Intentionality

Intentionality is not a mere linguistic fact. It is essential in mental acts. For why have we just intentional language? Here I agree with Chisholm, who ascribes the intentionality of our language to that of our mind. Sellars' "direct realism", I think, conceals preposterousness and is untenable. To see the matter clearly we must get over Chisholm's argument, which is still too linguistic. Indeed those who rejected the sense-datum theory have gone to the other extreme and regard "sense data" as fake. But the fact is that, though what appears to us is nothing but a physical object, yet it appears only via its various appearances. We should do justice to both of these points. It is concluded that, when we have a perceptual consciousness, we refer to or intend "something" via appearances, and this "something" is the object of our consciousness while the appearances are not. This "something" is not a Meinongian "pure object". Strictly speaking, we just intend. But here, as it were, a pseudo binary relation is effected, one of whose "terms" is the "something". (My expressions may be misleading, but they are unavoidable owing to the structure of our language.) Again, the "something" is "primordially indeterminate". All its sensible determinations finally concern only its appearances. (There are other kinds of intentional acts than perception; these are expectation, memory, imagination, thought etc. Unlike perception, they do not require "sense data" as their "building materials".) With intentionality we break out of the directly given. Russell is wrong on this point. My theory does not call in any queer object. Besides it could unify the perceptual world and that of physics, which Sellars separates severely