A Relational Theory of the Act*

1.1 The Problem ‘What is characteristic of every mental activity’, according to Brentano, is ‘the reference to something as an object. In this respect every mental activity seems to be something relational.’ But what sort of a relation, if any, is our cognitive access to the world? This question – which we shall call Brentano’s question – throws a new light on many of the traditional problems of epistemology. To take it seriously is to treat epistemology, or much of it, as applied ontology. For to affirm or deny that our cognitive experience is relational is to say nothing unless a clear account is given of what ‘relational’ might actually mean. Our task, then, is to supply an ontology of relations which is sufficiently general as to allow of application also to the domain of epistemology, an ontology which will mesh with our understanding of mental or cognitive phenomena. The beginnings of such an account are indeed provided by Brentano and his immediate followers, but the ontological investigations of Brentano, Stumpf, Meinong, Twardowski, Ehrenfels and Marty reach their high-point in the Logical Investigations of Edmund Husserl. In a series of papers companion to the present essay we have sketched something of the implications and background of the ontology put forward by Husserl in this work. Here we wish to apply the theory to the structures of our mental acts. We shall seek to show that Husserl’s ontology allows the formulation of what seems to be a quite new sort of answer to Brentano’s question.