Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Crane

Tim Crane is a British philosopher whose work concerns intentionality, consciousness, and thought about things that do not exist. He defends an intentional understanding of mental life while distinguishing what a state presents from the mode in which it presents it. His discussions of nonexistent objects ask how ordinary thought and language can concern something without committing us to a corresponding entity.

Major Works

  • The Mechanical Mind (first published 1995) — representation, computation, and theories of mind; substantially revised in later editions.
  • “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental” (1998) — a defense of intentionality as characteristic of mentality.
  • Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (2001) — intentionality, consciousness, mental causation, and the mind–body problem.
  • “The Intentional Structure of Consciousness” (2003) — intentional content, mode, and bodily sensation.
  • The Objects of Thought (2013) — intentional objects and nonexistence.

Intentionality and Aspectual Shape

An intentional state concerns something under some aspect. A person can think of a city as a destination without thinking of it as the birthplace of a writer, even when both descriptions concern the same place. Specifying what the thought concerns is therefore not always sufficient to specify how it is presented.

Crane uses the distinction among subject, intentional mode, and intentional content. The subject bears the state. The mode distinguishes, for example, believing from hoping, or seeing from imagining. The content concerns what is presented and how things are represented. A subject can entertain the same content under different modes or different contents under one mode.

Intentionality in this broad sense is not restricted to propositional attitudes stated with “that” clauses. A bodily sensation or a perceptual presentation can have intentional structure even if its content is not naturally expressed as a complete proposition. This flexibility is central to Crane’s treatment of consciousness.

The Intentional Structure of Consciousness

Crane challenges a strict division between intentional states, such as belief, and purely qualitative states, such as pain. He argues that bodily sensation exhibits directedness: pain presents a part or region of the body under a distinctive mode. A felt pain in the foot illustrates the difference between the state and what it concerns. In phantom pain, the apparent bodily object may be absent without the sensation ceasing to occur.

This is an intentionalist account, but not one that identifies every phenomenal difference with a difference in represented worldly properties alone. Seeing a scene and imagining it can differ even when their contents overlap. On Crane’s approach, mode belongs to the explanation of what the experience is like.

The strength of an intentionalist claim also matters. Saying that complete intentional structure determines phenomenal character does not automatically settle the metaphysical identity of properties or provide a reductive physical explanation.

Transparency and Its Limits

Transparency arguments emphasize that attention to perceptual experience tends to disclose what it presents, such as a tree’s color and shape, rather than an inner mental object. Crane’s account preserves that directedness while asking whether introspection can also reveal the mode of presentation.

A difference between seeing and hearing is not necessarily a difference between the properties represented by those senses. Similarly, painful presentation differs from neutrally thinking about the same bodily region. These comparisons put pressure on content-only explanations without establishing an additional nonintentional “mental paint.” The alternatives include richer contents, mode-sensitive intentionalism, and theories allowing irreducible qualitative properties.

Thinking of Nonexistent Objects

We can think of Sherlock Holmes, a golden mountain, or an impossible figure. These thoughts are not automatically unintelligible because their apparent objects do not exist. Yet treating intentionality as an ordinary relation between two existing things appears to leave such cases unexplained.

Crane resists introducing a special domain of nonexistent entities simply to provide objects for every thought. Calling something an intentional object identifies what a state is about; it need not assign that object membership in a special ontological category. A person thinking of Holmes is not thereby related to a real detective.

This approach requires distinctions among the object of thought, the content of the thought, and whatever existing things help explain it—such as a book, a description, or a mental representation. None of those existing things automatically replaces Holmes as what the thought concerns. The theory aims to respect ordinary discourse while remaining cautious about existential commitments.

Criticisms and Replies

Critics of intentionalism ask whether moods and sensations really present objects or whether intentional language is being imposed on them. Crane’s reply broadens intentionality beyond propositional attitudes and uses bodily and aspectual structure as evidence. A further objection asks whether mode provides an explanation of qualitative differences or merely renames them. The account then needs an independent analysis of the relevant modes and their connection to experience.

Object theorists question whether a theory avoiding nonexistent entities can explain apparently true statements about them. Other critics favor reducing such discourse to descriptions or fictional contexts. Crane’s project distinguishes the truth of relevant claims from an assumption that all apparent objects must exist, while acknowledging that different kinds of nonexistent-object discourse require analysis.

Development and Scope

The 1998 defense of the mental mark leads into the 2003 analysis of conscious intentional structure; the 2013 book develops the problem of objects more extensively. These projects connect, but an account of aboutness is not automatically a full account of consciousness, computation, or mental causation. Crane’s work makes those connections available for argument rather than treating them as conclusions of terminology.

  • Intentionality — content, object, and mode.
  • Intentionalism — intentional structure and phenomenal character.
  • Qualia — qualitative properties and their explanation.
  • Transparency — introspection of experience.
  • Brentano — the historical mark-of-the-mental thesis.
  • Block — objections to representational accounts.

Further Reading

  • Crane, Tim. The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines and Mental Representation. First edition. Penguin Books, 1995.
  • Crane, Tim. “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental.” In Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Anthony O’Hear. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Crane, Tim. Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • Crane, Tim. “The Intentional Structure of Consciousness.” In Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Quentin Smith and Aleksandar Jokić. Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Crane, Tim. The Objects of Thought. Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Mind, Matter, and Meaning — Gordon Swobe’s book-length argument about mind, consciousness, and meaning; an author position, not an endorsement by this reference page or its subjects.