Brentano's Intentionality Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 5):

1. Things do not have minds
2. Normal humans have minds; some animals act as if they do.
3. Beings with minds can refer to other beings or things; things without minds do not refer to beings or other things.

This last property, called intentionality by the German philosopher Franz Brentano, served as a good indicator of the existence of a mental process.  It refers to the notion that awareness is always of something, that it always has an object.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, Brentano's intentionality, the notion that awareness is always of something, corresponds to the notion of an emanating mental process, wherein a mental process ranges over a phenomenon — a phenomenon being a construal of experience as meaning. However, Systemic Functional Linguistic theory also offers a complementary perspective, an impinging mental process, wherein a phenomenon is the cause of a mental process.