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