Editing Intentionality (section)

== Overview<!--'Act psychology' redirects here--> ==
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 <!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->'''act psychology''', also called [[Intentionalism (philosophy of mind)|intentionalism]])<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Brentano |title=Franz Brentano – Britannica.com |access-date=2016-04-16 |archive-date=2016-03-20 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160320051129/http://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Brentano |url-status=live }}</ref> 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.
{{quote|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.| Franz Brentano|source=''Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint'', edited by Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 68.}}

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.&nbsp;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.&nbsp;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, [[Edmund Husserl|Husserl]] followed on Brentano, and gave the concept of intentionality more widespread attention, both in [[continental philosophy|continental]] and [[analytic philosophy]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Smith|first=David Woodruff|title=Husserl|publisher=Routledge|location=New York|isbn=0-415-28974-2|pages=10|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=T-TD3QmLHtgC|date=2006-12-04}}</ref>  In contrast to Brentano's view, French philosopher [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] (''[[Being and Nothingness]]'') identified  intentionality with [[consciousness]], stating that the two were indistinguishable.<ref>{{cite book |author=Jean-Paul Sartre |title=Being and Nothingness |year=2012 |publisher=Open Road Media |isbn=978-1453228555 }}</ref> German philosopher [[Martin Heidegger]] (''[[Being and Time]]''), defined intentionality as "[[Heideggerian terminology|care]]" (''Sorge''), a [[sentience|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").<ref>{{cite book |author=Martin Heidegger |title=Being and Time |year=1967  |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |page=84 |isbn=0631197702 }}</ref>

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.<ref>{{cite book|last=Ayer|first=A.J.|title=More of My Life|year=1984|publisher=HarperCollins|location=New York|isbn=0-19-281878-3|pages=26}}</ref>  Ryle insisted that perceiving is not a process,<ref>{{cite book|last=Locke|first=Don|title=Perception: And Our Knowledge Of The External World, Volume 3|year=2002|publisher=Routledge|location=London|isbn=0-415-29562-9|pages=28|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tmlmLuQU4OAC}}</ref> and Ayer that describing one's knowledge is not to describe mental processes.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last=Macdonald|first=Graham|title=Alfred Jules Ayer|url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/#5|encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University|access-date=28 December 2012}}</ref>  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.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last=Siewert|first=Charles|title=Consciousness and Intentionality|url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/#PheConInt|encyclopedia=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University|access-date=28 December 2012}}</ref>  (Sartre also referred to "consciousness" as "[[nothing]]").<ref>{{cite web|last=Franchi|first=Leo|title=Sartre and Freedom|url=http://files.lfranchi.com/papers/sartre.and.freedom.pdf|access-date=28 December 2012|archive-date=26 November 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131126014040/http://files.lfranchi.com/papers/sartre.and.freedom.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref>

[[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.<ref name=byrne>{{cite encyclopedia|last=Byrne|first=Alex|title=Intentionality|url=http://mit.edu/abyrne/www/intentionality.html|encyclopedia=Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia|publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology|access-date=28 December 2012}}</ref> 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.<ref name=bechtel>{{cite book|last=Bechtel|first=William|title=Philosophy of Mind: An Overview for Cognitive Science|year=1988|publisher=Erlbaum|location=Hillsdale NJ|isbn=978-0805802214|pages=[https://archive.org/details/philosophyofmind0000bech/page/44 44]–47|url=https://archive.org/details/philosophyofmind0000bech|url-access=registration}}</ref>  Chisholm's criteria for the intentional use of sentences are: existence independence, truth-value indifference, and [[opaque context|referential opacity]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Horosz|first=William and Tad S. Clements|title=Religion and Human Purpose: A Cross Disciplinary Approach|year=1986|publisher=Springer|location=New York|isbn=978-9024730001|pages=35}}</ref>

In current [[artificial intelligence]] and [[philosophy of mind]], intentionality is sometimes linked with questions of semantic inference, with both skeptical and supportive adherents.<ref>{{cite web|title=Might the Singularity never occur?|url=http://singularity.org/singularity-faq/#r38|work=Singularity FAQ|publisher=Singularity Institute|access-date=28 December 2012|archive-date=25 December 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121225044848/http://singularity.org/singularity-faq/#r38|url-status=live}}</ref>  [[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.<ref>{{cite book|last=Marconi|first=Diego|title="On the Referential Competence of Some Machines", in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing: Theory and Grounding Representations, Volume 3, edited by Paul Mc Kevitt|year=1996|publisher=Springer|location=New York|isbn=978-9401072335|pages=31|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=72dw2jkKfIwC}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite book|last=Atlan|first=H.|title="Ends and Means in Machine-Like Systems", in New Perspectives on Cybernetics: Self-Organization, Autonomy and Connectionism, edited by Gertrudis Van de Vijver|year=1991|publisher=Sringer|location=New York|isbn=978-9048141074|pages=39|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gqI68ZBMGk4C}}</ref>