Crane’s Intentionalism: Phenomenal Character as Mode and Content

Philosopher Tim Crane holds that intentionality, the mind’s directedness upon its objects, is the mark of the mental, and that phenomenal consciousness is therefore not a separate, non-intentional ingredient of mind but a way in which intentional states are had. His intentionalism is “strong”: conscious states have only intentional mental properties, so there are no qualia in the sense of non-intentional, felt properties. Yet it is not pure representationalism, because phenomenal character is fixed by a state’s entire intentional nature, its intentional mode (seeing, feeling, thinking) together with its content, not by content alone. Crane extends the view to bodily sensations, treats conscious thought as episodic and belief as never phenomenally conscious, and pairs the whole with a non-reductive metaphysics in which physicalism, if true, would have to be reductive.

In other words, Crane’s intentionalism holds that phenomenal consciousness is structured by intentionality: experience presents something to a subject in a particular way, through a particular mode of awareness. What an experience is like depends on both its content and its mode—seeing, hearing, hurting, or consciously thinking. His approach unifies sensory and cognitive experience while distinguishing conscious episodes from enduring unconscious beliefs. It is a phenomenological account of experience’s organization, situated within a nonreductive naturalism (Crane, 2003, 2009, 2013).

Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental

Crane revives Brentano’s thesis that all and only mental phenomena are intentional, against the widespread view that sensations and moods lack directedness (Crane, 1998). Intentionality has two essential features: directedness upon an object, and “aspectual shape,” the fact that objects are always presented in some way rather than another (Crane, 2003). Every intentional state consists of a subject related to a content by an intentional mode. Content need not be propositional: perception, Crane argues, is intentional without being a propositional attitude, since neither its directedness nor its accuracy conditions require propositional content (Crane, 2009b). Intentionality is also non-relational, because one can think about what does not exist; non-existent objects are “by-products” of intentionality (Crane, 2013a). His wider program, which he calls psychologism, treats the mind as a self-standing part of reality, studied through conceptual analysis, phenomenology, and empirical science together (Crane, 2014).

Mode and Content: Against Pure Representationalism

Crane distinguishes weak intentionalism, on which all mental states are intentional but some also have qualia, from strong intentionalism, on which they have only intentional mental properties. He regards the weak version as unstable, tending to collapse back into non-intentionalism, and defends the strong one (Crane, 2003). The decisive move concerns what fixes phenomenal character. For Tye, Crane notes, differences among conscious states are wholly explained by representational content. Crane objects that the difference between seeing an airplane overhead and hearing one, or between seeing shapes and feeling them, is partly a matter of the mode of apprehending the content. Phenomenal character is accordingly “fixed by two things: mode and content” (Crane, 2003), a view later framed as determination by a state’s “entire intentional nature” (Crane, 2009a). In Chalmers’s (2004) taxonomy, this is an impure representationalism, and Chalmers notes that his “manners of representation” correspond closely to Crane’s intentional modes.

Bodily Sensation and the Status of Qualia

Pains and other bodily sensations are the hardest cases for intentionalism. Crane locates their intentionality in their felt location: it is essential to a bodily sensation that it feels to be somewhere in the body. Against Tye’s view that pain represents bodily damage, he notes that subjects need not be aware of any damage. In a pain in the ankle, the intentional object is the ankle, the mode is feeling or hurting, and the content is roughly that the ankle hurts. Phantom-limb pain shows that, as elsewhere, the intentional object need not exist. Attending to a pain is attending to the place that hurts, which parallels the transparency of visual experience (Crane, 2003). Historically, Crane argues that the concept of qualia did not originate as a doctrine of intrinsic, non-intentional properties; that sense is a later development (Crane, 2000). He has also observed that the term “qualia” either expresses a controversial theory of consciousness or merely announces the existence of consciousness (Crane, 2025).

Conscious Episodes and Unconscious Belief

Crane’s account of phenomenal consciousness is episodic. Block’s access consciousness, he argues, must itself be understood in terms of phenomenal consciousness, which is the more fundamental notion. Beliefs are never phenomenally conscious, whereas episodes of thinking are, so thoughts and experiences share “a single way of being conscious” as occurrences in the stream of consciousness (Crane, 2013b). He rejects the standard assumption that conscious and unconscious states share the same kind of propositional content, proposing instead an account that explains why unconscious states merit the label (Crane, 2017).

Intentionalism and Naturalism Without Reduction

Crane presents intentionalism as a phenomenological account of the structure of consciousness that “says nothing about how there can be a physicalist reduction of consciousness” (Crane, 2003). On the mind-body problem, he poses a dilemma: mental causation pulls toward physicalism, consciousness toward dualism (Crane, 2004, 2025). He argues that the metaphysics of traditional emergentism and non-reductive physicalism coincide (Crane, 2001a), and that physicalism is “necessarily reductive in character,” so non-reductive physicalists who cannot close Levine’s explanatory gap are indistinguishable from emergentists (Crane, 2010). His own textbook proposes emergentism as an alternative to physicalist solutions (Crane, 2001b, 2004).

Crane’s naturalism does not require reducing mentality to physics. His broader metaphysics distinguishes rejecting physicalist reduction from embracing Cartesian dualism, leaving room for nonphysicalist monism (Crane, 2000). More recently, he describes minds as organisms’ mental capacities and consciousness as a determinable: different conscious activities are its determinations, rather than activities receiving an identical extra ingredient. This suggests investigating different capacities without assuming one uniform neural correlate or explanatory mechanism (Crane, 2026).

Challenges and Significance

The central difficulty is whether intentional modes explain phenomenal character or redescribe it. Calling an episode hurting rather than seeing identifies a difference, but does not establish why either is experienced. Crane acknowledges this limitation: his intentionalism does not close the explanatory gap or supply a physical reduction (Crane, 2003, 2009). His recent account also leaves the integration of mental capacities into a unified experiencing subject insufficiently developed (Crane, 2026).

For consciousness science, the contribution is a differentiated account of the phenomenon requiring explanation. Neural mechanisms can underpin psychological capacities without settling their ultimate ontology; empirical investigation and metaphysical reduction remain distinguishable projects (Crane, 2025).

Crane reunites the intentional and the phenomenal without reducing either: phenomenal consciousness is directedness had in a mode. The view treats the explanatory gap as a real feature of the problem while denying that consciousness requires a further non-intentional ingredient.

References

Chalmers, D. J. (2004). The representational character of experience. In B. Leiter (Ed.), The Future for Philosophy. Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (1998). Intentionality as the mark of the mental. In T. Crane (Ed.), Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (pp. 229–251). Cambridge University Press.

Crane, T. (2000). The origins of qualia. In T. Crane & S. Patterson (Eds.), History of the Mind-Body Problem. Routledge.

Crane, T. (2001a). The significance of emergence. In C. Gillett & B. Loewer (Eds.), Physicalism and Its Discontents. Cambridge University Press.

Crane, T. (2001b). Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (2003). The intentional structure of consciousness. In Q. Smith & A. Jokic (Eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (2004). Summary of Elements of Mind and replies to critics. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 4(11), 223–240.

Crane, T. (2009a). Intentionalism. In B. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann, & S. Walter (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199262618.003.0029

Crane, T. (2009b). Is perception a propositional attitude? Philosophical Quarterly, 59(236), 452–469.

Crane, T. (2010). Cosmic hermeneutics vs. emergence: The challenge of the explanatory gap. In C. Macdonald & G. Macdonald (Eds.), Emergence in Mind (pp. 22–34). Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (2013a). The Objects of Thought. Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (2013b). Unconscious belief and conscious thought. In U. Kriegel (Ed.), Phenomenal Intentionality (pp. 156–173). Oxford University Press.

Crane, T. (2014). Aspects of Psychologism. Harvard University Press.

Crane, T. (2017). The unity of unconsciousness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 117(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aox001

Crane, T. (2025). The mind-body problem. Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.3614036a