Intentionality
The property thoughts have of being “about” something: believing the sea is calm, wanting a coffee, fearing the storm.
Definition
The word comes from scholastic philosophy; in 1874 Franz Brentano made it the very mark of the mental. A stone is about nothing. A thought always aims at an object — even one that does not exist, like a unicorn or a dreaded future.
John Searle distinguishes intrinsic intentionality, that of our thoughts, from derived intentionality, that of the words in a book or the states of a machine, which mean something only to us. The question for AI is which side it stands on: are its sentences about the world, or only about other sentences?
See also
Related notions
In the essays
In the library