How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

Contemporary writers often refer to 'Brentano's Problem' meaning by this the issue of whether all intentional phenomena can be accounted for in terms of a materialist ontology. This, however, was not the problem of intentionaUty which concerned Brentano himself. Rather, the difficulty which he identified is that of how to explain the very contentfulness of mental states, and in particular their apparently relational character. This essay explores something of Brentano's own views on this issue and considers various other recent approaches. (...) It then examines the scholastic doctrine of 'intentional inexistence' in the version associated with Aquinas, according to which content is explained by reference to the occurrence in esse intentionale of the very same features (forms) as contribute to the constitution of extra-mental reality. Various interpretations and aspects of this view are considered and a version of it is commended as providing a plausible solution to Brentano's problem. (shrink)