske then
shows that a nomic relation between two properties F and G is an inten-
tional relationship. If F is lawfully related to G, and 'G' is extensionally
equivalent to ' H \ F is not necessarily related in a lawful way to H.
Therefore statements describing the lawful relations between properties and
magnitudes is not extensional. Thus any physical system whose internal
states are lawfully dependent in some statistically significant way is an in-
tentional system. In this sense, a thermometer and a galvanometer have in-
tentional states.
But a thermometer or a galvanometer does not know things. Cognitive
states are a variety of intentional states. The intentional states of ther-
mometers and galvanometers have their contents. The reason they never-
theless do not know whatever information they carry is that they carry too
much information, without distinguishing between informations that are
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 507

cognitively different. Thus the thermometer can only carry the information
that the mercury has risen that high along with the information that the
temperature has increased so much. It cannot distinguish between the two
informational contents, and so cannot carry the one information without
carrying the other information. In Dretske's words, the instrument is "in-
sensitive to such cognitive differences."6 It is not intentional enough. In
order for an intentional state to be sensitive to such cognitive differences,
and therefore to be able to know in the strict sense, the intentional state
must have a content which consists not only of the information it carries but
also of the manner in which that information is represented.7 An organism
with cognitive powers must have an informational capacity "that is at least
as rich in its representational powers as the language we use to express what
is known."' Thus cognitive states possess a higher degree of intentionality
than the thermometer does, or a rat does. All three, however, can have in-
tentional states having their own contents.
There are interesting differences between Sellars's idea of a representa-
tional system and Dretske's idea of an intentional state. Dretske's account is
free from that behaviorism which attaches to Sellars's: the content of the in-
tentional state is not simply extrapolated from the verbal or nonverbal
behavior, as Sellars would have it. The content on Dretske's view, really
belongs to the state, and the cognitive intentional state is really an internal
state. But, after all, it is an intentional state built out of systems (physical
and biological) that are intentional to a lesser degree. Thus we have higher-
order intentionalities built upon lower order ones, but at some point down
the roadone may supposethe lower order ones must be built out of
purely extensionally describable building blocks.
One may want to pursue this last line of thinking and arrive, instead, at
a position which so totally extends the category of intentionality over all
nature that there would be indeed nothing that does not exhibit some inten-
tionality or other. We can then say with Whitehead that every actual entity
intends every othernot to speak of higher order organisms and minds. I
do not want to go in that direction. I suspectlet this much be said at
presentthat such limitless generalisations tend to obliterate those limits
within which a concept such as intentionality could have any significance.
The grand metaphysics which then looms on the horizon can be courted on-
ly at the cost of paying a fairly heavy conceptual price.
For the present, I wish to raise the following questions in connection
with the Sellars-Dretske type of theory. First, a naturalistic theory of inten-
tionality requires that we have an account of representation or representing
content which by itself is free from the notion of intentionality. There are
obviously only three ways such an account can be given: either in terms of
508 J. N. MOHANTY

resemblance, or in terms of causality, or in termsas with Dretskeof the

idea of information. None of these, however, will do. 'Resemblance' will
not do, for if A resembles B, B also resembles A, which implies that if a
content C represents an object O by virtue of resemblance, O also will be
representing C. The resemblance account also cannot explain how the
representing content 'this man' will represent only this man and no other,
for the content also resembles all other men, at least many others. The
causal theory claims to be able to account for the last sort of cases; also, be-
ing an asymmetrical relation, the causal relation does not, if C is caused by
O, make O a representation of C as well. However, there are other dif-
ficulties that beset the causal account of representation. If a representation
C must, to be a representation of O, be caused by O, under what conditions
can it be a misrepresentation of O? How is false belief possible, in that
case?9 Furthermore, since there are a large number of causes that together
produce the putative C, it is not clear why, within the limits of the causal
theory, one should be allowed to say that C represents O, and not any of the
other causes. Dretske's information theory reduces the content to the infor-
mation carried, and the information is a function of a nomic relation be-
tween events at the two ends. The thermometer carries information as much
about the rise of mercury as about the increase in temperature. In that case,
there is no reason why C will be a representation of O, and not O of C.
However, as Frege said, there is no route from the object to the sense. Any
theory of representation which places the object and the content on the
same level will fail to account for intentionality, for misrepresentation as
well as for the representing function of the content.
Sellars's is a resemblance theory. If the objectivity a R b is being
represented by the rat, then in the rat's representing system there must be,
on this theory, a symbol a* which stands for a, b* which stands for b, and a
relation R*, a counterpart relation to R. However, as in all talk of
resemblance, resemblance cannot simply be read off. As Husserl pointed
out in his Logical Investigations,10 the Bildbewusstsein is a special inten-
tional, interpretive consciousness. A picture is not simply, in itself, a picture
of a given thing, it has to be taken to be so. On Sellars's view:
a (is) before b

and a
b
have the same syntactical form, namely 'a' and 'b' in a counterpart relation.
We may ask, when would 'a' and 'b' not be in a counterpart relation? Con-
sider
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 509

a
b
or b
a
One can always detect a relation is these two cases which can be regarded as
the counterpart of 'before'. We can construe, that is, any content as a pic-
ture of any objectgiven suitable rules of interpretation. How, then, is
misrepresentation possible?
Dretske's argumentapart from the already mentioned dif-
ficultiessuffers from a serious deficiency. He takes a nomic relation be-
tween F and G to be intentional on the ground that one may know
something to be F without knowing that it is G. In a thermometer, the rise
of mercury is nomically connected with the rise of temperature: this leads to
the conclusion that the thermometer is an intentional state, and yet a ther-
mometer does not know that it is F, without knowing that it is G. In fact,
one may even question why an intentional state should be so defined. We
know, of course, that in the intentional context substitution by identity does
not go through, but we did not expect substitution by nomic correlation to
go through in any case.
Whereas Sellars and Dretske want to embed intentionality in biological
or physical intentional states, Fodor, as is well known, regards the mental
act, the propositional attitude, to be related to a mental representation,
which belongs to a "mental lexicon" with its own syntax and semantics. But
how do these mental representations refer? What relates them to the world?
What is the meaning of a mental representation? Are all mental representa-
tions linguistic, i.e., discursive, or are there imagistic ones? How does the
mental lexicon relate to the many different languages speakers may be us-
ing? If the mental representations themselves have to be interpreted, in
order for us to be able to assign to them a structure and a content, then the
mental act is not merely related to a representation but must also contain an
"interpretation function."" One may, for example, ask,12 in what sense is
it the case that the internal states of a digital computer are representational.
Is it not the programmer who provides the essential link between the states
of the machine and states in the world? Furthermore, one cannot assign one
unique structure to a thing, apart from the interpretation by a human sub-
ject. Are not the structural equivalences (between the representation and
world) our own making? Finally, can a representation be a representation
not merely of, but also for and to a system, unless the system has a subjec-
tive point of view?'3
510 J. N. MOHANTY

II
These reflections lead us from cognitive psychology to the phen-
omenologically descriptive, psychological understanding of intention-
ality by John Searle. Searle begins by taking intentionality as directed-
ness,14 but proceeds to further determine this directedness as one of "rep-
resenting": "intentional states represent objects and states of affairs in
the same sense of 'represent' that speech acts represent objects and states of
affairs."15 Every intentional state is analysable into a "representative con-
tent" and a psychological mode in which one has that content. Searle em-
phasises that his use of "representation" is different both from its use in
traditional philosophy and from its use in cognitive psychology.16 First of
all, there is nothing of ontological significance in his use. The representative
content, we are told, when it is propositional, determines a set of conditions
of satisfaction of the intentional state: it determines under what conditions
a belief would be true, or a desire satisfied. It is not clear what his view is
regarding contents which are not propositional. Nor is it clear if he iden-
tifies contents with conditions of satisfaction, or regards the content as a
representation of the conditions of satisfaction. Even if the process-product
ambiguityas between the requirement and the thing requiredis kept in
mind, one would want to know if an intentional act represents to itself its
own conditions of satisfaction, or if its representing content consists of
those conditions. In the former case, besides representing the object or state
of affairs, the act must also represent the conditions that would satisfy its
intention. It is the latter which Searle most likely means. His use of 'con-
tent' is not also that of cognitive psychology or AI theories, for he rightly
finds the idea of a formal syntactic structure of mental representations
unclear. The contents for him are essentially semantic and not syntactical.17
All this is very nicely in consonance with classical phenomenological
psychology. Every intentional act, according to the latter, has an act-quality
(which is Searle's psychological mode) and an act-matter (which is Searle's
content).18 The act-matter determines both the reference and the mode of
reference. However, there are two features of Searle's theory to which I
want to draw attention: one allies him with naturalism, the other with a sort
of Heideggerean holismboth poise him, so it may seem, against
Husserlian phenomenology. In the first place, while affirming, with a great
deal of emphasis, that "there really are such things as intrinsic mental
phenomena"19 which are as real as any other biological phenomena, he yet
holds that intentional mental states are both caused by the operations of the
brain and realized in the structure of the brain.20 The causal laws by which
the brain can produce intentionality will, Searle hopes, be quite different
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 511

from the 'strict' laws in current science, they will be as different from those
we now employ" (as) the principles of quantum mechanics are from the
principles of Newtonian mechanics." From all this it follows that, for
Searle, intentionality is a natural phenomenon. This allies him with Sellars
and Dretske.
In the second place, Searle holds not merely that intentional states are
in general parts of networks of intentional states, but also that they always
figure against a background of non-representational, pre-intentional, men-
tal capacities (which primarily include knowing-hows). That intentional
states belong to a network of intentionalities is a part of Husserl's maturer
thesis about intentional implications. But that intentionality rests upon a
background of non-representational, non-cognitive skills and abilities
characterizing one's being-in-the-world, is possibly Heideggerean in origin.
Let me recall that Dreyfus has drawn attention to this alliance between
Searle's "holism" and Heideggerean "being-in-the-world" (as also, less
convincingly, between the cognitive psychologist's methodological solip-
sism and the Husserlian's egology).21

Ill
This brings me to the third level of understanding intentionality which,
as contrasted with the first i.e., the naturalisticmay be called the existent-
tial-phenomenological. In order to be able to bring out its distinctive
features, let me briefly refer to a tension in Searle's theory of intentionality.
On the one hand, intentionality is taken by him to be naturalistically
caused, while at the same time the very idea of causation is being intention-
alized.22 Naturalizing intentionality and intentionalizing causality go
together in his thinking. But the result is neither naturalism nor inten-
tionalism. We rather seem to be driven towards recognizing a third category
hovering before us. I will spell it out in a moment. The other aspect of the
tension is the way intentionality is grounded in what he calls the non-
representational background of lifeworld. If we unify these two aspects
without letting them be in tensionwe begin to get a glimpse of the second
picture of intentionality as an existential phenomenon.
Let me briefly return to the question of causality. Searle includes
causation within the representative content of the experiences of objects
(especially of perception and of action). It belongs, e.g., to the content of
perception that it is being caused by the object out there, to the content of
action that I am performing it. This is intentional causation. If we stress this
aspect of the sense of perception and action as intentional acts, then we
512 J. N. MOHANTY

have at hand the beautiful idea of the intermingling of intentionality and

causality, for which I find no clearer and better expression than the follow-
ing passage from Bernhard Waldenfels:
What we have from the beginning, according to Waldenfels, is "a
giveness of the efficacious and an efficacy of the given." To suffer from a
bodily injury, he writes,
"signifies neither that I do something (I hit something), nor that something
happens in the world (something hits something else), but rather that something
happens to me (I hit myself upon something). What happens to me, I can
neither objectify, without23 remainder, to a factual effect, nor can I ascribe to
myself as a free action."
The consequence of this intermingling is: intentionality is neither raised
above the causal order, nor caused by it (in the naturalistic sense), but
rather inseparable from causality at every point of its life. An opaque
weight of corporeality attaches to its being inextricably. Its being and the
sense of its being are ambiguous: it neither is pure interiority nor is reduci-
ble to pure exteriority. It is being-in-the-worldnot, to be sure, as a thing is
in the world, but as both constituted by, and constituting, its world. As con-
stituted, it is not fully transparent to itself; as constituting, it is not purely
opaque either. It is both at once and therefore ambiguous if judged in terms
of that Cartesian-sounding opposition.
Turning now to the notion of the Background, if intentionality is
rooted in nature, it is also made possible by a background of non-
representational skills and practices. Not only are all mental states not
representational, but what is more: the intentionality of many representa-
tional states (such as intending to board a train) presupposes physical skills,
knowing how to do various things which are not representational states.
The two very different kinds of grounding can be explicated thus: A belief
as an experience, as an event, is caused by the natural order, but the content
of the belief presupposes the Background. But this only shows that the
separation between the two sorts of grounding is artificial. The nature
which causes my intentionality as an event and the non-representational
lifeworld from which it derives its content must form a unity: that unity be-
tween nature and culture is the world that is meant to be captured by the
concept of being-in-the-world.
What this picture, then, grounds intentionality on, is not the non-
intentional causal order, but a non-representational but intentional-cum-
causal being-in-the-world. Let us call the latter the 'existential intentionali-
ty. ' Existential intentionality is not representative, nor is it merely cognitive.
It is cognitive-affective-volitional in one. Its subject is not the bare point of
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 513

a pure ego, but a concrete, corporeal, historical and mundane entity whose
unity is prior to the Cartesian distinction between the inner and the outer.
Merleau-Ponty calls it the body-subject; and this original intentionality is
'operative intentionality' which as much flows from the subject to the world
(as the subject's project) as from the world to the subject (as the world's
beckoning).

IV

Before moving on to the fourth, i.e., the transcendental understand-

ing of intentionality, I need to say why the phenomenological-existential
concept of intentionality needs to be surpassed by the transcendental. I have
already said why a purely naturalistic account is unsatisfactory. Never-
theless, a few more remarks about the relation between intentionality and
causality may be in order. The idea of 'representation' is important in the
naturalistic theories, because it is just this pictorial, or imagistic, idea of
representation that lends itself, relatively easily, to a physicalistic interpreta-
tion. Push the idea of content as meaningrather than as picture or im-
ageto the forefront in our theory, and physicalism finds itself incapable
of accommodating it. The particular occurrent act-token (or even the act-
type) could be meaningfully identified with a physical event, but the same
cannot be said of the noesis-noema structure. Conceptually, it makes no
sense even to say that this correlation to an irreal entity has its counterpart
in a correlation of the physical event and another such pictorial or imagistic
structure. The noema is not a representation, not a substitute for the object,
not 'in the mind' to be acted upon or to be mentally processed.24
There are indeed many other reasons why intentionality as noesis-
noema structure cannot be inserted into the causal order, all of which I need
not rehearse on this occasion.23 But let us now see what happens to that
"giveness of the efficacious and efficacy of the given" that Waldenfels
does, and Searle would, recognize as the intrusion of the causal order into
the intentional. The merit of this last thesis lies in its phenomenological, as
opposed to the naturalistic-scientific, nature: what it insists upon is that at
least certain experiences themselvesperceptual and actional, at any
ratedisplay a causal component in their structure. They have correctly
identified a phenomenon, but immediately proceeded to mis-interpret it.
The phenomenon they have identified is the phenomenon of passivity,
of being-affected-by-the-given that undoubtedly characterizes a whole class
of intentional experiences, the most striking being the case of perception.
Perception of an external physical object in particular is also an experience
514 J. N. MOHANTY

of being-affected-by. But there is nothing in this phenomonon that carries

the report of a real causality, of the story even in rudiments that physics and
physiology tell us. What characterizes the experiences under consideration
is rather felt causality. It is quite a different case when that causality itself is
thematized, i.e., made the object of the experience. In this latter case, a real
causality is the object of experience just as a real external object is the object
of normal, outer perception. Waldenfels's example of a sharp instrument
hitting my body and causing injury is of this type (falls into this case). In
that case, the object is real causality. It would be wrong to interpret the ex-
perience as though the object of the experience, qua its object, is also ex-
perienced as its cause. While the object, i.e., real causal event, is exper-
ienced as external and real, the experience itself is felt to be caused, the lat-
ter being a case of what I call felt causality.
Searle proceeds to elaborate precisely this distinction, without
recognizing that it would take away the naturalistic interpretation he wishes
to confer on his finding. The Humeans, he writes, "sought causation in the
wrong place. They sought causation as the object of our experiences,
whereas in its most primitive form it is part of the content of experiences of
perceiving and acting." The experience of causation is part of "the condi-
tions of satisfaction that are internal to the experience." Now if "the condi-
tions of satisfaction" or internal representation is Searle's reconstruction of
the Husserlian noema, then the causation he is talking about belongs not to
nature but to the noematic sense of the experiences concerned. Searle calls it
"intentional causation." The "intentional causation", according to him, is
a "logical" or "internal" relation, just because one component of "the
conditions of satisfaction" of the intentional experience requires that it be
the cause or effect of another component. The noema legislates,
predelineates, how it is to be satisfied. All this shows clearly that what
Searle has in mind is far from being outer, real and natural causality.
If intentional causality is thus appropriated into the content of the act,
and natural causality ruled out as inappropriate (as belonging to a different
level of discourse), what happens to that Background, that non-
representational life-world in which the intentional content is after all
grounded? to the Dasein's being-in-the-world? It is true that the intentional
content of a cognitive intentional state is determined in part by the inten-
tional contents of some other cognitive states (beliefs, etc.) but in part also
by non-cognitive practices, skills, expectations and abilities (also by
sedimented interpretations constituting one's tradition), which one takes
for granted in every day life. Thus, for me to be able to intend to walk from
one place to another presupposes not only beliefs such as that the ground
under me will not cave in, that material objects are impenetrable, etc., etc.,
but also skills to execute proper bodily movements necessary for walking.
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 515

Such skills are not intentional, they do not have representational contents,
they are not cases of knowing-that, but rather cases of knowing-how.
There are several things wrong in thus limiting the role of intentionali-
ty. First, as Mclntyre has pointed out,26 "even if I do not know how to walk
and so do not have the skills requisite for satisfying my intention to walk
across the room, I can form that intention if I believe that I have the re-
quisite skill and that belief would belong to my network."
The point of this argument is that even if as a matter of fact there is
such a Background for our intentional states, the Background qua
Background is not necessary. It can be appropriated into the network. Such
appropriation may be a never-ending process, but in principle there is no
reason why it is not conceivable that an intentional being performs his in-
tentional acts with a full reflective consciousness of all those presupposi-
tions, including his ability to form those movements. That, in fact, is the
implication of the possibility of transcendental reduction.27 The skills and
abilities under consideration have to be the skills and abilities of the person
who is the subject of intentional acts, nor is it necessary that he does have a
body. What is needed is that he is able to ascribe to himself abilities such as
to move himself aroundwhich is nothing but possessing the (practical)
'Ican' sort of kinaesthetic consciousness. What I am saying is compatible
withand perhaps is even implied in the point Aquila makes in the same
connection: what Searle shows is that a set of non-intentional capacities,
etc. must be recognised as constituting the matter (in the Kantian sense) of a
psychological state that has the "form" of intentionality, and so need not
be construed as external to the intentional act.28
These criticisms make, I believe, a provisionally strong case for the
"transcendental" interpretation of intentionality. They are intended to
show that a strong internalist theory of intentionality is a viable one, that in-
tentionality is not derivable from any of the other non-intentional concepts
such as causality. The network of intentional acts form one self-enclosed
mental life through whose internal contents and their concatenations the
world derives its various constituting senses. Carried to its utmost
possibilities, it yields the result that the world owes its sense to intentional
acts. Intentionality, then, is not mere directedness to world, but interpretive
of the world. It not only has its own content, it confers meaning on its ob-
ject, so that its object is presented as having that meaning for it. As con-
stitutive of the sense or senses of the world, intentionality is transcendental.
As must be apparent, such a conception is a generalisation of the Kantian
thesis that understanding makes nature possible.
There are three objections against the plausibility of such a thesis,
which I wish to briefly comment upon. One is that the theory makes what is
516 J. N. MOHANTY

out there dependent upon what is in the mind, and thus reverses the original
realistic intuition underlying the thesis of intentionality. Secondly, it leaves
no room for a direct, de re intentionality. Thirdly, by grounding the sense
of the world in the mind, it, like all transcendental philosophies, leaves no
room for the variety of discourses that are possible about the world, so that
the foundationalism entails a monolithic, nonrelativistic picture of the
world. The first and the second objections go together; the third is based on
a very different philosophical intuition.
First, then, as to the realistic intuition. There is no doubt such a
realistic intuition did in fact underlie the thesis of Brentano. Subsequent
development of that idea has shown that while something important in that
intuition needs to be preserved, that realism won't do. There are three
aspects of the situation of intentional reference: there is the being-about
that characterises it at the level of pre-reflective naivity. Then there is the
grasping-of-a-sense in reflective thought. But, ineluctably underlying these,
is the 'cunning of intentionality': the interpretive function, the Sinngebung,
which conceals itself under the surface phenomenon of 'grasping'. On
various occasions, I have used the metaphor of complementaritybetween
the particle and wave theories of lightto describe the relation between
'grasping' and 'Sinngebung'. This also illuminates the complementarity be-
tween phenomenology and hermeneutics.
Direct de re intentionalitynot in terms of a causal theory whose fun-
damental flaws have been pointed out earlier in this paper, but in terms of a
sui generis cognitive reltionship as forcefully suggested by Barry Smith,"
such as in veridical acts of perceptionneeds to be construed, within a
transcendental framework, differently from a purely ontological relation.
If, in principle, mental acts may have properties not transparent to their
subjects, we are left also with the possibility that the naivete with which the
perceiver construes his act in terms of a naturalistic ontology may only be
the surface phenomenon of a deep interpretive constitutive structure. There
is no doubt something importantly wrong in construing all acts on the pat-
tern of non-veridical acts or even of veridical acts which are descriptive: in
both cases, the intentionality of an act is explicable in terms of its being as-if
directed towards some object or other, and so in the long runin terms of
the concept of noema. But it is equally misleading to have a sort of inten-
tionality whose understanding makes us fall back upon "what may be
recognized from the outside, by suitably qualified observers."30 For
transcendental phenomenology, the truth must lie in between these ex-
tremes of a surface description by the subject of his acts and a third-person
observer's account. For this, we need a theory of perceptual meaningnot
assimilable into a theory of conceptual, or propositional, noema; a theory
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 517

of intuitive acts in which the object is presented with the sense of being self-
given; and a theory of perceptual interpretation. I will not develop such a
theory here, but shall only note that we do not have in veridical perceptual
acts a group of acts which force upon us the necessity for a naively realistic
ontology.
In fact, a transcendental theory of intentionality finds Putnam's
"Skolemization of absolutely everything"" a most congenial move to the
effect that it is absolutely impossible to fix a determinate reference for any
term at all, except by our interpretations (not by any mysterious mental
powers). As Putnam puts it, "the world doesn't pick models or interpret
languages."32 We do. We constitute our worlds and ourselves. It is easy to
show that, in that case, the third objection stated earlier expresses an anxie-
ty which is uncalled for. A transcendental theory of constituting inten-
tionality would encompass ontological relativism and is not a plea for a
monolithic picture of the world.33

I have distinguished between four levels of understanding of inten-

tionality: the descriptive-psychological, the naturalistic-causal, the existen-
tial and the transcendental-constitutive. In doing this, I have traversed a
path that represents a progressive deepening of our comprehension of inten-
tionality. However, it is not a simple linear progression such that the suc-
ceeding one leaves behind the preceeding ones. The naturalistic-causal
understanding thinks it can do justice to the descriptive-psychological. It
claims to supersede the latter by appropriating it into a causal context.
What I have questioned is the tenability of these two claims taken together.
The existential understanding seeks to preserve the truth of both of the
foregoing thesesbut claims to supersede both by freeing the Brentano
thesis from its mentalism and the causal theory from its physicalism. The
transcendental constitutive interpretation preserves the truth of this last
"overcoming" of Cartesian dualism, for the constitutive intentionality is
neither mental nor physicalboth these being constituted, and so mundane,
orders. The path is "dialectical" in the sense in whichas in Hegel's
Phenomenologythe succeeding "shape" both negates and preserves the
truth of the preceeding.
Another way of describing this "dialectical" path is as follows. One
begins, as with Brentano, with a descriptive thesis. This Brentano thesis is
then given a "naturalistic-causal", or "information-theoretic" and/or
"biological" grounding. The inability of such a "grounding" to preserve
the phenomenon of intentionality leads to a more purified, denaturalized,
518 J. N. MOHANTY

mentalistic thesis. But one also realizes that the mental contents must be
grounded in the natural and cultural orders, which provides the transition
from the mentalistic to an existential understanding of intentionality. We
face here a typical dialectical situation. The mentalistic thesis has a
representationalistic idea of intentional content (at worst, an image theory,
capable of being appropriated into a physicalistic version.) The existentialist
thesis rejects the idea of "representation" in favor of a non-
representational idea of Dasein's being-in-the-world. This opposition be-
tween a mentalistic representation theory and an existential non-
representational theory is to be overcome in the theory of intentionality as a
transcendental-constitutive function according to which (a) the intentional
content is not an internal representation but a publicly sharable meaning,
and (b) the world in which Dasein finds itself is the result of prior con-
stitutive accomplishments of an intentionally implicated community of
egos.
I should like to add that with this progressive deepening of our
understanding of the nature and function of intentionality, the relevant
philosophical problem also continues to get transformed. Thus, the prob-
lem to which the original Brentano thesis was a response was: how are men-
tal phenomena to be distinguished from the physical phenomena? (which
incidentally is very different from the contemporary question: how is the
mental different from the physical?) This Brentano question gets
transformed, in Husserl, into the question: how does a mental, or rather
any intentional, act refer to whatever is its intentional object? Or, making
both the act and its object specific particulars, one may want to ask: how
does that object become the object of this mental act? The answer roughly
is, as in much of cognitive psychology, "through a representional content
of the act, a mental representation of that object." But this way of asking
the question appears to be circular, for that object must then be identifiable
as that object or as satisfying any other description, before one could ask
the question, how does it become the object of this act. In other words, one
cannot start with an object which is available only through some intentional
act or other. The proper question, then, would seem to be: how does an in-
tentional act refer to whatever happens to be its object? In asking it this
way, one is starting with the conscious experience under consideration, but
then one finds that having such and such object as its intentional object is
internal to that experience. One then comes to recognize the structure act-
noema as the irreducible point to begin with. The lesson is something that
Frege clearly saw: there is no route from object to sense. We have
 LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING 'INTENTIONALITY' 519

unavoidably to traverse the path from sense to objectas also from sense to
the sense-giving, i.e., interpretive and constitutive function of intentionality.

J. N. Mohanty
Temple University

NOTES

1. Cp. The correspondence between Sellars and Chisholm on intentionality,

reprinted in: A. Marras (ed.), Intentionality, Mind and Language (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1972).
2. W. Sellars, Mental Events (pre-print), para 56.
3. W. Sellars, Mental Events (pre-print), para 57.
4. W. Sellars, Mental Events (pre-print), paras 46-49.
5. F. Dretske, "The Intentionality of Cognitive States", in: Mid-West Studies in
Philosophy, vol. V, 1980, eds., Peter French and Theodor E. Uehling, pp. 281-94,
esp. 285.
6. Ibid., p. 289.
7. Ibid., p. 290.
8. Ibid., p. 291.
9. For these criticisms, see Jerry Fodor, "Semantics: Wisconsin Style" (pre-
print).
10. Husserl, Logical Investigations. Inv. V, Appendix to 11 and 20 (Findlay tr.
vol. II, pp. 556-93).
11. Cp. Z. Pylyshyn, "Imagery and Artificial Intelligence," in Readings in
Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, ed. N. Black (London: Methuen, 1981), pp.
170-94.
12. Cp. J. Heil, "Does Cognitive Psychology Rest on a Mistake?" Mind XC,
321-42, especially 331.
13. Cp. R. Cummins, The Nature of Psychological Explanation (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 177.
14. J. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 3.
15. Ibid., p. 4.
16. Ibid., p. 11.
17. Cp. R. Aquila's review of Searle, Intentionality in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, XLVI, 1985.
18. Cp. E. Husserl, Logical Investigations. Inv. V.
19. Searle, cited in nl4, above, p. 262.
20. Ibid., p. 265.
21. Cp. Editor's Introduction to Hubert L. Dreyfus (ed.), Husserl, Intentionality
and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).
22. J. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1953), esp. ch. 4.
 520 J. N. MOHANTY

23. B. Waldenfels, "Intentionalitat und Kausalitat," in Der Spielraum des

Verhaltens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), pp. 98-125, esp. p. 109.
(English translation mine).
24. Cp. E. Marbach, "On Using Intentionality in Empirical Phenomenology: the
Problem of 'Mental Images'," Dialectica, 38 (1984) pp. 209-29, esp. p. 223.
25. See my "Intentionality, Causality and Holism," Synthese, 61 (1984) pp.
17-34.
26. R. Mclntyre, "Searle on Intentionality," Inquiry, 27 (1984) pp. 468-83, esp.
p. 479.
27. I am not surprised that Searle himself does not think the thesis about the
Background to be incompatible with Husserl's transcendental reduction. Cp. Mcln-
tyre, ibid., p. 482-83, nl2.
28. R. Aquila, Critical Notice on Searle, Intentionality, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, XLVI (1985) p. 163.
29. Barry Smith, "Acta Cum Fundamentis in Re", Dialectica, 38 (1984) pp.
157-78.
30. Ibid., p. 163.
31. Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), p. 15.
32. Ibid., p. 24.
33. I have shown how transcendental phenomenology is compatible with
relativism in a lecture entitled "Phanomenologie und Relativismus" given at the
meeting of the German Phenomenological Society, in Trier, Spring, 1985. A version
of that lecture is scheduled to appear in the proceedings of that meeting.