ABSTRACT
In chapter 3, I discussed various conceptions of what intentionality is and how it is thought to mark a distinction between mental and nonmental phenomena. We saw how some philosophers, like Brentano, viewed intentionality as creating a gulf between nonmental and mental phenomena that prohibited the development of a science of mental phenomena comparable to the sciences of purely physical phenomena. We also saw how other philosophers, like Quine, reject the reality of intentional phenomena and propose that psychology focus not on mental phenomena at all, but strictly on the behavior of humans and other organisms. Most cognitive scientists find both of these positions inadequate. In this chapter, I describe a variety of other philosophical positions that take intentionality to be a real feature of mental phenomena but try to explain how a science that is continuous with the physical sciences can account for intentionality.
