Emotions,feelings and intentionality

Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences.     

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.

Automatic actions: Agency,intentionality, and responsibility

This article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, that is unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinizes several mechanisms of automatic behavior, how they work, and whether the resulting behavior is an action. These mechanisms include actions caused by distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualization, mimicry, and semantically induced automatic behavior (which is later disregarded because of its lack of clarity). According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviors resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and to be intentional; and even the behavior resulting from the remaining mechanism (naturally acquired habits) is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question.     

Sartre on the ego,friendship and conflict

In both Being and Nothingness and the Notebooks for an Ethics we are told how one needs the Ego to get along in the everyday world, but yet at the same time that it is a psychic phenomenon that easily distorts everyday experience. In this paper, it is shown how, for Sartre, friends can play an important role by helping each other overcome the vested interest in maintaining the experience of a false, set identity that is engendered by the Ego. In addition, reference to the Notebooks will make it clear that support per se is insufficient to enable one to transcend the constraints of an entrenched Ego, and that instead this form of aid must be taken in conjunction with challenge, or a type of positive conflict, if one is going to be able effectively to help a friend for the task in question.     

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.