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Anders Nes, Are only mental phenomena intentional?, Analysis, Volume 68, Issue 3, July 2008, Pages 205–215, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/68.3.205
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Extract
It's a familiar suggestion that intentionality is the mark of the mental. The suggestion is typically spelled out and supported in terms of the following claim, which we may dub ‘Brentano's thesis’ (Brentano 1874/1973: 89):
Brentano's thesis: All and only mental phenomena are intentional.
An influential objection to Brentano's thesis is that intentionality isn't necessary to mentality, since bodily sensations, or moods, or other states of mind regarded as ‘qualitative’, are not intentional. Over the last decade, a number of philosophers, including Tim Crane (1998, 2001) and Michael Tye (1995, 2000), have sought to rebut this objection, presenting several interesting and powerful considerations in favour of an intentional view of qualitative states. Such arguments are central to Crane's (2001) recent sustained defence of Brentano's thesis.
While much ink has been lavished on the necessity of intentionality to mentality, little attention has been devoted to its sufficiency. In this paper, I take Crane's lucid and, I believe, fairly representative articulation of the notion of intentionality as my point of departure. I show that on a simpleminded but natural reading of some central passages in his articulation, the non-mental state of attracting a metal bar comes out as intentional. I then consider two types of response, both suggested by remarks in Crane. One is to spell out intentionality in explicitly mental terms. This, I shall argue, unacceptably trivializes one half of Brentano's thesis. Another is to ratchet up the necessary condition for intentionality by appeal to such phenomena as failure of substitution or of existential presupposition. I shall consider a variety of such possible strengthenings. We shall see they either fail to exclude all non-mental phenomena or are so strong that they ground new, serious challenges to the claim that qualitative states are intentional.
