As we shall see momentarily, it is a feature of both the original intentionality of beliefs and the derived intentionality of utterances that they can be misrepresentations.
Tye's account of experience content derives from the theories of intentionality for belief developed by Stampe (1977) and Stalnaker (1984).
Thus, on this model, the asymmetry in attributions is a distortion of the correct conception of intentionality (desire, belief, etc).
Philosophical inquiry into intentionality — that feature of beliefs, desires, and other mental states, in virtue of which they are of or about something — begins long before recent debates about mental content or even the work of phenomenologists towards the beginning of the twentieth century.
If the content or intentionality of an individual's belief and/or desire is, like a coin's monetary value, one of its extrinsic properties, then how can it be causally efficacious in the production of one of the individual's bodily movements?
It has also been argued against folk psychology that the intentionality of mental states like belief imply that they have semantic qualities.
Much of the impetus for the theory of direct reference came from the implications of the semantics of modal logic for the intentionality of singular thoughts and beliefs.
Fred Dretske (1995) has argued that the intentionality of many of an individual's beliefs and desires results from an ontogenetic non-intentional process of selective learning.
But Dretske's account of belief appears to make it distinct from conscious awareness of the belief or intentional state (if that is taken to require a higher order thought), and so would allow attribution of intentionality to systems that can learn.
The Theaetetus does not have much to say about intentionality more broadly, in particular about the intentionality of the perceptions and thoughts that are combined in belief — the dialogue's attention to these issues is limited, understandably, by the exigencies of the main argument.
