Intentionality, the aboutness or directedness of certain mental states towards their objects, was identified by Brentano as one of the essential features of the mental. Indeed, Brentano thought that it was this feature of the mental, in particular, the ability of the mind to stand in relations to intentionally inexistent objects, that marked the mind off as an essentially non-physical thing. One of the principal tasks of recent philosophy of mind, pace Brentano, has been to naturalize intentionality, to find a place for it in the natural, physical, order. And to naturalize intentionality in this sense requires showing how it can arise out of non-intentional, or non-semantic, properties and relations. This is the principal task of this second part of the book. As I shall try to show, there is, in fact, an intrinsic connection between this project and the position developed in Part I. The position defended in Part I, I shall argue, both requires a theory of representation and puts in place a framework within which a theory of representation is best located.

THE NEED FOR A THEORY OF REPRESENTATION

The need for a theory of representation can best be seen in terms of Paul Grice's (1957) famous distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning. Smoke naturally means fire, whereas the word ‘fire’, and not the word ‘smoke’, non-naturally means fire. To say that X naturally means Y, in this sense, is to say, roughly, that X indicates Y, whereas to say that X non-naturally means Y is to say, again roughly, that X denotes, designates, or refers to Y.