Abstract

The focus of this paper is the aspectuality of intentional mental states. The notion of aspectuality is meant to capture an essential feature of intentionality, namely, the feature that accounts for the peculiar way in which what a given mental state is directed at is intended by the subject of the state. Even though there has been plenty of theories on this subject matter, in my view all such theories have failed to capture a crucial feature of the phenomenon under investigation, namely, the plurality of the ways in which the aspectuality is realized in different intentional states. I claim that such a failure is mainly due to the almost undisputed adoption of a far from obvious assumption (that I label the «uniformity assumption »). According to this assumption, aspectuality has to be taken as a homogeneous and constant feature that does not vary with the way in which a given mental state is entertained. In my paper, I focus on the difference between conscious and unconscious states and claim that the aspectuality of the former involves subjective and phenomenal features that make it unreducible to the aspectuality of the latter. While presenting similarities with John Searle’s, my proposal differs from it, since it rejects Searle’s thesis of the indispensability of consciousness for aspectuality.