In ''The Myth of Original Intentionality,'' Daniel Dennett appears to want to argue for four claims involving the familiar distinction between original (or underived) and derived intentionality. 1. Humans lack original intentionality. 2. Humans have derived intentionality only. 3. There is no distinction between original and derived intentionality. 4. There is no such thing as original intentio...

A growing amount of research on intentionality within Anglo-American philosophy of mind has been focusing on the notion of phenomenal intentionality. How to characterize phenomenal intentionality is not a straightforward matter, but one relatively neutral option is in terms of counterfactual dependence: an intentional state has phenomenal intentionality just in case if it were not phenomenal it...

The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of th...

People excel at attributing intentionality to other agents, whether in simple scenarios such as shapes moving in two dimensions or complex scenarios such as people interacting. We note that intentionality attributions seem to fall into two categories: low-level intentionality in which an observer has a theory of mind about an agent, and high-level intentionality in which an observer believes th...

One of the most enduring elements of Davidson’s legacy is the idea that intentionality is inherently normative. The normativity of intentionality means different things to different people and in different contexts, however. A subsidiary goal of this paper is to get clear on the sense in which Davidson means the thesis that intentionality is inherently normative. The central goal of the paper i...

Since the seventies, it has been customary to assume that intentionality is independent of consciousness. Recently, a number of philosophers have rejected this assumption, claiming that intentionality is closely tied to consciousness, inasmuch as non-conscious intentionality in some sense depends upon conscious intentionality. Within this alternative framework, the question arises of how to acc...

Although intentionality has been implicated as a causal variable in healing research, its definition has been inconsistent and vague. The objective of this grounded theory study is to develop a substantive theory of intentionality in a naturalistic encounter between nurse-healers and their healee-clients, and to consider the implications for practice and research. Six expert nurse-healers and s...

This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality affect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affec...

Philosophers traditionally recognize two main features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the aboutness of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or “what it’s like” (Nagel 1974) aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be disti...