Abstract

The theme of these is essays is what might be called, rather ambitiously, the nature of the human mind. Psychologists and philosophers both investigate the nature of the mind, but from rather different angles. Psychologists and neuroscientists investigate the actual mechanisms in the brain, the body and the world which underpin mental events and processes. Philosophers, by contrast, ask more abstract questions: for example, about what makes any process mental at all, or how mental reality fits into the rest of reality. Psychology and philosophy are not opposed disciplines, but complementary, and the boundary between them is not sharp. The essays collected here address some of the most abstract philosophical questions, and barely touch on actual psychological discoveries. Nonetheless, I think everything that is said in this book is consistent with what psychologists have discovered and will discover. Where psychologists will want to disagree with things said in this book, their disagreement will be based on a difference of some philosophical opinion. What, then, is a mind? What is it to have a mind? What is it for something to be mental? We can all list the various states and capacities we have which we call mental or psychological: thought, sensation, desire, emotion, perception and so on. But is there something all these states and capacities have in common, which justifies us in calling them ‘mental’? I think there is, and that the concept of intentionality provides us with the answer. Intentionality is the philosopher’s word for the ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’.