ABSTRACT
Philosophers tend to have the bad habit of detecting complex and mind-boggling problems in contexts that seem clear and obvious in everyday life. Take the example of our thinking about physical objects: at every moment of our conscious lives we perceive objects in our environment, sometimes we form beliefs about them or doubt their existence, sometimes we wish they were other than they are, some of them evoke an aesthetic judgment, and so on. When we characterize all these activities in terms of their being about or directed towards an object, it might look as if we were just stating a fact so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning. As soon as we try to describe the details of this relation, however, things become increasingly complex and less obvious. Some of the objects towards which we are directed do not really exist, which might suggest that we are actually directed towards a mental object. This view, however, becomes problematic in the case of perception, where we are obviously directed towards physical rather than mental objects.
