Intentionality without Representationalism

Intentionality is most broadly characterized as mind’s directedness upon something. This broad characterization accords with our sense of the mind’s “openness to the world,” as Tim Crane (2008) puts it, or of the mind’s self-transcendence in apprehending an object, as a phenomenologist might put it. Such language captures the ordinary belief that one is directly and without mediation aware of ordinary things and states of affairs, that the subject and the world stand, as it were, in a certain kind of relation that is uniquely different from the relation of being in the world. The subject is subject of the world, and the relation is a dyadic, intentional relation of mind to world. Representationalist accounts, however, claim that mind is only mediately aware of ordinary things and states of affairs. The intentional relation, on this account, is triadic: mind, representation or representative content, and world.