Alleged problems in attributing beliefs,and intentionality,to animals

The ordinary attribution of intentionality to (nonhuman) animals raises serious problems for fashionable linguistic accounts of belief and of intentionality generally; and many of the alleged problems arise from such linguistic theories of mind. Another deeper source of alleged problems is the apartness thesis, that there is a significant difference in kind, with substantial moral import, between humans and other animals; for the last lines of defence of this erroneous thesis consist in making out that there are significant intentional differences. A wide range of recent arguments against assigning intentionality (in the full sense) to animals are criticized in detail: those of Stich and Williams, in terms of animals lacking effective or specifiable concepts (concepts now replacing souls); those of Stich and Davidson based on the requirement for beliefs of an isomorphic belief network; those based on the usual opacity of intentionality; those of Descartes and Davidson and others based on the requirement of, or arguments to the essentiality of, language use for attributions of intentionality; arguments based on the requirement of capacity for pretence or awareness of error; and arguments used by Vendler and Malcolm. Several different arguments for assigning intentionality to animals are then advanced, arguments from cerebral organization, exteriorization arguments, and interiorization arguments from the semantical analysis of intentionality. The main arguments advanced are not analogical; they are not anthropocentric, or the result of personifying languageless animals; and the attributions of intentionality they lead to are not impoverished or of reduced status.     

Meta-Externalism vs Meta-Internalism in The Study of Reference

We distinguish and discuss two different accounts of the subject matter of theories of reference, meta-externalism and meta-internalism. We argue that a form of the meta-internalist view, “moderate meta-internalism”, is the most plausible account of the subject matter of theories of reference. In the second part of the paper we explain how this account also helps to answer the questions of what kind of concept reference is, and what role intuitions have in the study of the reference relation.     

Collective Affordances

Abstract

This article develops an ecological framework for understanding collective action. This is contrasted with approaches familiar from the collective intentionality debate, which treat individuals (with collective intentions) as fundamental units of collective action. Instead, we turn to social ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory and argue that they provide a promising framework for understanding collectives as the central unit in collective action. However, we submit that these approaches do not yet appreciate enough the relevance of social identities for collective action. To analyze this aspect, we build on key insights from social identity theory and synthesize it with embodied and ecological accounts of perception and action. This results in the proposal of two new types of affordances. For an individual who enacts her “embodied social identity” of being a member of a particular collective, there can be what we call embodied social identity affordances. Moreover, when several individuals dynamically interact with each other against the background of their embodied social identities, this might lead to the emergence of a collective, which we understand as a dynamically constituted and ecologically situated perception-action system consisting of several individuals enacting relevant embodied social identity affordances. Building on previous work in social ecological psychology, we suggest that there can be genuine collective affordances, that is, affordances whose subject is not an individual, but a collective.     

Intentional Objects

The idea of an intentional object, or an object of thought, gives rise to a dilemma for theories of intentionality. Either intentional objects are existing objects, in which case it is impossible, contrary to appearances, to think about something which does not exist. Or some intentional objects are non-existent real objects. But this requires an obscure and implausible metaphysics. I argue that the way out of this dilemma is to deny that being an intentional object is being an entity of any kind. 'Object' here does not mean thing or entity. Rather, to say that something is an intentional object is just to say that it is an object of thought (or other intentional state or act) for a subject. It is further argued that theories of intentionality should not dispense with the idea of an intentional object.     

Intentionality and Content in McDowell

In its most general form, the issue of intentionality takes the following shape: How can something be about something else? In basic cases, this relation is one between a subjective occurrence and a state of affairs, allowing the problem of intentionality to be articulated in this manner: What makes it the case that a subjective occurrence has the capacity to be about something external to it? The views of John McDowell on intentionality form the focus of this article. They are examined through the notion of content and via the later Wittgenstein's standpoint on content and intentionality. The main objective is to reach a conspicuous perspective of McDowell's stance on intentionality in order to uncover its presuppositions. This leads to the identification of a pivotal point of tension in McDowell's philosophical commitments, in particular the extent to which he can legitimately claim to be a quietist.     

A longitudinal investigation of the still‐face effect at 6 months and joint attention at 12 months

An understanding of intentionality is thought to underlie developing joint attention. Similarly, early social‐communicative behaviours have been argued to reflect an appreciation of adult intentionality. This study explored the relation between social‐communicative behaviours during the still‐face effect at 6 months and joint attention at 12 months in a longitudinal sample of 42 infants. Three types of joint attention were investigated: coordinated joint attention (infant alternates looks between an adult and objects), initiating joint attention (infant uses communicative gestures to engage or direct adult attention) and attention following (infant follows an adult's line of gaze and pointing towards an object). The still‐face effect was correlated with later attention following, but not coordinated or initiating joint attention. Initiating joint attention was correlated with coordinated joint attention. We propose that the former association reflects a lower‐level detection of adult intentionality rather than a higher‐level interpretation of an agent's intentions towards outside entities. The findings support two bodies of research – one advocating for a distinction between types of joint attentional ability and a second proposing that infants can detect intentional actions without understanding or attributing mental states to objects.     

Against definitions

Definitional accounts of language structure are explored in this paper. Several classes of arguments for definitions are reviewed; those which connect to: classical theories of reference, theories of informal validity, theories of sentence comprehension, and theories of concept learning. We suggest that, for each of these areas, accounts which rely upon definition are, in fact, not to be preferred on evidential grounds to plausible non-definitional alternatives. We also present a series of experimental observations bearing on one of these areas — that of sentence comprehension. We show that one widely cited class of examples of definitional structures — that of “causative verbs” — fails to affect subject judgements of those relations among the words of causative sentences which depend upon the putative definitional structures. Such subject judgements are independently demonstrated to be sensitive to structural relations of comparable type for other linguistically non-problematic types.     

Affective intentionality and the feeling body

This text addresses a problem that is not sufficiently dealt with in most of the recent literature on emotion and feeling. The problem is a general underestimation of the extent to which affective intentionality is essentially bodily. Affective intentionality is the sui generis type of world-directedness that most affective states – most clearly the emotions – display. Many theorists of emotion overlook the extent to which intentional feelings are essentially bodily feelings. The important but quite often overlooked fact is that the bodily feelings in question are not the regularly treated, non-intentional bodily sensations (known from Jamesian accounts of emotion), but rather crucial carriers of world-directed intentionality. Consequently, most theories of human emotions and feelings recently advocated are deficient in terms of phenomenological adequacy. This text tries to make up for this deficit and develops a catalogue of five central features of intentional bodily feelings. In addition, Jesse Prinz’s embodied appraisal theory is criticized as an exemplary case of the misconstrual of the bodily nature of affective experience in naturalistic philosophy of mind.

Metaemotional Intentionality

This article argues against two theories that obscure our understanding of emotions whose objects are other emotions. The tripartite model of emotional intentionality holds that an emotion's relation to its object is necessarily mediated by an additional representational state; I argue that metaemotions are an exception to this claim. The hierarchical model positions metaemotions as stable, epistemically privileged higher‐order appraisals of lower‐level emotions; I argue that this clashes with various features of complex metaemotional experiences. The article therefore serves dual purposes, offering metaemotions as a counterexample to an intuitive thesis about emotional intentionality, and examining their intentional structure in its own right.     

The logic, intentionality, and phenomenology of emotion

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.

On Several Misuses of Sober’s<Emphasis Type="Italic"> Selection for/Selection of</Emphasis> Distinction

Teleological Theories of mental representation are probably the most promising naturalistic accounts of intentionality. However, it is widely known that these theories suffer from a major objection: the Indeterminacy Problem. The most common reply to this problem employs the Target of Selection Argument, which is based on Sober’s distinction between selection for and selection of. Unfortunately, some years ago the Target of Selection Argument came into serious attack in a famous paper by Goode and Griffiths. Since then, the question of the validity of the Target of Selection Argument in the context of the Indeterminacy Problem has remained largely untouched. In this essay, I argue that both the Target of Selection Argument and Goode and Griffiths’ criticisms to it misuse Sober’s analysis in important respects.     

The Goldilocks Problem of the specificity of visual phenomenal content

Existentialist accounts maintain that visual phenomenal content takes the logical form of an existentially quantified sentence. These accounts do not make phenomenal content specific enough. Singularist accounts posit a singular content in which the seen object is a constituent. These accounts make phenomenal content too specific. My account gets the specificity of visual phenomenal content just right. My account begins with John Searle's suggestion that visual experience represents an object as seen, moves this relation outside the scope of the existential quantifier and then replaces it with the relation of objects being ‘present as accessible’, as described by Alva Noë.     

INTENTIONALITY AND PHENOMENOLOGY

Abstract: This paper examines two recent attempts to articulate a particular relationship between intentionality and phenomenology. Terry Horgan and John Tienson (2002) have argued for what they call the inseparability thesis: that the intentional and the phenomenal are, in a certain sense, inseparable. Brian Loar (2002, 2003) , following on from earlier work, has argued for a kind of intentionality, phenomenal intentionality, that is pervasive and more fundamental than ordinary wide content. Problems with both views can be seen once we consider a number of dimensions to intentionality, and reflect more generally on the notion of phenomenal intentionality itself.     

The Epistemic Value of Affective Disruptability

In order to explore how emotions contribute positively or negatively to understanding the meaning of complex socio-culturally specific phenomena, I argue that we must take into account the habitual dimension of emotions – i.e., the emotion repertoire that a feeling person acquires in the course of their affective biography. This brings to light a certain form of alignment in relation to affective intentionality that is key to comprehending why humans understand situations in the way they do and why it so often is especially hard to understand things differently. A crucial epistemic problem is that subjects often do not even enter a process of understanding, i.e., they do not even start to consider a specific object, theory, circumstance, other being, etc. in different ways than the familiar one. The epistemic problem at issue thus lies in an unquestioned faith in things being right the way they are taken to be. By acknowledging the habitual dimension of affective intentionality, I analyze reasons for this inability and suggest that being affectively disruptable and cultivating a pluralistic emotion repertoire are crucial abilities to overcome this epistemic problem.

     

How Berkeley Corrupted His Capacity to Conceive

Berkeley’s capacity to conceive of mind-independent bodies was corrupted by his theory of representation. He thought that representation of things outside the mind depended on resemblance. Since ideas can resemble nothing than ideas, and all ideas are mind dependent, he concluded that we couldn’t form ideas of mind-independent bodies. More generally, he thought that we had no inner resembling proxies for mind-independent bodies, and so we couldn’t even form a notion of such things. Because conception is a suggestible faculty, Berkeley’s arguments actually made it the case that he himself couldn’t conceive of mind-independent bodies.

VARIETIES OF VIRTUE ETHICS

The revival of virtue ethics over the last thirty-five years has produced a bewildering diversity of theories, which on the face of it seem united only by their opposition to various features of more familiar Kantian and Utilitarian ethical theories. In this paper I present a systematic account of the main positive features of virtue ethics, by articulating the common ground shared by its different varieties. I do so not to offer a fresh defence of virtue ethics, but rather to provide a conceptual map that locates its main claims and arguments in relation to those of rival theories, and identifies its distinctive contribution to contemporary ethics. I set out six specific claims which are made by all forms of virtue ethics, and I explain how these claims distinguish the theory from recent character-based forms of Kantian ethics and Utilitarianism. I then use this framework to briefly survey two main strands of virtue ethics which have been developed in the literature.¹     

Someone is pulling the strings: hypersensitive agency detection and belief in conspiracy theories

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 (N = 202) participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2 (N = 330), whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief.     

Elementary Polyhedral Mereotopology

A region-based model of physical space is one in which the primitive spatial entities are regions, rather than points, and in which the primitive spatial relations take regions, rather than points, as their relata. Historically, the most intensively investigated region-based models are those whose primitive relations are topological in character; and the study of the topology of physical space from a region-based perspective has come to be called mereotopology. This paper concentrates on a mereotopological formalism originally introduced by Whitehead, which employs a single primitive binary relation C(x,y) (read: x is in contact with y). Thus, in this formalism, all topological facts supervene on facts about contact. Because of its potential application to theories of qualitative spatial reasoning, Whitehead's primitive has recently been the subject of scrutiny from within the Artificial Intelligence community. Various results regarding the mereotopology of the Euclidean plane have been obtained, settling such issues as expressive power, axiomatization and the existence of alternative models. The contribution of the present paper is to extend some of these results to the mereotopology of three-dimensional Euclidean space. Specifically, we show that, in a first-order setting where variables range over tame subsets of R ³, Whitehead's primitive is maximally expressive for topological relations; and we deduce a corollary constraining the possible region-based models of the space we inhabit.     

Probability and knowledge: A reply to Miss Weyland

An attempt is made to find a coherent verbal expression of the intuition that reality is a manifold of more or less comprehensive wholes (gestalts), all discernible in terms of qualities. Quantitative natural science is thought to describe abstract structures of reality, not contents. The qualities are neither subjective nor objective, they belong to concrete contents with structures comprising at least three abstract relata: object, subject, and medium. Their status is that of entia rationis, not content of reality. Recent developments in physics suggest that we shall look in vain for physical ‘things’ of which reality is composed. Adequate expressions of concrete contents form designations rather than declarative sentences. They may obviously contain value terms. The attempt to formulate an ontology along the suggested lines seems to be closely related to phenomenology of a Heideggerian rather than Cartesian kind. It serves the endeavour to change the conception of the man‐nature relationship.     

Subject‐Involving Luck

In recent years, philosophers have tended to think of luck as being a relation between an event (taken in the broadest sense of the term) and a subject; to give an account of luck is to fill in the right‐hand side of the following biconditional: an event e is lucky for a subject S if and only if ____. We can call such accounts of luck subject‐relative accounts of luck, since they attempt to spell out what it is for an event to be lucky relative to a subject. This essay argues that we should understand subject‐relative luck as a secondary phenomenon. What is of philosophical interest is giving an account of subject‐involving luck, i.e., filling in the right‐hand side of this biconditional: it is a matter of luck that S ?s iff ____. The essay argues that one of the upshots of focusing on subject‐involving luck is that lack of control accounts of luck (LCALs) become more attractive. In particular, a range of counterexamples to LCALs of subject‐relative luck do not apply to LCALs of subject‐involving luck.