https://plato.stanford.

edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex

2. Intentional inexistence
Contemporary discussions of the nature of intentionality were launched and many of them were
anticipated by Franz Brentano (1874, 88–89) in his book, Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint,
from which I quote two famous paragraphs:
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. Every mental phenomenon includes something as
object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is
presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired
and so on.
This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical
phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that
they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.
As one reads these lines, numerous questions arise: what does Brentano mean when he says that the
object towards which the mind directs itself ‘is not to be understood as meaning a thing’? What can it
be for a phenomenon (mental or otherwise) to exhibit ‘the intentional inexistence of an object’? What
is it for a phenomenon to ‘include something as object within itself’? Do ‘reference to a content’ and
‘direction toward an object’ express two distinct ideas? Or are they two distinct ways of expressing
one and the same idea? If intentionality can relate a mind to something that either does not exist or
exists wholly within the mind, what sort of relation can it be?
Replete as they are with complex, abstract and controversial ideas, these two short paragraphs have
set the agenda for all subsequent philosophical discussions of intentionality in the late nineteenth and
the twentieth century. There has been some discussion over the meaning of Brentano’s expression
‘intentional inexistence.’ Did Brentano mean that the objects onto which the mind is directed
are internal to the mind itself (in-exist in the mind)? Or did he mean that the mind can be directed
onto non-existent objects? Or did he mean both? (See Crane, 1998 for further discussion.)
Some of the leading ideas of the phenomenological tradition can be traced back to this issue.
Following the lead of Edmund Husserl (1900, 1913), who was both the founder of phenomenology
and a student of Brentano’s, the point of the phenomenological analysis has been to show that the
essential property of intentionality of being directed onto something is not contingent upon whether
some real physical target exists independently of the intentional act itself. To achieve this goal, two
concepts have been central to Husserl’s internalist interpretation of intentionality: the concept of
a noema (plural noemata) and the concept of epoche (i.e., bracketing) or phenomenological
reduction. By the word ‘noema,’ Husserl refers to the internal structure of mental acts. The
phenomenological reduction is meant to help get at the essence of mental acts by suspending all naive
presuppositions about the difference between real and fictitious entities (on these complex
phenomenological concepts, see the papers by Føllesdal and others conveniently gathered in Dreyfus
(1982). For further discussion, see Bell (1990) and Dummett (1993).
In the two paragraphs quoted above, Brentano sketches an entire research programme based on three
distinct theses. According to the first thesis, it is constitutive of the phenomenon of intentionality, as
it is exhibited by mental states such as loving, hating, desiring, believing, judging, perceiving, hoping
and many others, that these mental states are directed towards things different from themselves.
According to the second thesis, it is characteristic of the objects towards which the mind is directed
by virtue of intentionality that they have the property which Brentano calls intentional inexistence.
According to the third thesis, intentionality is the mark of the mental: all and only mental states
exhibit intentionality.
Unlike Brentano’s third thesis, Brentano’s first two theses can hardly be divorced from each other.
The first thesis can easily be recast so as to be unacceptable unless the second thesis is accepted.
Suppose that it is constitutive of the nature of intentionality that one could not exemplify such mental
states as loving, hating, desiring, believing, judging, perceiving, hoping, and so on, unless there
was something to be loved, hated, desired, believed, judged, perceived, hoped, and so on. If so, then it
follows from the very nature of intentionality (as described by the first thesis) that nothing could
exhibit intentionality unless there were objects—intentional objects—that satisfied the property
Brentano called intentional inexistence.
Now, the full acceptance of Brentano’s first two theses raises a fundamental ontological question in
philosophical logic. The question is: are there such intentional objects? Does due recognition of
intentionality force us to postulate the ontological category of intentional objects? This question has
given rise to a major division within analytic philosophy. The prevailing (or orthodox) response has
been a resounding ‘No.’ But an important minority of philosophers, whom I shall call ‘the
intentional-object’ theorists, have argued for a positive response to the question. Since intentional
objects need not exist, according to intentional-object theorists, there are things that do not exist.
According to their critics, there are no such things.
We shall directly examine the intentional-object theorists approach in section 7. Before doing so, in
section 3, we shall examine the way singular thoughts about concrete particulars in space and time
can be and have been construed as paradigms of genuine intentional relations. On this relational
construal, an individual’s ordinary singular thought about a concrete physical particular involves a
genuine relation between the individual’s mind and the concrete physical particular. In sections 4–5,
we shall examine two puzzles that further arise on the orthodox paradigm. First, we shall deal with
the puzzle of how a rational person can believe of an object referred to by one singular term that it
instantiates a property and simultaneously disbelieve of the same object referred to by a distinct
singular term that it instantiates the same property. Section 4 is devoted to Frege’s solution to this
puzzle. In section 5, we shall scrutinize Russell’s solution to the puzzle of true negative existential
statements. In section 6, we shall see how the theory of direct reference emerged within the orthodox
paradigm out of a critique of both Frege’s notion of sense and Russell’s assumption that most proper
names in natural languages are disguised definite descriptions.