Barresi & Moore's “intentional schema” will not do the work of “theory of mind.” Their model will account neither for fundamental facts of social competence, such as the social attributions of the 10-month-old infant, nor the possibility that, though having a theory of mind, the chimpanzee's theory is “weaker” than the human's.

Barresi & Moore assume an equivalence between ontogenetic and evolutionaiy transformations of social understanding. The mechanisms of evolution allow for novel structures to arise, both through terminal addition and through the onset of novel pathways at time points that precede the end points of ancestral pathways. Terminal addition may not be the appropriate model for the evolution of human object-directed imitation, intermodal equivalence, or joint attention.

In recent publications, Michael Tye and Alva Noë have claimed that there is a sense in which a tilted plate looks round and another sense in which it looks elliptical. This paper argues that their proposal faces decisive objections. On Tye and Noë's account of ordinary, veridical perception, appearances are in constant conflict. As a characterization of ordinary visual experience, this cannot be correct. I examine various responses to this criticism, and conclude that they all fail. I then argue that (...) Noë's account has the further, unintended and undesirable consequence of promoting a version of the sense-datum theory. (shrink)

Hisashi Nasu, Lester Embree, George Psathas, and Ilja Srubar (eds.), Alfred Schutz and His Intellectual Partners; Sandra P. Thomas and Howard R. Pollio, Listening to Patients, A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice; Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation.

Phenomenology's systematic exploration of how a world comes into existence for knowers – knowers who are often conceptualized as individual and ostensibly isolated – requires that it provide some account of the constitution of alterity. In this paper, I address this issue by arguing that we apperceive alterity in terms of the intentionality of behavior. A corollary of this argument is that the apperception of an alter as specifically human is a secondary attribution, following the primary apperception of intention. I (...) further argue that the intentionality of behavior is understood through the projection of a narrative frame, or a “protonarrative,” onto the alter's behavior. I suggest that protonarrativity is the form that experience takes as its ontological condition. Our living is not simply known to us reflectively as protonarrative; rather, experience is lived as protonarrative. (shrink)

Environmental thinkers often suppose that the natural world (or some parts of it, at least) exists in its own right, independent of human concerns. The arguments developed in this paper suggest that it is possible to do justice to this thought without endorsing some form of metaphysical realism. Thus the early sections look to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception to develop an anti-realist account of the independent reality of the natural world, one, it is argued, that has certain advantages over the (...) accounts proffered by 'environmental realists'. The concluding sections draw upon certain of Merleau-Ponty's later works to defend a rather bolder claim: that the conceptions of realism endorsed by environmental thinkers are not just ill equipped but, in fact, unable to acknowledge what may be provisionally referred to as the more-than-human dimension of reality. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the temporal openness of perceptual experience provides insight into the basic structure of learning. I draw on Husserl's account of the mutability of the retained past inAnalyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Merleau‐Ponty's account of the perceptual field, as well as his remarks on habit, inPhenomenology of Perception, in order to elucidate the relation between the perceptual past and the future it portends. More specifically, I argue that retention and habituation in perceptual experience (...) open dimensions of meaning that transform the initial, initiating, experiences in which meaning is first established. As a result, our experience of meaning is always subject to further development that we cannot anticipate. This temporal openness has consequences for our learning to navigate a perceptual field, but also, I argue, for our developing more complex ways of engaging with the world. Specifically, I show how learning requires that we commit ourselves to an object or task before we are in a position to recognize the implications or significance of our commitment. I further consider the role that others play in the inherent openness of learning to the development of new meaning. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore provide a welcome focus on children's abilities to integrate first and third person information about intentional relations but they pay insufficient attention to the origins of children's understanding of the nature of subjective orientations vis-à-vis a shared world and the potential significance of such understanding as a source (rather than an outcome) of domain-general information-processing capacities.

Immediate imitation is likely to be a major, direct input to Barresi & Moore's level 2 competence, but deferred imitation is unlikely to play a key role in the transition to level 3, because (1) the attribution of first person knowledge is neither a necessary cause nor an obvious consequence of deferred imitation, and (2) deferred imitation does not correlate phylogenetically with capacities that more plausibly either yield or reflect a concept of intentional agency.

While poststructuralist feminist theorists have clarified our understanding of the gendered subject as produced through a matrix of language, culture, and psycho-sexual affects, they have found agency difficult to ground. I argue that this is because in these theories the body has served primarily as an inscribed surface. In response to this surface body, particular to this age, I have turned to Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth which allows us to theorize the agency crucial to feminist politics. While the poststructuralists' rejection (...) of depth is largely due to its roots in Cartesian rationality, depth is much more than this. Rather than allowing for the impossibility of political action, depth means that as bodily moving and acting subjects we are part of Being, and thus part of the questions raised in this age, even if it is a mark of this age that this tends to be forgotten. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore's account has at least two implications for moral psychology. First, it appears to provide support for cognitive theories of moral competence. Second, their claim that the development of social understanding depends upondomain-generalchanges in cognitive ability appears to oppose the idea that moral competence is under-pinned by a moral module.

This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—object to its (...) gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin. (shrink)

The present paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of Flesh/reversibility intellectually is significantly flawed, and leads phenomenology into something of a dead end. This is shown through the following strategy. First Merleau-Ponty’s account of originary perception and his critique of the reflective attitude are expounded. They are shown to culminate in rejection of the subject-object relation as an ontological fundamental in favour of a ‘hyper-reflective method’. A critique of Merleau-Ponty’s position is then offered. It argues that originary perception is not logically (...) prior to reflective thought, and that Merleau-Ponty fails to do justice to the scope of the subject-object relation. Specifically, he overlooks the way in which the relation is the basis of our practical perceptual orientation. It is then shown how this relation actually pervades Merleau-Ponty’s own all-important ‘hyper-reflective’ alternative – the notion of ‘Flesh’. Possible counter-arguments are considered and refuted. The.. (shrink)

For the better part of the past decade, global social movements have drawn popular attention to the power of image production and acts of representation, particularly the ways ubiquitous cameras challenge the exercise of power This essay lays out a theoretical schema for interrogating a broader “politics of visibility” at work in the early twenty-first century, most readily apparent through the activities of smartphone-enabled and visually-savvy activists. As new media technologies have opened up new strategies of representation, these modes of (...) representation have been incorporated into existing media practices that delimit the ways in which the consequentiality of various movements and political projects can be understood. Theoretically revisiting the concept of visibility, this essay critiques the relationship between technology and the production of knowledge in media studies before arguing that the visibility of an event presages a consequentiality partially determined by the ways in which it is rendered perceptible and thus, intelligible. (shrink)

Here it is shown that 'vacant nature' is deployed as sign in Anglo-American landscape representation of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to support a Cartesian imaginary of spatial extension. The referent of this imaginary is variously denoted as 'America' (John Locke), the 'north west' (Jefferson), the 'wilderness' (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and the 'frontier' (Frederick Jackson Turner) but throughout it is essentially the same 'vacant' landscape; its function is to produce a site and space of appearance for an imperial self, an (...) isolate pursuing self-extension through commodity production and consumption. This spatial representation—the predecessor of the abstract space of shopping malls, interstates, commercial advertising, global markets, office buildings, and suburbs—is contrasted with 'place,' a space shaped by topography, collective memory, and ecological constraint. (shrink)

The difference between first and third person information may be thought of as a difference in either informationalcontentor informationalmodality. Each option faces some problems. I try to sort out some of these issues and raise a question about the explanatory force of the notion of a schema.

ArgumentThis essay considers the work of projection and the hand of the projectionist as important components of the social space of the cinema as it comes into being in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. I bring the concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the place of the body as an entity that applies itself to the world “like a hand to an instrument” into a discussion of the pre-cinematic projector as an instrument that we can interpret (...) as evidence of the experience of the work of the projectionist in the spirit of film theory and media archaeology, moving work on instrumentation in a different direction from the analysis of the work of the black box in laboratory studies. Projection is described as a psychological as well as a mechanical process. It is suggested that we interpret the projector not simply in its activity as it projects films, but in its movement from site to site and in the workings of the hand of its operator behind the scenes. This account suggests a different perspective on the cinematic turn of the nineteenth century, a concept typically approached through the study of the image, the look, the camera, and the screen. (shrink)

In our commentary we elaborate on Barresi & Moore's use of language as a tool. In particular, we highlight the importance of cognitive linguistic research with its emphasis on the relation between morpnosyntax and intentional schemes. We also speculate about how language itself might play a role in children's integration of first and third person knowledge.