Abstract

A survey of current attitudes towards the concept of intentionality provides for an interesting sociology of philosophers. One group regards the notion as a kind of ghost-in-the-machine redivivus, come back to haunt them. The spectral threats posed to a seamless materialist ontology by such things as immateriality, incorrigibility and privacy had seemed exorcised in the first round, at the hands of Ryle and Wittgenstein. But now it appeared that their opponents had been holding in reserve a much more sophisticated concept of mind that required such intractables as mental states that derive their identity from their meanings, meanings themselves as abstract and intensional entities, intentional as opposed to real objects, and the like.