Abstract

Consciousness is often thought to be a counterexample to Brentano's conjecture that intentionality is the mark of the mental. This thought is denied by the thesis of intentionalism, according to which the phenomenal character of an experience is determined by which sort of propositional-attitude state the experience is. This thesis treats two objections to intentionalism: first, that experience is not a propositional-attitude state, but rather a relation of acquaintance or presentation between a subject and an experienced object; and second, that propositional-attitude states do not automatically give rise to consciousness, so that the intentionalist cannot explain why in this case they do. A recurring theme is investigation of why conscious perceptual experience is often thought to carry a phenomenology of "presence to the mind"