Els Elffers
1. Introduction
Phenomenology covers a large area, and the same is true of speech act theory. Here I will focus on one point of contact between them, namely intentionality. Intentionality is a key concept in phenomenology and it also figures in speech act theory as developed by philosophers such as John Searle (b. 1932) and Paul Grice (1913–1988).
What is intentionality? The Oxford English Dictionary says: “Intentionality is the distinguishing property of mental phenomena of being necessarily directed upon an object, whether real or imaginary“.
This meaning applies to intentionality as presented in the work of the man who introduced the concept in the late 19th-century, the philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). He borrowed the term from mediaeval philosophy and reintroduced it by making it the central concept of his new psychology. According to Brentano, mental life consists of acts, such as perceiving, thinking and feeling. These acts are called intentional, because they cannot occur without an object to which they are directed. You cannot perceive without perceiving something, you cannot think without thinking something, etc. Brentano considered intentionality as exclusively belonging to mental phenomena; in physical phenomena it is entirely absent.
The concept was developed further, in the first place by Brentano’s pupils Anton Marty (1847–1914) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who made it a key notion of phenomenological philosophy and psychology. Others adopted the concept and elaborated it in various ways.
During this process, the idea of directedness acquired two more specific meanings; first aboutness: intentional acts are directed to a content, namely objects and states of affairs; second goal-directedness: intentional acts are essentially purposive (this is also the modern non-philosophical meaning of the word “intentionality”). This diversification came about through a gliding scale from intentional as ‘relating to’ via ‘referring to’ to ‘directed to’. Van Baaren formulates this development in the following way:
To the [‘aboutness’, E.E.] use of the term a second meaning was added, the meaning ‘goal-directedness’. According to this meaning, an action can be intentional or not. According to Brentano, a mental phenomenon or act has always an intentional object, its content. In this sense, acts are always intentional. There is a sliding semantic scale of ‘relation to’, via ‘referring to’ to ‘being directed to’. It is unclear whether Brentano tried to make use of this ambiguity. (Van Baaren 1996: 144, transl. E.E.)
Both varieties of intentionality were, in one way or other, incorporated into philosophy of language: ‘aboutness’ – intentionality mainly in logical semantics, goal-directed-intentionality mainly in speech act theory.
Only goal-directed intentionality, and especially its philosophical-linguistic implications, is my present focus. I will argue, first, that it is no coincidence that Husserl’s pupil Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), a renowned phenomenologist, was the first to develop a fully-fledged speech-act theory during the first decades of the 20th century. Second, I will show that Searle’s speech act theory only partially benefits from its appeal to goal-directed intentionality.
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History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 