But here our basic intuition that felt aboutness is internal slaps back. Yet the way they feel fixes the nature of their aboutness, so that gold experiences belong to the same psychological kind as fool's gold experiences and to a different psychological kind from inverted gold experiences. That is, a distinction must be drawn between the object as it is in itself and as it is qua experienced . Ultimately, the account of experiential intentionality I am about to canvass turns on just such a distinction. A familiar model runs something like this.
Every object has many properties.
Some it has essentially, most accidentally. The essential properties are properties the object cannot lose without ceasing to be the thing it is. Crucially, some objects have essential properties independently of us and how we treat them. Now, what I suggest we do is distinguish between those properties of gold that are essential to it as it is in itself and those that are essential to it as object of experience . As it is in itself, gold is essentially atomic number 79.