How to be an adverbialist about phenomenal intentionality

Synthese - Kriegel has revived adverbialism as a theory of consciousness. But recent attacks have shed doubt on the viability of the theory. To save adverbialism, I propose that the adverbialist...     

Brentano on the dual relation of the mental

Brentano held that every mental phenomenon has an object and is conscious (the dual relation thesis). The dual relation thesis faces a number of well-known problems. The paper explores how Brentano tried to overcome these problems. In considering Brentano's responses, the paper sheds light on Brentano's theory of judgement that underpins his philosophy of mind.     

Motor intentionality and the intentionality of improvisation: a contribution to a phenomenology of musical improvisation

Continental Philosophy Review - The intentionality of improvisation represents surely one of the most pressing and controversial issues in contemporary action theory: how do we find the way to...     

An information integration approach to phenomenal causality

Phenomenal causality was studied by using Michotte's launch event, in which successive motion of two objects evokes an immediate perception that the first motion causes the second. Information integration theory was used to address the complementary issues of invariant perceptual structure and individual differences in phenomenal causality. Three informational cues were varied conjointly: temporal and spatial contiguity of the two motions, and the ratio of their speeds. The dependent measure was a judgment of degree of causality or naturalness. The results showed that individual differences were related to these instruction conditions; the subjects showed five distinctive response patterns. Two were the modal patterns elicited by the instructions, and the others fell in between. The averaging model gave a good account of the data, with meaningful parameter estimates. Individual differences were localized in cueevaluation, whereas theirintegration into a unified judgment followed an invariant averaging rule. The results allow some reconciliation between Michotte and his critics.     

An attentional approach to study mental representations of different parts of the hand

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the fingers are represented separately from the palm. An exogenous spatial orientation paradigm was used where participants had to detect a tactile stimulus that could appear on the palm, the middle finger or the ring finger of the left hand. The tactile target was preceded by a non-predictive cue using different stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA). We observed a Facilitation Effect in the palm and Inhibition of Return (IOR) for fingers using a short cue-target SOA, whereas the IOR was found in fingers and palm in long cue-target SOA. Also we observed a ‘Cue above Target’ effect (facilitation effect when the Cue had appeared distal to the target location in a vertical line) at the long SOA. Together, we suggest that the general pattern of results supports the proposed hypothesis about the different mental representation of fingers and palms, but with a considerable and hierarchical interrelation between them.     

A new argument for the phenomenal approach to personal persistence

Philosophical Studies - When it comes to personal identity, two approaches have long ruled the roost. The first is the psychological approach, which has it that our persistence through time...     

Personality and mental time travel: a differential approach to autonoetic consciousness

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel (MTT). Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future.     

Moore,Brentano, and Scanlon: a defense of indefinability

Philosophical Studies - Mooreans claim that intrinsic goodness is a conceptual primitive. Fitting-attitude theorists object: they say that goodness should be defined in terms of what it is fitting...     

Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology.     

Appraising the threat of illness: a mental representational approach

This article (a) describes a mental model underlying initial evaluations of illness signs and (b) reports an experiment demonstrating the model's utility by showing how the model represents evidence of defensiveness among people who test positively for a sign of illness. The model consists of a set of cognitive elements that people consider to evaluate the threat represented by a sign of possible illness. Seventy-two undergraduates were led to believe that they tested positively or negatively on a saliva test for a fictitious risk factor for a disease. In addition, half the participants were told about the existence of a simple preventive treatment for the disease, whereas the others were not. Subsequently the participants answered questions about elements of the threat-appraisal model. Analysis of their responses reveals evidence of defensiveness on several elements of the model. Those testing positively for the risk factor, especially those uninformed about its treatment, minimized threat by (a) increasing their estimates of the false-positive rate of the test, (b) decreasing their estimates of the seriousness of the risk factor, and (c) decreasing their estimates of the extent to which the disease itself is life-threatening. Applications of the model to actual illness threats and the relation between threat-related judgments and health-related behavior are discussed.     

The mental representation of lexical form: a phonological approach to the recognition lexicon

We propose a psycholinguistic model of lexical processing which incorporates both process and representation. The view of lexical access and selection that we advocate claims that these processes are conducted with respect to abstract underspecified phonological representations of lexical form. The abstract form of a given item in the recognition lexicon is an integrated segmental-featural representation, where all predictable and non-distinctive information is withheld. This means that listeners do not have available to them, as they process the speech input, a representation of the surface phonetic realisation of a given word-form. What determines performance is the abstract, underspecified representation with respect to which this surface string is being interpreted. These claims were tested by studying the interpretation of the same phonological feature, vowel nasality, in two languages, English and Bengali. The underlying status of this feature differs in the two languages; nasality is distinctive only in consonants in English, while both vowels and consonants contrast in nasality in Bengali. Both languages have an assimilation process which spreads nasality from a nasal consonant to the preceding vowel. A cross-linguistic gating study was conducted to investigate whether listeners would interpret nasal and oral vowels differently in two languages. The results show that surface phonetic nasality in the vowel in VN sequences is used by English listeners to anticipate the upcoming nasal consonant. In Bengali, however, nasality is initially interpreted as an underlying nasal vowel. Bengali listeners respond to CVN stimuli with words containing a nasal vowel, until they get information about the nasal consonant. In contrast, oral vowels in both languages are unspecified for nasality and are interpreted accordingly. Listeners in both languages respond with CVN words (which have phonetic nasality on the surface) as well as with CVC words while hearing an oral vowel. The results of this cross-linguistic study support, in detail, the hypothesis that the listener's interpretation of the speech input is in terms of an abstract underspecified representation of lexical form.     

Intentionality: Some Lessons from the History of the Problem from Brentano to the Present

Abstract

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness.     

Effect of intentionality on willingness to reciprocate a favor

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to examine the influence of deliberate vs accidental help, and, to a lesser extent, high vs low help, on the magnitude of reciprocity; and (2) to clarify the role of obligation and attribution of motivation as mediators of reciprocity. Ss were assigned to one of four cells in a 2 × 2 factorial design. They were run on two tasks, the first to manipulate the two independent variables, and the second to measure magnitude of reciprocity. Both main effects were highly significant in the predicted direction. Data were obtained supporting the role of both obligation and attribution of motivation as mediating intentionality of help and magnitude of reciprocation.