Intentionality can be established as a fundamental semantical relation or regarded with suspicion as resulting from an inherently dualistic world-view. The activities of reference, belief, desire and the like are characteristically described as of another kind as what is referred to, believed or desired. This difference poses a constant challenge to philosophical attempts to eliminate the classical epistemological dichotomy. Taking a closer look at so-called intentional phenomena, however, reveals that neither undisturbed belief in their existence, nor unrelenting attempts to remove them from the picture altogether are satisfactory. Commonsense examples of fulfillment, such as discovering a solution to a problem or keeping a promise give a good starting point for showing this.
Two types of situations are relevant in such cases, one marked by an uncertainty, a question, generally speaking by an unresolved tension between constituents of a certain state, the other one suggested by an overcoming of uncertainty, e.g., the determination of an answer or the achievement of satisfaction when a promise is kept. What one finds is a dichotomy that calls for resolution into a state of satisfaction. But how can the question (the expectation, the promise) be present in its fulfillment? These conditions of fit by definition exclude just the unfulfilled features. An answer, once articulated, does not exhibit the question it is an answer to. To solve this problem it is important to realize, by looking at examples like the ones given, how artificially both our previous positions have been opposed. Utterances are neither simply isolated (and in need of interpretation), nor simply functioning in a satisfying way. We use them in particular circumstances in order to fulfill certain needs. It is loosely said that something answers a question. A more precise way of putting this would be to say that within a certain context something is accepted by someone as an answer. There is a peculiar logic at work here. By relating an unresolved situation to a state of comparative closure an extremely useful move of mastering the world is described. This bears on the process of signification and its fulfillment in unproblematic use.
Achieving satisfaction is not adequately described as making one final move toward an aim. It involves a qualitative change in the description of the whole enterprise. Here we can begin to see why fulfillment of intentional attitudes might (precariously) hold semantics together. In some sense, ordinary meaningful behavior must be described by excluding reference to possible disturbances. Nevertheless the complexity of the overall situation can only be captured if the second descriptive approach, pointing at the lack of fit, is included. Fulfillment cannot be conceptualized as a result only, it has to be seen as fulfillment of something and by this very feature relates back to the state of unfulfillment. In proceeding from an explicitly objectified semantical situation toward its resolution the problematic dichotomy can be eliminated but the resulting one-dimensional account of successful communication loses its punch if it is divorced from this genesis. Pure satisfaction is a phantom.
Fulfillment of intentional structures, seen in this way, is a concept referring to both a process of satisfaction and its result, weaving together situations characterized by a lack of fulfillment and by the lack of this lack. It is crucial that when some want changes into accomplishment the whole apparatus employed to describe the respective situations is completely reshuffled, provoking claims of radical incommensurability. As long as signifiers can be viewed in isolation their correlates in the realm of sense are also bound to appear as single entities, causing the problem of commerce between signifier and signified. Lack of satisfaction produces the construct of something capable of satisfying this state. But it is exactly because of this that the constructed entity cannot fulfill its task of satisfaction as if it were a missing piece of equipment fitting into a predesigned slot. Its raison d'etre is to indicate the incompleteness of the situation by its absence, it cannot simply be added to it like another of its elements.
Thus fulfillment, seen as a process, relates two qualitatively different types of situations. Obviously, introducing a one-to-one correlation between its respective constituents will not work here. This is why the apparatus of formal semantics is of no use in clarifying the situation. Establishing a metaphysical link between the signified and the signifier likewise is a misguided way of grasping what happens when the patterns of description switch. Thus Derrida is right against Husserl insofar as he stresses the uneliminable strangeness within this relation. But he misses Husserl's legitimate concern with intuitive closure. Talk about satisfaction amounts to a decision to see those patterns in the light of each other and more precisely to regard a lack of disruption as a state internally connected with a particular disruption and its removal. Only by resorting to the analysis of a preceding problem and the logical space it opens up can some features of a state of the world be recognized as solutions. Taken by themselves they remain mute, just as a question without the prospect of an answer is mere rhetoric. Various philosophers have attacked the inclination to be inside and outside of a particular language-game at the same time. Such tendencies can certainly be a source of confusion, but, if my remarks on fulfillment are correct, we cannot dismiss them out of hand. The course of investigation suggesting itself here, rather, is to find out more about this simultaneity.