This book is about semanticity or intentionality – about how semanticity or intentionality fit in a non-semantic, non-intentional world. Intentionality is one important feature of minds – of human minds, if not of other minds. It is what allows some of a human being's states of mind – the so-called “propositional attitudes” (such as beliefs and desires) – to be about (or represent) non-mental and mental things and states of affairs, some actual, some possible, and some impossible. In other words, having intentionality or being representations, an individual's states of mind have semantic properties. In particular, an individual's beliefs have truth-conditions: they can be true and they can be false (as the case may be). In contemporary philosophy, there are two broad approaches to intentionality: there is so to speak a topdown approach and there is a bottom-up approach.

What I call the top-down approach is embodied in the work of Davidson. The project is to characterize intentionality by starting with creatures – human beings – exhibiting systems of full-fledged propositional attitudes, possessing both the ability to speak a natural language and the further ability to attribute propositional attitudes to other creatures. From this top-down point of view, what is striking about an individual's full-fledged propositional attitudes is their holistic character. As Davidson (1982: 473) puts it, “one belief demands many beliefs, and beliefs demand other basic attitudes such as intentions, desires and … the gift of tongues.”