Phenomenal Intentionality

The Research Problem

Phenomenal intentionality is the form of mental directedness grounded in how an experience is lived through. When a person visually experiences a blue cup, the episode has a phenomenal character: something appears blue and cup-shaped from a perspective. It also has intentionality: the experience presents a certain possible arrangement of objects and properties. The fundamental question concerns the explanatory connection between these features. Does the very occurrence of this manner of appearing supply the experience with content, or must some additional causal, computational, interpretive, or worldly relation be responsible for its being about something?

The problem matters because theories of mind require a principled explanation of representation. A thermometer covaries with temperature, and an inscription may stand for a proposition. Mental episodes seem to exhibit a distinctive sort of presentation, in which objects and possibilities figure in the lived significance of the episode itself. The phenomenal intentionality program holds that this experiential dimension is indispensable to understanding at least some original intentionality and, in its stronger forms, all intentionality. The contemporary philosophical framework is surveyed and critically differentiated by Bourget and Mendelovici (2026), whose updated encyclopedia entry is a valuable map of a rapidly elaborating research field.

The proper object of this inquiry is both a property and a theory. Phenomenal intentionality names a putative kind of directedness. Phenomenal Intentionality Theory, or PIT, claims that such directedness is explanatorily basic in the architecture of the mind. A philosopher can accept the first thesis and deny the second: the existence of experience-based content does not entail that unconscious or standing content must originate there. Conversely, a theory may emphasize the representational character of perception while explaining it entirely through informational relations rather than through phenomenal consciousness.

The monograph proceeds from the lived structure of presentation to the scope of explanatory generalization. Its central methodological principle is that the identity of a philosophical explanandum must remain fixed across rival theories. Predictive success in cognitive science, correctness conditions in semantics, and subjective aboutness are related phenomena, but a reduction of one to another needs an argument specifying the relation. This issue is especially clear in Mendelovici and Bourget's (2023) distinction between the hard problem of intentionality and several explanatory tasks involving representational posits.

Phenomenal Character and Directedness

Phenomenal consciousness is the experiential character of a mental occurrence: the way seeing, hearing, thinking, pain, or emotion is present to a subject. Intentionality is the mental orientation toward something, including actual things, possible events, qualities, propositions, and fictional objects. Content is the way a state presents its purported subject matter. Reference is a more specific relation in which a term or state is related to an object; reference can fail even when a state has content. A hallucinated animal can be presented as located before someone although no animal is there.

The distinction between intentional content and intentional object is decisive. An experience might present a particular shape in a particular position, regardless of whether any object answers to that presentation. Two experiences can have matching presentational content while differing in their success in singling out real particulars. Similarly, the same physical object can be presented differently: as a distant vessel, an unfamiliar shape, or one's own cup. Phenomenal intentionality theories frequently begin with these ways of presentation rather than with successful external reference.

The claim that experience constitutes intentionality also requires precision. In an everyday case it is uncontroversial that seeing a blue cup occurs alongside awareness of what looks blue. Constitutive explanation is stronger than coexistence. It says that the state possesses a certain intentional profile in virtue of its phenomenal character or that the two profiles belong to a single state as metaphysically inseparable aspects. It is therefore essential to distinguish an evidential correlation, a necessary connection, a grounding relation, and an identity relation. Each yields different possibilities for states with matching phenomenology and divergent environmental histories.

The expression phenomenal intentionality should not be confused with intentionally acting, with the ordinary sense of the adjective intentional, or with the thesis that introspection reveals all the content of a thought. An experience may possess content that its subject has difficulty articulating. It may be vague, determinately visual without being verbally reportable, or constrained by a field of possible perspectives. The existence and limits of such content form the research problem rather than an answer assumed in advance (Siewert, 1998; Mendelovici, 2018).

Four Explanatory Questions

A comprehensive study separates four questions whose frequent conflation produces apparent progress without genuine agreement. First is the existential question: are there mental states that have intentionality in virtue of their phenomenal character? The weak affirmative position requires only one kind of successful example. Second is the constitutive question: what relation connects an experiential way of appearing with its content? Identity and metaphysical grounding answer this differently. Third is the scope question: which types of content are phenomenal, and what happens to the rest? Strong theories identify all intentionality with phenomenal intentionality; moderate theories grant derivation from it; weak theories leave other intentionality independent. Fourth is the world-directedness question: how does an experiential presentation relate to actual objects, environmental kinds, historical uses, and public reference?

These questions are logically distinct. Suppose a visual experience of red provides its own assessable manner of representing redness. That supports a local form of phenomenal intentionality. It establishes neither that an unexpressed belief about planetary orbits is currently conscious nor that an unconscious classifier is incapable of representing a planet. Suppose further that the same phenomenal episode could occur in two environments. This suggests an internally determined way of presentation; it leaves open whether the episode's object-dependent content differs across those environments.

A theory succeeds only to the extent that it handles the questions it claims to answer. Descriptions of experience can establish phenomenological plausibility, while theoretical connections between phenomenal states and causal history require additional metaphysical premises. Empirical work can constrain whether a state is conscious, how its reports arise, and which operations occur without awareness; it does not by itself decide whether the ordinary language of representations is literal, instrumental, or constitutive. The resulting pluralism of explanatory evidence is a discipline for evaluating rival accounts, not a retreat from the possibility of systematic theory.

Historical Foundations Before Brentano

The contemporary label is recent, but questions about intentional awareness are embedded in much older theories of cognition. Aristotle's De Anima examines perception as reception of perceptible form without the matter of its object (II.12, 424a17–24), and treats intellect and intelligible form in Book III. This conceptual framework makes sense perception an encounter with determinate qualities and makes thinking intelligible in relation to what can be thought. It differs from a modern theory of subjective qualia. Aristotle describes a metaphysical and explanatory relation among capacities, actuality, objects, and forms, rather than presenting an isolated thesis about the phenomenal constitution of content.

Medieval discussions of intentio, species, and mental reference developed a wide range of theories concerning how intellect and perception are directed to things. The medieval background is an important part of the history invoked by Brentano, but no single medieval view can be treated as identical with contemporary PIT. The distinctions between forms present in cognition, signs, and intentional objects were embedded in theories of knowledge and being with different explanatory commitments.

Descartes's Meditations (1641), especially Meditation II, articulates the indubitability of current thinking under a method of radical doubt, while his third meditation considers ideas according to their objective reality. The fact that an idea presents something becomes central to understanding what it is to have an idea, although Descartes's explanatory ontology and the causal argument concerning ideas are remote from contemporary metaphysical grounding accounts. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) locates the materials of understanding in sensation and reflection, while Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) develops an empiricist account of impressions, ideas, and their relations. These sources make the content of thought continuous in significant ways with experience; they neither establish the modern identification of intentionality with experience nor settle how reference is achieved.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) reconceives the conditions of objective experience in terms of the synthesis of representations and the unity of apperception. On Kant's account the intelligibility of object-directed experience is conditioned by forms of sensibility and understanding. The historical lesson is methodological: simply appealing to experiential occurrence leaves open the question of the principles under which a manifold is experienced as an object. This question recurs in current arguments about the determinacy of phenomenal content.

Brentano and Intentional Inexistence

Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Book II, chapter 1, section 5, brought intentionality into the center of modern philosophy of mind. His formulation describes every mental phenomenon as characterized by an intentional or mental inexistence of an object. Inexistence here belongs to a historical philosophical vocabulary concerning the way an object is included or intended in a mental phenomenon. It should not be paraphrased into the claim that every object represented by a mind literally exists as a miniature entity in consciousness.

Brentano distinguishes mental phenomena from physical phenomena through intentional directedness: in presenting, something is presented; in judging, something is accepted or rejected; in loving or hating, something is evaluated. This offers a general mark of the mental extending beyond sensory episodes. It thereby raises the question of whether subjectively lived acts and their intentional structures are separable. His account of inner consciousness also attempts to explain how a mental act can be conscious of itself without generating an infinite hierarchy of additional acts. The historical point is captured by his investigation of unified mental activity rather than by a contemporary distinction between narrow and wide content.

A contemporary PIT theorist can claim continuity with Brentano insofar as conscious manifestation and original directedness are integrated. Still, the differences remain decisive. Brentano's starting point is a classification of mental phenomena, with distinctive accounts of presentation, judgment, and emotion. PIT is a contemporary family of metaphysical accounts about what grounds intentional properties, including hypotheses about unconscious processes and the environmental individuation of content. Retrospective classification is illuminating only when these different theoretical projects remain visible (Brentano, 1874/1973; Kriegel, 2018; Siewert, 2022).

Husserl and the Structure of Intentional Experience

Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901) transforms the Brentano inheritance by studying the intentional structure of acts and the logic of meaning. In the Fifth Investigation, act-quality concerns how a subject performs an act—judging, imagining, questioning, desiring—while act-matter concerns what and how something is intended. This distinction makes possible content identity across differing attitudes: a single state of affairs can be judged, doubted, hoped for, or entertained without being asserted. Husserl's emphasis on intentional matter and object-as-intended offers an alternative to treating intentionality primarily as a relation to an actual object.

Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (1913), develops noetic and noematic descriptions of intentional consciousness. The noetic side concerns the lived act and its moments; the noematic side concerns the object as intended and the sense in which it is intended. The nature of the noema, including whether its sense should be understood through an intensional or more object-involving framework, remains contested in Husserl scholarship. It is methodologically unsound to translate noema immediately as a modern semantic proposition or as a private mental picture.

Husserl's phenomenological reduction brackets ordinary existential commitments to investigate how objects are given. Bracketing an object's existence does not thereby erase the differences between perceiving, remembering, and imagining it. Experience has horizons: a perceived object is given through limited profiles, with absent sides anticipated as potentially perceivable. Intentionality is therefore a structured accomplishment of lived consciousness over time, rather than a bare item of content attached to a sensation. The analyses of internal time-consciousness emphasize retention and protention, through which temporally extended objects and one's experiential succession can be given.

Phenomenal intentionality theory can draw on Husserl's thesis that experiential appearing has an intrinsic directed structure. Yet a phenomenological description of structures of givenness is not automatically an identity thesis about metaphysical properties. The move from description to metaphysical priority has to be argued. Recognizing this transition allows the historical phenomenology and the contemporary analytic debate to illuminate each other without suppressing their different evidential standards (Husserl, 1900–1901/1970; 1913/1983; Siewert, 2022).

Phenomenology After Husserl

Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–1937) and Being and Nothingness (1943) develop consciousness as directed beyond itself while maintaining an immediate, prereflective consciousness that does not make the ego an object in every experience. The idea is relevant to phenomenal intentionality because the act's being lived is not simply a second representational act added to the first. Experience can have an implicit self-presence in the course of its orientation toward the world. This structure informs later self-representational approaches, although they differ in whether they formalize reflexivity as a content-bearing representation.

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) develops embodied intentionality. Perceptual objects matter within possibilities for bodily orientation, action, and skill. The grasp of a room as navigable, a tool as usable, or a gesture as expressive cannot always be exhausted by an inventory of propositional judgments. This is a powerful challenge to theories that identify the fundamental content of experience with an internal description whose use is independent of the subject's body and environment. It also complicates any simplistic notion that internalism entails isolation from the world.

The post-Husserlian tradition reveals why experiential directedness cannot be reduced to a static picture. Phenomenal structure includes time, practical orientation, affective salience, and the manner in which objects appear as inviting, threatening, reliable, or unfamiliar. These observations motivate a richer field for PIT to explain. They also raise a comparative question: must the grounding base include the body's concrete worldly engagement, or can it be wholly specified by intrinsic phenomenal properties? Different answers yield genuinely different theories under the same general label.

The Analytic Separation and Reunion

Much twentieth-century analytic philosophy treated sensation and intentional belief as distinct explanatory problems. The former was associated with subjective quality, the latter with propositional content, behavior, inference, or linguistic semantics. Frege's distinction between sense and reference supplied a powerful framework for understanding differences in cognitive significance; Russell's analyses addressed the logical form of reference and descriptions. These developments helped explain why a thought can be directed toward something without depending on its successful identification. They did not settle the phenomenal status of thought itself.

Behaviorist and functionalist approaches explained mental-state kinds through dispositions and causal roles. Their methodological success lay partly in their capacity to relate mental states to publicly investigable conditions. Still, the question whether a state with a specified functional role feels a certain way remained open. Nagel's 1974 discussion of what it is like to be an organism and Jackson's 1982 knowledge argument gave new prominence to phenomenal consciousness, while Block's 1995 distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness made explicit the possibility that experience exceeds accessibility for report and reasoning. These debates did not directly establish PIT, but they clarified the nature of its proposed explanatory basis.

Intentionalist or representationalist theories of consciousness changed the terms of the debate. Dretske's Naturalizing the Mind (1995) and Tye's Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995) sought to understand phenomenality through an appropriate kind of representational content. The explanatory direction moved from representation toward consciousness. By contrast, consciousness-first theories proposed that the special directedness of experience can help explain what representation is. The same claim that experience has intentional content is shared by both projects, yet their central explanatory ambitions are different (Siewert, 2022; Bourget & Mendelovici, 2026).

The Modern Emergence of Phenomenal Intentionality

Several works established the contemporary program. Searle's Intentionality (1983) and subsequent discussions of consciousness and the unconscious argue for a constitutive connection between genuine mental intentionality and the capacity for consciousness. Siewert's The Significance of Consciousness (1998) maintains that phenomenal character matters to the identity of an experience and to its assessability for accuracy. Horgan and Tienson's 2002 chapter joins the intentionality of phenomenal life to the phenomenology of intentional states, including thought. Loar's 2003 essay explicitly presents phenomenal intentionality as a basis of mental content. Pitt's 2004 article develops the argument that conscious thought has a distinctive phenomenal character through which its content can be introspectively differentiated.

The following stage made the program a systematic metaphysical alternative. Bourget's 2010 account links phenomenal consciousness and underived intentionality. Kriegel's The Sources of Intentionality (2011) develops a consciousness-first explanation that distinguishes intrinsic and derivative content. The edited collection Phenomenal Intentionality (Kriegel, 2013) brings together competing perspectives, while Mendelovici's The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality (2018) develops a robust internalist version focused on the apparent intentionality of experience and its relation to worldly content. The 2023 article by Mendelovici and Bourget explicitly challenges theories that explain the representations posited by science without explaining the ordinary experiential phenomenon of aboutness.

These texts constitute a research program precisely because their answers differ. Some accept cognitive phenomenology and others take sensory phenomenology as the basic source. Some accept relational content; others construe phenomenal representation in fundamentally nonrelational terms. Some recognize unconscious intentionality as genuinely intentional but derivative; others deny that standard computational representation has the same metaphysical status as experiential aboutness. The disagreements show why phenomenality as an explanatory starting point does not produce a single fixed metaphysics.

Weak, Moderate, and Strong Theories

Three levels of commitment clarify the logical scope of the program. Weak PIT holds that at least some intentional states are intentional in virtue of phenomenal consciousness. Moderate PIT holds that all actual intentionality is either phenomenal intentionality or depends at least partly upon it. Strong PIT holds that every genuinely intentional state is a phenomenal intentional state. This taxonomy is adopted explicitly in the May 2026 revision by Bourget and Mendelovici and clarifies why acceptance of phenomenal intentionality alone leaves the larger dependence thesis unsettled.

The inferential gap is crucial. From the proposition that a visual experience has content by virtue of its phenomenal character, it follows only that some intentionality is phenomenal. To conclude that a standing belief is fundamentally grounded in such an experience, one needs a connecting principle describing the relevant relation: a disposition to undergo an experience, a causal connection to past experiences, a rational interpretive structure, or some further organizing relation. Each candidate has different temporal and modal consequences.

Strong PIT raises a special issue concerning absent episodes. A person who sleeps retains ordinary standing beliefs, while the episodes characteristic of phenomenal presentation may be absent. The strongest version can preserve its thesis by questioning whether the standing disposition possesses original intentionality, by postulating latent phenomenal states, or by interpreting apparent standing content as presently attributed rather than instantiated. These options carry substantial explanatory costs. Moderate PIT allows standing beliefs to possess derivative content and thus offers a flexible but less economical metaphysical picture.

Weak PIT has an independent significance. Even if content ultimately depends on causal history or functional organization, experience may contribute a distinctive form of presentational content. The disagreement is then about completeness and priority. Evaluating the theories requires attention to both the quality of the experiential examples and the adequacy of the proposed extension to nonoccurrent mental life.

Constitution, Grounding, Identity, and Reduction

To say that phenomenal consciousness constitutes intentionality is to assert an intimate metaphysical relation whose exact form has to be specified. Grounding versions treat a phenomenal state as a basis in virtue of which an intentional property is instantiated. Identity versions maintain that the relevant phenomenal and intentional states are one and the same occurrence under different descriptions. In the former, explanatory direction is asymmetric. In the latter, the relation itself is symmetric, even if philosophical explanations give priority to the phenomenal description.

Reduction introduces another question. A theory might offer nonintentional phenomenal properties and then define intentionality entirely through them. It might instead insist that phenomenal states are already inherently intentional, leaving no reduction from a wholly nonintentional base. Some theories understand phenomenal consciousness relationally, with its phenomenality consisting in a relation to presented contents or abstract properties; others regard the occurrence as intrinsically sufficient for its manner of seeming. The distinctions are recorded explicitly in the contemporary debate (Bourget & Mendelovici, 2026).

A grounding claim requires more than a modal correlation. If all actual experiences of a given quality possess the same content, their covariance leaves open which property explains which. A metaphysical explanation must identify the constitutive features responsible for correctness, object-presentation, or content determination and show why the alleged basis cannot be present without them. The challenge becomes sharper if the theory claims that phenomenality can ground a state whose content is more specific than what introspection reveals.

The explanatory problem can be expressed without a fictional formal proof: for a phenomenal character P and intentional feature I, the theory must tell us whether P entails I, grounds I, or is identical with I, and whether its relation is necessary or contingent. It must also explain the status of external content E, whose worldly success conditions may diverge among phenomenal duplicates. This explicit map prevents the term source from concealing several different philosophical theses.

Original and Derived Intentionality

Original intentionality is intentionality that does not obtain merely because another intentional agent interprets a sign. A written word on a page can mean something through linguistic practices, while a current thought seems to present its subject matter to the thinker directly. The distinction invites a regress question: if every intentional state gets its content from an earlier interpreter, where does the chain of interpretation end? A consciousness-first answer identifies phenomenal presentation as a possible terminus.

Yet the contrast between original and derived intentionality admits more than one analysis. Linguistic symbols receive content through conventions, practices, histories, and intentions, which are themselves contested candidates for originality. An unconscious neural representation can be described as meaningful because it participates in explanatory models of cognition; whether this involves original, derivative, or merely attributed intentionality is precisely what the theory must determine. Neither public utility nor computational complexity settles this ontological classification.

The constitutive thesis yields a plausible direction of dependence in many ordinary cases. An inscription representing a red circle requires an interpretation, while seeing a red circle gives the subject an immediate manner of appearing. But immediate seeming is compatible with subsequent error about the object's identity or the meaning of the inscription. The strongest defense of phenomenal originality therefore begins with presentational orientation and explains higher-order identification as a further cognitive achievement.

A complete derivation account needs criteria for faithful inheritance and transformation. If a belief formed through an experience later incorporates scientific concepts or testimony, its final content may exceed the earlier perceptual episode. Derivation must allow semantic enrichment through inference, language, and shared practices. Otherwise a theory of derived intentionality becomes an implausible restriction on what persons can think. The program succeeds when it specifies these transformations rather than treating the word derived as a solution (Loar, 2003; Kriegel, 2011; Mendelovici, 2018).

The Phenomenological Argument

The most immediate argument begins from the experienced fact that things appear a certain way. Looking at an object presents it as possessing certain spatial and qualitative features. The episode seems to possess that presentational character intrinsically: a further interpretation is unnecessary for it to seem that way to the subject. If intentionality consists, at least in some paradigmatic cases, in such a presenting of a possible state of affairs, the episode's phenomenal character already realizes the relevant intentionality.

This argument has two strengths. It identifies its target through a direct example and provides a plausible sufficient condition for a modest sort of content. It also distinguishes genuine object-presentation from an accidental correlation between a brain event and an environmental feature. A pattern may cause an experience while the experience represents something else. The merely causal connection need not share the intentional structure of what appears.

Its critical weakness concerns the transition from seeming to content. Critics can accept that the experience has a phenomenal character while suggesting that the content is conferred by a representational mechanism with which that character is necessarily correlated. Another alternative construes what seems intrinsic as a relational feature of perceptual engagement. Siewert's analysis contests the idea that a further interpretation must be supplied in perceptual cases, while Gertler (2001) points to the unresolved explanatory direction.

The proper result is a conditional argument. If the way an experience presents a scene is sufficient for that episode to be assessable for accuracy, and that assessability is a genuinely intentional feature, then at least some phenomenal intentionality is established. The disputed premises are substantive, and the argument is informative precisely because it exposes them. Its success supports weak PIT immediately; moderate PIT still requires a derivation argument for the remaining forms of mental content.

Accuracy and Normativity

A visual experience may portray something as located to the left although no object is there. This possibility makes intelligible a distinction between accuracy and error internal to experiential presentation. Siewert's The Significance of Consciousness (1998, especially the discussion of accuracy around pp. 221–245) argues that the phenomenal character of the way something looks is sufficient to make the experience assessable as accurate or inaccurate. The structure matters because correctness conditions are commonly taken as marks of intentional content.

The reasoning can be reconstructed as follows. First, undergoing a given experiential manner of seeming presents things as being a certain way. Second, if the world is that way, the experience succeeds along that dimension; if it differs, the experience fails along the same dimension. Third, the possibility of success and failure belongs to what the state presents, independently of whether the subject presently judges that the state is true. Consequently, the experiential manner of seeming supplies at least some normatively assessable content.

The reconstruction faces two challenges. One asks whether all phenomenal qualities have such conditions. Pain, diffuse anxiety, and undirected mood can seem less easily assessed in terms of correspondence to worldly circumstances than visual appearances. Another asks whether assessability is the product of a wider perceptual or conceptual system that accompanies the experience. The first challenge demands a differentiated theory of phenomenal kinds; the second demands a compelling account of the explanatory sufficiency of phenomenal character.

Accuracy also differs from justification. An experience may present a scene falsely yet offer the subject prima facie reasons to believe it. This epistemic role depends on its seeming character and context, not simply on eventual truth. If consciousness carries its own content, its significance extends into a theory of evidence. The transition from experienced appearance to justified judgment requires separate principles concerning reliability, defeaters, and rational response.

Narrow Content and the Duplicate Argument

Internalist approaches take a form of content to be fixed by properties intrinsic to the subject. The familiar duplicate argument imagines two subjects with phenomenally identical experiences but radically different environments. One may have a normal experience of a tree; the other may be stimulated so as to experience exactly the same apparent tree in a simulated environment. If both experiences present a tree-like object in the same way, then at least a presentational dimension appears independent of actual successful reference.

Loar's 2003 account makes phenomenal directedness central to narrow content. What the subject experiences as being directed toward an object can remain fixed even where external reference changes. This view preserves both the explanatory reality of conscious presentation and the importance of environmental factors in determining which objects or kinds a thought actually concerns. The argument is especially pressing when experiences of hallucination and perception appear subjectively indistinguishable.

The objection is that phenomenal indistinguishability does not automatically entail strict phenomenal identity, and strict phenomenal identity does not by itself entail identity of all content. Disjunctivist and externalist philosophers may hold that veridical experience and hallucination differ in constitution while sharing a manner of presentation or a limited epistemic profile. A brain-in-a-vat hypothesis also leaves difficult questions about what the imagined subject's words actually mean.

A careful conclusion recognizes levels of individuation. The phenomenal presentation as of a tree, the general conceptual content tree, a demonstrative relation to this particular tree, and the causal history of acquiring the concept need not coincide in metaphysical dependence. Phenomenal intentionality theories are strongest where they explain intrinsic presentation and supply a further theory for linking it to public reference. The claim that every kind of intentional content is narrow requires an additional argument (Loar, 2003; Horgan, Tienson, & Graham, 2004; Mendelovici, 2018).

Determinacy and Aspectual Shape

Intentionality has an aspectual structure: a subject can apprehend one thing under different modes of presentation. An object may be experienced as a particular silhouette, as the neighbor's bicycle, or as the vehicle that caused an obstruction. The phenomenal intentionality program proposes that experiential character can ground at least some of the ways something is presented. Introspection appears especially suited to revealing the aspect under which an object is present, even when the subject lacks knowledge of its ultimate nature.

Content determination presents an additional problem. Causal tracking relations often underdetermine whether an internal state represents a proximal stimulus, a distal object, a property correlated with the object, or a biological condition historically associated with it. Teleosemantics and conceptual-role accounts introduce selection histories and rational roles to resolve underdetermination, yet can face new interpretive choices concerning which feature is content. Phenomenal theorists claim an advantage for perceptual experience: its manner of appearing seems to privilege a certain presented feature more directly than covariance alone.

This advantage does not make all phenomenal content maximally precise. A blurry appearance may represent an indeterminate boundary; perceptual color character can leave open competing scientific accounts of color. Moreover, the experience of a scene may vary in grain across attention and conceptual familiarity. Determinacy must thus be distinguished from exhaustive explicit specification. A state can have enough determinate content for assessment while leaving many properties and identities unsettled.

Horgan and Graham's work on content determinacy, along with the arguments developed by Mendelovici, makes this distinction central. The proposed connection between phenomenal experience and content should specify which features are fixed by the experience itself and which are contributed through conceptual competence, learning, and worldly reference. The explanatory achievement is strongest when it predicts the correct level of specificity instead of merely announcing that phenomenology fixes content.

Nonexistent Objects and Intentional Relations

One can fear a fictional creature, imagine a nonexistent palace, or think about a hypothetical planet. These are intentional episodes even when their purported objects do not exist. The problem is classical: if intentionality is a relation, what occupies the object position when there is no relevant object? Brentano's intentional inexistence was one historical response within a broader psychological theory. Contemporary nonrelational theories reconstruct the difficulty without postulating a special population of mental objects.

Kriegel's nonrelational approach argues that intrinsic intentionality can be understood through monadic properties of representing in certain ways, rather than through a relation that requires a real object. A subject can thus be in a state of imagining-a-dragon-wise without there being a dragon related to that state. Phenomenal properties supply a candidate basis for the intrinsic intentional features. This proposal explains why empty presentations are possible, but it also raises a problem concerning the identity and structure of their contents.

Relational phenomenal intentionality offers another path. Some theorists understand the relevant relata as abstract properties, structured contents, or other entities available even when an ordinary concrete object is missing. In these accounts the lack of a dragon need not imply the absence of a representable property or content. Their success depends on an account of the relevant abstract ontology and the connection between the subject and that ontology. Pautz and Bourget defend forms of relational phenomenal intentionality, while Mendelovici develops an especially rigorous nonrelational account.

Neither strategy can simply infer the nature of intentionality from a grammatical expression. That thought is described as being about a fictional object does not entail that the metaphysics must include a relation to that object. Equally, redescribing an intentional state as a monadic phenomenal property must explain why it has the specific content attributed to it. The problem of nonexistents therefore probes the architecture of a proposed theory and its power to explain more than the formal possibility of empty reference (Kriegel, 2007, 2011; Bourget, 2019; Mendelovici, 2018).

Representationalism and Its Inverse

Representationalism about phenomenal consciousness holds, in a common formulation, that phenomenal character is constituted by intentional or representational content of an appropriate kind. Dretske (1995) and Tye (1995) provide influential naturalistic versions: differences in representational features help explain why experiences look and feel as they do. Phenomenal intentionality theories typically reverse explanatory priority, holding that a form of intentional directedness is constituted by the phenomenal nature of experience. Because both positions connect phenomenal and intentional features, they may agree on numerous cases while disagreeing about the metaphysical order of explanation.

The contrast is easily obscured if either theory is described as the claim that experience represents something. Such a description is too weak to identify an explanatory commitment. Representationalism may identify experiential character with nonconceptual content specified in informational and functional terms. PIT may identify original intentionality with experiential presentation prior to the introduction of such functional individuation. A theory can also be representationalist about consciousness and endorse weak PIT because the resulting phenomenal state is itself a contentful state. Stronger commitments require additional theses about the source of all content.

The transparency argument illustrates the tension. When attending to visual experience, one ordinarily seems to attend through it to the colors and shapes of things, not to a private object. Representationalists invoke this phenomenon to argue that phenomenal character is exhausted by what is represented. Phenomenal intentionalists can instead argue that transparency reveals an intrinsic manner of worldly presentation, a feature of experiencing that provides a basis for aboutness. Thus the phenomenological observation alone does not determine the explanatory direction. What would decide the issue is a metaphysical analysis connecting the character of experience with correctness, content individuation, and worldly relation.

The debate also intersects with externalism. If representational content is externally determined, representationalism can imply that phenomenal character depends on environmental factors. PIT can be combined with internalism about the basic phenomenal presentation while accepting environmentally sensitive derived content. Yet relational forms of PIT show that even the consciousness-first program does not impose a single answer about the ontology of experience. A responsible comparison therefore treats direction of explanation and location of determining factors as independent axes.

Cognitive Phenomenology

Cognitive phenomenology concerns whether conscious thinking has a distinctive experiential character beyond sensory imagery, emotional feeling, and bodily sensation. If understanding a proposition has a proprietary phenomenology, the case for phenomenal intentionality gains an important resource: the phenomenal basis may extend directly into conceptual thought rather than deriving conceptual content entirely from sensory presentations. Pitt (2004) argues that conscious thoughts can be introspectively distinguished according to content and uses contrasts between reading with and without understanding to draw attention to the relevant phenomenal difference.

Consider an utterance heard in an unfamiliar language and then heard again after its meaning has been learned. The auditory qualities can be very similar while the second occasion involves an experience of understanding. The difference invites the proposal that semantic apprehension itself changes phenomenology. A rival account attributes the difference to accompanying imagery, anticipation, affect, learned associations, or shifts of attention. The inferential problem is to distinguish a proprietary experiential character of thought from the sensory and affective consequences that often accompany thinking.

Horgan and Tienson (2002) invite attention to spontaneous thoughts that arise without discernible verbal imagery. Siewert (1998, 2011) examines the phenomenology of realization and sudden understanding. Goldman's 1993 discussion of the tip-of-the-tongue experience suggests that a subject may experience possession of a conceptual structure even when a corresponding word is unavailable. These arguments are serious precisely because they concern recognizable phenomena, but their evaluation must permit rival decompositions of the episode. Inaccessible introspective detail cannot be assumed to reveal a unique metaphysical structure.

The philosophical stakes extend to thought-content determinacy. A distinctive experience of thinking that p could supply a basic difference between entertaining p and entertaining q. Still, the same phenomenal experience may be compatible with different referents or with multiple fine-grained conceptual formulations. Therefore a defense of cognitive phenomenology supports a source of presentational differentiation more readily than it proves that every semantic distinction is phenomenally fixed. Pautz (2013) offers a particularly relevant alternative: sensory phenomenology can ground determinate content even when proprietary cognitive phenomenology does not do the principal explanatory work.

The Intentionality of Perception

Perception is a central test case because it combines vivid phenomenal organization with systematic relations to the world. A red object appears at a place within a structured field; it may be experienced as near, partly occluded, moving, dangerous, or available for action. Its presentation includes orientation, figure–ground organization, apparent constancy, and often anticipation of unseen profiles. A theory that captures mere color patches but overlooks the perceived object and its environmental situation fails to explain much of what perceptual experience seems to present.

The accuracy argument is strongest here. The appearance of a slanted line makes sense as accurate or inaccurate relative to the line's orientation. However, veridical seeing and matching hallucination raise the issue of whether perceptual consciousness involves the object itself as a constitutive element. Naïve realism and disjunctivism give the successful relation to objects a fundamental role in at least certain perceptual episodes. More internalist theories emphasize a presentational aspect that persists even in deceptive cases. Relational versions of PIT seek a consciousness-first account compatible with certain external or abstract relations (Bourget, 2019; Bourget & Mendelovici, 2024).

Perception also supplies a challenge about demonstrative thought. Looking at a particular tree may produce the thought that this tree is flowering. The demonstrative expression has an object-involving character that is difficult to derive from a purely intrinsic color-and-shape presentation. A plausible account must distinguish the demonstrative mode of attention from the external relation by which it successfully singles out an object. Some forms of content may be narrower than the referential success conditions of the states in which they occur.

The analysis of perceptual content therefore reveals two distinct achievements: constituting an experience as presenting a certain scene and connecting that presentation to a particular scene in the world. Consciousness-first theories address the former directly. They must articulate the route to the latter rather than taking referential success as an unexamined consequence of vivid presentation.

Bodily and Affective Experience

Pain, bodily orientation, hunger, fear, anger, and mood test the proposed universality of phenomenal intentionality. In visual perception, presenting a possible arrangement of objects provides an intuitive correctness standard. A pain episode is ordinarily experienced as located, urgent, and aversive, but its content may concern bodily tissue, a represented bodily condition, an imperative to protect an area, or some combination. The felt quality of a pain does not automatically establish whether its intentional content is a proposition, a bodily location, or a practical demand.

Affective experiences display evaluative structure. Fear commonly presents a situation as threatening; admiration may present someone as worthy; shame can present a socially interpreted self as exposed to evaluation. The phenomenal intentionalist can argue that the felt quality participates in the way the situation is presented. An alternative view grants a feeling associated with fear but locates the representational component in a judgment or appraisal. Since emotions can be rationally criticized, a theory of their intentionality must account for standards of appropriateness that extend beyond sensory truth conditions.

Moods present a more difficult case. Anxiety can color an entire environment without isolating a single intentional object, and elation may transform the significance of many possible events. Mendelovici (2013) offers an account of intentionalism about moods that provides a philosophical resource for broadening the scope of phenomenal content. Nonetheless the possibility of diffuse, object-unspecific affect must remain a live challenge to a theory asserting that every phenomenal state has precise object-directed content.

Embodied phenomenology provides a further contribution. Felt bodily orientation is often tied to capacities for movement and practical coping. What is presented may have a motor-affordance structure that ordinary proposition-based models inadequately capture. Phenomenal intentionality will be most explanatory when it accommodates practical and affective modes of world-presentation on their own terms rather than forcing every episode into the form of a silently entertained sentence.

Thought, Understanding, and Standing Attitudes

An occurrent conscious judgment and a standing belief can share the ordinary description that their subject believes a certain proposition. Their temporal ontologies differ. The occurrent judgment is an episode; the standing belief can endure without being consciously rehearsed. Any general theory of phenomenal intentionality must identify what content-bearing property, if any, persists while a subject sleeps, shifts attention, or engages in an unrelated activity.

A derivativist account can hold that a standing attitude has content in virtue of dispositions to undergo appropriate conscious episodes. Searle's discussions of the unconscious emphasize the connection between genuinely intentional unconscious states and their potential accessibility to consciousness. A functional derivation approach instead identifies a network of causal or inferential relations to phenomenal states. Kriegel's interpretivist approach brings in ideal rational interpretation. These accounts are not interchangeable: dispositional manifestation, functional connection, and normative interpretability have distinct sufficient conditions.

The dispositional view has a familiar difficulty. A subject may believe a proposition whose full formulation has never been consciously entertained, perhaps because the belief is an inferential commitment implicit in a complex conceptual structure. If its content is to be derived from possible experiences, the theory owes an account of which possible episodes, under which conditions, determine it. An appeal to all possible manifestations threatens circularity if one first identifies the relevant manifestations by the very content to be explained.

Complex beliefs also depend on language, testimony, abstract concepts, and communal standards of application. A person may successfully think about quarks or historical dynasties without a sensory experience corresponding to the full theoretical content. The phenomenal intentionalist can distinguish the conscious grasp of a concept from its external reference and socially stabilized use. This distinction supports a sophisticated theory, but it limits the degree to which all conceptual content can be directly read from phenomenology.

The resulting question is how thinking achieves semantic reach. Phenomenal presentation may constitute the occurrence of understanding or the taking of a proposition as true, while the proposition's truth conditions can incorporate explanatory structures extending far beyond one experience. A theory that respects both elements can distinguish lived understanding from the historically acquired meaning of what is understood.

Unconscious Cognition

Perceptual processing and cognitive control involve many operations that are not themselves ordinarily experienced. Cognitive science models such operations through computational representations, prediction errors, syntactic structures, and internal maps. Their success supports the explanatory utility of representational descriptions. It does not immediately establish whether each postulated representation has the same original intentionality as conscious presentation. The philosophical controversy concerns how these forms of representation are related.

Three strategies appear in the contemporary PIT literature. Eliminativism denies that some purported unconscious representations are genuinely intentional in the target sense, while allowing their causal and computational usefulness. Inflationism expands the class of phenomenal states to include some processes that the subject does not introspectively access. Derivativism grants that some unconscious states have content, but holds that this content depends upon phenomenal intentionality in other states or subjects. Bourget and Mendelovici's revised 2026 survey carefully distinguishes these options.

Each strategy faces a different burden. Eliminativism must avoid defining intentionality so narrowly that familiar explanatory achievements become difficult to compare. Inflationism must articulate what it means for a state to be phenomenal yet inaccessible and how such states can be distinguished from merely subpersonal processing. Derivativism must specify a noncircular relation connecting the content of the unconscious state to a conscious basis, particularly for highly specialized perceptual processes.

Evidence from blindsight, masked priming, attention, and perceptual discrimination can inform these arguments, provided behavioral access and phenomenal consciousness are not assumed identical. An ability to discriminate without reportable visual awareness does not logically entail either the total absence of phenomenality or the possession of experiential presentation with ordinary visual content. Such cases are interpreted through experiments, theoretical operationalizations, and philosophical assumptions about consciousness.

A successful PIT should take scientific representation seriously as a distinct target and then explain its relation to subjective aboutness. The study of unconscious cognition is where the difference between a local theory of experienced presentation and a universal theory of intentionality becomes most consequential.

Externalism, Reference, and the World

Semantic externalism holds that at least some content properties depend on relations beyond the subject's intrinsic constitution. Putnam's Twin Earth example and Burge's arguments concerning social content indicate that thoughts can depend on environmental and linguistic histories. Their relevance to phenomenal intentionality is direct: if two subjects share phenomenal character while differing in what their words and concepts refer to, experiential identity alone does not determine every aspect of content.

The issue should be divided into three distinct dimensions. Phenomenal presentation concerns how a scene or proposition occurs in experience. Conceptual competence involves a subject's mastery of patterns of inference and use. Reference connects an expression or thought with worldly particulars, kinds, or properties under actual conditions. Some contents may integrate all three. The existence of such integration does not show that any one component exhausts the others.

A radically internalist PIT can grant the first dimension alone the title of original intentionality, treating other dimensions as relations that affect what we ordinarily say the subject is thinking about. Mendelovici's 2018 account explores a version of this strategy. A relational PIT can maintain that consciousness itself involves relations to contents or abstract properties, though a further account is then needed of reference to particular worldly objects. The dialogue between Bourget and Mendelovici (2024) reveals the extent of these ontological alternatives: an ordinary-object relation, an abstract-content relation, and a nonrelational aspect theory have different metaphysical and explanatory commitments.

World-directedness is more than accuracy as a formal relation to a possible condition. It includes successful identification, causal learning, correction by others, reference persistence, and the possibility of discovering that one's initial beliefs were about something fundamentally different from what one imagined. These public and diachronic dimensions present a serious extension problem for strong PIT. The theory can meet it by explaining how experiences enter historical relations and social practices without surrendering the constitutive role of presentational consciousness.

Rival Naturalistic Theories

Informational theories explain representational content through systematic dependence between an internal state and an environmental condition. Teleosemantics adds biological functions and selection histories to determine what a state is supposed to indicate. Conceptual-role theories locate content in rational, inferential, or practical relations among mental states. These accounts are diverse and should be assessed according to their stated explanatory targets rather than treated as one monolithic naturalism (Dretske, 1995; Fodor, 1990; Millikan, 1984; Neander, 2017).

Their principal advantages are continuity with empirical science and the ability to investigate representational success, learning, and behavioral control through public evidence. A mechanistic theory can explain how a system tracks environmental regularities without first settling disputed metaphysical questions about experience. A teleological account can explain misrepresentation by distinguishing proper function from actual performance. Functional-role theories can account for the systematic relationships among beliefs, desires, inferences, and action.

PIT objects that these theories can leave the distinctive phenomenon of mentally presenting a content unexplained. Covariance alone permits too many candidate referents; selection history may explain proper response conditions without explaining how a content is consciously entertained. Mendelovici and Bourget (2023) sharpen the criticism by distinguishing the everyday phenomenon of aboutness from the representational states posited by folk psychology and cognitive science.

The objection should be evaluated symmetrically. If a naturalistic theory must show why its proposed base suffices for intentionality, a phenomenal intentionality theory must show why phenomenality suffices for the same target and why its account extends to nonconscious states. It is unsatisfactory for either side to select the explanatory phenomenon by definition alone and then pronounce the other theory irrelevant. The crucial question is whether one kind of phenomenon admits of a principled explanation through the other, or whether an integrated theory requires several explanatory levels.

Skepticism and Explanatory Burdens

The brain-in-a-vat scenario motivates an apparently stable intrinsic content across radical differences in external circumstances. Yet it also invites skepticism about what any given experience is genuinely of. If phenomenal presentation fixes only a way of seeming, how does the subject know what that seeming is about? A purely nonrelational intentionality may guarantee a presentational profile while leaving the relation between that profile and its purported object mysterious.

The challenge is aggravated by the mismatch between experiential specificity and theoretical description. A single color experience may be associated with reflectance profiles, lighting conditions, neural processing, and learned color categories. The experience itself does not disclose which scientifically individuated property determines its content. PIT can claim that the phenomenal property is the primary content, but that move also changes the intended explanandum unless it explains how our ordinary claims about colors and worldly things emerge from the experience.

Another issue is whether the phenomenal state is metaphysically sufficient for content. Conceivability arguments are delicate: imagining a red-ish experience without representation may be described either as imagining an incoherent phenomenon or as imagining a sensation whose significance has not been established. Neither verdict is neutral. What counts as a coherent imagined case depends on an antecedent theory of phenomenality and intentionality.

A constructive evaluation locates burden-sharing. Phenomenology offers indispensable first-person evidence about apparent directedness; metaphysics determines whether that evidence warrants constitution or grounding; empirical science constrains how episodes occur and how their features vary; social semantics explains conventions and reference over time. A complete philosophical theory articulates the relations among these bodies of evidence rather than replacing one with another.

Method and Interdisciplinary Evidence

Philosophical inquiry into phenomenal intentionality requires several methods with distinct evidential powers. Phenomenological description attends to the presentation of objects, the experience of understanding, and the difference between perception, imagination, and judgment. Argument reconstruction identifies the steps from such experiences to claims about necessary intentional content. Historical reconstruction prevents the contemporary program from being anachronistically projected onto Aristotle, Brentano, Husserl, or other philosophers. Conceptual analysis determines whether different authors are attempting to explain the same kind of aboutness.

Cognitive science can investigate how perception, report, attention, memory, and behavior co-vary with neural and functional states. Such work is relevant to the availability and structure of conscious episodes and to hypotheses about unconscious content. But its operational categories are often constructed through reports, discrimination measures, and task performance. It therefore leaves open philosophical disagreements concerning whether these operational measures capture phenomenal consciousness. The distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness remains especially important when empirical findings are recruited in support of an expansive or restrictive account of PIT.

Comparative work in philosophy of language contributes an account of how words and concepts acquire meanings through use, convention, and reference. Epistemology contributes accounts of the role of appearances in justification. Metaphysics supplies the notions of grounding, identity, property, relation, and dependence. These disciplinary connections explain why the theory cannot be assessed solely by a vivid thought experiment about a colored patch.

An emerging research topic concerns nonbiological systems. Computational systems may generate representations that guide reasoning, action, and public discourse. From the perspective of the phenomenal intentionality debate, their apparent representational capacities raise the question whether those capacities constitute original intentionality, derived intentionality, or another theoretically important class of representation. Answering this question depends on evidence about the relevant systems and on the chosen theory of intentionality. One cannot infer phenomenal consciousness from linguistic performance alone, nor infer the impossibility of original intentionality from the system's engineered origin. The philosophical question belongs to the broader study of the relation between publicly attributable reason and experiential constitution.

Philosophical Synthesis

The investigation establishes a structured set of results. First, phenomenal intentionality is a coherent and philosophically significant candidate for the original directedness of at least some conscious states. Perceptual appearing can possess a determinate enough structure to be assessed for accuracy, and this form of presentation is difficult to characterize adequately through mere covariance. Second, the move from experiential presentation to universal derivation of all mental content demands a separate theory. The existence of a foundational example cannot settle the scope of its explanatory dependence.

Third, phenomenal character and content have several legitimate modes of individuation. An experience's aspectual character, its conceptual organization, and the external object to which it refers can be related without having identical grounds. This differentiated view makes sense of shared phenomenology alongside differences in reference, and it explains why the controversy between internalism and externalism cannot be resolved merely by asking whether experience is directed toward objects.

Fourth, the strongest philosophical difficulty is the passage from occurrent lived content to standing and unconscious content. A theory must specify how dispositions, functional roles, histories, interpretive practices, and ideal reasoning contribute to the intentional identity of such states. Where these relations contribute something indispensable, moderate PIT has a substantial explanatory advantage over strong PIT, even though the greater flexibility must be disciplined by independent criteria of derivation.

Fifth, the distinction between phenomenal intentionality and intentionalism about consciousness is fundamental. A representationalist can accept that experiences have content while locating explanatory priority in a nonphenomenal representation. A phenomenal intentionalist reverses or complicates this direction. The philosophical disagreement concerns what constitutes what, rather than whether experiences are generally contentful.

These results support a layered philosophical thesis: phenomenal presentation is a fundamental constraint on theories of mental content because it reveals a kind of directedness whose lived structure demands explanation; successful public reference, stable conceptual competence, and unconscious computational representation require additional principles whose dependence on phenomenality remains a substantive matter for theory and evidence. This synthesis preserves the central insight of PIT while making its strongest universal ambition answerable to independently testable conceptual conditions.

Open Questions

A first unresolved question concerns the scope of cognitive phenomenology. Can subjects possess experiences of understanding with proprietary phenomenal content that is independent of all sensory imagery and affect? More refined comparisons among understanding, language comprehension, and unfamiliar symbols may constrain competing introspective interpretations, although no single task identifies the metaphysical nature of an experience.

A second concerns the ontology of intentional content. Can intrinsic phenomenal aspects ground reference to abstract and concrete entities, or must some intentional features be fundamentally relational? The debate becomes more exact when the relevant content is separated into presentational mode, conceptual structure, and externally anchored reference. A third concerns nonexistents: does the possibility of thought about nonactual things favor nonrelational content, or does it support a relation to properties or propositions?

A fourth concerns the extent of phenomenal states. What grounds the claim that unconscious occurrent cognition lacks phenomenality, and how would a theory of unnoticed phenomenal states avoid reducing phenomenality to an unexplained theoretical posit? A fifth concerns dispositional content: which possible experiential manifestations determine the standing belief that persists across changes of attention and sleep?

A sixth concerns the explanatory role of normativity. If the content of an experience makes accuracy possible, does that normative structure originate within phenomenology or arise from its embedding in a practical and epistemic system? A seventh concerns the historical acquisition and transformation of concepts. Can an intrinsic phenomenal basis explain why a subject's grasp changes when theoretical discoveries revise the public identity of a referent?

Finally, a theory of intentionality for biological and nonbiological cognition must clarify the relationship between the manifestation of reason in publicly interpretable activity and the experiential constitution of original aboutness. The wider philosophical problem is therefore not exhausted by determining which systems are conscious. It concerns how types of content are individuated, how their validity is assessed, and how they may belong to different realizations of cognition.

Conclusion

Phenomenal intentionality identifies the directedness inherent in the lived presentation of objects, properties, possibilities, and thoughts. Its contemporary theory develops an ambitious explanation of intentionality through phenomenal consciousness and stands at the intersection of historical phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind, semantics, metaphysics, and cognitive science. Historical inquiry establishes genuine continuities with Brentano's account of mental phenomena and Husserl's analyses of experiential givenness while also distinguishing the modern metaphysical debate from its predecessors. Contemporary inquiry distinguishes weak acceptance of experience-based content, moderate claims about derivation, and strong claims that all intentional states are phenomenal.

The core philosophical achievement of the program is its insistence that an explanation of representation must address mental presentation itself. A causal or computational process can predict, classify, and control, yet the question remains what makes a state an instance of experienced aboutness. The theory's corresponding obligation is to show how the phenomenal basis supports the wide variety of intentional forms attributed to persons: understanding, memory, enduring belief, absent-object thought, theoretical reference, and unconscious processing.

The resulting synthesis gives phenomenal presentation foundational explanatory importance within the philosophy of mental content and rejects the automatic inference from local constitutive examples to an unrestricted reduction of all intentionality. The future of the research program depends on principled accounts of the relations among experiential character, conceptual determinacy, normative correctness, semantic reference, and historical or functional dependence. This is the precise philosophical work required for a comprehensive theory of intentionality.