ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a hypothesis that is perhaps not essential to the Materialist programme but that, if true, would be a most useful preliminary simplification. Bill Lycan calls this doctrine as rather grandiloquently, 'the Hegemony of Representation'. Instead of the term 'representation' the usual technical term used by philosophers is 'intentionality'. The Austrian philosopher, Franz Brentano, was so impressed by the intentionality of the mind that he thought that it was the special mark of the mental. The mental is intentional, nothing material is intentional, and so mind and matter are perfectly distinct. In effect, he used a Properties argument to show the difference of mind from matter. Ryle made great use of dispositions in his attempt to elucidate the concept of mind. But if dispositions already have proto-intentionality, a primitive sort of intentionality, then the Materialists can try to give an account of intentionality in terms of the dispositions bestowed upon us by the material brain.
