I very much enjoyed Harro's comments below on the historical novelty of Brentano's invention of intentionality and its absence in Victorian thought. (Strictly speaking: Brentano revived a scholastic term, see below.) But I am, however, afraid that there is also a potential source of confusion in his claim. What follows is in large part copied and pasted from the online article, by Pierre Jacob,"Intentionality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/intentionality/. This article is a very useful resource in understanding the history and content of my claims below. The philosophic meaning of the word "intentionality" (as coined by Brentano) should not be confused with the ordinary meaning of the word "intention." I quote Brentano: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves. I have included the first (otherwise very puzzling) sentence to make the historical point about the Scholastics. As Jacob comments, "In the two paragraphs quoted above, Brentano sketches an entire research programme based on three distinct theses. According to the first thesis, it is constitutive of the phenomenon of intentionality, as it is exhibited by mental states such as loving, hating, desiring, believing, judging, perceiving, hoping and many others, that these mental states are directed towards things different from themselves. According to the second thesis, it is characteristic of the objects towards which the mind is directed by virtue of intentionality that they have the property which Brentano calls intentional inexistence. According to the third thesis, intentionality is the mark of the mental: all and only mental states exhibit intentionality." So, when philosophers generally talk about (Brentano's) 'intentionality' it is not about the goal-directedness of behavior/action (ordinary usage), but rather about the about- ness/directness of thought (or the content(s) of thought). Brentano's intentionality can become important in thinking about rationality of behavior, but only indirectly (when we wonder how intentional objects, which are relational (this follows from their aboutness), can be "causes'' or "reasons"). However, there is indeed a (mostly seperate) literature on the question to what degree collective agency/rationality is possible in which intentionality is often used in its ordinary sense distinct from Brentano's use. (The literature is not entirely distinct because Searle has contribituted to both.) Yours, Eric Schliesser