Another important concept in the Philosophy of Language is that of intentionality, sometimes defined as "aboutness". Some things are about other things (e.g. a belief can be about icebergs, but an iceberg is not about anything; a book or a film can be about Paris, but Paris itself is not about anything), and intentionality is the term for this feature that certain mental states have of being directed at objects and states of affairs in the real world. Thus, our beliefs, fears, hopes and desires are intentional, in that they must have an object.
The term was initially coined by the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, but was revived in the 19th Century by the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838 - 1917), an important predecessor of the school of Phenomenology. Brentano claimed that all and only mental phenomena exhibit intentionality, which he saw as proof that mental phenomena could not be the same thing as, or a species of, physical phenomena (often called Brentano's irreducibility thesis).
Later philosophers of language such as J. L. Austin (1911 - 1960) and John Searle (1932 - ) have posed the question: how does the mind, and the language that we use, impose intentionality on objects that are not intrinsically intentional? How do mental states represent, and how do they make objects represent, the real world. Austin's solution is in his theory of illocutionary acts and Searle's related solution is in his theory of speech acts, in which language is seen as a form of action and human behavior, so that by saying something, we actually do something. Combining this idea with intentionality, Searle concludes that actions themselves have a kind of intentionality.