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M ichelle M ontague distinction between an object and a thing (Reales) He immediately sees the difficulty in thinking of intentionality as a relation to Reales: If I take something relative (ein Relativ) from among the broad class of comparative relations, something larger or smaller for example, then, if the larger thing exists, the smaller one must exist too. . . It is entirely different with mental reference If someone thinks of something, the one who is thinking must certainly exist, but the object of his thinking need not exist at all In fact, if he is denying something, the existence of the object is precisely what is excluded whenever his denial is correct So the only thing which is required by mental reference is the person thinking The terminus of the so-called relation does not need to exist in reality at all For this reason, one could doubt whether we really are dealing with something relational here, and not, rather, with something somewhat similar to something relational in a certain respect, which might, therefore, better be called “quasi-relational” (“Relativliches”) (Appendix 211–12/271–272) As Crane (2006) points out, calling intentionality ‘quasi-relational’ doesn’t much more than name the problem of thinking of intentionality in relational terms So although Brentano started thinking about intentionality in different terms, he didn’t produce a sophisticated theory in these new terms So what happened between 1874 and 1911, and how Brentano’s ‘innovations’ relate to current issues in the theory of intentionality? We can begin to answer both of these questions by first considering Twardowski and Meinong’s developments of Brentano’s views and Brentano’s awareness of these developments 3. Twardowski and Meinong Both Twardowski and Meinong attempted to improve on aspects of Brentano’s 1874 theory of intentionality In his book On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894/1977), Twardowski introduced a distinction between content and object, which provided a possible clarification of Brentano’s notion of ‘immanent object’ and addressed a puzzling issue with Brentano’s theory of judgment In his famous article ‘The Theory of Objects’ (1904), Meinong developed a theory of objects with Brentano’s insight about intentionality as one of its central building blocks I’ll begin with the puzzle for Brentano’s theory of judgment and Twardowski’s solution The puzzle results from two features of Brentano’s theory, namely that judgments are ‘objectual’, and that the object of a particular mental act is an ‘immanent object’, which has ‘intentional inexistence’ in the act Brentano’s objectual theory of judgment stands in contrast to a ‘propositional’ theory of judgment.21 Very briefly, according to a propositional theory, judgments are intentional attitudes, which are related to propositions or something propositionlike A typical example is Jenny judges that grass is green, where ‘that grass is 210
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