โ Scribed by Dale Jacquette
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Mental events are typically divided into two categories -the intentional and the phenomenal. Intentional psychological states include belief, hope, fear, desire, envy, love, and hate. These are described as having or being directed toward intentional objects. 1 Phenomenal psychological states by contrast involve the lived-through experience of qualitative content or secondary quality. 2 These include sensations of pleasure, pain, heat, cold, color, texture, and taste.
It is often said that sensational or phenomenal experience cannot be reduced to the intentional. This in turn is supposed to contradict Franz Brentano's thesis that a property is mental or psychological if and only if it is intentional. 3 If sensation cannot be reduced to the intentional, then there are mental or psychological properties which are not intentional. Richard Rorty supports this criticism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. "The obvious objection to defining the mental as the intentional", he writes, "is that pains are not intentional -they do not represent, they are not about anything". 4
Non-human sentient animals may also have psychological experiences. But if the animals are pre-or non-linguistic, then their psychological experiences cannot be straightforwardly characterized as intentional, s There may therefore be two types of counter-examples to Brentano's intentionality thesis.
(1) (2)
Sensations are mental or psychological, but not intentional. The psychological experiences of non-human pre-or non-linguistic sentient animals are psychological, or in some sense mental, but not intentional.
Counter-examples of both kinds can be eliminated as challenges to Brentano's thesis if sensation is intentional or reducible to the intentional. But in what
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