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Jerry Fodor in a recent review of work on intentionality sorts out positions into several categories. [1] My own belief is that there is one categorization of such views that counts far more than any of the others. It is a bifurcation of theories of intentionality into two basic categories. On the one hand, there are those I would call "Internalists." The Internalists are those who believe meaning (in the German Bedeutung not Sinn) can be understood by an analysis of some present state of the organism. For instance, what makes some use of the sentence, "The book is on the table" mean some putative state of affairs for some speaker is an internal state of that speaker. Internalists can come in all shades: some might claim that the internal state is a neural state; others, that it is a computational state or set of computational states; still others, that it is a phenomenal state, involving what might be thought of as a mental image. Each of the last two holds the view that the internal state in some way or other represents the world it means, and it is this representation that is its meaning the world. Externalists, on the other hand, hold that there is no internal state of the organism that is its meaning anything. To borrow from Kripke, the Externalists hold that even if God could perceive all the internal states of the organism, God could not know thereby what it was the organism meant or that it meant anything at all. [2] In a strict sense, according to the Externalists, there is no internal state of the organism that is its intentional state. Thinking about intentional states as mental states, in the way having a pain can be thought of as a mental state, is believed by many Externalists to be at the root of the problem. [3] Unless we know the social context, history, and social practices in which these internal states are embedded, we cannot ascribe meaning to the organism's utterance or even regard it as making an utterance. This limning has a third-person air about it, but Externalists want to hold that not even the organism itself could make such ascriptions to itself solely on the basis of what was occurrently going on in it.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-4033-8_22

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