Which brings us into the very heart of the humanities, of course, where meaning, at least since Franz Brentano at the end of the nineteenth century, has been understood as “intentional.” An ordinary meaning, Brentano rightly pointed out, is always intentional, in the sense that it is about something else. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this intentional notion of meaning was more or less dogmatized in the humanities by postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, who insisted that every meaning is really a grammatical function, that every word points to other words for its meaning,
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