The “of” of intentionality and the “of” of acquaintance (original) (raw)

Higher-Order Intentionality and Higher-Order Acquaintance

Philosophical Studies, 2007

I argue against such ''Higher-Order Intentionalist'' theories of consciousness as the higher-order thought and inner sense views on the ground that they understand a subjectÕs awareness of his or her phenomenal characters to be intentional, like seeming-seeing, rather than ''direct'', like seeing. The trouble with such views is that they reverse the order of explanation between phenomenal character and intentional awareness. A superior theory of consciousness takes the relation of awareness to be nonintentional.

Sartre on Intentionality and Pre-Reflective Consciousness

Penultimate Draft. To appear in Matthew Eshleman, Christophe Perrin and Constance Mui eds., The Sartrean Mind (New York: Routledge)

This paper examines the ideas of consciousness, intentionality and pre-reflective awareness as they feature in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Consciousness is nothingness in the sense that no intentional object of awareness can ever be part of consciousness. Intentional directedness towards an object is a form of revealing activity in which an object is presented as being a certain way. This activity is underwritten by a mastery of the relations between environmental and bodily contingencies and the resulting consequences for appearance of the intentional object. Pre-reflective awareness is built in to intentional directedness towards the world in virtue of the fact that many, perhaps all, of the contingencies that underwrite such directedness are ones in which the conscious subject is implicated. All three of these ideas are offered both as interpretations Sartre’s view, and also as claims in their own right which, I suspect, stand a very good chance of being true.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the HOT Theory of Consciousness

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2002

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness entails self-consciousness, or, even more strongly, that consciousness is self-consciousness. As Kathleen Wider puts it in her terrific book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, ‘all consciousness is, by its very nature, self-consciousness.’ I share this view with Sartre and have elsewhere argued for it at length. My overall aim in this paper is to examine Sartre's theory of consciousness against the background of the so-called ‘higher-order thought theory of consciousness’ (the HOT theory) which, in turn, will shed light on the structure of conscious mental states as well as on Sartre's theory of (self-) consciousness and reflection. Another goal of this paper is, following Wider, to show how Sartre's views can be understood from a contemporary analytic perspective. Sartre's theory of consciousness is often confusing to the so-called ‘analytic Anglo-American’ tradition, but I att...

Sartre on Pre-Reflective Consciousness: The Adverbial Interpretation

To appear in S. Miguens, C. Morando and G. Preyer eds., Pre-Reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (New York: Routledge 2015)

This paper defends an adverbial interpretation of Sartre's account of pre-reflective consciousness, according to which non-positional self-consciousness should be understood as an adverbial modification of an act of positional consciousness.

« Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness? About Sartre and Brentano »

S. Miguens, C.B. Morando, G. Preyer (eds.), Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Routledge, 2015

Sartre and Brentano share a common notion of intentionality, according to which sensory contents are intentional objects, and all intentional acts are pre-reflectively self-conscious. This paper diagnoses the roots of this theoretical agreement in a common understanding of the Cartesian Cogito, as meaning for both authors that only intentional acts are self-evident. But such an interpretation, and its two above consequences, are challenged. In particular, the idea that all intentional acts are pre-reflectively self-conscious is presented by both authors as a transcendental condition of the Cogito: thus, if their understanding of the Cogito is mistaken, then pre-reflective self-consciousness becomes useless, and should be abandoned in face of its theoretical difficulties. Husserl's understanding of the Cogito is then presented as a more legitimate one, as a consequence of which sensory contents do not exist as mere intentional objects, but are self-evident sense-data in their own right.

The Stalemate Between Causal and Constitutive Accounts of Introspective Knowledge by Acquaintance

The Stalemate Between Causal and Constitutive Accounts of Introspective Knowledge by Acquaintance, 2024

This paper will be concerned with the role acquaintance plays in contemporary theories of introspection. Traditionally, the relation of acquaintance has been conceived in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind as being only epistemically relevant inasmuch as it causes, or enables, or justifies a peculiar kind of propositional knowledge, i.e., knowledge by acquaintance. However, in recent years a novel account of the role of acquaintance in our introspective knowledge has been offered. According to this novel constitutive approach, acquaintance is, in itself, a sui generisi.e., non-propositional-kind of knowledge. As we will suggest, a stalemate between David Chalmers' account of direct phenomenal concepts-as a prototypical example of a causal view-and Anna Giustina's account of primitive introspection-as a prototypical example of a constitutive view-is looming in the current controversy between the two families of theories. Towards the end of the essay, we will point to some possible ways for a constitutive theorist to break the stalemate.

An Adverbial Theory of Consciousness

This paper develops an adverbial theory of consciousness. One motivation is the Dretskean intuition that consciousness involves awareness not dependent on any reflexive intentional relation between a subject and mental state; another is that an adverbial theory of consciousness can avoid an act/object construal of such conscious awareness. An adverbial is described and contrasted with Mark Rowlands' similar distinction between actualist and objectualist construals of consciousness; the two views are very similar given their antecedents in Kant's distinction between inner sense and apperception. Adverbialism has also been defended as an interpretation of Brentano by Amie Thomasson; this view is described and endorsed and defended from its near rival, Keith Hossack's Brentano inspired identity thesis. The paper then develops an account of globally supported self-ascription to embed this neo-Brentanian view of experiencing consciously within a more general account of the relation between consciousness and self-knowledge. This approach is contrasted to Shoemaker's functionalist treatment of the self-tokening of conscious states and of "self-blindness". It is argued that to be fully consistent, Shoemaker has to abandon the claim that introspectionism is guilty of a self-scanning model or rational control as he seems committed to that model too. The view defended in this paper is a person level acount of conscious self-ascription, not a "no reasons" view in which warrant is supplied by underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Representationalisms, Subjective Character, and Self-Acquaintance

Open MIND, 2-vol. set

In this study I argue for the following claims: First, it's best to think of subjective character as the self-acquaintance of each instance of consciousness-its acquaintance with itself. Second, this entails that all instances of consciousness have some intrinsic property in virtue of which they, and not other things, bear this acquaintance relation to themselves. And, third, this is still compatible with physicalism as long as we accept something like in re structural universals; consciousness is a real, multiply instantiable, natural universal or form, but it likely has a highly complex, articulated structure, and "lives" only in its instances. In order to make these cases, I give a characterization of subjective character that accounts for the intuition that phenomenal consciousness is relational in some sense (or involves a subject-object polarity), as well as the competing and Humean intuition that one of the supposed relata, the subject-relatum, is not phenomenologically accessible. By identifying the subject with the episode or stream of consciousness itself and maintaining that consciousness is immediately self-aware ("reflexively" aware), these competing intuitions can be reconciled. I also argue that it is a serious confusion to identify subjective character with one's individuality or particularity. I argue that deeper reflection on the fact that consciousness has only incomplete self-knowledge will allow us to see that certain problems afflicting acquaintance theories, like the one I defend, are not the threats to certain forms of physicalism that they might seem to be. In particular, I briefly consider the Grain Problem and the apparent primitive simplicity of the acquaintance relation itself in this light.

Consciousness and Intentionality: The Face of the Phenomena

Prolegomena, 2016

In his book The Significance of Consciousness, Charles Siewert argues that some of our phenomenal features are intentional features, because we are assessable for accuracy in virtue of having these phenomenal features. In this paper, I will, first, show that this argument stands in need of disambiguation, and will emerge as problematic on both available readings. Second, I will use Thomas Szanto’s recent ideas to develop a deeper understanding of the difficulties with Siewert’s argument. Szanto emphatically contrasts the Husserlian, constitutive conception of intentionality with the mainstream, representational conception. If we interpret Siewert’s ideas in representational terms, it will be possible to add to my critical objections. However, I will suggest that it is also possible to interpret, or perhaps to modify, Siewert’s views in Husserlian constitutive terms, thereby addressing the objections raised in the present paper.