Exploring the Realm of the Mental (original) (raw)
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 2018
Abstract: The first section of this paper outlines the major theme, that “mind” is not the label of something unitary but of a collection of things that can only be revealed by research at three different levels. The first level of enquiry is the account of mind that can be gleaned from what is often referred to as our folk psychology . Even with its limitations, it is an indispensable part of our social interactions. The second section outlines how, with the rise of experimental psychology , our account of human minds has been extended because experimental psychology often reveals a level of factors in our mental life which is not open to ordinary observation. The third section explores how our account of human minds is extended even further by the modern instrument-aided researches at the level of neuropsychology . The fourth section argues that no one level of enquiry should be described as ultimate or dominant but that each level reveals different facts about our mental life. Th...
European Journal of Philosophy
Your belief that Obama is a Democrat wouldn't be the belief that it is if it didn't represent Obama, nor would the pain in your ankle be the state that is if, say, it felt like an itch. Accordingly, it is tempting to hold that phenomenal and representational properties are essential to the mental states that have them. But, as several theorists have forcefully argued (including Kripke (1980) and Burge (1979, 1982)) this attractive idea is seemingly in tension with another equally attractive thesis, namely, physicalism about the mental. In this paper, we show that these seemingly incontrovertible essentialist intuitions are in fact compatible with physicalism. By appealing to a plenitudinous ontology of objects, we argue that there are physical things with which mental states can be identified. This is preferable to existing views that give up the essentiality claims or weaken the physicalist thesis.
2005
With the publication of Edward Pols's recent books on the nature of free will (The Acts of Our Being,l982, Univ. of Mass. Press) and knowledge (Radical Realism,1992, Cornell Univ. Press), ithe components were in place for a comprehensive assay of the mind-body problem. It is no surprise, then, that Pols's newest book, Mind Regained (1998, C:ornell Univ. Press), undertakes just such a study, continuing and intensifying his defense of the mind as being able to know reality directly and as being as real as the things it is able to directly know. Like Pols's previous works, Mind Regained is so rich in interrelated content that it defies brief, simple summarizing, so this review will do the next best thing and provide a lengthy, complex summary. As the barest of synopses, however: in the first chapter, Pols makes it clear that, whatever its limitations, the tradition based on Plato and Aristotle was basically right on the issues of knowing, causality, mind, and soul. In three...
Between scientific and lived realities of the mind (2017 Master's thesis)
2017
The thesis puts forward an exploration of the relationship between two perspectives on the mind: the scientific perspective, through which the mind is described and explained by the disciplines of cognitive science, and the lived perspective, through which the mind is experienced and understood in the context of everyday life. In articulating this apparent duality of views I draw upon two influential philosophical accounts: Edmund Husserl’s (1970) investigation of the life-world and the world of science and Wilfrid Sellars’ (1963) analysis of the manifest and the scientific image of the human being in relation to the world. The presentation and juxtaposition of the two analyses opens a way to an exploration of the interdependence of science and the life-world. It also sets the stage for a critique of naturalism in mind sciences. Following Husserl, I show that the naturalistic attitude stems from forgetting that the idea of the objective scientific reality is but an abstraction from the concrete life-world of experience, value, and meaning. Surveying the conceptual space of philosophy of mind, I further challenge the naturalistic attitude by demonstrating the untenability of its metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. As I argue, naturalism amounts to a particularly inconsistent stance in studying human epistemic processes, where it must paradoxically presuppose the very aspects of the world that it set out to disclose. Concluding that cognitive science lacks absolute metaphysical or epistemological foundations, I suggest that studying the mind needs to recognize the importance of the lived perspective of being a mind. I explore the multifaceted ways in which the scientific perspective on the mind is both rooted in the life-world and shapes it in turn. I conceptualize two dimensions of this interrelatedness through the presentation of Varela et al.’s (1991) enactive approach to cognitive science and Ian Hacking’s (1995) theory of the looping of human kinds. I conclude by proposing that consistent study of mind which acknowledges the impossibility of separating the cognizing subject from her cognized world is bound to remain open to revision of its own foundations. Cognitive science is thus imbued with a demand for reflexivity towards its own theory and practice which would recognize the historical, experiential and socio-political embeddedness of its concepts as well as the role which cognitive science itself plays in shaping societal conceptions of the mind and the way in which the mind is concretely understood, experienced, lived, and acted upon in the context of everyday life.
It has been five years since the appearance of the second edition. Philosophy of mind remains a vibrant, thriving field, and this is a good time to update and improve the book.
Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Perspectives
2017
Life experience translates into psychological reality through memories, imaginations, visions, smells, touches as sensory perceptions, cognitive and affective processes. In a person's focusing ability, someone does not live the consciousness of someone else. With 3D brain images, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to correlate and reconstruct the active parts of the brain with what is being observed by the subject (Naselaris et al., 2009). In human beings as a whole, the complex and the superior are included in the frame of extended consciousness, developed by Damásio (1999). If consciousness plays a key role in allowing us to bring information together in novel ways, researchers suggest that consciousness serves other functions too. Edelman et al. (2000), Nir et al. (2010) or Graziano (2013) have expanded the knowledge about the dynamic and correlational mental processes. Nili et al. (2015) questioned our imagination: "How does an information-processing machine produce subjective awareness?" The understanding of consciousness is discussed in five paradigm shifts. Here, a literary and phenomenological view on consciousness is examined, as well as a psychobiological, neurological, emotional, social-neurological perspective. The thoughts on consciousness that stem from science-fiction films and literature are analysed in the context of building an artificial intelligence (AI) machine.
What distinguishes a conscious occurrent thought from a non-conscious occurrent thought? I argue that the notion of 'access-consciousness' cannot provide a satisfactory answer and that we must appeal to phenomenological properties. If this is right, a further question arises about what kind of phenomenological features are required. Can we give a satisfactory account of what makes an occurrent thought a conscious thought solely by reference to sensory phenomenologyincluding both verbal and non-verbal imagery? I argue that we cannot, and that we must appeal to 'cognitive phenomenology' in order to be able to say what distinguishes conscious occurrent thought from non-conscious occurrent thought.
Science of Mind (and General Bibliography)
The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution (David Marshall Miller & Dana Jalobeanu eds) , 2021
m a r t i n e p e ´c h a r m a n What Rubric for the Science of Mind? Let me introduce the issue of the science of mind in the seventeenth century by considering Nicolas Malebranche's The Search After Truth (1674), which presents the explanation of the nature of mind and of all its faculties as indispensable for "the science of man." 1 The complete study of the human mind, Malebranche says, examines the mental faculties related to the mind's union either with body (sense, imagination, passions) or with God (understanding, will). Yet these faculties are not parts composing the mind. From the outset, the Search assumes that mind is immaterial or unextended, and therefore undoubtedly "a simple, indivisible substance without any composition of parts." 2 Thus, the science of mind depends on the real distinction between mind and body. And this, notes Malebranche, "has been known with sufficient clarity for only a few years"i.e., from René Descartes. 3 In other words, the science of mind, the indispensable condition for "the most necessary of all our knowledge . . . the knowledge of ourselves," 4 was a product of Cartesian metaphysics.
2019
The subject of mental processes or mental states is usually assumed to be an individual, and hence the boundaries of mental features – in a strict or metaphorical sense – are naturally regarded as reaching no further than the boundaries of the individual. This chapter addresses various philosophical developments in the 20th and 21st century that questioned this natural assumption. I will frame this discussion by fi rst presenting a historically infl uential commitment to the individualistic nature of the mental in Descartes’ theory. I identify various elements in the Cartesian conception of the mind that were subsequently criticized and rejected by various externalist theories, advocates of the extended mind hypothesis and defenders of embodied cognition. Then I will indicate the main trends in these critiques
Organon F
Physicalism demands an explication of what it means for something to be physical. But the most popular way of providing one-viz., characterizing the physical in terms of the postulates of a scientifically derived physical theory-is met with serious trouble. Proponents of physicalism can either appeal to current physical theory or to some future physical theory (preferably an ideal and complete one). Neither option is promising: currentism almost assuredly renders physicalism false and futurism appears to render it indeterminate or trivial. The purpose of this essay is to argue that attempts to characterize the mental encounter a similar dilemma: currentism with respect to the mental is likely to be inadequate or contain falsehoods and futurism leaves too many significant questions about the nature of mentality unanswered. This new dilemma, we show, threatens both sides of the current debate surrounding the metaphysical status of the mind.