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PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIAL THEORY 323

of facts to be explained, we have accepted what really counts about
intentionality and the reduction—the rest is quibbling about the details.
In this sense all the great patriarchs of the phenomenological movement
—Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—are committed to inten-
tionality and the reduction.
But even more important than what all the phenomenologists accept
is what they all reject. We can get at this by asking what is to my mind
the most important question to ask about intentionality: to what question
is it a response, what problem does it purport to solve? More precisely,
what issues are resolved when intentionality, as we have broadly defined
it here, is accepted as a principle rather than taken as something that
has to be explained. Answering these questions correctly will enable us
to understand intentionality better but will also raise questions about its
usefulness for an understanding of the social world.
Brentano acknowledged the medieval origins of the concept of
intentionality, and this early sense was preserved in Descartes' use of the
distinction between the formal and the objective reality of an idea. Ideas
by nature refer to things beyond themselves, and for Descartes ideas are
mental entities, pensees. Thus, Husserl thought that Descartes already
had hold of something like the modern sense of intentionality, and even
that his principle of hyperbolic doubt had captured the essence of the
epoch6 or reduction that should follow from it.^ Indeed, all the philo-
sophers of the early modern period, especially the British empiricists,
since they used the term idea in roughly the Cartesian sense, had all they
needed to recognize the centrality of the intentional relation.
But they all made what Husserl considered the wrong move. They
lived, after all, in the age in which the new and exciting and acceptable
way of understanding things was to derive them from their antecedents
according to causal laws. They shifted their attention from the inten-
tionality of ideas to the causes of ideas—or, more often, they confused
the two questions, equating the intentional object of a thought with its
causal origin. As is well known, this led philosophy in two incompatible
but strangely complementary directions: from the viewpoint of Descartes'
problem of proving the existence and nature of the external world, it led
directly to Humean skepticism. If the causal relation is a contingent or
external relation, any inference from our ideas to a world which causes

^ Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenol-
ogy, translated by D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 75-78.