CONCEPT
Intentionality (Searle)
Not intention in the everyday sense, but the philosophical property by which mental states are directed toward or about objects and states of affairs in the world — the aboutness that, Searle insisted, formal computation does not possess.
When a person believes it is raining, the belief is about the rain. When a person fears the dark, the fear is directed toward the darkness. When a person understands "the cat is on the mat," the understanding is about a specific spatial relationship between a specific animal and a specific object. This property — directedness, aboutness, reference — is not incidental to mental life. In Searle's framework, it is the defining feature. Consciousness without intentionality would be a light that illuminates nothing. Intentionality is what gives consciousness its content, what makes it consciousness of something, what connects the inner life of mind to the outer life of world. Searle's central claim about AI was that computational systems do not possess intentionality — they process symbols whose aboutness is assigned externally by human designers and interpreters, not intrinsically by the processing itself.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Searle drew a distinction between intrinsic intentionality and