Philosophical Review 110 (April 2001):199-240. Intentionalism Defended Alex Byrne Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentional component could be present without the sensational component or vice versa. 1 Recently a number of philosophers have argued that this picture of perception is incorrect. According to them, the sensational component of a perceptual experience cannot vary independently of its intentional component: the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is entirely determined by the experience’s propositional content—that is, by what it represents. Usually this is supposed to hold also of “bodily sensations”: experiences of pain, twinges, tickles, and the like. The phenomenal character of such experiences, it is claimed, is likewise entirely determined by their propositional contents. This view comes in a number of variants, and also goes under a number of names: ‘the intentionalist view’, ‘Intentional Theory’, ‘representationism’, ‘representationalism’, ‘the hegemony of representation’, ‘the Representational Thesis’. 2 ‘Intentionalism’ carries the least exegetical baggage from other authors, so I shall use that. Intentionalism is controversial: indeed, Ned Block has called the division between its proponents and opponents “[t]he greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind” (1996, 19). 1 See, in particular, Reid [1764] 1997, [1785] 1969. Reid called the sensational component a sensation and the intentional component a perception . For more on Reid, see section 7 below.