Intentionality
The Basic Idea
What does it mean to be human? Is it the bodies that carry us or the minds in our heads? Is it the emotions we feel or the experiences we have? Like most of us, thinking about what it means to be human might send you spiralling down a deep train of thought.
Intentionality refers to the ability of one’s mind to represent something. It is mostly ascribed to mental states, such as perceptions, beliefs, and desires.1 In discussions of the human mind, consciousness and intentionality are often central phenomena. Intentionalism has even become its own area of study.2 Intentionalism, also known as representationalism, refers to the belief that the nature of one’s conscious mental state is determined by its intentionality.3
An unconscious consciousness is no more a contradiction in terms than an unseen case of seeing.
– Franz Brentano, founder of intentionalism and author of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
