Intentionality

It was Franz Bretano who introduced the concept of intentionality. Husserl took the concept into his development of phenomenology. Then, the concept has had an great impact on modern contemporary continental philosophy.

Intentionality is a phenomenon that it is not possible to reduce to something else. It implies that it must be taken as it is. To explain the concept in another way is to basically objectify our consciousness. The term is not a relation between mental phenomena perceived as facts. Mental phenomena are themselves intentional.The problem of mening is a phenomenological problem, where phenomenology conceives meaning as a description as a essential structure of our consciousness. According to Husserl, this description is not psychological. Phenomenology goes ahead of the study of consciousness, being a process that is always a priori. This means that the problem of meaning also goes in front of the psychology. It is not even a problem for psychology. The problem of meaning does not need a theory. We all know what meaning is in some way or another. 

The phenomenological descripton is to make this knowledge more explicit and detailed. Husserl actually sees naturalism as the greatest danger, as one must refute and always be on guard against. With naturalism and psychologisme Husserl understands all science which pretends to be a philosophy. 

Objectivism does not accept phenomenology's explanation of the problem of meaning because of methodological reasons. Phenomenology is not based on a hypothetical-deductive method based on sensory experience or observation of a multitude of separate individual facts. The alternative given by the phenomenological or subjective theory is that meaning should be handled with the terms one uses to describe the relationships between observable indices of events, things or facts. Semiotics facilitates have an objective scientific approach to what has been called "opinion". As such, semiotic terminology and methodology has the same scientific structure as physics and biology.