Thinking about Thought

Thoughts are about items in (or aspects of) the world, and mental representations refer to them: how can this representational power be explained? In this chapter, the author introduces the philosophical problem of intentionality, clarifies how key terms will be used in this book, explains (and to some extent motivates) the author’s starting assumptions, and sets out her main aims. Among other things, she here discusses the naturalization project, relations between intentionality and consciousness, the distinction between original and derived intentionality, and the (natural-factive) notion of informational content as distinct from the notion of representational content involved in semantic evaluations. The aim in this book is to give a “modest” theory of original intentionality, a theory of referential-intentional content with its scope initially limited to sensory-perceptual (nonconceptual) representations. The focus will be on the origination question (what is the basis of original intentionality?), not on the derivation question (how do more sophisticated forms of intentionality derive from less sophisticated?).