The intentionality of memory

In the philosophy of perception, typically, everything is illuminated. Discussions of perceptual experience primarily focus on subjects situated in illuminated environs. Rarely do we see treatment of putative perceptual experience involving darkness. In this paper, I will carefully canvas and characterize the nature of experiences of darkness, marking a substantive distinction between two such kinds of experiences. Crucially, I give an account of the distinctive phenomenology of experiences of darkness, and show that neither of the two broad kinds of experiences of darkness requires, as Roy Sorensen has recently suggested, the reification of unfamiliar entities to serve as objects of perceptual awareness. I will also offer potential candidates for the proper representational contents of experiences of darkness. This exploration not only reveals that such experiences pose no threat to a view like representationalism, but also demonstrates how experiences of darkness can be given their rightful place in a naturalistic theory of perceptual awareness. Atlast, darkness will be brought out from the shadows.

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,

As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames

No light; but rather darkness visible …

–John Milton, Paradise Lost     

The intentionality bias and schizotypy

The “intentionality bias” refers to our automatic tendency to judge other people's actions to be intentional. In this experiment we extended research on this effect in two key ways. First, we developed a novel nonlinguistic task for assessing the intentionality bias. This task used video stimuli of ambiguous movements. Second, we investigated the relationship between the strength of this bias and schizotypy (schizophrenia-like symptoms in healthy individuals). Our results showed that the intentionality bias was replicated for the video stimuli and also that this bias is stronger in those individuals scoring higher on the schizotypy rating scales. Overall these findings lend further support for the existence of the intentionality bias. We also discuss the possible relevance of these findings for our understanding of certain symptoms of schizophrenic illness.     

The intentionality of intention and action

Cognitive Science is likely to make little progress in the study of human behavior until we have a clear account of what a human action is. The aim of this paper is to present a sketch of a theory of action. I will locate the relation of intention to action within a general theory of Intentionality. I will introduce a distinction between prior intentions and intentions in actions; the concept of the experience of acting; and the thesis that both prior intentions and intentions in action are causally selfreferential. Each of these is independently motivated, but together they enable me to suggest solutions to several outstanding problems within action theory (deviant causal chains, the accordian effect, basic actions, etc.), to show how the logical structure of intentional action is strikingly like the logical structure of perceptions, and to construct an account of simple actions. A successfully performed intentional action characteristically consists of an intention in action together with the bodily movement or state of the agent which is its condition of satisfaction and which is caused by it. The account is extended to complex actions.     

Sensorimotor intentionality: The origins of intentionality in prospective agent action

Efficient prospective motor control, evident in human activity from birth, reveals an adaptive intentionality of a primary, pre-reflective, and pre-conceptual nature that we identify here as sensorimotor intentionality. We identify a structural continuity between the emergence of this earliest form of prospective movement and the structure of mental states as intentional or content-directed in more advanced forms. We base our proposal on motor control studies, from foetal observations through infancy. These studies reveal movements are guided by anticipations of future effects, even from before birth. This implies that these movements, even if they are simple and discrete, are the actions of an intentional agent. We develop this notion to present a theory of the developing organisation of a core feature of cognition as embodied agent action, from early single actions with proximal prospectivity to the complex serial ordering of actions into projects to reach distal goals. We claim the prospective structural continuity from early and simple actions to later complex projects of serially-ordered actions confirms the existence of an ontogenetically primary form of content–directedness that is a driver for learning and development. Its implications for understanding autism are discussed.     

The intentionality of intention and action

This article presents a sketch of a theory of action. It does so by locating the relation of intention to action ‐vithin a general theory of Intentionality. It introduces a distinction between ptiorintentions and intentions in actions; the concept of the experience of acting; and the thesis that both prior intentions and intentions in action are causally self‐referential. Each of these is independently motivated, but together they allow suggested solutions to several outstanding problems within action theory (deviant causal chains, the accordion effect, basic actions, etc.); the demonstration of striking similarities between the logical structure of intentional action and the logical structure of perception; and the construction of an account of simple actions. A successfully performed intentional action characteristically consists of an intention in action together with the bodily movement or state of the agent which is its condition of satisfaction and which is caused by it. The account is extended to complex actions.     

The perceived intentionality of groups.

Heider and Simmel [Heider, F., Simmel, M., 1944. An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology 57, 243-259] found that people spontaneously describe depictions of simple moving objects in terms of purposeful and intentional action. Not all intentional beings are objects, however, and people often attribute purposeful activity to non-object individuals such as countries, basketball teams, and families. This raises the question of whether the same effect found by Heider and Simmel would hold for non-object individuals such as groups. We replicate and extend the original study, using both objects and groups as stimuli, and introducing two control conditions with groups that are not engaged in structured movement. We found that under the condition that best promoted the attribution of intentionality, moving groups are viewed as purposeful and goal-directed entities to the same extent that moving objects are. These results suggest that the psychological distinction between the notion of 'intentional entity' and the notion of 'object' can be found even in the perception of moving geometrical figures.     

The real trouble with intentionality

I argue that the project of naturalizing intentionality is misconceived. Intentionality should not be considered as a challenge to our naturalistic world-view, but rather as something which gives rise to a logical problem: how to save the principle of indiscernibility of identicals from apparent counterexamples arising from intensional discourse.     

Real intentionality

Intentionality is an essentially mental, essentially occurrent, and essentially experiential (conscious) phenomenon. Any attempt to characterize a notion of intentionality that detaches it from conscious experience faces two insuperable problems. First, it is obliged to concede that almost everything (if not everything) has intentionality—all the way down to subatomic particles. Second, it has the consequence that everything that has intentionality has far too much of it—perhaps an infinite amount. The key to a satisfactory and truly naturalistic theory of intentionality is (1) a realistic conception of naturalism and (2) a properly developed understanding of the phenomenon of cognitive experience.     

Shared intentionality

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill -- as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of chimpanzees -- and then at a version based on shared intentionality -- as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of human 1- and 2-year-olds. We thus see the following transformations: gaze following into joint attention, social manipulation into cooperative communication, group activity into collaboration, and social learning into instructed learning. We conclude by highlighting the role that shared intentionality may play in integrating more biologically based and more culturally based theories of human development.     

The intelligibility of metaphysical structure

Philosophical Studies - Theories that posit metaphysical structure are able to do much work in philosophy. Some, however, find the notion of ‘metaphysical structure’ unintelligible. In...     

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.