1.1 The Picture We Didn’t Choose

Think of wanting a glass of water. Now try to keep the wanting while removing everything wanted: no water, no relief, no change in how you feel. What have you kept? The question concerns what makes this a desire at all, before we ask where in the brain it happens.

Most of us carry a different starting picture without ever having decided to. The world lies out there; the mind sits in here; perception runs the traffic between them. Signals arrive from outside, the brain works them into a representation, and what you are aware of at any waking moment is that representation, your best inner rendering of an outer world you never quite touch. The world causes the rendering. The rendering is all you get.

Every version of the inner theater model of mind begins the same way; mind on one side, world on the other, and the only real question left over asks how the first ever reaches the second. The gap does not turn up at the end of that inquiry as a finding. It sits at the start, built into the shape of the question, before a single piece of evidence gets weighed.

That starting point can be questioned. The wanting suggests another: perhaps a mental state comes already directed, rather than first arriving as a self-contained event and then finding something to concern. Franz Brentano made that thought the basis of a classification of the mental.

1.2 What Brentano Saw

Brentano asked: what makes a mental state mental at all? I take from him the constitutive role of directedness, not his original account of its objects. His 1874 formulation, quoted above, treats the object as existing within the mental act. The world-involving account this book will defend departs from that framework. Brentano gives us a question and a proposed mark, not an already completed escape from Descartes.

Brentano taught philosophy in Vienna for twenty years, in a lecture room that drew both Twardowski and Husserl to him. In 1874 he published Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, turning the new empirical study of psychology toward a classification of his own: a three-part taxonomy of mental phenomena, built to win the subject the standing of a science. At its center he set a single property, one he claimed every mental state shares.

He reached back for the Scholastics’ word for it, intentional, from the Latin intentio, a stretching-toward; from that root philosophy later built the noun we now lean on, intentionality. The word misleads modern ears, so set the everyday sense aside first. Brentano did not mean intention in the sense of planning a dinner or filing a tax return. He meant something far more basic: the property, shared by everything mental, of being about something, directed toward something, of something. A belief bears on tomorrow’s weather. A desire reaches toward a glass of water. A fear takes the dog at the gate as its object. Vision presents the red cup across the room; hearing, the kettle beginning to whistle; touch, the mug’s heat; smell, the coffee; proprioception, the hand already reaching. Memory returns to yesterday’s kitchen. Imagination rehearses a conversation that has not happened yet. What a state concerns need not lie outside the mind: you can think about your thinking. Nor need it exist. Thinking about a dragon requires no dragon, indoors or out.

Read the mark first as directedness, not yet as a theory of content. Some directed states plainly specify conditions that can obtain or fail. Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin press the nearer rival: basic perceiving and skilled coping may reach into the world without specifying any such conditions. Directedness, on their view, can come before content.¹ Brentano’s claim still cuts deep. This pointing does not sit among the mental’s other features. It is the mark — the thing that sorts the mental from the merely physical.

Two questions need separating. Must every mental state concern something? I defend that claim, beginning with the familiar cases here. Does directedness already amount to representational content, with conditions under which a state gets something right or wrong? Hutto and Myin make that a further dispute, which the later account of meaning must answer. Nor do I follow Brentano in treating every mental phenomenon as conscious; directedness alone will not decide that question in this book.

Return to the wanting, or try an anger that concerns nothing and a perception that presents nothing. Vague does not mean undirected: you can want something without knowing quite what, or see a shape without recognizing it. The exercise asks whether, after removing everything the state concerns, you can still identify the desire, anger, or perception you began with. Directedness does not look like a coat those states merely put on.

Two apparent counterexamples deserve daylight: diffuse mood and bodily pain. Neither is obviously blank. A mood can present the world as inviting, flat, or threatening without singling out an object; pain can present the body as damaged or requiring withdrawal. Chapter 7 tests that answer rather than taking it for granted. A wholly undirected mental state would defeat the necessity claim. An undirected feature within an otherwise directed state would instead challenge the stronger claim that directedness exhausts its character.

Anger-at-the-delay and anger-at-the-remark differ partly in what each concerns. Remove that difference and we lose one way of telling the states apart. This supports giving directedness a constitutive role; it does not yet show that every feature of either anger consists in directedness. Pain and mood must face that stronger test on their own terms.

Notice the quiet reversal this works on the received picture. The inner/outer story may begin with something out there: light reaches the eye, signals travel through the nervous system, and an event occurs in here. But it treats that inner event as complete before asking what, if anything, it represents. Directedness then becomes a second achievement, a bridge thrown back across the gap to its worldly source.

The use I make of Brentano changes that explanatory order. A mental state does not first arise as a bare inner occurrence and acquire an object afterward. It exists as a directed state: anger-at-the-delay, fear-of-the-dog, seeing-the-tree. The object need not exist, but the directedness belongs to the state from the start. This is the proposal the familiar examples support and the harder ones must test.

1.3 Whose Aboutness? Original and Derived

One qualification remains: not everything that points counts as mental.

A sentence concerns the world; a photograph, the wedding it shows; a road sign, the curve ahead. If aboutness marks the mental, has the sign become a mind?

No. The difference turns on dependence upon an interpreting practice.² Drivers make the symbols mean the curve by reading them so; left alone, paint remains on metal, legible to us and not to the rain.

Strip away every practice that reads the sign and its meaning vanishes. Philosophers call this derived intentionality: aboutness on loan, real in use but dependent on interpreters.

A state with original content works differently. Its own world-involving history and use help fix what would make it accurate or mistaken; an interpreting practice does not exhaust that standard. Original does not mean uncaused, uninherited, or self-created. Evolution, education, culture, engineering, and learning may all stand in the state’s pedigree. The contrast concerns what fixes correctness, not whether the state sprang from nowhere. The road sign carries real but derived content. Neither having meaning nor carrying a useful signal, by itself, makes the sign a mind. Chapter 14 develops that distinction.

Whether borrowed meaning can run all the way down with no interpretation-independent content remains contested. Daniel Dennett rejects a sharp original/derived divide. On his interpretationist account, intentional descriptions earn literal standing when they capture real patterns whose predictive and explanatory success is not merely in the interpreter’s eye. This book retains the distinction as a diagnosis of semantic dependence, not a gate through which all genuine meaning or mindedness must pass. Dependence can vary by content and grain: a learner may inherit a word from a practice while acquiring new, world-answerable uses of it.

1.4 The Sealed Room as Inheritance

Put the argument together and the mind looks world-directed from the start. Its basic mode is being-toward: toward objects, toward fields, toward states of affairs that may or may not obtain, and sometimes toward no more than how things stand, with nothing singled out at all. That result does not yet prove the externalism Part Three will earn. It does make the sealed inner room a poor place to begin. And if directedness belongs to mentality from the first, why does so much of philosophy, science, and ordinary talk proceed as though we sit behind our eyes watching a private show?

Because the inner theater has a history. The picture that puts an inner object between the perceiver and the world grew through influential readings of Descartes and his successors. Later scientific talk often kept the arrangement while replacing ideas with brain states. A genealogy will not show the room false. It can show that we were never obliged to begin inside it, and hand the burden back to anyone who asks us to stay.

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Chapter Summary

The claim. Intentionality names the directedness Brentano proposed as the mark of the mental. The book takes that proposal into a different framework: mental states come already concerned with something, without requiring an object lodged within them.

Where the argument stands. The familiar examples support a constitutive role for directedness, not yet the stronger claim that it exhausts every mental feature. The road sign shows why meaning alone cannot establish a mind. Original content requires some independence from interpreting practice, not independence from history or inheritance.

What’s left open. Whether diffuse moods and bodily pain are wholly directed, whether basic directedness requires satisfaction-conditioned content, whether a machine’s mechanisms earn such content, and whether the larger system understands by means of it wait for later argument. None is settled here.

The hand-off. A mind world-directed through and through makes the sealed chamber look less like a discovery than a room we were handed. So the next chapter steps inside it to watch the walls go up, brick by brick, and then asks what the finished room can say in its own defense. What it says best, it says as a question — the one that makes the picture look unavoidable.

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Notes

1. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995 [1874]), Book II, ch. 1, p. 88. The canonical formulation: “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 toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.” The Scholastic lineage matters: intentionality’s roots run through Aquinas and Aristotle’s account of the intellect’s receiving the form of an object without its matter. Brentano’s innovation was to elevate intentionality from one property of the mental among others to its defining criterion — the mark distinguishing mental from physical phenomena. For the framing of the thesis as the mark of the mental and a defense of its sufficiency as well as its necessity, see Tim Crane, “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental,” in Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 229–251 (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43). Crane’s own thesis is the weak one — that all mental states are intentional “regardless of whether these states also have non-intentional properties” — so the claim this chapter makes sits inside his, not beyond it. He stops short of the identity claim the book argues later, assigning that to “contemporary intentionalists like Michael Tye and Gilbert Harman,” and he names “the naggingness of a toothache” as a property of pain he takes to be wholly non-intentional (Crane, “Intentionality,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998, sec. 3). The ally who supplies the mark does not follow the argument all the way, and the case where he stops is the case Appendix B.6 and Chapter 7 take up. Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin make the prior challenge explicit in Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), esp. the preface and chs. 1, 4, and 6: intentional directedness and even perceptual experience may occur without specified conditions of satisfaction. The book therefore cannot define their rival away by using directedness and content interchangeably. Note that “intentional inexistence” in Brentano’s usage names the object’s existing-in the mental act (Latin in-existere, on the model of Aristotelian immanent form), not the object’s nonexistence; the standard English rendering has misled generations of readers, a confusion traced and corrected in Crane, “Brentano on Intentionality,” in The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School, ed. Uriah Kriegel (London: Routledge, 2017), 41–48. On the distinction between content and object, see Kazimierz Twardowski, On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894), and Husserl, Logical Investigations, Fifth Investigation, sec. 11. Husserl denies that the intentional object is a real constituent of the act, whether or not that object exists; his example of Jupiter does not relocate a nonexistent object into the external world (quoted and discussed in Crane, “Brentano on Intentionality”). The book carries directedness into its own world-involving framework rather than attributing that whole framework to Brentano or Husserl. ↩
2. John Searle gives the intrinsic/derived vocabulary an influential modern formulation in Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 1; he sharpens the observer-relative framing in The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). The underlying problem reaches well beyond his account: how public signs inherit meaning and how thoughts or mechanisms acquire content that does not depend on further interpretation. For the analysis of conventional meaning through speaker meaning, see H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” The Philosophical Review 66, no. 3 (1957): 377–388. For naturalistic programs aimed at underived content, see Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); and Nicholas Shea, Representation in Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). The present chapter uses derived and original to mark dependence on an interpreting practice, not allegiance to a specifically Searlean theory, and it does not reserve underived content for whole biological minds. Selection, learning, and producer-consumer organization may establish original mechanism-level content. Part Four therefore asks separately whether machine mechanisms possess such content and whether the larger system believes, understands, or acts by means of it. For the interpretationist alternative, which rejects any sharp distinction between original and derived intentionality, see Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). ↩