ABSTRACT
The whole subject of collective intentionality has become a booming area in contemporary philosophy. This is to be welcomed. Traditionally, most of the analyses of intentionality had a very narrow range; they typically focused on beliefs, sometimes belief and desire, and almost always on individuals’ beliefs and desires. I think a natural extension of the philosophy of intentionality to cover perception, and of course intentional action, as well as all of the emotions, is clearly necessary. Indeed I have worked on all of these issues (Searle 1983, 2015). Furthermore, we need to examine not only intrinsic intentionality, but also derived intentionality, as, for example, when we treat a mark as a symbol standing for something else or a sentence as having truth conditions. The sentence, as a syntactical object, has no intrinsic intentionality. The intentionality of sentences, symbols, pictures, marks, etc. is all derived from the intentionality of human beings.
