Debates In Philosophy Of Mind Research Articles

Experiential knowledge: From philosophical debate to health care practice?

Despite experience-based expertise being increasingly common in health care, what experiential knowledge consists of remains a topic for debate. Here I propose a philosophical approach to clarify experiential knowledge, drawing on an analogous debate in philosophy of mind, which similarly targets the intuition that experience may generate unique knowledge. I outline the philosophical debate and explicate some relevant ideas for health care, so as to (a) evaluate whether and to what extent this analogous debate is helpful, and (b) supplement existing ideas on experiential knowledge with a philosophical analysis.

Reconciling the Noema Debate

One of the key concepts of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is the noema. Husserl uses the concept to denote the aspect of what is intended in experience as it remains within the transcendental domain of inquiry after the phenomenological reduction. Despite such seeming simplicity, Husserl’s discussion of the noema is ambiguous to the extent that it has sparked a wide-ranging debate in the secondary literature. The gist of the dispute concerns the question about the relation between the noema and the object: whether the noema is content, ontologically distinct from the object, or the object itself just considered differently in philosophical reflection. In this paper, I propose an interpretation that aims to reconcile two opposing positions of this debate (the so-called West and East Coast interpretations). The impetus for the reconciliation stems from the fact that both interpretations seem to be correct while they also suffer from their own shortcomings. I propose the reconciliation by applying a distinction Husserl makes between two areas of phenomenological investigation, neutralized pure phenomenology and non-neutralized phenomenology of reason. Having clarified the distinction between them, I suggest that both competing interpretations can be partially correct when reserved for the aspect of the noema in either of the two areas of phenomenological investigation. Finally, I show how this proposal could aid in resolving issues in the recent discussion concerning Husserl’s noema and the internalism–externalism debate in philosophy of mind.

Pain, placebo, and cognitive penetration

There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by cognitive states. We explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for the cognitive penetration debate in philosophy of mind. We single out as important a form of influence on experience that we termradical cognitive penetration,and argue that some cases of placebo analgesia constitute compelling instances of this phenomenon. Still, we urge caution in extrapolating from this to broader conclusions about cognitive penetration in perceptual experience. Instead, we suggest that the cognitive penetration of pain raises distinctive psychological, epistemological, and ethical issues.

The limits of perceptual phenomenal content

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of mind and epistemology about whether perceptual experience only represents those “thin” features of our environment that are apprehended by our senses, or whether, in addition to these, at least some perceptual experiences represent more complex, “thick” properties. My aim in this paper is to articulate an important difference between thin and thick properties, and thus to diagnose a key intuitive resistance many proponents of the thin view feel towards the thick view. My diagnosis then provides us with a novel and compelling argument against the thick view. In what follows, first I consider two unsuccessful versions of an alternative strategy against the thick view found in the literature. Next, I present my own argument. The argument involves proposing two constraints on the phenomenal contents of perceptual experience, which I call the Presentation Principle and the Containment Principle, and then reasoning from these principles to a conclusion that is fatal to (most forms of) the thick view—an outcome that I call the problem of Phenomenal Explosion. I conclude by responding to several objections.

Précis of "Transformative Experience"

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that affect our future circumstances and shape the sort of person we will become. Some of these are major, life-changing decisions. In such cases, we stand at a personal crossroads and must choose our direction. If we make these sorts of life-changing decisions about our futures rationally, can we also make them authentically? In Transformative Experience I argue that, under the most natural and ordinary construal of decisions like this, we cannot. My argument draws on debates in philosophy of mind about how experience is necessary for us to have certain epistemic capacities and cognitive abilities. It also draws on debates about the intrinsic value of subjective color experience, and the importance of the first-personal perspective in understanding the self and its possibilities. I use familiar examples from these classic philosophical debates to raise new questions about experience, its value, and its role in prospectively assessing our first personal futures. Using formal tools drawn from decision theory, causal modeling, and cognitive science, I assess first personal decision making and self-construction in contexts of what I call “transformative decision-making”, a well-defined and—it turns out—very common choice situation in everyday life. In the Afterword, I discuss how the argument has formal applications in and substantive relevance to counterfactual semantics, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of statistics, social science, cognitive science and psychology.

The Philosophy of Ullin Place. From Mysticism to Materialism

Ullin Place was an extraordinary person. From his early interest in mysticism he later turned to anthropology, which in turn brought him to logical behaviorism. While working on the improvement of logical behaviorism Place formulated the thesis of mind-brain identity, and has thereby founded the identity theory, which is still one of the most influential approaches in contemporary philosophy of mind. At the same time Place continued to see himself as Gilbert Ryle’s follower; he insisted that the ongoing discussions about the metaphysics of consciousness are meaningless because the philosophical problem is already solved and the time for empirical research has come. The paper shows how Place’s biography was interrelated with the development of his materialistic philosophy, how his article “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?” relates to the rest of his work, and how this article has influenced the debates in philosophy of mind in the second half of the twentieth century.

Consciousness and the Extended Mind in the “Metamodernist” Novel

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Ali Smith’s How to be Both (2014) and Will Self’s Umbrella (2012) can be read as employing a metamodernist approach to the depiction of subjective consciousness. The article looks at how both novels follow on from their authors’ engagement with recent advances and debates in philosophy of mind. This engagement results in an implicit model of the mind as extended in both novels. Drawing on work on the relationship between cognition and affect, the article argues that this model of the mind can be understood in terms of an oscillation at the level of consciousness. This article proposes that oscillation is a dynamic fundamental to the mind as depicted in these novels, allowing it to connect the metamodernist framework with contemporary philosophy of mind.

ARE THOUGHTS EVER EXPERIENCES?

Abstract The recent debate in philosophy of mind over whether thought has its own distinctive phenomenology, so-called cognitive phenomenology (CP), has led to a sharp division between proponents and skeptics of CP. This paper critically examines an ambitious argument against the existence of CP, which is based on a particular view of the temporal structure of thought. The argument, roughly, is that experiences, those mental entities that have phenomenology, persist as processes, while thoughts, on the other hand, are non-processive states or events. So no thoughts are experiences. The present paper attacks the claim that thoughts never temporally unfold as processes.

Précis of Transformative Experience

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that affect our future circumstances and shape the sort of person we will become. Some of these are major, life-changing decisions. In such cases, we stand at a personal crossroads and must choose our direction. If we make these sorts of life-changing decisions about our futures rationally, can we also make them authentically? In Transformative Experience I argue that, under the most natural and ordinary construal of decisions like this, we cannot. My argument draws on debates in philosophy of mind about how experience is necessary for us to have certain epistemic capacities and cognitive abilities. It also draws on debates about the intrinsic value of subjective color experience, and the importance of the first-personal perspective in understanding the self and its possibilities. I use familiar examples from these classic philosophical debates to raise new questions about experience, its value, and its role in prospectively assessing our first personal futures. Using formal tools drawn from decision theory, causal modeling, and cognitive science, I assess first personal decision making and self-construction in contexts of what I call “transformative decision-making”, a well-defined and—it turns out—very common choice situation in everyday life. In the Afterword, I discuss how the argument has formal applications in and substantive relevance to counterfactual semantics, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of statistics, social science, cognitive science and psychology.

Kim’s dilemma: why mental causation is not productive

Loewer (in: Physicalism and its discontents, 2001; Philos Phenomenol Res 65:655–663, 2002; in: Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, 2007) has argued that the nonreductive physicalist should respond to the exclusion problem by endorsing the overdetermination entailed by their view. Kim’s (Physicalism, or something near enough, 2005; in: Contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, 2007) argument against this reply is based on the premise that mental causation must be a productive relation in order to sustain human agency. In this paper, I challenge the premise that mental causation is a productive relation by appealing to the underlying double prevention structure of the physiological mechanisms of human action. Since the causal pathways from an agent’s mental events to bodily movement involves an absence, mental causation is not productive. This places Kim in a troublesome dilemma in his debate with Loewer: either surrender mental causation or deny that causation is a productive relation. With the support offered for productive mental causation undermined, responses to the exclusion problem based on accepting overdetermination remain viable options for the nonreductive physicalist.

Book Review: The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination

The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination. By Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans. Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion. York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. vi + 213 pp. $140.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).Charles Taliaferro is a philosopher, Jil Evans is an artist, both are Episcopalians, and this volume-co-authored by them and including a series of paintings by Evans-provides a useful introduction to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. Their distinctive emphasis is to highlight the essential role of the imagination, and especially images (both mental and visual), in thinking through the ongoing intellectual conflict between and naturalism.The dominant worldview in contemporary Western science and philosophy is arguably naturalism, which is itself a philosophical (rather than a scientific) position holding that nature (variously and contentiously defined) is all that exists. Naturalists can be divided into two basic groups, and broad. Strict naturalists want a thoroughgoing, physical (or materialistic) account of the world (p. 6). When it comes to human nature, strict naturalists insist that mind and brain are identical, and thus reduce all mental activities to chemical processes. To be consistent, strict naturalists bite the bullet and claim that our subjective sense of ourselves as having conscious intentions, experiences, and even beliefs is an illusion. Consciousness, therefore, does not exist, our subjective experience of it notwithstanding. A prominent contemporary strict naturalist is the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, also well known as one of the New Atheists.Broad naturalists, on the other hand, share the strict naturalist position that the cosmos is not, at base, purposive or teleological. But they differ insofar as they allow that consciousness, experience, values, aesthetic properties, and the like have emerged (p. 7). That is, broad naturalists admit that apparently non-material realities exist, but they are still explainable through natural material processes, and do not pre-date their gradual evolutionary emergence in the lives of certain animals, ourselves certainly and others possibly. Taliaferro and Evans state that both strict and broad naturalists reject theism, the soul, any concept of an individual afterlife, and so on. Indeed, this negation of and its associates (sometimes referred to as supernaturalism) is the almost universal mark of naturalism (p. 7). Naturalism is thus the positive philosophical face of atheism.In contrast to all forms of naturalism, which they find problematic on multiple counts both rational and imaginative, Taliaferro and Evans advocate theism (p. 8) and integrative dualism (p. 98) as the best general framework to account for reality as we actually experience it from within rather than from the third-person perspective of the sciences. When it comes to dealing with the challenge of evils both natural and moral, Taliaferro and Evans move from this general Platonic framework to a more Christian theological mode, arguing that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, combined with a potential afterlife, can redeem rather than justify the evils in creation (pp. …

The Plurality of Substantial Forms in John Pecham

The Plurality of Substantial Forms in John Pecham Caleb Glenn Colley (bio) John Pecham was a Franciscan theologian who took both a strongly anti-Thomist position and a strongly anti-Averroist position in late-13th-century debates in philosophy of mind. Following a successful career as a theologian, Pecham was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1279 until his death in 1292. Pecham is one of a number of Franciscan philosophers who advocated for what has become known as the “Binarium Famosissimum,” or the two famous and related doctrines of the plurality of forms and universal hylomorphism.1 These two doctrines were vigorously opposed by Thomas Aquinas. They had a history prior to the 13th century, with an embryonic presence in the work of Augustine and then fuller expression in Avicebron and his translator/interpreter Dominicus Gundissalinus. The traditional view of the scholarship has been that Avicebron and Gundissalinus were the primary inspiration for the 13th-century emphasis on these doctrines, although a recent doctoral dissertation by Michael B. Sullivan has claimed that Augustine is the inspiration for 13th-century teaching in support of spiritual matter.2 Yet in Sullivan’s discussion of Pecham in particular, we find the Binarium Famosissimum have been artificially separated. Furthermore, Sullivan leaves out the direct relevance of the doctrines to the theological controversies that were pressing in the 13th century and which provided motivation for the doctrines. Here, I will argue based on Pecham’s texts3 that one cannot properly understand Pecham’s doctrine of spiritual matter (and why he would vigorously [End Page 59] oppose Aquinas’ doctrine of matter) without taking into account the larger philosophical and theological context, which includes the plurality of forms debate. It will become clear that (1) Sullivan’s emphasis on Augustine’s influence must be significantly qualified; (2) It is possible to develop a more complete understanding of Pecham according to which his views are more fully motivated and relevant to his historical context. Sullivan’s Discussion Sullivan’s discussion of spiritual matter includes a summarization of some of Pecham’s passages on spiritual matter. Sullivan rightly emphasizes some aspects of Pecham’s writing on the subject, particularly Pecham’s connection to Bonaventure. These aspects include the following: Pecham argues for spiritual matter based on the soul as a moving principle. Pecham cites what he takes to be Plato’s doctrine: “the soul moves itself and that movement is continuous.”4 Pecham argues that the corporeal body cannot be the principle that individuates the soul, since the soul retains its individuality even when [End Page 60] separated from the body. That is, matter must have already played a role in individuating the spiritual substance, independent of the body.5 Pecham argues that matter could possibly exist without form.6 Pecham argues that the genus of substance is divided into spiritual and corporeal substances, and that all substances must be composed of matter and form.7 Pecham assumes the Boethian authenticity of the Gundissalinus text De Unitate et Uno.8 In this report of what Sullivan includes in his brief discussion of Pecham, I have provided citations from a number of Pecham texts. Sullivan, however, actually cites only three Pecham passages—one from the Commentary on the Sentences, one from the fourth Quodlibet [Romanum], and one from the Tractatus De Anima. This limited reading gives very little attention to the Tractatus and no attention to Pecham’s Summa De Ente et Essentia or Quaestiones De Anima. The rationale behind the limited nature of Sullivan’s reading would seem to be the fact that Sullivan’s project is oriented toward presenting Augustine as the leading inspiration for the doctrine of spiritual matter in the 13th century. In fact, despite what Sullivan says, Avicebron (through his translator and interpreter Gundissalinus) must be considered the primary source for the Binarium Famosissimum.9 But one cannot understand Pecham’s doctrine [End Page 61] of spiritual matter without taking into account the larger philosophical and theological context of his writing, which is highlighted by the plurality of forms debate. Pecham’s Doctrines of Spiritual Matter and the Plurality of Forms Pecham believes in universal hylomorphism. One cannot believe in universal hylomorphism without believing...

All Things in Mind: Panpsychist Elements in Spinoza, Deleuze, and Peirce

Benedict de Spinoza, C.S. Peirce, and Gilles Deleuze delineate a trajectory through the history of ideas in the dialogue about the potentials and limitations of panpsychism, the view that world is fundamentally made up of mind. As a parallel trajectory to the panpsychism debate in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, this approach can inform and enrich the discussion of the role and scope of mind in the natural world. The philosophies of mind developed by Deleuze and Peirce are Spinozistic in their natural monism but move beyond Spinoza to explain mind as a part of the natural world in semiotic terms.

The why of consciousness, theoretical gap and a double-aspect theory

In the first part of this paper I will outline the debate in philosophy of mind between those who, to borrow from Chalmers (Chalmers 1996) recognize the existence of the hard problem of consciousness and between those who do not. I will call the two groups non-reductivists and reductivists, respectively. The second part will put forward a specific type of criticism against reductivists - in short that its proponents incorrectly assume the resolution of another dispute, the one between the so-called pessimistic and optimistic inductivists. It will be claimed that such an assumption should not be made, and that until the latter debate is settled, or at least until a specific solution is offered within the context of the philosophy of mind, we have every right to be skeptical towards reductivist attempts. In the third part of the paper I will propose a possible solution which might offer some hope of finding the middle ground between the two sides.

Pluralistic physicalism and the causal exclusion argument

There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that scientific endeavors of understanding the human mind or the brain exhibit explanatory pluralism. Relatedly, several philosophers have in recent years defended an interventionist approach to causation that leads to a kind of causal pluralism. In this paper, I explore the consequences of these recent developments in philosophy of science for some of the central debates in philosophy of mind. First, I argue that if we adopt explanatory pluralism and the interventionist approach to causation, our understanding of physicalism has to change, and this leads to what I call pluralistic physicalism. Secondly, I show that this pluralistic physicalism is not endangered by the causal exclusion argument.

Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy). Edited by Brian P. McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen

Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy). Edited by Brian P. McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen

Aproximación a una neurobiología de las psicoterapias

IntroductionDespite the recognized effectiveness of diverse psychotherapies, very little is known about their action mechanisms specifically from a neurobiological point of view. Since Sigmund Freud to Eric Kandel, there have been several attempts to study the neural correlates of psychotherapeutic interventions. So far they have been conceived as a learning process of new ways to perceive the world, since they involve encephalic structures related to memory, executive function, self-perception, and emotional regulation. Neuroimaging and electro-chemical testing are methods of approaching neuronal functioning that could help to better understand the relationship between psychotherapy and the brain. MethodA contextual framework is proposed in this article in order to review some of the studies that demonstrate an empiric relation between different psychotherapeutic techniques and an observable change in laboratory parameters or neuroimaging findings in patients with some psychiatric disorders. Results and ConclusionsDespite the limitations of the studies such as small sample sizes and heterogeneous methodology, there is now far more clear evidence that psychotherapy works with a cerebral mechanism expressed in neurofunctional changes that provide solid arguments to the permanent debate in Philosophy of Mind about the mind-brain dichotomy, showing the ontological implausibility of this dichotomy, and the need for different epistemological levels that will allow Psychology and Psychiatry to benefit from the development of the neurosciences.

Recent Texts in Philosophy of Mind

The field of textbooks in philosophy of mind is a crowded one. I shall consider six recent texts for their pedagogical usefulness. All have been published within the last 4-5 years, though two are new editions of previously published books. Three are authored monographs: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind by K. T. Maslin, On the Philosophy of Mind by Barbara Montero, and Mind: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction to the Major Theories by Andre Kukla and Joel Walmsley. The other three are anthologies: Mind and Cognition edited by William Lycan and Jesse Prinz; Arguing About the Mind edited by Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro; and Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen. These six texts constitute a diverse bunch. Within each of the two groups (monographs and anthologies), each individual text differs significantly from the other two in its approach, scope, and thus suitability for various levels of teaching. I shall begin with the monographs.

Inferentialism and the Transcendental Deduction

One recent trend in Kant scholarship has been to read Kant as undertaking a project in philosophicalsemantics, as opposed to, say, epistemology, or transcendental metaphysics. This trend has evolved almost concurrently with a debate in contemporary philosophy of mind about the nature of concepts and their content. Inferentialism is the view that the content of our concepts is essentially inferentially articulated, that is, that the content of a concept consists entirely, or in essential part, in the role that that concept plays in a system of inferences. By contrast, relationalism is the view that this content is fixed by a mental or linguistic item's standing in a certain relation to its object. The historical picture of Kant and the contemporary debate about concepts intersect in so far as contemporary inferentialists about conceptual content often cite Immanuel Kant not only as one of the founding fathers of a tradition that leads more or less straightforwardly to contemporary inferentialism, but also as the philosopher who first saw the fatal flaws in any attempt to articulate the content of our concepts relationally.

Review of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen

Review of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen