Intentionality and Noema

Abstract

One may want to have an account of intentionality within the framework of a naturalistic theory. For such an account, mental acts, characterised by intentionality, occur as events within the spatiotemporal and causal order of nature. How precisely these events are to be located within the causal order of nature, more particularly within the structure of the human body, would have to be worked out in detail. But, in principle, on such an account, a physicalistic theory of nature, body, and the mental is perceived as capable of making room for a specific sort of natural occurrences which exhibit, at the phenomenal level, the property of intentionality. Consequently, physical nature, which as a whole is nonintentional, may still be regarded as exhibiting intentionality with regard to one of its proper subsets. Physical theory, then, allows for a subordinate theory which is not truth-functional, but intensional. The two theories would coexist inasmuch as the intensional theory holds good for the phenomenal properties of that subset, while the physical, extensional theory is true of its noumenal reality. If intentionality is true of the mental states in their phenomenological aspects, physics is still true of their real, ontological nature. Intentionality, then, would be an appearance of physical nature under specificable conditions. Phenomenology would be grounded in physics.

First read in a symposium at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, held at Philadelphia, in 1981. The other symposiast was John Searle. Richard Aquila commented. Originally published in The Journal of Philosophy LXVIII (1981), pp. 706–717. Reprinted with permission.