Neri (and Asparagus) -
Feel free to just skim over this - it is pushing around 2000 words I think? May be best to skip past most of my look at your "EXAMPLE." I think I just covered ground there you've heard before form me. The latter part has more weight, and I was partly speaking with Asparagus in mind regarding my opposition to Heidegger.
It is hard for me to get past the first point:
(1) Intentionality is that feature of the mind by which it is directed AT, or ABOUT, or OF objects and states of affairs in the world. By the latter expression, Searle means all things whose existence does not depend on being experienced.
The thing is I cannot agree with this definition of "intentionality" as what phenomenology is concerned with. I am not sure if you or Searle said "mind." For now I will assume Searle said "mind" and say this is the fundamental error.
Intentionality is not a "feature of the mind", because the phenomenologist doesn't try to delineate mind from matter in any form whatsoever. There is no "mind" for the phenomenologist accept in the case of the concept of "mind" being an object.
It is hard to get your head around this view I admit. The reason I have been talking about "vision" in particular was to remove it as a principle feature of perception, a feature that is very dominant for congenitally sighted humans.
For this reason I cannot accept this point as having anything to do with phenomenological intentionality. This mistake is further enforced by the appeal of intentional states being "caused by brain processes." Phenomenology does not make an appeal to physical processes directly; indirectly, yes, there is applicability. This is the whole point of "bracketing." It is not to dismiss physical datum, only to not direct investigation DIRECTLY upon ideas of what is or is not physically objective.
point (4), you can probably see, makes absolutely no sense in phenomenological terms if applied to ideas of physically objectivity.
Your/Searle's example:
EXAMPLE: If I see a man before me, the content is that there is a man before me. The object is the man himself. If I am having a corresponding hallucination, the experience has a content, but no object--even though the content can be the same in both cases. The presence of a content does not necessarily mean that there must be an object.
This is wrong. Phenomenologically you would not "see" a man "before" you. There is phenomenon on your horizon of being from which intentionality adumbrates and reveals a kinaesthetic (a wholeness - for common understanding probably easier to say "bodily felt") item which is palpable, useable and there to be discovered through interactions ... this is incredibly hard to describe!
The above example you give is Kantian. Kant says in order to have any experience we must have somethin in place in order to process the experience. There is no "a priori", no knowledge before experience, because experience is necessary for what we understand as "knowledge." There most certainly must be something that allows experience to be known, something that allows experience to be experience. This is the reductionist approach and can uncover many interesting objective facts, but it can never reveal the actual "experience" in a felt way, only through mechanisms of biology can we gain some understanding of the internal processes.
Phenomenology is about looking at the subjective appreciation. You are not born "knowing" anything (well you are, so let us say that at some prenatal stage you don't "know" anything), yet you are equipped with biological functions and before you "see" a face you recognize it. This is because newborns have bodily mapping (this would be the "kinaesthetic" I was clumsily trying to refer to above.) What I am not doing is making a direct appeal to what is objective physicalism, I am merely showing that what we "see" is not what we "see", it is what we know. We know a face because we have a face, we understand certain sensible groupings because we possess them. The intentionality is the reconciliation of the subject and its adumbration of existence. Objects, in the physicalist sense, are brought into play in order to further explore the wholeness of existence - and a certain natural flow (basically entropy) is the underlying unknown. Given that life is a very peculiar thing in that it, from our limited perspective, seems to guard against entropy by creating homeostasis to some workable degree. Such investigations then move towards physics.
Phenomenology is concerned with consciousness. Phenomenology limits itself, as any category of knowledge must. The limit of phenomenology is set out by its concern with the subjective nature of consciousness.
The phenomenologist does not assume the physicality of "the man before them" nor do they imagine that the "man before them" is imaginary. Neither of these points are of direct concern to the phenomenologist, they are not within the limitations set out by the phenomenological investigation. The concern is purely aimed at what it is about the phenomenon apparent/concrete/imagined that makes it a phenomenon. It is from here that it gets deeply confusing and if you're not careful you can slip into semantic confusions and begin to conflate words in a vain attempt to refine the idea more precisely - enter Heidegger and the whole field of philosophical hermeneutics.
What Husserl released, I believe, is what appeals to me. The processes of "knowing" and "thinking" is wrapped up in verbosity. The words themselves are adumbrations given weight through intersubjectivity. This does not make words useless (only a fool would say such a thing.) But what it does reveal, by not being able to reveal, is that "prior" to words a kind of "knowledge" was present in the conscious being, and we do experience the "world" every moment without the need for a running verbal commentary. Because we don't pull in the full experience of the moment into one "item" which we can use as a tool we do not have intentionality of such an item, because it is a non-item (such a thought would be to jump into the infinite reductionism of the homunculi idea.) But given that we're not talking about some "physical core" or some "physical principle" of consciousness, phenomenology is not bothered by such thoughts directly.
The post modernist and hermeneutic fields have been so popular because they are touching on something that was brought about by Husserl's phenomenological disposition. Sadly they became enthralled and fixated upon the tool of verbal language, which is no wonder considering its immense force in the political sphere. And the fact that is necessarily encourages willful freefall.
I see the above movements as being part and parcel of the pathway beyond the natural political functioning of language. I believe that once we learn how to better "look" beyond language, to not register "knowledge" as only being a verbal item, then we'll make better headway into the phenomenological investigation. The only discernable way I can see this happening is through extreme advances in cognitive neuroscience and how education will function alongside technological advances in this area.
As powerful as words are they are still deeply one dimensional compared to the richness of experience. The post modernist plan is to basically issue orders on what words to say and therefore reconstruct thought. In various fields of investigation and human endeavor these rules and laws of language are enforced - we generally call this "jargon". Science refines language to suit its needs and art to suit its needs. In political discourse and law other rules and uses of worded discourse are adhered to too.
In the above respect I would say that the phenomenological investigation is best suited to cognitive neurosciences and "art"; art because it appeals more to emotional exploration than delineations of physical rules. It is a art that allows us to open up to more ambiguous thoughts, feelings and emotions without being told what to think - it is in more literate areas where art makes a certain crossover; it is this particular area that likely gained such appeal to the post modernist historians and literary theory. Again, this would stem from the initial step taken by Husserl and the successful attempt of Heidegger to derail it (consciously or not.)
The destruction of the appeal of post modernist views will likely lead to either a new found appeal in the primary phenomenological investigation, or something entirely different that will flow from the phenomenology ideas evolution.
next points (I'll try and be more brief!)
(5) Intentional states typically fit the world with one or two directions of fit.
(6) Perceptions are supposed to fit how the world is. They have a mind-to-world direction of fit.
(7) A perception will either match or fail to match the world. In such case the intentional state is either satisfied or not satisfied.
(5) Intentional states have no direction or care for this or that. It is likely here that you may understand, if you didn't already, what is mean t by "directedness." There is no literal direction, because in a dream state such an idea serves no purpose other than as a reference. This is why terms like "about" and "adumbrate" are used. We understand "direction" as a physical "over there" idea, but we are well acquainted to the colloquial use of "forward thinking" and such things. It is in this vain that "direction" is used in the phenomenology sense, because it does not appeal to physical "here" or "there", to "internal" or "external." This is the only step Husserl made and one which Heidegger took a whole lot further, with people like Derrida and Foucault following in his wake.
(6) You can probably see how this make no sense for a phenomenological investigation. There is no "mind." I guess it is fair to say that in these terms "mind" is equivalent to "phenomenon", but even that is a warped stretch on my part!
(7) I don't quite see how a perception will "match or fail"? For the physicalist bias we can of course say that I may be deluded or fooled by a certain experience and then come to disregard my intial analysis - that is nothing to do with phenomenology though. Phenomenology is concerned with the "directedness" and about what I have previously outlined (the "moments" and "parts".) Physicality is concerned with only "parts" of the phenomenon, whilst phenomenology reveals the underlying items of investigation that the objective perspective cannot so easily cope with, the moments of experience are not measureable in any way other than thorugh their obviousness as being necessary for experience. A table not occupying any space is not a table, but being able to remove the leg of the table doesn't make the table not exist - what is more of concern with the removal of the table leg for the phenomenologist is that the "object" of table is not removed, but by taking away a leg some "moment" is removed because the functionality has shifted - the table has become "broken" or "ill-fitted" within the phenomenological horizon. If you follow that you can then perhaps see the wide ranging field opened up here? The issue with Heidegger is that he became fixated upon the interplay of words and covered up the phenomenon with language.
As an analogy of why I am often so brutal about Heidegger, it is because I see him as the describer of a painting, the critique casting out aspersions about a painting, yet being wholly unable to capture the painting within the words he writes. It is a case of "a picture paints a thousands words", and phenomenon is endlessly open to reiteration. Husserl is concerned with the phenomenon and Heidegger is concerned with the explanation of phenomenon as being the pheonomenon (as the worded description meaning more than the phenomenon - to which there is certainly something to be said!)