  Of all these metaphors, the ones involving directionality—or intentionality—are likely to be the most helpful to us. For there are contemporary philosophers who characterize intentionality, not in terms of a polyadic or many-place property, but as a sui generis type of monadic  property.[27]  According to these philosophers, intentionality is a property whose intrinsic nature is such that, when it is exemplified by a subject in appropriate circumstances, which include the presence of an appropriate object, it relates its subject to the object in question—in particular, it relates the subject to it as thinker to object thought. This analogy is useful because non-reductive realists typically regard intentionality as a special case (or type) of relation. According to them, all paradigmatic relations (or at least all those that qualify as sui generis accidents) are properties whose intrinsic nature is such that their exemplification in the appropriate circumstances will relate their subjects to something else. It is just that in certain cases, these properties relate their subjects specifically as thinkers to objects thought.