At any given moment, even one in which you’re sitting completely still, there are many things going on in your body. Your heart and circulatory system are pumping blood, your respiratory system is regulating your breathing, your digestive system is processing the contents of your most recent meal, and so on. At any given moment, there are also many things going on in your mind. Even if you’re not experiencing quite the jumble of thoughts that Cho was when Harry kissed her, you’re probably thinking and feeling many things all at the same time. Just consider a typical moment in the life of a student in a college class. As he stares at his professor’s PowerPoint slides and listens intently to what she’s saying, determined to process every word, he might also be worrying about the exam he has tomorrow, remembering the fun time he had with friends last night, fighting off an intense wave of exhaustion, and trying to ignore a persistent itch on his left arm.
Propositional attitudes
Consider the claim: it’s sunny today in Southern California. We can take many different kinds of mental stances towards this claim. I might believe that it’s sunny today in Southern California, hope that it’s sunny today in Southern California, dread that it’s sunny today in Southern California, and so on. Beliefs, desires, hopes, and dreads are mental states that philosophers refer to as propositional attitudes, so called because they consist in our taking a particular kind of attitude toward a certain kind of content, i.e., a proposition.
Now consider various different beliefs that someone might have: the belief that Arsenal is currently playing a match against Sheffield United, the belief that Arsenal is losing, and the belief that people in the United States refer to the game that they’re playing as “soccer” while people in the United Kingdom refer to the game that they’re playing as “football.” Each of these beliefs is representational, as each of them represents or is about events or states of affairs in the world. In fact, all propositional attitudes are representational mental states. Whether I believe or desire or hope or dread that Arsenal win today’s game, my mental states can be said to be about or directed at a certain event currently happening in the world. Philosophers refer to this phenomenon of representationality or aboutness as intentionality. “Intentionality” is here a technical word, and in this technical sense, it doesn’t have anything to do with purposefulness. Whether a mental state has intentionality in the sense we’re now talking about is completely independent of whether the mental state was deliberately or voluntarily formed.
Sometimes we have propositional attitudes that, though they can be described as being directed, cannot really be described as being directed at the world. Rather, they are directed at non-existent entities or states of affairs. Even in these sorts of cases, however, the mental state is about something and so has intentionality. Consider a child who desires to be as strong as Wonder Woman, or who worries that he will be attacked by the Loch Ness Monster, or who believes that Wonder Woman would emerge victorious were she to battle the Loch Ness Monster. Even though Wonder Woman and the Loch Ness Monster don’t really exist, the child’s desire, worry, and belief have intentionality nonetheless.
Some philosophers have claimed that all mental states are intentional. Indeed, some philosophers have even suggested that having intentionality is a distinguishing mark of the mental – it’s what makes a state a mental state. Compare your mental state of believing that chocolate ice cream is delicious to the state that your stomach is in as it digests the chocolate ice cream or the state that your chin is in when it is covered by chocolate ice cream. All of these states involve chocolate ice cream, but only the mental state represents the chocolate ice cream. The view that intentionality is the mark of the mental is perhaps most closely associated with 19th century German philosopher Franz Brentano (1874), and the claim that all mental states are intentional has recently been defended by a number of philosophers of mind known as intentionalists or representationalists. But this claim is a controversial one, and as we will see, there are various mental states that seem to serve as counterexamples to this intentionalist claim.
Though beliefs and desires are both propositional attitudes, they are importantly different kinds of mental states. Compare your belief that there is chocolate ice cream in the freezer with your desire that there is chocolate ice cream in the freezer. Although both of these propositional attitudes represent the state of affairs that there is chocolate ice cream in the freezer, they do so in different ways. But how do we capture this difference? Here the philosophical notion of direction of fit is often introduced.
Beliefs have what’s called a mind-to-world direction of fit. When we believe something, we aim to represent the world as it is (or as we take it to be), and we thus aim to conform the content of our mental state to the world. If, for example, you were to discover that your roommate ate all the chocolate ice cream that had previously been in the freezer, you would give up your belief that there’s chocolate ice cream in the freezer. In contrast, when we desire something, we do not aim to represent the world as it is. Rather, we aim to adjust the world so that it conforms to the content of the mental state. A discovery that there is no chocolate ice cream in the freezer does not prompt you to give up the desire. Instead, it’s likely to prompt you to go to the store to buy some chocolate ice cream – or to send your roommate to do so! Desires thus have what’s called a world-to-mind direction of fit. Of course, we are not always successful in these endeavors – sometimes our beliefs are untrue, and sometimes our desires go unsatisfied. But these aims are central to making the relevant mental state the kind of mental state that it is.
Each of us has lots of beliefs and desires – lots and lots of beliefs and desires. Consider the desires you have about your own life. You want to be well fed, well educated, well liked, and so on… The list here will likely get pretty long pretty quickly and we haven’t yet even begun to take into account the desires you have about other people’s lives or the state of the world in general. Or consider the beliefs you have about world geography. You believe that Melbourne is south of Sydney, that Spain borders Portugal, that New York lies above the equator, and so on… Here again the list will likely get pretty long pretty quickly, and there are many, many other subject matters about which you likely have lots of beliefs.
At any given moment, however, very few of this vast number of beliefs and desires are present before your mind. Prior to reading the last paragraph, you were likely not actively thinking about the geographical relationship between Melbourne and Sydney or between Spain and Portugal. Or right now, before you go on to read the rest of this sentence, you are likely not actively thinking that Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States or that a triangle is a three-sided figure, even though these may very well be beliefs of yours. Philosophers thus distinguish between occurrent beliefs and desires and non-occurrent beliefs and desires. When you’re taking a geography test about Australia, or trying to plan an Australian vacation, you might call up your belief about the geographical relationship between Sydney and Melbourne, and it becomes occurrent. Most of the time, however, this belief is non-occurrent.
Feelings: Moods, emotions, sensations
In addition to propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires, we have many other kinds of mental states. One obvious class consists of moods and emotions, often referred to as affective states. You might be disgusted or surprised, angry or anxious, elated or depressed. How exactly to distinguish moods from emotions – indeed, even whether we should distinguish moods and emotions – is a vexed topic about which philosophers have had much to say. We will return to this topic in greater depth in Chapter Five, but for now, we’ll settle for a rough characterization of the apparent difference: when the affective states are persistent and all pervasive, coloring everything one does, we tend to classify them as moods; when they are more short-lived or less all-encompassing, we tend to classify them as emotions. Recalling a piece of terminology that we saw earlier, emotions seem clearly to have intentionality, i.e., they are directed at or about a specific thing or event or state of affairs in the world. Someone might be happy that she got a promotion at work or, conversely, angry that she was passed over for a less-qualified candidate. But someone might be in an elated or depressed mood that’s not about any particular thing or event – or even some collection of things or events. Rather, the mood seems best characterized as about nothing at all. In this way, moods seem non-intentional, or at least not as obviously intentional as emotions. Indeed, moods serve as one of the standard counterexamples to the thesis we encountered earlier that all mental states have intentionality.
When talking about our emotions and moods, we often characterize them as feelings. It’s not just that you are disgusted or surprised or angr...
