phenomenological reductions.Consciousness is of or about an object. That is, when we experience something, it is that object itself we are conscious of, not a representative of it. All agree that objects don't appear before consciousness magically: A process is involved that makes the presence of the object possible. A fundamental mistake occurs, thinks Husserl, when, in theorizing about the process, we succumb to the temptation to say that it is the process we are conscious of, rather than the object. We then substitute some part of the process for the object and misunderstand consciousness as consciousness of this representative of the object, rather than of the object itself. The doctrine of intentionality is the rejection of this mistake . For example, when we visually perceive a chair, we do it by means of a retinal image and then mental images. Almost no one makes the mistake of claiming that what we are conscious of is the retinal image, but many do hold that it is some mental representative of the chair that we are really conscious of, rather than the chair itself. The most notorious offender, of course, is Descartes, who, in proposing his Theory of Ideas, claims that the mind is never in contact with anything outside of itself. The notion is also prevalent in traditional Empiricism. Husserl insists that it is the object itself that consciousness grasps and he repudiates all . Intentionality is not, of course, a claim that there are no representations - the existence of retinal images itself would overthrow such a foolish stand. Rather it is the claim that whatsoever intermediate entities there may be in the process of grasping an object, it is not these representatives that we are conscious of, but the object itself. Husserl's doctrine of intentionality maintains that consciousness is of the objects experienced and does not stop at intermediate events along the way, whether these are on one unified stage or dispersed t...
