Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Intentionalism

Intentionalism connects the phenomenal character of experience, what undergoing it feels like, with its intentional or representational character, how it presents things. In a visual experience a tomato appears red and round; in a bodily experience an ache seems located in a shoulder. Intentionalists hold that understanding these presentations helps explain the experiences’ felt differences.

The term covers several theses. A theory that perceptual experience has content is weaker than a theory that content fully determines its phenomenal character. Neither thesis should be confused with intentionality in general, the directedness of belief, desire, and other mental states.

Weak and Strong Versions

Supervenience intentionalism says that a phenomenal difference requires an intentional difference. Experiences alike in all relevant intentional respects cannot differ phenomenally. This is a constraint on variation; by itself it does not explain what phenomenal character consists in.

Strong representationalism offers a reductive explanation: phenomenal character consists in representational content of an appropriate kind. Influential accounts by Fred Dretske and Michael Tye connect this proposal with naturalistic theories of representation. Not every intentionalist endorses the same reduction, theory of content, or account of physical realization.

Pure and impure intentionalism differ over whether content alone suffices or whether intentional mode also contributes. Seeing a shape and imagining it may involve similar represented properties while feeling different. An impure account includes the manner of presentation. Further debates concern attention, perceptual organization, bodily affect, and how fine-grained content must be.

These distinctions prevent a misleading inference: adding every phenomenal feature to a loosely defined “content” would make the thesis hard to test. A substantive theory needs an independently motivated account of which intentional differences explain which phenomenal contrasts.

Motivations: Transparency and Unity

The transparency observation starts with attention. Looking for the redness in a tomato experience ordinarily directs attention toward the tomato as presented, rather than toward a red mental surface. Gilbert Harman and Tye use this observation to motivate representational accounts. Alex Byrne’s “Intentionalism Defended” develops an argument beyond a simple appeal to transparency.

Transparency does not decide the entire dispute. Attention may disclose a visual mode, blurriness, or other features of an experience; philosophers disagree about whether these qualify the observation or refute it. Tim Crane argues that intentionalism need not entail the strongest transparency claim.

A second motivation is explanatory unity. Perception, illusion, and hallucination all present a scene, though only some presentations are accurate. A content-based account can explain their similarity without requiring an actually red inner object whenever something looks red. Extending this account to pain and emotion promises further unity, but also exposes it to harder counterexamples.

Tye’s PANIC Account

Tye’s influential earlier theory associates phenomenal character with Poised, Abstract, Nonconceptual, Intentional Content:

  • Poised: available to influence belief and cognition rather than confined to inaccessible sensory processing.
  • Abstract: the character-relevant content need not contain a particular external object as a constituent.
  • Nonconceptual: experiencing a property does not require possessing a concept of that property.
  • Intentional: the state represents, with conditions under which its presentation is accurate.

The proposal helps explain why a creature can see a shade it cannot classify and why a matching hallucination can share aspects of visual character. Its components face independent challenges: the role of access, the nature of nonconceptual content, and the content of bodily experiences all require defense. PANIC is one theory, not a definition that every intentionalist accepts. Tye’s later panpsychist work also shows that representationalism about character need not settle the metaphysics of consciousness as a whole.

Mental Paint, Inversion, and Other Objections

Ned Block’s mental paint objection holds that phenomenal character can outrun representational content. It does not require a little observer looking at an inner picture. An intrinsic property of an experiential state might partly constitute its character while the state also represents the world.

Inverted-spectrum cases sharpen the challenge. Could two people classify colors in the same way but experience them differently? Matching verbal behavior is insufficient to establish matching content, so intentionalists dispute what has actually been held fixed. Realists reply that specifying wider content does not yet explain why a given presentation should have one feel rather than another.

Inverted Earth adds environmental history. If a person’s sensory inputs are preserved while the surrounding color environment changes systematically, their representational content might eventually change. Does phenomenal character change with it? Externalist intentionalists and their critics disagree about the correct content attribution and the stability of the experience.

Pain, undirected anxiety, moods, and afterimages create other tests. Advocates interpret bodily condition, threat, location, or the visual field as represented. Critics ask whether unpleasantness or diffuse feeling exceeds that content. Allowing affective modes may answer some cases, but a theory must explain those modes rather than merely rename the problem.

Conscious Thought and Higher-Order Theories

David Pitt’s cognitive-phenomenology account identifies the content of conscious occurrent thought with its phenomenal character. His explanatory direction is important: distinctive intrinsic cognitive phenomenology constitutes thought content. This is not simply Tye’s externally grounded perceptual theory extended to thinking. The proposals share an interest in content and consciousness but differ over what explains what.

Higher-order theories primarily address why a state is conscious, often appealing to a representation of that state. Intentionalism primarily addresses what fixes its phenomenal character. Some combinations of these theories are possible; a disagreement arises when an intentionalist theory also claims that first-order organization suffices for consciousness. Character, conscious status, and the identity of the experiencing subject should therefore be distinguished.

Further Reading

  • Byrne, Alex. “Intentionalism Defended.” The Philosophical Review 110, no. 2 (2001): 199–240.
  • Tye, Michael. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. MIT Press, 1995.
  • Crane, Tim. “Introspection, Intentionality, and the Transparency of Experience.” Philosophical Topics 28, no. 2 (2000): 49–67.
  • Block, Ned. “Mental Paint.” In Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, edited by Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg. MIT Press, 2003.
  • Pitt, David. “Introspection, Phenomenality, and the Availability of Intentional Content.” In Cognitive Phenomenology, edited by Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague, 141–173. Oxford University Press, 2011.