Intentionality

Intentionality refers to the characteristic of standing for, or representing, other entities, properties, ideas, or states of affairs. For example, the mental representations studied in cognitive psychology instantiate intentionality. Conversely, intentionality is not to be confused with people's intentions or goals. A full understanding of the implications of intentionality to studies of society and music means addressing its origins as a concept, thinking about its contemporary employment in philosophy and analysis, and uncovering its usefulness for thinking about music and music theory. The idea of intentionality in philosophy has its roots in the Latin verb intendere but it has come to be closely associated with the psychological work of Franz Brentano and the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and his reading and application of Brentano's concept. The concept has enjoyed wider currency in social studies in what might be called phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology.

In psychology and the philosophy of mind, the question of intentionality is central to processes of perception and refers to the “directedness” of consciousness or the way in which the mind approaches a concept, an object, or a thing. Because the objects represented in the mind do not physically exist in the mind, their ontological status is characterized by the quality of intentional inexistence: representations are a reference to a content or a direction toward an object. It is the intentional inexistence of mental phenomena. For Husserl, intentionality is an attempt to understand and bridge the relationship between thought and the object of perception. This idea [Page 625]is taken forward in a phenomenology of social life—specifically, the kinds of perceptions and processes that make interpretations of phenomena possible without reference to a purely empirical and realist description or direct match between perception and “reality.”

Questions of intentionality are important for thinking about the complex ways in which mind and the world are mediated and their relationship to one another. Artifacts such as art and music are perceived by thought in ways shaped by different forms of thinking, imagination, social concerns, and so on, and they are often perceived as socially constructed by the subjective perception. Other thinkers have thought of the world outside as somehow constitutive of thought in terms of the primacy of the “real” over thought. By looking at the complex relationship between mind and world, the concept of intentionality helps one overcome that dualism, although philosophers subsequent to Husserl, and shaped by his work, have struggled with the same question of the exact relationship of being with the world and the constitutive role of individual and social perception. Many thinkers have tried to elaborate the relationship of intentionality to politics and art, but recent developments in cognitive science and philosophy have attempted to comprehensively resituate the debate in terms of the world, science, and the challenge to subjective ways of thinking.

For aesthetics and for music specifically the idea of intentionality has initiated debates on the nature of music and listening to rethink the relationship between the mind, or more specifically the listening subject or body, and the sounds that people experience. One theory of sound distinguishes between two types of listening—one about reception and resonance, the other about the search for meaning and signification. This distinction is important for thinking about the presence of music and sound in the sense of focusing on the immanence of the sound itself rather than seeing it as the mediator of social concerns, representation, or signification. It reframes the philosophical concept of intentionality by shifting the focus from perception and meaning in thought to the corps sonore, the listening body, which receives the resonance of sound like an echo chamber.

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