This is the first in a series of two articles that serve as an introduction to recent debates about cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology can be defined as the experience that is associated with cognitive activities, such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding. What is at issue in contemporary debates is not the existence of cognitive phenomenology, so defined, but rather its nature and theoretical role. The first article examines questions about the nature of cognitive phenomenology, while the second article explores the (...) philosophical implications of these questions for the role of consciousness in theories of intentionality, introspective self-knowledge, and knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

How come we can represent Bigfoot even though Bigfoot does not exist, given that representing something involves bearing a relation to it and we cannot bear relations to what does not exist? This is the problem of intentional inexistence. This paper develops a two-step solution to this problem, involving an adverbial account of conscious representation, or phenomenal intentionality, and the thesis that all representation derives from conscious representation. The solution is correspondingly two-part: we can consciously represent Bigfoot because consciously representing (...) Bigfoot does not involve bearing a relation to Bigfoot, but rather instantiating a certain non-relational property of representing Bigfoot-wise; and we can non-consciously represent Bigfoot because non-consciously representing Bigfoot does not involve bearing a relation to Bigfoot, but rather bearing a relation to conscious representations of Bigfoot. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

This is the second in a series of two articles that serve as an introduction to recent debates about cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology can be defined as the experience that is associated with cognitive activities, such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding. What is at issue in contemporary debates is not the existence of cognitive phenomenology, so defined, but rather its nature and theoretical role. The first article examines questions about the nature of cognitive phenomenology, while the second article explores the (...) philosophical implications of these questions for the role of consciousness in theories of intentionality, introspective self-knowledge, and knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

The ontology of (merely) intentional objects is a can of worms. If we can avoid ontological commitment to such entities, we should. In this paper, I offer a strategy for accomplishing that. This is to reject the traditional act-object account of intentionality in favor of an adverbial account. According to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of bearing the thinking-about relation to dragons, but of engaging in the activity of thinking dragon-wise.

Could there be a cognitive zombie – that is, a creature with the capacity for cognition, but no capacity for consciousness? Searle argues that there cannot be a cognitive zombie because there cannot be an intentional zombie: on this view, there is a connection between consciousness and cognition that is derived from a more fundamental connection between consciousness and intentionality. However, I argue that there are good empirical reasons for rejecting the proposed connection between consciousness and intentionality. Instead, I argue (...) that there is a connection between consciousness and cognition that is derived from a more fundamental connection between consciousness and rationality. On this view, there cannot be a cognitive zombie because there cannot be a rational zombie. (shrink)

We argue that the letter of the Extended Mind hypothesis can be accommodated by a strongly internalist, broadly Cartesian conception of mind. The argument turns centrally on an unusual but highly plausible view on the mark of the mental.

The cognitive phenomenology debate centers on two questions. (1) What is an apt characterization of the phenomenology of conscious thought? And (2), what role does this phenomenology play? I argue that the answers to the former question bear significantly on the answers to the latter question. In particular, I show that conservatism about cognitive phenomenology is not compatible with the view that phenomenology explains the constitution of conscious thought. I proceed as follows: To begin with, I analyze the phenomenology of (...) our sensory experiences and argue for a _weak phenomenal holism_ (WPH) about sensory phenomenology. Next, I explore how WPH can be integrated into the competing accounts of cognitive phenomenology. I argue that, given WPH, conservatism turns out to reduce phenomenal character to a merely concomitant phenomenon that has no explanatory power when it comes to the constitution of conscious thoughts. In contrast, liberalism is explanatorily more powerful in this respect. Finally, I propose a new version of liberalism that explains how phenomenology constitutes conscious thoughts and fits best with WPH. (shrink)

Recent work on consciousness has distinguished between the qualitative character of an experience (what a particular experience is like) and its subjective character or subjectivity (the for-me-ness of any experience). It is often suggested that subjectivity is a characteristic inner awareness subjects enjoy of their own occurrent experiences. A number of thinkers have also suggested that not only is each subject aware of her own experiences, but that in having these experiences she is aware of them as her own. This (...) is the subjectivity-mineness thesis: necessarily, an experience which is given to its subject is given as the subject’s own experience. I shall argue against the subjectivity-mineness thesis. While I agree that experiences are characterised by inner awareness, it is questionable whether inner awareness entails an awareness of my experiences as mine. I shall offer an alternative account of inner awareness, the impersonal account. On this account the subject of the experience is not presented in the content of inner awareness, but the mode of inner awareness is such that necessarily, this awareness is an awareness of experiences which belong to this subject. This is what makes inner awareness a characteristically first-personal form of awareness. (shrink)

Traditionally, intentionality is regarded as that feature of all and only mental states – paradigmatically beliefs and desires – in virtue of which they are directed at or are about something. The problem of intentionality is to explain how it fits into the natural order given the intuition that no physical entity can be intentionally directed in this sense. The basic assumption of this paper, proposed by enactivists, is that failure to naturalize intentionality and mental representation is partly due to (...) the fact that most participants in the debate take intentionality and mental representation to be equivalent. In contrast, it is proposed to treat intentionality as a feature of whole embodied agents (paradigmatically organisms) who can be directed at objects and states of affairs in various ways, while representation should be regarded as a feature of mental states (and their respective vehicles or underlying mechanisms). The present paper develops and motivates the distinction, applies it to Metzinger’s project of naturalizing phenomenal representation, and demonstrates the range of theoretical options with respect to a delineation of cognition given the enactive proposal. It is taken as problematic that enactivism takes the realm of cognition to be identical to the realm of biology. Instead, a constraint on a theory of intentionality and representation is that it should delineate the subject matter of cognitive science and distinguish it from other sciences, also to leave room for the possibility of artificial intelligence. One important implication of the present proposal is that there can be creatures which can be intentionally directed without having the capacity to represent. That is, their intentionality is restricted to being able to be directed at existent things. Only creatures in possession of the right kind of neurocognitive architecture can produce and sustain representations in order to be directed at non-existent things. It is sketched how this approach conceives of intentionality as a developmental and layered concept, allowing for a hierarchical model of varieties of intentionality, ranging from the basic pursuit of local environmental goals to thoughts about fictional objects. (shrink)

I begin this paper by demonstrating that there is a perceived overlap between phenomenology and the personal level. This perception has recently played a decisive role in evaluating phenomenological contributions to discussions within cognitive science, for example, on topics of social cognition. In this paper, I aim not only to understand what might be meant by associating phenomenology with the personal level, but to cast this association in a critical light. I show that the personal level is essentially an explanatory (...) level, whereby perceptions and mental state terms (paradigmatically, belief and desire) explain purposive action. I then separate the notion of consciousness from the notion of the personal level. To do so, I advance Wittgenstein’s private language argument in conjunction with Sellars’ account of how the meaning of mental state terms derives from their explanatory function. Using the Wittgenstinian/Sellarsian picture as guide, I show that characterising personal level explanations by reference to conscious experiences imputes excess baggage over and above the commitment to a unique explanatory level. Yet, for many, ‘phenomenology’ is the level of conscious experience. I argue that it is when the extra baggage of assuming that we are aware of our explanatory, personal level mental states is coupled with the controversial claim that phenomenology is tantamount to the verbalisation of conscious states that the ill begotten association between them is arises. (shrink)

Propositional attitudes are often classified as non-phenomenal mental states. I argue that there is no good reason for doing so. The unwillingness to view propositional attitudes as being essentially phenomenal stems from a biased notion of phenomenality, from not paying sufficient attention to the idioms in which propositional attitudes are usually reported, from overlooking the considerable degree to which different intentional modes can be said to be phenomenologically continuous, and from not considering the possibility that propositional attitudes may be transparent, (...) just like sensations and emotions are commonly held to be: there may be no appropriate way of describing their phenomenal character apart from describing the properties and objects they represent. (shrink)

Clinicians and cognitive scientists typically conceive of delusions as doxastic—they view delusions as beliefs. But some philosophers have countered with anti-doxastic objections: delusions cannot be beliefs because they fail the necessary conditions of belief. A common response involves meeting these objections on their own terms by accepting necessary conditions on belief but trying to blunt their force. I take a different approach by invoking a cognitive-phenomenal view of belief and jettisoning the rational/behavioural conditions. On this view, the anti-doxastic claims can (...) be rejected outright, and doxasticism can be defended. I call this the cognitive phenomenological defence of doxasticism. (shrink)

One of the most enduring elements of Davidson’s legacy is the idea that intentionality is inherently normative. The normativity of intentionality means different things to different people and in different contexts, however. A subsidiary goal of this paper is to get clear on the sense in which Davidson means the thesis that intentionality is inherently normative. The central goal of the paper is to consider whether the thesis is true, in light of recent work on intentionality that insists on an (...) intimate connection between intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. According to several recent authors, there is a kind of intentionality – “phenomenal intentionality” – that is fully constituted by the phenomenal character of conscious experiences. I will argue that although Davidson’s thesis, when correctly understood, is compelling for most intentionality, it is false of phenomenal intentionality. I start, in §1, with an explication of the notion of phenomenal intentionality; in §2, I elucidate Davidson’s thesis and his case for it; in §3, I argue that the case does not extend to phenomenal intentionality; I close, in §4, with some objections and replies. (shrink)

This monograph introduces a meta-framework for conducting interdisciplinary research in the science of emotion, as well as a framework for a particular kind of theory of emotion. It can also be understood as a “cross-over” book that introduces neophytes to some of the current discourse and major challenges for an interdisciplinary approach to the science of emotion, especially from a philosophical perspective. It also engages experts from across the disciplines who are interested in conducting an interdisciplinary approach to research and (...) theorizing in the science of emotion, and introduces to them some of the contemporary debates in the philosophy of emotion. It does so by providing a taxonomy of theories of emotion which allows one to understand the contemporary interdisciplinary discourse in the science of emotion as a debate between four fundamental types of theories of emotion—realism, instrumentalism, eliminative-realism, and eliminativism—and which can be found or potentially found across the disciplines, and by arguing for foundational principles which can unify, without consilience, these four kinds of approaches as perspectives about the same object of inquiry. It also covers a wide range of concerns, including the problem of skepticism in the science of emotion, the problem of the underdetermination of a theory by the evidence, the question of the place of ordinary intuitions and ordinary language for a science of emotion, the mind-body problem, the hard problem of consciousness, the meta-hard problem of consciousness, the problem of intentionality, questions about the rationality of emotions and whether emotions can be a vehicle for knowledge, and the debate between cognitive and noncognitive theories in the philosophy of emotion. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of cashing out the claim that intentionality is ultimately phenomenal: an indirect one, according to which the intentional content of an experiential intentional mental state is determined by the phenomenal character that state already possesses, so that intentionality is so determined only indirectly; a direct one, which centers on the very property of intentionality itself and can further be construed in two manners: either that very property is determined by (...) the above phenomenal character, or it is a sui generis phenomenal property, thereby giving its own contribution to the overall phenomenal character of that state. Yet neither way sounds ultimately satisfying. For the indirect way may work only under the assumption that intentionality is monadic. Since the direct way explicitly endorses this assumption, the indirect way must give pride of place to it. Yet the direct way seems to be unsuccessful, in any of its forms. Thus, the phenomenal intentionality research program ought to give way to another research program concerning intentionality. (shrink)

It may be true that we are epistemically in the dark about various things. Does this fact ground the truth of fallibilism? No. Still, even the most zealous skeptic will probably grant that it is not clear that one can be incognizant of their own occurrent phenomenal conscious mental goings-on. Even so, this does not entail infallibilism. Philosophers who argue that occurrent conscious experiences play an important epistemic role in the justification of introspective knowledge assume that there are occurrent beliefs. (...) But this assumption is false. This paper argues that there are no occurrent beliefs. And it considers the epistemic consequences this result has for views that attempt to show that at least some phenomenal beliefs are infallible. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature of consciousness’ intrinsic intentionality from a transcendental-phenomenological viewpoint. In recent philosophy of mind the essentially intentional character of consciousness has become obscured because the latter is predominantly understood in terms of “qualia” or the “what-it-is-like-ness” of mental states and it is hard to see why such subjective “feels”, of all things, could bestow states with objective reference. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, this is an inadequate understanding of consciousness, which should instead be defined in (...) terms of presence. Consciousness essentially takes place as presence-of, i.e., consists in something coming to appearance. This presence-of is not only a fundamental, irreducible phenomenon, but also in a radical sense un-naturalisable. Naturalism only knows “nature”, as the world of objects, and the question of intentionality then seems to be how certain inner-worldly objects can be “representations” of other inner-worldly objects. In fact, no object is ever intrinsically “about” anything. This is exclusively the nature of subjectivity qua consciousness, which is not an object alongside other objects but rather exists as the manifestation of objects. (shrink)

In the following précis, I provide a summary of Interdisciplinary Foundations for the Science of Emotion. Much of what I say can be found in the “About the “Book” section of my book, although I provide some elaborations here. My summary focuses primarily on the central aim of the book, and the general strategy that I take in order to achieve my aim. What I present is a proposal for an interdisciplinary science of emotion. That proposal goes by the name (...) of meta-semantic pluralisme, and a central principle of this proposal is what I refer to as the α-ωe principle. My summary includes chapter summaries, which provides not only a more detailed account of my general strategy, but also a summary of the fruitfulness of this first principle for interdisciplinary research and theorizing in the science of emotion, including the work it can do in the areas of metaphysics, language, consciousness, intentionality, rationality, and epistemology. Finally, one should note that some of the contents of this précis should also provide a response to at least some of the commentators’ requests for clarification, and I address the concerns not covered in this précis in my subsequent replies. (shrink)

As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of cashing out the claim that intentionality is ultimately phenomenal: (i) an indirect one, according to which the intentional content of an experiential intentional mental state is determined by the phenomenal character that state already possesses, so that intentionality is so determined only indirectly; (ii) a direct one, which centers on the very property of intentionality itself and can further be construed in two manners: either that very property is (...) determined by the above phenomenal character, or it is a sui generis phenomenal property, thereby giving its own contribution to the overall phenomenal character of that state. Yet neither way sounds ultimately satisfying. For the indirect way may work only under the assumption that intentionality is monadic. Since the direct way explicitly endorses this assumption, the indirect way must give pride of place to it. Yet the direct way seems to be unsuccessful, in any of its forms. Thus, the phenomenal intentionality research program ought to give way to another research program concerning intentionality. (shrink)

The meaning and significance of Benjamin Libet’s studies on the timing of conscious will have been widely discussed, especially by those wishing to draw sceptical conclusions about conscious agency and free will. However, certain important correctives for thinking about mental states and processes undermine the apparent simplicity and logic of Libet’s data. The appropriateness, relevance and ecological validity of Libet’s methods are further undermined by considerations of how we ought to characterise intentional actions, conscious intention, and what it means to (...) act with conscious intent. Recent extensions of Libet’s paradigm using fMRI and decision-based tasks suffer from similar limitations. The result is that these sorts of laboratory studies of isolated, trivial, decontextualized bodily movements, in a context of extended (conscious) intentional experimental participation and cooperation, are of dubious and potentially misleading relevance to the study of agency. (shrink)

Optimal decision-making requires us to accurately pinpoint the basis of our thoughts, e.g. whether they originate from our memory or our imagination. This paper argues that the phenomenal qualities of our subjective experience provide permissible evidence to revise beliefs, particularly as it pertains to memory. I look to the source monitoring literature to reconcile circumstances where mnemic beliefs and mnemic qualia conflict. By separating the experience of remembering from biological facts of memory, unusual cases make sense, such as memory qualia (...) without memory or a failure to have memory qualia with memory. I argue that a pragmatic, probabilistic approach to belief revision is a way to rationally incorporate information from conscious experience, whilst acknowledging its inherent difficulties as an epistemic source. I conclude with a Bayesian defense of source monitoring based on C.I. Lewis’ coherence argument for memorial knowledge. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that the self is a construct or illusion and simultaneously real. The notion of self is constitutive in metaphysics and operates subconsciously and indirectly in all human activities. The metaphysical self constitutes its own reality. The article is critical of developments in cognitive science and neuroscience where neurocentrism reduces self to brain processes. The tenet is that the self is more than its biological make-up and the measurement of brain processes. The metaphysical as well (...) as illusory aspects of self are discussed. Some important aspects of self that are visited include the construction of the self, its bodylines, contextuality, intentionality and unity. The nature of human intuition as grounded in our evolutionary make-up is proposed as a basis for the unity of the self. The role of the self in religion is briefly dealt with, focusing on the link between the notion of self and the concept of God. (shrink)

It may be true that we are epistemically in the dark about various things. Does this fact ground the truth of fallibilism? No. Still, even the most zealous skeptic will probably grant that it is not clear that one can be incognizant of their own occurrent phenomenal conscious mental goings-on. Even so, this does not entail infallibilism. Philosophers who argue that occurrent conscious experiences play an important epistemic role in the justification of introspective knowledge assume that there are occurrent beliefs. (...) But this assumption is false. This paper argues that there are no occurrent beliefs. And it considers the epistemic consequences this result has for views that attempt to show that at least some phenomenal beliefs are infallible. (shrink)

The present article is a critical assessment of the “Connection Principle” – the principle according to which the two key properties of mental states, intentionality and phenomenality , are necessarily co-instantiated. A theory of mind endorsing some version of this principle assumes that all intentional states are either conscious or otherwise potentially conscious. The Connection Principle, being a subject of much controversy in the past 15 years, has divided the community of philosophers of mind in two, as it were, irreconcilable (...) camps. What poses a special challenge to both friends and foes of the Connection Principle – albeit for different reasons – is a plausible explanation of intentional character of unconscious mental states. We want to point to and comment on certain weaknesses of Searle’s attempt to solve this problem – an attempt drawing on the idea that unconsciousmental states “retain” its “aspectual shape” while unconscious. Eventually, we will venture to show why the notion of aspectual shape cannot play the explanatory role assigned to it by Searle, and why a more restrictive and a more consistent criterion for ascribing intentionality to unconscious states is needed. This new criterion should be sensible to our folk-psychological intuition suggesting that there are dispositional states that play an indispensable causal role inour mental economy and, as such, build a genuine subset of all nconscious, i.e., purely neurophysiological states of our mind/brain.U tekstu se želimo kritički osvrnuti na Searleovo “načelovezanosti” – načelo prema kojemu su svojstvo intencionalnosti i svojstvo fenomenalnosti nužno koinstancirana. Svaka teorija uma koja uključuje neku varijantu tog načela polazi od pretpostavke da su sva intencionalna stanja ili svjesna ili potencijalno svjesna. Riječ je o stajalištu koje je polariziralo filozofe uma i u posljednjih petnaestak godina bilo predmetom zanimljivih rasprava. Moglo bi se reći da se prema stavu – bilo eksplicitnom bilo implicitnom – koji neki filozof uma zauzima prema načelu vezanosti može prepoznati opći istraživački program kojemu pripada. I za zagovornike i za protivnike načela vezanosti – doduše iz različitih razloga – osobiti izazov predstavlja objašnjenje intencionalnosti nesvjesnih mentalnih stanja. Cilj nam je ukazati na neke nedostatke Searleova pokušaja da riješi taj problem – pokušaja kojemu u osnovi leži zamisao da nesvjesna mentalna stanja zadržavaju svoju aspektualnost dok su nesvjesna. Konkretno, pokazat ćemo zašto pojam aspektualnosti ne može igrati eksplanatornu ulogu koju mu je Searle namijenio te zašto bi trebalo pronaći neki drugi, restriktivniji i konzistentniji kriterij pripisivanja intencionalnosti potencijalno svjesnim stanjima. Taj bi kriterij, prema našem shvaćanju, trebao biti kompatibilan s pučkopsihološkom intuicijom o postojanju dispozicijskih stanja koja igraju neizostavnu kauzalnu ulogu u našemmentalnom funkcioniranju i koja, kao takva, čine autentičan podskup svih nesvjesnih stanja našeg mozga/uma. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s intentions in the (...) world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

Part 1 of the thesis questions the traditional relation model of intentionality. After fixing reference on the target phenomenon, intentionality, and explaining my interest in it, I ask what sorts of things intentionality might be a relation to. I consider ordinary objects, properties, propositions and hybrid views, and conclude all make the intentional relation appear rather mysterious. From there, I move on to examine the relation view’s most prominent proponents, the tracking theorists—pointing out some challenges such views face, and concluding (...) that it might be worthwhile looking into alternatives to the relation view. Part 2 asks whether the newly emerging phenomenal intentionality movement can provide a viable alternative to the relation model of intentionality. After focusing on a specific kind of phenomenal intentionality theory—something I call modificationism—I examine three such accounts. From there I go on to discuss some common complaints/challenges these kinds of views face, and consider how they might be addressed within the modificationist framework. In Part 3, I address what I call the problem of cognitive contact: how do our contentful mental states manage to make cognitive contact with the ordinary objects (e.g. tables and chairs) that they appear to. The problem is particularly acute for any version of phenomenal intentionality that denies the relation view, and has been given very little attention in the literature. I consider how a modificationist might address this problem, and conclude that though some avenues appear promising, there is nevertheless a great deal of work to be done if modificationism, and phenomenal intentionality theory, is to overcome this problem. (shrink)