Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate

150 PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS AND CLASSIFICATION
objects, or ideal objects, my directedness towards these objects is obviously
not brought about because I am causally influenced by the objects in question.
Thus, an important aspect of intentionality is exactly its existenceindependency.
In short, our mind does not become intentional through an
external influence, and it does not lose its intentionality, if its object ceases to
exist. Intentionality is not an accidental feature of consciousness that only
comes about the moment consciousness is causally influenced in the right
way by an object, but is on the contrary a feature belonging to consciousness
as such. That is, we do not need to add anything to consciousness for it to
become intentional and world-directed. It is already from the very start
embedded in the world.
How do we intend an object By meaning something about it. It is sense
that provides consciousness with its object-directedness and establishes the
objectual reference. More specifically, sense does not only determine which
object is intended, but also as what the object is apprehended or conceived.
Thus, it is customary to speak of intentional ``relations'' as being perspectival
or aspectual. One is never simply conscious of an object, one is always
conscious of an object in a particular way; to be intentionally directed at
something is to intend something as something. One intends perceives,
judges, imagines) an object as something, i.e. under a certain conception,
description or from a certain perspective. To think about the capital of
Denmark or about the native town of Niels Bohr, to think of Hillary Clinton's
husband or of the last US president in the twentieth century, to think
about the sum of 2 ‡ 4 or about the sum of 5 ‡ 1, or to see a Swiss cottage
from below or above, in each of the four cases one is thinking of the same
object, but under different descriptions, conceptions or perspectives, that is
with different senses.
The phenomenological take on intentionality can be further clarified by
contrasting it with what is known as the representational model. According to
this model, consciousness cannot on its own reach all the way to the objects
themselves, and we therefore need to introduce some kind of interface
between the mind and the world, namely mental representations. On this
view, the mind has of itself no relation to the world. It is like a closed
container, and the experiences composing it are all subjective happenings
with no immediate bearing on the world outside. The crucial problem for
such a theory is of course to explain why the mental representation, which
per definition is different from the object, should nevertheless lead us to the
object. That something represents something different that X represents Y)
is not a natural property of the object in question. An object is not representative
in the same way that it is red, extended or metallic. Two copies of the same
book may look alike, but that does not make one into a representation of the
other; and whereas resemblance is a reciprocal relation, this is not the case for