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Intentionality and Causality in John Searle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David L. Thompson
David L. Thompson*
Affiliation:
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NewfoundlandA1C 5S7
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Extract

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. Brentano's 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 preestablished harmony.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 83 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1986

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References

1 This paper grew out of discussions at a seminar of the McGill Philosophy Department. I gratefully acknowledge the hospitality and inspiration of the participants.

2 This is an oversimplification. For Husser!, the psychical is as much a constituted, objective realm as the physical; Intentionality is attributed to the Transcendental Ego, not the empirical ego. Searle ignores this point and attributes Intentionality to loosely defined ‘mental states.’ He is therefore using Intentionality more in Brentano's sense than Husserl's. I cannot, however, discuss this problem here.

3 Searle, John Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar All in-text references are to this work.

4 Modelled on Chapter 2, especially p. 48.