COMO SER INTENCIONALISTA E DISPOSICIONALISTA

Abstract

Intentionalists believe that intentionality, the relational property of being about something, is constitutive of mentality. Brentano’s thesis says: 1) the mental is intentional; 2) nothing physical exhibits that property. Dispositionalism, I believe, should be extended to include all mental properties, which are also dispositional and realized physically in the brain, like the solubility of sugar which is realized in its molecular structure. My aim is to show how we can be intentionalists (by accepting the first part of Brentano’s Thesis) and dispositionalists at the same time (by accepting that mental states, acts and events have a physical base of realization). In a nutshell: the intentional is the manifestation of mental dispositions. Dispositions in general, psychological dispositions in particular, are two-sided and presupposes, on the one hand, a physical realization, and a manifestation which is properly mental, on the other. Something has to be said about language in that context, because public representations instantiate semantic properties which also are intentional, and many of our mental states have their content specified by the use of a sentence belonging to a public language.