After brentano, beyond husserl: critical realism and the ontological status of the intentional object in theoretical psychology

This article reopens an old question with new tools. What is the ontological status of the intentional object, once we accept neither Brentano’s reading of mental directedness as the immanent in-existence of an object nor Husserl’s relocation of that object into the ideal correlate of an act? The recent revival of Brentano scholarship has shown that the standard immanentist picture rests on a misattribution, while contemporary work on phenomenal intentionality, nonexistent objects, and naturalised content has multiplied positions without supplying theoretical psychology with a usable ontology of aboutness. The analysis develops a single original contribution: a framework I call stratified intentional realism, which transposes the Brentano–Husserl problematic into the stratified ontology of critical realism—the distinction between the intransitive and transitive dimensions of inquiry and the domains of the real, the actual, and the empirical. On this account the intentional object is neither an intramental particular nor a mind-independent thing but a transitive-dimension relational structure: real because it is causally relevant within psychological generative mechanisms, yet non-substantial because it carries no existence commitment regarding its relatum. A two-axis typology classifies nine post-Brentanian positions by ontological locus and by whether directedness is construed transitively or intransitively. Applied to theoretical psychology, the framework dissolves three standing problems—the reification of mental representations, the realism–antirealism split over content, and the disciplinary fragmentation diagnosed by realist metatheorists. The method is conceptual and comparative, drawing on primary sources and on the 2019–2023 literature. The principal limitation is that the framework is defended analytically rather than through empirical modelling, and its causal-relevance claim awaits operationalisation