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.     

Innovation 101: Promoting Undergraduate Innovation Through a Two-Day Boot Camp

Commitment involves how a person invests resources in a work role over long periods of time. Creativity is a novel, appropriate variation that is embraced by a field of gatekeepers and transforms the symbolic domain. This qualitative analysis (Cohen's kappas of .62, .86, .68 across three coders) addresses the different roles that commitment plays in the careers of 36 writers, depending on what level of creative influence the literary field has attributed to the writer's work. The sample was segmented into genre conformers who played by established literary rules (M = 0.15, SD = 0.18), experimentalists whose innovations have not yet caught on widely (M = 0.80, SD = 0.17), and domain transformers who changed the canon (M = 1.32, SD = 0.27). For genre conformers, commitment compensates. They invest technique in the craft of writing to improve their social standing among other writers, editors, and critics within the field. For experimentalists, commitment defies. They translate their selves into words by twisting traditions and supports to yield new meanings, which gains them an emotional rush plus increased control over their self-expression. For domain transformers, commitment impassions. They trust some beloved aspect of literature, such as a character or poetic form, to convert new minds to the latent possibilities of the domain.     

Sex differences in the original thinking of preschool and elementary school children

Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to assess the development of sex differences in the creative potential of preschool and early elementary school children. Preschool, first‐, and third‐grade children (N = 188) received the Multidimensional Stimulus Fluency Measure (MSFM). The MSFM assesses creative potential in terms of popular and original responses (ideational fluency). Comparisons of the three groups of children indicated that sex differences emerged throughout early elementary school. No sex differences were found within the preschool sample; but by third‐grade, boys were found to score significantly higher than girls on both popular and original responses. These findings were discussed with regard to evaluation, conformity, assimilative strategies, and the environmental factors which might affect creative potential.     

When the rules are reversed: Action-monitoring consequences of reversing stimulus–response mappings

How does switching tasks affect our ability to monitor and adapt our behavior? Largely independent lines of research have examined how individuals monitor their actions and adjust to errors, on the one hand, and how they are able to switch between two or more tasks, on the other. Few studies, however, have explored how these two aspects of cognitive?Cbehavioral flexibility interact. That is, how individuals monitor their actions when task rules are switched remains unknown. The present study sought to address this question by examining the action-monitoring consequences of response switching??a form of task switching that involves switching the response that is associated with a particular stimulus. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants performed a modified letter flanker task in which the stimulus?Cresponse (S?CR) mappings were reversed between blocks. Specifically, we examined three ERPs??the N2, the error-related negativity (ERN), and the error positivity (Pe)??that have been closely associated with action monitoring. The findings revealed that S?CR reversal blocks were associated with dynamic alterations of action-monitoring brain activity: the N2 and ERN were enhanced, whereas the Pe was reduced. Moreover, participants were less likely to adapt their posterror behavior in S?CR reversal blocks. Taken together, these data suggest that response switching results in early enhancements of effortful control mechanisms (N2 and ERN) at the expense of reductions in later response evaluation processes (Pe). Thus, when rules change, our attempts at control are accompanied by less attention to our actions.     

Enhanced attentional capture in trait anxiety

Attentional Control Theory (ACT) proposes that anxiety is specifically associated with more attentional distraction by salient stimuli. Moreover, there is some suggestion that worry is one mechanism whereby anxiety impairs attentional control. However, direct evidence for these hypotheses is lacking. In the current study we addressed limitations of previous work by examining the relationships between trait anxiety and worry and attentional distraction by a salient, task-irrelevant color singleton in a visual search task. Results revealed that trait anxiety, but not worry, was related to increased attentional distraction (i.e., capture) by the color singleton. The current results suggest that anxiety is associated with a general enhancement of bottom-up processes involved in motivational significance detection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Naïve Realism,Seeing Stars,and Perceiving the Past

It seems possible to see a star that no longer exists. Yet it also seems right to say that what no longer exists cannot be seen. We therefore face a puzzle, the traditional answer to which involves abandoning naïve realism in favour of a sense datum view. In this article, however, I offer a novel exploration of the puzzle within a naïve realist framework. As will emerge, the best option for naïve realists is to embrace an eternalist view of time, and claim that in the relevant case, one sees a still existent star‐stage located somewhere in the distant past.