Conscious Thought

There is a felt difference between following an argument to its conclusion and keeping up with an argument in your judgments while failing to see how its conclusion follows from its premises. In the first case there’s what I’m calling an inferential seeming, in the second case there isn’t. Inferential seemings exhibit a cluster of functional and normative characteristics whose integration in one mental state is puzzling. Several recent accounts of inferring suggest inferential seemings play a significant role in the (...) process, but none provides a fully satisfactory understanding of inferential seemings themselves. In this paper I critically examine theoretical options on offer in the existing literature, then develop an alternative view. I discuss implications for recent debates about general principles governing inference, such as Fumerton’s Principle of Inferential Justification and Boghossian’s Taking Condition. (shrink)

An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents. But these contents may be orthogonal to the processes that determine how thoughts unfold over time, remaining stable or wandering from one topic to another. In this chapter, we emphasize the importance of incorporating such processes into current definitions of mind-wandering, and propose that mind-wandering and other forms of spontaneous thought (such as (...) dreaming and creativity) are mental states that arise and transition relatively freely due to an absence of constraints on cognition. We review existing psychological, philosophical and neuroscientific research on spontaneous thought through the lens of this framework, and call for additional research into the dynamic properties of the mind and brain. (shrink)

Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, internal verbalization, “talking in your head,” the “little voice in the head,” and so on. It is both a familiar element of first-person experience and a psychological phenomenon whose complex cognitive components and distributed neural bases are increasingly well understood. There is evidence that inner speech plays a variety of cognitive roles, from enabling abstract thought, to supporting metacognition, memory, and executive function. One active area of (...) controversy concerns the relation of inner speech to auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia, with a common proposal being that sufferers of AVH misidentify their own inner speech as being generated by someone else. Recently, researchers have used artificial intelligence to translate the neural and neuromuscular signatures of inner speech into corresponding outer speech signals, laying the groundwork for a variety of new applications and interventions. (shrink)

The cognitive experience view of thought holds that the content of thought is determined by its cognitive-phenomenal character. Adam Pautz argues that the cognitive experience view is extensionally inadequate: it entails the possibility of mix-and-match cases, where the cognitive-phenomenal properties that determine thought content are combined with different sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. Because mix-and-match cases are metaphysically impossible, Pautz argues, the cognitive experience view should be rejected. This paper defends the cognitive experience view from Pautz’s argument. I build on resources (...) in the philosophy of mind literature to show that cognitive-phenomenal properties are modally independent from sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. The result is that mix-and-match cases, though modally remote, are metaphysically possible. The possibility of mix-and-match cases allows us to move from defensive posture to a critical one: it poses problems for any theory of content that imposes rationality constraints, including Pautz’s positive view, phenomenal functionalism. (shrink)

The phenomenal view of thought holds that thinking is an experience with phenomenal character that determines what the thought is about. This paper develops and responds to the objection that the phenomenal view is chauvinistic: it withholds thoughts from creatures that in fact have them. I develop four chauvinism objections to the phenomenal view—one from introspection, one from interpersonal differences, one from thought experiments, and one from the unconscious thought paradigm in psychology—and show that the phenomenal view can resist all (...) four. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In contemporary philosophy of mind and psychiatry, schizophrenic thought insertion is often used as a validating or invalidating counterexample in various theories about how we experience ourselves. Recent work has taken cases of thought insertion to provide an invalidating counterexample to the Humean denial of self-experience, arguing that deficiencies of agency in thought insertion suggest that we normally experience ourselves as the agent of our thoughts. In this paper, I argue that appealing to a breakdown in the sense of agency (...) to explain thought insertion is problematic, and that rather than following the prevailing binary approach which holds that certain features of consciousness go missing while others remain wholly intact, a better explanation involves construing thought insertion as a disturbing or disrupting of the subjectivity (for-me-ness) of experience. The result is that experiencing ourselves as the subject of our thoughts is where future research should be directed, given the robust persistence of this form of self-experience across psychopathological and non-psychopathological cases alike. (shrink)

Cognitive effort is thought to be familiar in everyday life, ubiquitous across multiple variations of task and circumstance, and integral to cost/benefit computations that are themselves central to the proper functioning of cognitive control. In particular, cognitive effort is thought to be closely related to the assessment of cognitive control’s costs. I argue here that the construct of cognitive effort, as it is deployed in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is problematically unclear. The result is that talk of cognitive effort may (...) paper over significant disagreement regarding the nature of cognitive effort, and its key functions for cognitive control. I highlight key points of disagreement, and several open questions regarding what causes cognitive effort, what cognitive effort represents, cognitive effort’s relationship to action, and cognitive effort’s relationship to consciousness. I also suggest that pluralism about cognitive effort – that cognitive effort may manifest as a range of intentional or non-intentional actions the function of which is to promote greater success at paradigmatic cognitive control tasks – may be a fruitful and irenic way to conceive of cognitive effort. Finally, I suggest that recent trends in work on cognitive control suggests that we might fruitfully conceive of cognitive effort as one key node in a complex network of mental value, and that studying this complex network may illuminate the nature of cognitive control, and the role of consciousness in cognitive control’s proper functioning. (shrink)

I seek an explanation for the etiology and the function of mind wandering episodes. My proposal – which I call the cognitive control proposal – is that mind wandering is a form of non-conscious guidance due to cognitive control. When the agent’s current goal is deemed insufficiently rewarding, the cognitive control system initiates a search for a new, more rewarding goal. This search is the process of unintentional mind wandering. After developing the proposal, and relating it to literature on mind (...) wandering and on cognitive control, I discuss explanations the proposal affords, testable predictions the proposal makes, and philosophical implications the proposal has. (shrink)

This chapter defends the thesis that feeling conviction is sufficient for belief: if you feel conviction that p, then you believe that p. I begin with a neutral characterization of belief in terms of its normative profile: belief is a state that is subject to certain distinctive norms of rationality. The main argument of the chapter is that feelings of conviction are beliefs because they are subject to the same norms of rationality that govern our beliefs. Functionalists often deny that (...) feelings of conviction constitute beliefs when they play dysfunctional causal roles, as in cases of mad belief or delusion or implicit bias, but this only serves to obscure the kind of irrationality involved in such cases. These are dysfunctional beliefs, rather than non-doxastic states, or "in-between" cases. (shrink)

Our paper serves as an introduction to a budding field: the philosophy of mind-wandering. We begin with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated or stimulus-independent. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto centre stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations that researchers must overcome to move forward. Specifically, the standard definitions do not account for (i) the dynamics of mind wandering, (ii) task-unrelated thought that does not qualify as mind-wandering, (...) and (iii) the ways that mind-wandering can be task-related. We then survey three philosophical accounts that improve upon the current psychological definitions. We first present our account of mind-wandering as “unguided thinking”. Next we review Thomas Metzinger’s view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency, as well as Peter Carruthers’s and Fabian Dorsch’s definitions of mind-wandering as disunified thinking. We argue that these latter views are inadequate, and we show that our definition of mind-wandering as unguided thinking is not only conceptually and phenomenologically precise but also can be operationalized in a principled way for empirical research. (shrink)

Sometimes, thinking a thought and saying something to oneself are the same event. Call this the ‘thinking-as-speaking’ thesis. It stands in opposition to the idea that we think something first, and then say it. One way to argue for the thesis is to show that the content of a token thought cannot be fully represented by a token mental state before the production of the utterance which expresses it. I make an argument for that claim based on speech act theory. (...) Many inner speech utterances are inner speech acts; as such they are individuated by an amalgam of semantic content and illocutionary force, which only come together with the performance of the speech act. Call the performance of a speech act its meaning and call its meaning its content. Since a token thought is individuated by its content it follows that the content of the speech act is not represented by any token mental state before the speech act is performed. Metaphysically, a thought, when it is an inner speech act, is not an object of any kind, but an action – the action of performing the speech act. I illustrate my argument with the action of deciding something. (shrink)

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and are insufficiently (...) precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

Researchers in the psychological sciences have put forward the thesis that various sources of psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific evidence demonstrate that being conscious of our mental states does not make any difference to our behaviour. In this paper, I argue that the evidence marshalled in support of this view — which I call psychological epiphenomenalism — is subject to major objections, relies on a superficial reading of the relevant literature, and fails to engage with the more precise ways in which (...) philosophers understand mental states to be conscious. I then appeal to work on implementation intentions to demonstrate that an intention's being 'access conscious' enhances its functional role, which makes it more likely that we will successfully carry out our intended behaviour. The result is that consciousness in at least one relevant sense is not epiphenomenal, with further work remaining to be done to show how other kinds of consciousness cause behaviour too. (shrink)

What occurs in the mind of an expert who is performing at their very best? In this paper, I survey the history of debate concerning this question. I suggest that expertise is neither solely a mastery of the automatic nor solely a mastery of intelligence in skilled action control. Experts are also capable of performing automatic actions intelligently. Following this, I argue that unconscious-thought theory (UTT) is a powerful tool in coming to understand the role of executive, intelligent action control (...) in the fluidly automatic performance of expertise. Relying on a body of empirical evidence concerning the cognitive structures and perceptual strategies employed by experts, I show that the realm of skilled action is an ideal environment within which the powers of unconscious cognitive processing can have positive effects on action. I conclude that experts rely upon unconscious thinking in the production of intelligently automatic skilled actions. (shrink)

Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but extends to (...) cases of cross-modal perception, threatening representationalism about consciousness in general. I then give two responses to the challenge, both of which appeal to intentional modes. The difference in intentional mode between a thought and a visual perception can either explain why we should not expect any phenomenal overlap between the two experiences, or it can make it clear why the phenomenal overlap is easy to overlook. I show that these responses are available to the representationalist about perceptual consciousness, as well as the proponent of cognitive phenomenology. The upshot is that, when it comes to the matching content challenge, both perceptual representationalism and cognitive representationalism stand on equal dialectical footing. (shrink)

The sensory constraint on conscious thought says that if a thought is phenomenally conscious, its phenomenal properties must be reducible to some sensory phenomenal character. I argue that the burgeoning psychological literature on aphantasia, an impoverishment in the ability to generate mental imagery, provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint. The best explanation of aphantasics’ introspective reports, neuroimaging, and task performance is that some aphantasics have conscious thoughts without sensory mental imagery. This argument against the sensory constraint supports the existence (...) of a non-sensory phenomenology of thought. Moreover, this argument can be extended to show that this non-sensory phenomenology determines a thought content. Finally, it can potentially diagnose the disagreement over cognitive phenomenology in the philosophy of mind, as such disagreement may turn on interpersonal variation in mental imagery. (shrink)

No es pensando como creamos mundos. Es comprendiendo el mundo como aprendemos a pensar. Cosmovisión es un término que debe significar un conjunto de fundamentos a partir de los cuales emerge una comprensión sistémica del Universo, sus componentes como la vida, el mundo en que vivimos, la naturaleza, el fenómeno humano y sus relaciones. Es, por tanto, un campo de la filosofía analítica alimentado por las ciencias, cuyo objetivo es ese conocimiento agregado y epistemológicamente sostenible sobre todo lo que somos (...) y contenemos, que nos rodea y con lo que nos relacionamos de alguna manera. Es algo tan antiguo como el pensamiento humano y, además de utilizar elementos de la cosmología científica, engloba todo lo que en filosofía y ciencia se refiere al universo y la vida. Una cosmovisión no es un conjunto de ideas, hipótesis y suposiciones, sino un sistema basado en la observación, el análisis, la evidencia y la demostración. Ninguna cosmovisión pretende definir, establecer, proponer, sino solo comprender, analizar e interpretar. Cada uno de nosotros construimos y transportamos nuestra cosmovisión a lo largo de nuestra vida, sin establecer formas, como trasfondo de nuestro pensamiento y comportamiento. Lingüísticamente, el término “cosmovisión” se deriva del alemán, equivalente al concepto de “Weltanschauung” utilizado por varios filósofos. Sin embargo, esta relación lingüística no es aplicable porque va en contra de lo que proponemos como cosmovisión. Esta palabra alemana hace referencia a una visión prelógica o protoexperimental de la realidad, con un contexto intuitivo y alejado de un conocimiento crítico que aún no existía en el momento de su formulación. Sin duda, las cosmovisiones, no tiene sentido en que las entendamos, cobijen y utilicen estos elementos proto-experimentales o prelógicos que incluyen la historia, el inconsciente colectivo y todos los arquetipos que portamos. Sin embargo, en el concepto que aquí aplicamos, la cosmovisión va mucho más allá de este contenido, primero al someterlo constantemente al pensamiento crítico actual y, finalmente, al hacer de la experiencia analítica (y no del pensamiento o la intuición en sí) su verdadero universo. António Lopes expone la amplitud de este contenido: -/- “Las cosmovisiones no son el producto del pensamiento. No nacen del simple deseo de saber. La aprehensión de la realidad es un momento importante en su configuración, sin embargo, es uno solo. Proviene de la conducta vital, de la experiencia de vida, de la estructura de nuestra totalidad psíquica. El apoyo de la vida a la conciencia en el conocimiento de la realidad, en la apreciación de la vida y en la realidad volitiva, es el trabajo lento y arduo que ha hecho la humanidad en el desarrollo de los conceptos de vida. (W. Dilthey, 1992 [1911]: 120)” . En este trabajo buscamos esbozar una cosmovisión a partir de las realidades que ofrece la ciencia en la actualidad. No nos proponemos, en ningún momento, hacer ciencia; o teorizar la filosofía, pero siempre buscaremos ser apoyados por ellos o, al menos, protegidos por ellos de las distorsiones cognitivas que solemos llevar. -/- . (shrink)

I present an argument that propositional attitudes are not mental states. In a nutshell, the argument is that if propositional attitudes are mental states, then only minded beings could have them; but there are reasons to think that some non-minded beings could bear propositional attitudes. To illustrate this, I appeal to cases of genuine group intentionality. I argue that these are cases in which some group entities bear propositional attitudes, but they are not subjects of mental states. Although propositional attitudes (...) are not mental states, I propose that they are typically co-instantiated with mental states. In an attempt to explain this co-instantiation, I suggest that propositional attitudes of minded beings are typically realized by mental states. (shrink)

Coordination in thought is the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. Such treatment can be indirect, via an identity belief, or direct. Direct coordination presents a problem concerning how this treatment is justified. Dickie accounts for the justification of coordination in terms of aptness to a motivational state: coordination serves to fulfil a need to represent things outside the mind. I argue that this account gets the problem coordination presents wrong, and so does not (...) present an adequate solution. While the material of that account may be reconfigured to provide a more promising proposal, I argue that this depends on a specious psychology of belief, and will anyway end up being circular. I propose an account that, while similar in some ways, improves on both the official and reconfigured Dickie-style accounts, and points to some broader conclusions about the nature of rational cognition. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nature of emotional experience in relation to the senses, and it defends the thesis that emotional experience is partly non-sensory. In §1 I introduce my reader to the debate. I reconstruct a position I call ‘restrictivism’ and motivate it as part of a reductive approach to mind’s place in nature. Drawing on intuitive but insightful remarks on the nature of sensation from Plato, I map out the conditions under which the restrictivist thesis is both substantive and (...) plausible. I then present two arguments against it. The first argument, which I lay out in §2, draws on recent empirical results in emotion research to show that restrictivism cannot be reconciled with the possibility of knowledge of one’s own emotional state by acquaintance. The second argument, which I present in §3, individuates a claim on which most contemporary theories of emotional valence converge and uses it to demonstrate that restrictivism has a false implication: it must deny that valence is experientially felt. (shrink)

Integration information theories posit that the integration of information is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. In this paper, we focus on three of the most prominent information integration theories: Information Integration Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and Attended Intermediate-Level Theory. We begin by explicating each theory and key concepts they utilize. We then argue that the current evidence indicates that the integration of information is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. Unlike GWT and AIR, IIT maintains that conscious experience is both (...) necessary and sufficient for consciousness. We present empirical evidence indicating that simple features are experienced in the absence of feature integration and argue that it challenges IIT’s necessity claim. In addition, we challenge IIT’s sufficiency claim by presenting evidence from hemineglect cases and amodal completion indicating that contents may be integrated and yet fail to give rise to subjective experience. Moreover, we present empirical evidence from subjects with frontal lesions who are unable to carry out simple instructions and argue that they are irreconcilable with GWT. Lastly, we argue that empirical evidence indicating that patients with visual agnosia fail to identify objects they report being conscious of present a challenge to AIR’s necessity claim. (shrink)

It is usual to distinguish between two kinds of doxastic attitude: standing or dispositional states, which govern our actions and persist throughout changes in consciousness; and conscious episodes of acknowledging the truth of a proposition. What is the relationship between these two kinds of attitude? Normally, the conscious episodes are in harmony with the underlying dispositions, but sometimes they come apart and we act in a way that is contrary to our explicit conscious judgements. Philosophers have often tried to explain (...) these situations in largely doxastic terms, by identifying one or other of the attitudes as our ‘real’ beliefs. This chapter argues that this is not generally realistic and we should appeal to a wider range of psychological attitudes. Such an account would be best supported by a picture of the unconscious mind which does not sharply separate the doxastic from the conative and the affective. (shrink)

This essay presents the conditional probability of co-contribution account of the individuation of cognitive systems (CPC) and argues that CPC provides an attractive basis for a theory of the cognitive self. The argument proceeds in a largely indirect way, by emphasizing empirical challenges faced by an approach that relies entirely on predictive processing (PP) mechanisms to ground a theory of the cognitive self. Given the challenges faced by PP-based approaches, we should prefer a theory of the cognitive self of the (...) sort CPC offers, one that accommodates variety in the kinds of mechanism that, when integrated, constitute a cognitive system (and thus the cognitive self), to a theory according to which the cognitive self is composed of essentially one kind of thing, for instance, prediction-error minimization mechanisms. The final section focuses on one of the central functions of the cognitive self: to engage in conscious reasoning. It is argued that the phenomenon of conscious, deliberate reasoning poses an apparently insoluble problem for a PP-based view, one that seems to rest on a structural limitation of predictive-processing models. In a nutshell, conscious reasoning is a single-stream phenomenon, but, in order for PP to apply, two streams of activity must be involved, a prediction stream and an input stream. Thus, with regard to the question of the nature of the self, PP-based views must yield to an alternative approach, regardless of whether proponents of the predictive processing, as a comprehensive theory of cognition, can handle the various empirical challenges canvassed in the preceding section. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content is just to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficulty is (...) insurmountable: the contents of occurrent desires cannot be determined by acts of predication. (shrink)

There is no abstract for this chapter. The following is a summary. -/- We distinguish between, explicit, inadvertent, and habitual racist actions. We argue that while inadvertent bigots and habitual racists are inclined to (sincerely) deny that they committed a racially motivated action, they have different reasons for their denial. Inadvertent bigots are denying it because, however deeply they search, they are not going to find any such motive. Habitual racists, by contrast, may hold explicit egalitarian attitudes but they are (...) nonetheless implicitly racially motivated. There is thus an implicit stressful conflict between their covert racist intentions and their overt egalitarian attitudes. While they aren’t aware of the source of this distress, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that they nevertheless will engage in dissonance-reducing strategies. Specifically, we argue that habitual racists will be inclined to confabulate a description of the action in non-racial terms. (shrink)

Objective Manic and depressive phases of bipolar disorder (BD) show opposite psychomotor symptoms. Neuronally, these may depend on altered relationships between sensorimotor network (SMN) and subcortical structures. The study aimed to investigate the functional relationships of SMN with substantia nigra (SN) and raphe nuclei (RN) via subcortical-cortical loops, and their alteration in bipolar mania and depression, as characterized by psychomotor excitation and inhibition. -/- Method In this resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study on healthy (n = 67) and BD (...) patients (n = 100), (1) functional connectivity (FC) between thalamus and SMN was calculated and correlated with FC from SN or RN to basal ganglia (BG)/thalamus in healthy; (2) using an a-priori-driven approach, thalamus-SMN FC, SN-BG/thalamus FC, and RN-BG/thalamus FC were compared between healthy and BD, focusing on manic (n = 34) and inhibited depressed (n = 21) patients. -/- Results (1) In healthy, the thalamus-SMN FC showed a quadratic correlation with SN-BG/thalamus FC and a linear negative correlation with RN-BG/thalamus FC. Accordingly, the SN-related FC appears to enable the thalamus-SMN coupling, while the RN-related FC affects it favoring anti-correlation. (2) In BD, mania showed an increase in thalamus-SMN FC toward positive values (ie, thalamus-SMN abnormal coupling) paralleled by reduction of RN-BG/thalamus FC. By contrast, inhibited depression showed a decrease in thalamus-SMN FC toward around-zero values (ie, thalamus-SMN disconnection) paralleled by reduction of SN-BG/thalamus FC (and RN-BG/thalamus FC). The results were replicated in independent HC and BD datasets. -/- Conclusions These findings suggest an abnormal relationship of SMN with neurotransmitters-related areas via subcortical-cortical loops in mania and inhibited depression, finally resulting in psychomotor alterations. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p.

É minha afirmação que a tabela da intencionalidade (racionalidade, mente, pensamento, linguagem, personalidade etc.) que apresenta proeminentemente aqui descreve mais ou menos precisamente, ou pelo menos serve como um heurista para, como pensamos e nos comportamos, e por isso engloba não meramente filosofia e psicologia, mas tudo o resto (história, literatura, matemática, política etc.). Note especialmente que a intencionalidade e a racionalidade como eu (juntamente com Searle, Wittgenstein e outros) a vêem, inclui tanto ações ou reflexos automatizados inconscientes do Sistema (...) 1. -/- Eu forneço uma pesquisa crítica de algumas das principais descobertas de dois dos mais eminentes alunos de comportamento dos tempos modernos, Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle, sobre a estrutura lógica da intencionalidade (mente, linguagem, comportamento), tendo como ponto de partida a descoberta fundamental de Wittgenstein – que todos os problemas verdadeiramente 'filosóficos' são os mesmos — confusões sobre como usar a linguagem em um contexto específico, e por isso todas as soluções são as mesmas — olhando como a linguagem pode ser usada no contexto em questão para que suas condições de verdade sejam (Condições de Satisfação ou COS) são claras. O problema básico é que se pode dizer qualquer coisa, mas não se pode significar (COS claro do Estado para) qualquer expressão arbitrária e significado só é possível em um contexto muito específico. Analiso vários escritos por e sobre eles da perspectiva moderna dos dois sistemas de pensamento (popularizados como "pensando rápido, pensando devagar"), empregando uma nova tabela de intencionalidade e nova nomenclatura de sistemas duplos. Eu mostro que este é um heurista poderoso para descrever o comportamento. -/- Assim, todo o comportamento está intimamente conectado se tomar o ponto de vista correto. A Ilusão fenomenológica (esquecimento ao nosso Sistema 1 automatizado) é universal e se estende não apenas ao longo da filosofia, mas ao longo da vida. Tenho certeza que Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg e o Papa seriam incrédulos se fossem informados de que sofrem do mesmo problema que Hegel, Husserl e Heidegger, (ou que diferem apenas em grau de viciados em drogas e sexo em serem motivados pela estimulação de seus cortices frontais pela entrega de dopamina (e mais de 100 outros produtos químicos) através do tegmentum ventral e do núcleo accumbens), mas é claramente verdadeiro. Enquanto os fenomenologistas só perderam muito tempo de muitas pessoas, eles estão desperdiçando a terra e o futuro de seus descendentes. (shrink)

É minha afirmação que a tabela da intencionalidade (racionalidade, mente, pensamento, linguagem, personalidade etc.) que apresenta proeminentemente aqui descreve mais ou menos precisamente, ou pelo menos serve como um heurista para, como pensamos e nos comportamos, e por isso engloba não meramente filosofia e psicologia, mas tudo o resto (história, literatura, matemática, política etc.). Note especialmente que a intencionalidade e a racionalidade como eu (juntamente com Searle, Wittgenstein e outros) a vêem, inclui tanto ações ou reflexos automatizados inconscientes do Sistema (...) 1. Eu forneço uma pesquisa crítica de algumas das principais descobertas de dois dos mais eminentes alunos de comportamento dos tempos modernos, Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle, sobre a estrutura lógica da intencionalidade (mente, linguagem, comportamento), tendo como ponto de partida a descoberta fundamental de Wittgenstein – que todos os problemas verdadeiramente 'filosóficos' são os mesmos — confusões sobre como usar a linguagem em um contexto específico, e por isso todas as soluções são as mesmas — olhando como a linguagem pode ser usada no contexto em questão para que suas condições de verdade sejam (Condições de Satisfação ou COS) são claras. O problema básico é que se pode dizer qualquer coisa, mas não se pode significar (COS claro do Estado para) qualquer expressão arbitrária e significado só é possível em um contexto muito específico. Analiso vários escritos por e sobre eles da perspectiva moderna dos dois sistemas de pensamento (popularizados como "pensando rápido, pensando devagar"), empregando uma nova tabela de intencionalidade e nova nomenclatura de sistemas duplos. Eu mostro que este é um heurista poderoso para descrever o comportamento. Assim, todo o comportamento está intimamente conectado se tomar o ponto de vista correto. A Ilusão fenomenológica (esquecimento ao nosso Sistema 1 automatizado) é universal e se estende não apenas ao longo da filosofia, mas ao longo da vida. Tenho certeza que Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg e o Papa seriam incrédulos se fossem informados de que sofrem do mesmo problema que Hegel, Husserl e Heidegger, (ou que diferem apenas em grau de viciados em drogas e sexo em serem motivados pela estimulação de seus cortices frontais pela entrega de dopamina (e mais de 100 outros produtos químicos) através do tegmentum ventral e do núcleo accumbens), mas é claramente verdadeiro. Enquanto os fenomenologistas só perderam muito tempo de muitas pessoas, eles estão desperdiçando a terra e o futuro de seus descendentes. (shrink)

经过半个世纪的遗忘,意识的本质现在是行为科学和哲学中最热门的话题。从路德维希·维特根斯坦在20世纪30年代的开创性工作(蓝本和布朗书),到50年代到现在,他的逻辑继承者约翰·西尔尔(John Searle)的开创性工作开始,我创建了下表,作为推进这项研究的启发。行显示学习的各个方面或方式,列显示由意识逻辑结构(LSC)的两个系统(双过程)组成的非自愿过程和自愿行为,也可以视为逻辑结构理性( LSR-Searle),行为(LSB),人格(LSP),现实(LSOR),故意性(LSI)——古典哲学术语,意识的描述性心理学(DPC),思维的描述性心理学(DPT)——或者更好,思想描述心理学(LD PT)的语言,这里介绍的术语,以及我最近的其他著作中介绍的术语。 那些希望从现代两个系统的观点来看为人类行为建立一个全面的最新框架的人,可以查阅我的书《路德维希的哲学、心理学、Min d和语言的逻辑结构》维特根斯坦和约翰·西尔的《第二部》(2019年)。那些对我更多的作品感兴趣的人可能会看到《会说话的猴子——一个末日星球上的哲学、心理学、科学、宗教和政治——文章和评论2006-20 19年第3次(2019年)和自杀乌托邦幻想21篇世纪4日(2019年)。.

我的论点是，这里突出的故意表（理性、思想、思想、语言、个性等）或多或少地准确地描述了我们思考和行为的方式，因此它不包括仅仅是哲学和心理学，但一切（历史，文学，数学，政治等）。特别要注意，故意和理性，因 为我（连同西尔，维特根斯坦和其他人）认为它，包括有意识的审议语言系统2和无意识的自动前语言系统1的动作或反射。 我提供了一个关键的调查，两个最杰出的学生的行为在现代的一些主要发现， 路德维希·维特根斯坦和约翰·西尔，关于故意的逻辑结构（思想、语言、行为），以维特根斯坦的基本发现为出发点——所有真正的"哲学"问题都是一样的——关于在特定上下文中使用语言的困惑，因 此所有解决方案都是相同的——研究如何在问题语境中使用语言，使其真理条件（满意条件或 COS） 是明确的。基本问题是，一个人可以说什么，但一个人不能意味着（状态明确的COS）任何任意的话语和意义只有在非常具体的上下文中才可能。我从现代两种思想体系（被推广为"思维快，思维慢"） 的角度分析各种著作，采用新的意向表和新的双系统命名法。我表明，这是一个强大的启发式描述行为。 因此，如果一个人采取正确的观点，所有行为都是密切相关的。现象幻象（遗忘我们的自动化系统1）是通用的，不仅延伸到整个哲学，而且贯穿整个生命。我确信，如果乔姆斯基、奥巴马、扎克伯格和教皇被告知他们患有与黑 格尔、胡塞尔和海德格尔同样的问题，他们将会难以置信（或者，他们只与毒品和性瘾君子在程度上有所不同，他们的动机是通过心室和核积体来刺激他们的前皮质（和其他100种化学品），这显然是事实。虽然现象学家只浪 费了很多人的时间，但他们却在浪费地球和他们后代的未来。 .

While philosophers of mind have devoted abundant time and attention to questions of content and consciousness, philosophical questions about the nature and scope of mental action have been relatively neglected. Galen Strawson’s account of mental action, arguably the most well-known extant account, holds that cognitive mental action consists in triggering the delivery of content to one’s field of consciousness. However, Strawson fails to recognize several distinct types of mental action that might not reduce to triggering content delivery. In this paper, (...) we argue that meditation provides a useful model for understanding a wider range of types of mental action than heretofore recognized. Conclusions yielded by two distinct bodies of current psychological research on meditation and cognition, and meditation and introspection, buttress meditation’s suitability for this role. (shrink)

Phenomenal contrast arguments (PCAs) are normally employed as arguments showing that a certain mental feature contributes to (the phenomenal character of) experience, that certain contents are represented in experience and that kinds of sui generis phenomenologies such as cognitive phenomenology exist. In this paper we examine a neglected aspect of such arguments, i.e., the kind of mental episodes involved in them, and argue that this happens to be a crucial feature of the arguments. We use linguistic tools to determine the (...) lexical aspect of verbs and verb phrases – the tests for a/telicity and for duration. We then suggest that all PCAs can show is the presence of a generic achievement-like phenomenology, especially in the cognitive domain, which contrasts with the role that PCAs are given in the literature. (shrink)

It is often supposed one can draw a distinction, among the assumptions on which an inference rests, between certain background assumptions and certain more salient, or foregrounded, assumptions. Yet what may such a fore-v-background structure, or such structures, consist it? In particular, how do they relate to consciousness? According to a ‘Boring View’, such structures can be captured by specifying, for the various assumptions of the inference, whether they are phenomenally conscious, or access conscious, or else how easily available they (...) are to such consciousness. According to an ‘Interesting View’, there are fore-v-background structures over and above such classifications. The chapter gestures at reasons for thinking that an Interesting View at least merits exploration. The paper discusses some recent contributions to such a view in analytical philosophy; some remarks in Husserl on what he dubbed the horizonal dimension of acts of consciousness; and psychological work on the role of gist or schema representations in perception and memory. It is proposed that background assumptions can figure in consciousness by being as it were condensed into a consciously, though inattentively, entertained notion of their overall thematic gist, where this thematic gist gives the drift of a possible elucidation of how or why such-and-such salient grounds mean that so-and-so conclusion holds. (shrink)

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to (...) intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint. (shrink)

If there is content that we reason on, cognitive content, it is in the head and accessible to reasoning mechanisms. This paper discusses the phenomenal theory of cognitive content, according to which cognitive contents are the contents of phenomenal consciousness. I begin by distinguishing cognitive content from the closely associated notion of narrow content. I then argue, drawing on prior work, that the phenomenal theory can plausibly account for the cognitive contents of many relatively simple mental states. My main focus (...) in this paper is the question whether the phenomenal theory can account for the apparently abstract and complex cognitive contents of "high-level" thoughts. It might seem dubious that the theory can account for such cognitive contents, because cognitive phenomenology is too scarce and too thin. However, I argue there are in fact few abstract or complex cognitive contents, so the phenomenal theory's predictions are correct. This position explains some apparently irrational behavior that is otherwise hard to explain, and it makes sense of the central role of inner speech and other forms of consciousness in reasoning. (shrink)

To some it is a shallow platitude that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support. To yet others it is a false dogma. In this chapter, I defend the claim that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component, confining the claim to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. It is one thing, I emphasize, to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has an auditory-phonological component—quite another to propose that (...) it always does. When forced to argue for the stronger point, we stand to make a number of interesting discoveries about inner speech itself, and about our means for discriminating it from other psycholinguistic phenomena. Establishing the stronger conclusion also provides new leverage on debates concerning how we should conceive of, diagnose, and explain auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia. (shrink)

It is argued that although George Bealer's influential ‘Self-Consciousness argument’ refutes standard versions of reductive functionalism (RF), it fails to generalize in the way Bealer supposes. To wit, he presupposes that any version of RF must take the content of ‘pain’ to be the property of being in pain (and so on), which is expressly rejected in independently motivated versions of conceptual role semantics (CRS). Accordingly, there are independently motivated versions of RF, incorporating CRS, which avoid Bealer's main type of (...) refutation. I focus particularly on one such theory, which takes concepts to be event types that are individuated by their psychological roles, which has the resources of responding to each of the more specific worries Bealer expresses. (shrink)

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a distance (...) that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons. (shrink)

Upon first hearing sinewaves, all that can be discerned are beeps and whistles. But after hearing the original speech, the beeps and whistles sound like speech. The difference between these two episodes undoubtedly involves an alteration in phenomenal character. O’Callaghan (2011) argues that this alteration is non-sensory, but he leaves open the possibility of attributing it to some other source, e.g. cognition. I discuss whether the alteration in phenomenal character involved in sinewave speech provides evidence for cognitive phenomenology. I defend (...) both the existence of cognitive phenomenology and the phenomenal contrast method, as each concerns the case presented here. (shrink)

This study will examine the ontological dependency between the thinking act of the intellect and the intelligibility of the objects of thought. Whereas the intellectual tradition prior to Duns Scotus grounds the formation of the objects of thought and our ability to understand them with certainty in different forms of participation in the divine intellect, Scotus shows that the intelligibility of the objects of thought is internal to them alone and is not dependent on participation.

This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognitive self-assessments of their performance (...) on those tasks. The PWA showed no deficits in their ability to categorize objects for any of the three trial types (visual, thematic, and categorial). However, on the categorial trials, their metacognitive assessments of whether they had categorized correctly were less reliable than those of the control group. The categorial trials were distinguished from the others by the fact that the categorization could not be based on some immediately perceptible feature or on the objects’ being found together in a type of scenario or setting. This result offers preliminary evidence for a link between covert language use and a specific form of metacognition. (shrink)

Hili Razinsky, free downlad at link. ABSTRACT: Emotional perceptions are objectivist (objectivity-directed or cognitive) and conscious, both attributes suggesting they cannot be ambivalent. Yet perceptions, including emotional perceptions of value, allow for strictly objectivist ambivalence in which a person unitarily perceives the object in mutually undermining ways. Emotional perceptions became an explicandum of emotion for philosophers who are sensitive to the unique conscious character of emotion, impressed by the objectivist character of perceptions, and believe that the perceptual account solves a (...) worry about the possibility of a conflict between an emotion and a judgement. Back into the 1980s Greenspan has argued that emotional ambivalence is possible, her reasons implying that objectivist accounts of emotion are inconsistent with ambivalence. Tappolet has more recently replied that perceptual accounts allow for emotional ambivalence since the opposed values seen in ambivalence are good or bad in different senses. The present paper identifies strict objectivist ambivalence between judgements and between emotional perceptions by contrasting them with such ambivalence of separate values such as evoked by Tappolet. (shrink)

A brief review of the life and spiritual autobiography of the unique American mystic Adi Da (Franklin Jones). The sticker on the cover of some editions says `The most profound spiritual autobiography of all time` and this might well be true. I am in my 70´s and have read many books by spiritual teachers and on spirituality, and this is one of the greatest ones. Certainly it is by far the fullest and clearest account of the process of enlightenment I (...) have ever seen. Even if you have no interest at all in the most fascinating of all human psychological processes, it is an amazing document that reveals a great deal about religion, yoga, and human psychology and probes the depths and limits of human possibilities. I describe it in some detail and compare his teaching with that of the Indian mystic Osho. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Materialism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, dynamic systems theory and computationalism are popular views, but they were shown by Wittgenstein to be incoherent. The study of behavior encompasses all of human life but behavior is largely automatic and unconscious and even the conscious part, mostly expressed in language (which Wittgenstein equates with the mind), is not perspicuous, so it is critical to have a framework which Searle calls the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR) and I call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order (...) Thought (DPHOT). After summarizing the framework worked out by Wittgenstein and Searle, as extended by modern reasoning research, I comment on this first book in a trilogy on Human Nature by the leading authority on Wittgenstein. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX . (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought-content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present (...) an account of the nature of unsymbolized thinking that accords with and can be seen as a continuation of the activity of inner speech, while offering a way of explaining thought-content determinacy in terms of linguistic structures and representations. (shrink)

This paper brings together several strands of thought from both the analytic and phenomenological traditions in order to critically examine accounts of cognitive enhancement that rely on the idea of cognitive extension. First, I explain the idea of cognitive extension, the metaphysics of mind on which it depends, and how it has figured in recent discussions of cognitive enhancement. Then, I develop ideas from Husserl that emphasize the agential character of thought and the distinctive way that conscious thoughts are related (...) to one another. I argue that these considerations are necessary for understanding why forms of cognitive extension may diminish our cognitive lives in different ways. This does not lead to a categorical rejection of cognitive enhancement as unethical or bad for human flourishing, but does warrant a conservative approach to the design and implementation of cognitive artifacts. (shrink)

We take ourselves to have an inner life of thought, and we take ourselves to be capable of linguistically expressing our thoughts to others. But what is the nature of this “inner life” of thought? Is conscious thought necessarily carried out in language? This paper takes up these questions by examining Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. For Merleau-Ponty, language expresses thought. Thus it would seem that thought must be independent of, and in some sense prior to, the speech that expresses it. (...) He also claims, however, that thinking just is linguistic expression, and thus that language constitutes thought. The primary aim of this paper is to make sense of this constitutive claim while maintaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an inner life of thought that exists independently of linguistic expression, and that this inner life rightly deserves the label “thought”. The upshot of this account is twofold. First, it explains why the mainstream view of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression seems plausible, but is ultimately inadequate. Second, it functions as a corrective to contemporary debates about the nature and scope of phenomenal consciousness and the sense in which conscious experience has content. (shrink)