What’s in a (Mental) Picture

In this paper I present several interpretations of Brentano’s notion of the intentional inexistence of a mental state’s intentional object, that is, what that state is about. I hold moreover that, while all the interpretations in Sections 1-5 are wrong, the penultimate interpretation focused on in Section 6, according to which intentional inexistence amounts to the individuation of a mental state by means of its intentional object, is right provided that it is embedded in the fully correct interpretation given in Section 7. This is because it merely provides one of the necessary conditions for this last interpretation, in which intentional inexistence amounts to the constitution of a mental state by means of its intentional object. Finally, I argue that both these interpretations preserve the idea, which strikes everyone as true, that an intentional object exists in the mental state about it very much in the same way as a pictorial character exists in the picture (qua interpreted entity) that depicts it.