I ntentionality green’ designates a proposition or something proposition-like According to Brentano’s objectual theory, judgment is a sui generis mental phenomenon in which we either affirm or deny the existence of an object, but this is not to be understood as predicating existence of an object Although ‘There is an x, such that x is F’ does involve predicating F of x, according to Brentano’s theory, ‘There is an F’ involves no predication For Brentano, all simple judgments have one of two contents: ‘There is an F’ or ‘There is not an F.’ Every simple judgment is directed at an individual object – an F – and either affirms or denies the existence of that object The following are reductions offered by Brentano’s theory: is reducible to ; is reducible to ; is reducible to ; is reducible to .22 Now consider my judgment that the aether does not exist According to Brentano, the object of this mental act, the aether, is an immanent object, so it does ‘exist’ inside my consciousness – it appears to my consciousness So, it seems there is a sense in which I would be wrong in denying its existence The obvious issue here is that what I wish to deny the existence of is not an immanent object, which intentionally exists in my mental act, but rather something that if it did exist would exist independently of my consciousness Judging that the aether does not exist means rejecting a physical space-filling substance outside of my consciousness In other words, the object of this judgment does not seem to be an object that has only ‘intentional inexistence’ Twardowski offers a solution to this problem by attempting to clarify the notion of an ‘immanent object’ According to Twardowksi, every mental phenomenon has a content (Inhalt) and an object (Gegenstand): “One has to distinguish . . between the object at which our idea “aims, as it were,” and the immanent object or the content of the presentation.”23 The content of a mental act is wholly “inside” the mind and depends for its existence on the occurrence of a mental act The object of a mental act is that at which the act aims, and typically does not depend on the occurrence of a mental act: We shall say of the content that it is thought, presented, in the presentation; we shall say of the object that it is presented through the content of the presentation (or through the presentation) What is presented in a presentation is its content; what is presented through a presentation is its object. . . When one says something is presented, one merely has to add whether it is presented in the presentation or through the presentation In the first case, ‘the presented’ means the content of the presentation; in the second, the object of the presentation.24 The notion of an ‘immanent object’ is identified with the content of the presentation, while the object of a presentation provides us with a more intuitive notion of what it 211