Bodily Awareness, Imagination and the Self

Common wisdom tells us that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These senses provide us with a means of gaining information concerning objects in the world around us, including our own bodies. But in addition to these five senses, each of us is aware of our own body in ways in which we are aware of no other thing. These ways include our awareness of the position, orientation, movement, and size of our limbs (proprioception and kinaesthesia), our sense of balance, and our awareness of bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, and sensations of pressure or temperature. We can group these together under the title ‘bodily awareness’. The legitimacy of grouping together these ways of gaining information is shown by the fact that they are unified phenomenologically; they provide the subject with an awareness of his or her body ‘from the inside’. Bodily awareness is an awareness of our own bodies from within. This perspective on our own bodies does not, cannot, vary. As Merleau‐Ponty writes, ‘my own body…is always presented to me from the same angle’ (1962: 90). It has recently been claimed by a number of philosophers that, in bodily awareness, one is not simply aware of one's body as one's body, but one is aware of one's body as oneself. That is, when I attend to the object of bodily awareness I am presented not just with my body, but with my ‘bodily self’. The contention of the present paper is that such a view is misguided. In the first section I clarify just what is at issue here. In the remainder of the paper I present an argument, based on two claims about the nature of the imagination, against the view that the bodily self is presented in bodily awareness. Section two defends the dependency thesis; a claim about the relation between perception and sensory imagination. Section three defends a certain view about our capacity to imagine being other people. Section four presents the main argument against the bodily self awareness view and section five addresses some objections.     

Fallibility and Trust

I argue that while admission of one's own fallibility rationally requires one's readiness to stand corrected in the light of future evidence, it need have no consequences for one's present degrees of belief. In particular, I argue that one's fallibility in a given area gives one no reason to forego assigning credence 1 to propositions belonging to that area. I can thus be seen to take issue with David Christensen's recent claim that our fallibility has far‐reaching consequences for our account of rational belief and epistemic rationality. My arguments inter alia rely on the idea that in basing one's beliefs on one's evidence, one trusts both that one's evidence has the right pedigree and that one gets its probative force right, where such trust can rationally be invested without the need of any further evidence.     

Phenomenology of Bodily Integrity in Disfiguring Breast Cancer

In this paper, I explore the meaning of bodily integrity in disfiguring breast cancer. Bodily integrity is a normative principle precisely because it does not simply refer to actual physical or functional intactness. It rather indicates what should be regarded and respected as inviolable in vulnerable and damageable bodies. I will argue that this normative inviolability or wholeness can be based upon a person's embodied experience of wholeness. This phenomenological stance differs from the liberal view that identifies respect for integrity with respect for autonomy (resulting in an invalidation of bodily integrity's proper normative meaning), as well as from the view that bodily integrity is based upon ideologies of wholeness (which runs the risk of being disadvantageous to women). I propose that bodily integrity involves a process of identification between the experience of one's body as “Leib” and the experience of one's body as “Körper.” If identification fails or is not possible, one's integrity is threatened. This idea of bodily integrity can support breast cancer patients and survivors in making decisions about possible corrective interventions. To implement this idea in oncology care, empirical‐phenomenological research needs to establish how breast cancer patients express their embodied self‐experiences.     

Absolve You to Yourself: Emerson's Conception of Rational Agency

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously warned his readers against the dangers of conformity and consistency. In this paper, I argue that this warning informs his engagement with and opposition to a Kantian view of rational agency. The interpretation I provide of some of Emerson's central essays outlines a unique conception of agency, a conception which gives substance to Emerson's exhortations of self‐trust. While Kantian in spirit, Emerson's view challenges the requirement that autonomy requires acting from a conception of the law. The key to understanding Emerson's opposition to Kant rests in showing how obeying the law requires spontaneity on the part of the agent herself. Emerson's concerns about conformity and consistency further enrich the view of agency, argued for by Richard Moran, according to which we take responsibility for our minds by taking up a first‐person deliberative perspective on our minds. Conformity and consistency in one's thinking and acting permits society and one's own past to dictate when deliberation may come to an end, thereby undermining a crucial sense in which an agent, in taking up the deliberative perspective, has taken responsibility for her mind.     

The Subjective Basis of Kant's Judgment of Taste

Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful.     

GOD AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD

There are a number of apparent parallels between belief in God and belief in the existence of an external world beyond our experiences. Both beliefs would seem to condition one's overall view of reality and one's place within it – and yet it is difficult to see how either can be defended. Neither belief is likely to receive a purely a priori defence and any empirical evidence that one cites either in favour of the existence of God or the existence of the external world would seem to blatantly beg the question against a doubter. I will explore just how far this parallel can be pushed by examining some strategies for resisting external world scepticism 1 .     

The Sense of Touch: From Tactility to Tactual Probing

Because philosophical reflections on touch usually start from our ability to perceive properties of objects, they tend to overlook features of touch that are crucial to correct understanding of tactual perception. This paper brings out these features and uses them to develop a general reconception of the sense of touch. I start by taking a fresh look at our ability to feel, in order to reveal its vital role. This sheds a different light on the skin's perceptual potential. While it is commonly observed that tactile experiences have two intentional objects, an external object and one's own body, I will advance a more accurate alternative: in tactile experiences, one becomes aware of what one's body undergoes. This alternative not only fits better with tactility's vital role; it is also key to explaining how active touching provides for a unique contribution to our perceptual relation to material objects. By thus connecting tactility's vital role to the way we rely on touch while manipulating objects, this essay offers a cross-sectional survey of our tactile powers that reveals the interplay between sensing and touching.     

What is Wrong with Husserl's Scientific Anti-Realism?

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental.     

Achieving Transparency: An Argument For Enactivism

The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about perception. I argue that it supports a form of enactivism—the view that capacities for perceptual experience and for intentional agency are essentially interdependent. I clarify the perceptual phenomenon at issue, and argue that enactivists should expect to find a parallel instance of transparency in our agentive experience, and that the two forms of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 1). I then argue that i) we do indeed find such parallels: the way in which an action is directed towards its goal through our bodily movements parallels the way in which an experience is directed towards its object through our perceptual sensation (Section 2), and ii) reflecting on sensorimotor skills shows why the two instances of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 3). Section 4 gives reasons for generalizing beyond the cases considered so far by applying the enactive view to Kohler's landmark studies of perceptual adaptation. The final section clarifies the form of enactivism to which the previous sections point. The view that emerges is one whereby our perceptual and practical skills are interrelated aspects of a single capacity to have one's mind intentionally directed upon the world. The transparency of experience, on this view, is achieved in virtue of our capacities as agents as much as it is given in virtue of our capacities as perceivers.     

The Microevolution of Mathematical Representations in Children's Activity

In this article, I discuss children's design of mathematical representations on paper, asking how material displays are constructed and transformed in activity. I show that (a) the design of displays during problem solving shapes one's mathematical activity and sense making in crucial ways, and (b) knowledge of mathematical representations is not simply recalled and applied to problem solving but also emerges (whether constructed anew or not) out of one's interactions with the social and material settings of activity. A detailed characterization of student-designed tables of values to solve problems about linear functions is also presented.     

Is the body represented in everyday bodily activities?

There seem to be good reasons to think that there must be body representations or some kind of body content required for riding a bike or grabbing a cup of coffee. However, when I ride a bike or grab a cup of coffee, am I just representing the bike and the cup? Or am I actually also representing my body and bodily movements? The thesis of this paper is that the body not only figures in the content that guides everyday activities but that it must. How is this possible? Exactly what elements of the subject’s body can be said to figure in this content? I will proceed in three steps: in the first, I bring together the conceptual resources that seem to be required; in the second, I discuss a couple of proposals about how to link the notion of affordance and the topic of bodily representations, arguing that they are misguided; finally, I propose a view according to which the body’s physical and spatial properties are an unavoidable part of the content that guides everyday activities.     

EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS AND ETHICAL DELIBERATION

How are we to distinguish between appropriate emotional responses that reveal morally salient reasons and inappropriate emotional responses that reflect our prejudices? It is often assumed that reason – considered as distinct from emotion – will make the distinction. I argue that this view is false, and that the process by which emotional responses are vetted involves ‘emotional self‐awareness’. By this, I mean feeling an emotion, being aware of so doing, and feeling some usually subtle emotional response, often of calm or anxiety, to it, together with a general readiness to feel and acknowledge what emotions one has. Registering and exploring feelings of anxiety that arise in emotional self‐awareness helps enable us to detect when emotions and thoughts are inappropriate. Deliberation that is not emotionally open in this way is therefore at an epistemic disadvantage. Furthermore, the attempt to remain unemotional when evaluating one's emotions can be produced or co‐opted by anxiety about one's feelings of precisely the kind that indicates one's emotional responses and thoughts are being distorted.     

A Dilemma for Calibrationism

The aim of this paper is to describe a problem for calibrationism: a view about higher order evidence according to which one's credences should be calibrated to one's expected degree of reliability. Calibrationism is attractive, in part, because it explains our intuitive judgments, and provides a strong motivation for certain theories about higher order evidence and peer disagreement. However, I will argue that calibrationism faces a dilemma: There are two versions of the view one might adopt. The first version, I argue, has the implausible consequence that, in a wide range of cases, calibrationism is the only constraint on rational belief. The second version, in addition to having some puzzling consequences, is unmotivated. At the end of the paper I sketch a possible solution.     

Internalized Oppression and Its Varied Moral Harms: Self‐Perceptions of Reduced Agency and Criminality

The dominant view in the philosophical literature contends that internalized oppression, especially that experienced in virtue of one's womanhood, reduces one's sense of agency. Here, I extend these arguments and suggest a more nuanced account. In particular, I argue that internalized oppression can cause a person to conceive of herself as a deviant agent as well as a reduced one. This self‐conception is also damaging to one's moral identity and creates challenges that are not captured by merely analyzing a reduced sense of agency. To help illustrate this claim, I consider experiences of people of color who internalize stereotypes regarding criminality and moral deviance. With these examples in mind, I show that internalized prejudices regarding criminality can cause people of color (men and women) to view themselves as outlaws in the moral community, that is, as wrongdoers. This conclusion helps give voice to some of the challenges that women of color who experience multiple sorts of internalized prejudices often face. To conclude, I discuss one strategy for empowerment that women of color have used when confronted with multiple forms of internalized oppression.     

Risky visuomotor choices during rapid reaching in childhood

Many everyday actions are implicit gambles because imprecisions in our visuomotor systems place probabilities on our success or failure. Choosing optimal action strategies involves weighting the costs and gains of potential outcomes by their corresponding probabilities, and requires stable representations of one's own imprecisions. How this ability is acquired during development in childhood when visuomotor skills change drastically is unknown. In a rewarded rapid reaching task, 6‐ to 11‐year‐old children followed ‘risk‐seeking’ strategies leading to overly high point‐loss. Adults' performance, in contrast, was close to optimal. Children's errors were not explained by distorted estimates of value or probability, but may reflect different action selection criteria or immature integration of value and probability information while planning movements. These findings provide a starting point for understanding children's risk‐taking in everyday visuomotor situations when suboptimal choices can be dangerous. Moreover, children's risky visuomotor decisions mirror those reported for non‐motor gambles, raising the possibility that common processes underlie development across decision‐making domains.     

The Problem of Self‐Torture: What's Being Done?

We commonly face circumstances in which the cumulative negative effects of repeatedly acting in a certain way over time will be significant, although the negative effects of any one such act, taken on its own, are insubstantial. Warren Quinn's puzzle of the self‐torturer presents an especially clear example of this type of predicament. This paper considers three different approaches to understanding the rational response to such situations. The first focuses on the conditions under which it is rational to revise one's prior intentions. The second raises the possibility of a fundamental disconnect between the rational assessment of an extended pattern of choices and the assessment of the individual choices that make up that pattern. I show that neither adequately addresses the underlying issues. I propose a third approach, according to which the rational assessment of the “self‐torturer's” choices is guided, not by any plan or intention the he has actually adopted, but by the plan or plans it would have been reasonable for him to adopt from the outset. The larger significance of this conclusion is brought out through the identification of conditions under which one's past choices can non‐derivatively constrain the rational response to one's present circumstances.     

From left to right: Processing acronyms referring to names of political parties activates spatial associations

In line with previous studies, showing that abstract concepts like “power” or “god” implicitly activate spatial associations, in the present study we hypothesized that spatial associations are coactivated during the processing of acronyms referring to names of political parties as well. In four studies, it was found that the reading of these acronyms was accompanied by the implicit activation of spatial left–right associations. That is, participants responded faster to left-wing parties by means of a left-hand button press and vice versa for right-wing parties (Experiments 1 to 3), and participants responded faster when a political acronym was presented at the side of the screen corresponding to the political orientation of the acronym (Experiment 4). Interestingly, a correlation was observed between the effect size for left-wing parties and participants' political preferences, suggesting that the reaction time effects reflect the perceived distance of a party to one's own political orientation. Together these findings indicate that spatial representations activated in response to political acronyms do not simply reflect lexical–semantic associations or spatial metaphors, but representations of parties' political orientation relative to one's own sociopolitical position.     

Creativity,Spontaneity, Impasse,and Leaps of Faith: Reply to Commentaries

In my reply to the commentaries, I address several points of convergence with and divergence from Drs. Danielle Knafo and Philip A. Ringstrom. I clarify my view that while shame can drive the creative process, the thrust of my paper is about ways in which shame can close down access to one's creative potential, as well as creating obstacles to vitality and intimacy in relationships. I expand on how it was indeed a visceral, embodied sense of my own shame which served as an “informant,” as Ringstrom suggests, of Julia's chronic experience of shame, opening a door to our exploration of the repetitive enactments between us. Grounding my understanding of therapeutic action and enactments in a relational perspective, I describe how I view enactments as inevitable and co-created, and reflecting on them collaboratively as a potentially useful opportunity in analytic work. I resonate with Ringstrom and Knafo's belief in the creativity inherent in the psychoanalytic process, and the importance of spontaneity and risk taking, particularly in negotiating impasses in treatment. Finally, I describe Julia's poetic reflections upon reading the paper.     

Practical Reason,Sympathy and Reactive Attitudes

This paper has three aims. First, I defend, in its most radical form, Hume's scepticism about practical reason, as it applies to purely self‐regarding matters. It's not always irrational to discount the future, to be inconstant in one's preferences, to have incompatible desires, to not pursue the means to one's ends, or to fail to maximize one's own good. Second, I explain how our response to the “irrational” agent should be understood as an expression of frustrated sympathy, in Adam Smith's sense of sympathy, rather than a genuine judgement about Reason. We judge these people because we cannot imaginatively identify with their desires and attitudes, and this is frustrating. Third, compared to the standard cognitive view, my account better explains the nature of our criticism of the “irrational,” and, by portraying “irrationality” as a cause of upset to other people, provides a better normative basis for being “rational.”