Since the late seventies, the main research program for understanding intentionality has been based on the attempt to naturalize intentionality by identifying a natural relation that holds between internal states of the brain and external states of the world when and only when the former represent the latter. Call this the Naturalist-Externalist Research Program, or NERP. Some philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal consciousness has an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role it is not accorded in NERP. There is a vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research program – what the author calls the Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. My principal goals in this chapter are the following. First, the chapter will explicitly articulate, and elaborate upon, what is taken to be the fundamental claims at the heart of this nascent research program. Secondly, the chapter will review some of the arguments in the recent philosophical literature that support key theses of PIRP, in the process illustrating some apparent advantages of the framework in comparison to NERP. Thirdly, the chapter will point out some important theoretical options within the generic PIRP framework, specifying issues about which proponents of the general framework might disagree.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 122 citations exist upstream.