Intentional Directedness Research Articles

Understanding Social Robots: Attribution of Intentional Agency to Artificial and Biological Bodies.

Much research in robotic artificial intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life has focused on autonomous agents as an embodied and situated approach to AI. Such systems are commonly viewed as overcoming many of the philosophical problems associated with traditional computationalist AI and cognitive science, such as the grounding problem (Harnad) or the lack of intentionality (Searle), because they have the physical and sensorimotor grounding that traditional AI was argued to lack. Robot lawn mowers and self-driving cars, for example, more or less reliably avoid obstacles, approach charging stations, and so on-and therefore might be considered to have some form of artificial intentionality or intentional directedness. It should be noted, though, that the fact that robots share physical environments with people does not necessarily mean that they are situated in the same perceptual and social world as humans. For people encountering socially interactive systems, such as social robots or automated vehicles, this poses the nontrivial challenge to interpret them as intentional agents to understand and anticipate their behavior but also to keep in mind that the intentionality of artificial bodies is fundamentally different from their natural counterparts. This requires, on one hand, a "suspension of disbelief " but, on the other hand, also a capacity for the "suspension of belief." This dual nature of (attributed) artificial intentionality has been addressed only rather superficially in embodied AI and social robotics research. It is therefore argued that Bourgine and Varela's notion of Artificial Life as the practice of autonomous systems needs to be complemented with a practice of socially interactive autonomous systems, guided by a better understanding of the differences between artificial and biological bodies and their implications in the context of social interactions between people and technology.

Intentional Directedness and Immanent Content

This paper will investigate the roots of intentionality in Aristotle’s theory of perception and assess the accuracy of Brentano’s proposed location of intentionality in Aristotle. When introducing intentionality into contemporary philosophy, Brentano attributed it to Aristotle, whose theory of psychology he believed to reveal the characteristics of intentional inexistence. After setting up a working definition of intentionality that stresses such features as immanent content and intentional directedness, I will then clarify Aristotle’s theory of perception with regard to these two characteristics. I draw the conclusion that we can only find the roots of immanent content in Aristotle’s perceptual theory. For him, directedness moves from the sensible object to the sensitive soul, and thus it does not correspond to what contemporary philosophers define as intentional directedness.

An enactivist approach to treating depression: cultivating online intelligence through dance and music

This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment. As I understand it, sensemaking is fully embodied, fundamentally affective, and thoroughly embedded in a social environment. I begin by presenting an enactivist conceptualization of affective intentionality and describing how this general mode of intentional directedness to the world is disrupted in cases of major depressive disorder. Next, I utilize this enactivist framework to unpack the notion of ‘temporal desituatedness,’ and maintain that the characteristic symptoms of depression result from a disruption to the future-directed structure of affective intentionality. This can be conceptualized as a loss of “online intelligence” and a shrinking of the field of affordances. Then, I argue that two of the standard modes of treatments for depression, medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, are not fully sufficient means of restoring online intelligence, and that these limitations stem partly from the approaches’ implicit commitment to a brain-bound, overly cognitivist view of the mind. I recommend expressive arts interventions such as dance-movement therapy and music therapy as important supplementary treatment methods that deserve further consideration. Insofar as they revitalize subjects’ bodies and emotions, cultivate an openness to the future, and promote self-insight and social synchrony, these treatment modes not only reflect key insights of enactivism, but also offer great potential for lasting healing.

An enactive account of placebo effects

Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities (such as treatments or therapies), our intentional relationship to the environment (such as implicit or explicit beliefs about a treatment’s healing powers) and bodily effects (placebo responses). How can a mere attitude toward a treatment result in appropriate bodily changes? We argue that an ‘enactive’ conception of cognition accommodates and renders intelligible the phenomenon of placebo effects. Enactivism depicts an organism’s adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and the meaningful properties of its environment as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system. In doing so it provides an account of the interrelations between mind, body and world that demystifies placebo effects.

Heidegger’s philosophical botany

Heidegger argues that for being x to count as ‘alive’ it must satisfy three metaphysical conditions. It must be (1) capable of engaging in active behaviour with (2) a form of intentional directedness that (3) offers to us a “sphere of transposition” into which we can intelligibly “transpose ourselves.” Heidegger’s discussion of these conditions, as they apply to the being of animals, is well-known. But, if his argument is sound, they ought also to apply to the being of plants (given that plants, too, belong within the domain of the living). Heidegger, unfortunately, does not supply this part of his ontology of life in any systematic detail. However, my thesis is that it is possible to interpret the nature and activities of plants, along the lines of (1)–(3), and thus to make good on Heidegger’s omission. The key to this reconstruction is a reconceptualization of plant movements as constituted by a form of representationally blind, motor-intentionality.

“Until the End of the World”: Eidetic Variation and Absolute Being of Consciousness—A Reconsideration

This paper suggests interpreting Husserl’s thesis of the “fictional destruction of the world” (gedankliche Destruktion der Welt) in the light of the eidetic method of variation. After having reconstructed Husserl’s argument and shown how it relies on the methodologically regimented joint venture of free fantasy and bounded concepts, the author concludes that (1) the a priori of a world, namely its empirical (more or less rational) style, is tantamount to the a priori of a world that can be possibly experienced by some conceivable form of consciousness. (2) If consciousness is a priori bound to transcendence, such transcendence is not necessarily supposed to be the transcendence of a world, for a non-world would be enough to entertain the intentional directedness. This twofold claim allows for a novel interpretation of Husserl’s principle of the asymmetry between world and consciousness.

How can emotions be both cognitive and bodily?

The long-standing debate between cognitive and feeling theories of emotion stems, in part, from the assumption that cognition and thought are abstract, intellectual, disembodied processes, and that bodily feelings are non-intentional and have no representational content. Working with this assumption has led many emotions theorists to neglect the way in which emotions are simultaneously bodily and cognitive-evaluative. Even hybrid theories, such as those set forth by Prinz (2004) and Barlassina and Newen (2013), fail to account fully for how the cognitive and bodily elements of emotion are integrated. As a result, such accounts are unable to provide an adequate characterization of the intentionality or phenomenology of emotions. I will argue that an enactive account of emotions, one which characterizes them as a way of engaging with and making sense of one’s surroundings, can help us to overcome this false dichotomy between cognitive and body elements. What I call ‘affective framing’ is at the core of emotional experience. It is the way in which we engage with and appraise our surroundings in and through bodily feelings of caring, so that the bodily and cognitive elements of emotion necessarily are fused. The notion of affective framing not only helps to clarify the relationship between bodily and cognitive elements of emotion, but also offers a useful way to make sense of both the intentional directedness and phenomenal character of emotional experience.

Affectively Driven Perception: Toward a Non-representational Phenomenology

While classical phenomenology, as represented by Edmund Husserl’s work, resists certain forms of representationalism about perception, I argue that in its theory of horizons, it posits representations in the sense of content-bearing vehicles. As part of a phenomenological theory, this means that on the Husserlian view such representations are part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. I believe that, although the intuitions supporting this idea are correct, it is a mistake to maintain that there are such representations defining the phenomenal character of low-level perception. What these representations are called on to explain, i.e., the phenomenal character of perceiving objects in their full presence, can be more parsimoniously explained by appealing to certain affective states or affect schemas that shape the intentional directedness of low-level perceptual experience and define its phenomenal character in a non-representational way. This revision of the Husserlian view, it is shown, also helps us understand the normative character of perception.

The primacy of fact perception

After outlining an enactive account of fact perception, I consider J. L. Austin's discussion of the argument from illusion. From it I draw the conclusion that when fact perception is primary the objects perceived are those involved in the fact. A consideration of Adelson's checkershadow illusion shows that properties as basic as luminance are perceived in the contexts of facts as well. I thus conclude that when facts are perceived they structure our perception of objects and properties. I then argue that which facts are perceived is determined by contexts which are themselves determined by our interests. Here I appeal to Heidegger's views on everyday coping as a foundational form of intentional directedness. A discussion of Simons and Chabris’ gorilla experiment provides contemporary empirical support of the Heideggerian analysis. Finally, I argue that there cannot be context-free perception on the enactive account inasmuch as perception, qua action, is always permeated with the interests of the subject.

Why is Ethics First Philosophy? Levinas in Phenomenological Context

This paper explores, from a phenomenological perspective, the conditions necessary for the possession of intentional content, i.e., for being intentionally directed toward the world. It argues that Levinas's concept of ethics as first philosophy makes an important contribution to this task. Intentional directedness, as understood here, is normatively structured. Levinas's ‘ethics’ can be understood as a phenomenological account of how our experience of the other subject as another subject takes place in the recognition of the normative force of a command. This supplies a condition that—as the paper shows by examining Husserl and Sartre on how our experience of the Other constitutes an ‘objective’ world—earlier phenomenologists have misunderstood, because they have treated ethical experience as ‘founded’ on a prior theory of representation (‘ontology’ in Levinas's language). Ethics is first philosophy because it is only by acknowledging the command in the ‘face’ of the Other that we can account for the sensitivity to the normative distinctions that structure intentional content. Throughout, the paper shows how Levinas's analyses, in Totality and Infinity, draw upon and develop the analyses of Husserl and Sartre.

Husserl, the Absolute Flow, and Temporal Experience

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of internal time consciousness has a reputation for being complex, occasionally to the point of approaching impenetrability. The latter applies in particular to his remarks about what he calls the ‘absolute time-constituting flow’,1 some of which Husserl himself describes as ‘‘shocking (when not initially even absurd)’’ (Husserl, 1991, p. 84). [...]

Articulating the World: Experimental Systems and Conceptual Understanding

Attention to scientific practice offers a novel response to philosophical queries about how conceptual understanding is empirically accountable. The locus of the issue is thereby shifted, from perceptual experience to experimental and fieldwork interactions. More important, conceptual articulation is shown to be not merely ‘spontaneous’ and intralinguistic, but instead involves a establishing a systematic domain of experimental operations. The importance of experimental practice for conceptual understanding is especially clearly illustrated by cases in which entire domains of scientific investigation were first made accessible to articulated conceptual understanding. We thereby see more clearly how experimental systems themselves, and not merely the theories and models they make possible, have an intentional directedness and ‘representational’ import.

TWO KINDS OF INTENTIONALITY IN LOCKE

AbstractIdeas play at least two roles in Locke's theory of the understanding. They are constituents of ‘propositions,’ and some of them ‘represent’ the qualities and sorts of surrounding bodies. I argue that each role involves a distinct kind of intentional directedness. The same idea will in general be an ‘idea of’ two different objects, in different senses of the expression. Identifying Locke's scheme of twofold ‘ofness’ reveals a common structure to his accounts of simple ideas and complex ideas of substances. A consequence is a distinction among substance sorts parallel to one of his distinctions between primary and secondary qualities.

Aim that Bow! An Interactivist Gaze at the Problem of Intentional Tracking

In this essay I offer a theory of the outward directedness of intentional states, namely, an account of what makes intentional states directed at their respective intentional objects. The theory is meant to be complementary to the canonical interactivist account of mental content in that the latter emphasizes the predicative, intensional, and internal aspects of representation whereas here I shall focus on its denotative, extensional, and external aspects. Thus, the aim is to establish that the two projects are not only consistent but mutually supportive. Further, it is hoped that supplementing the interactivist conception of representation with a theory of intentional directedness along such lines will increase its overall appeal to critical readers. Based on the core idea that the directedness of a representation is a function of the manner in which it is constructed within, and contributes to the ongoing unfolding of a dynamical interactive loop connecting information to focused action, the theory is subsequently extended to cover many problem domains familiarly associated with representation and reference.

Intentionality, Cognitive Integration and the Continuity Thesis

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition.

On "Absorbed Coping"

The work of philosophers in the existential tradition of and Merleau-Ponty presents a challenge to the proposition that the fundamental relation of a person to the environment consists in the relation of the content of an individual mind to the world of entities as represented by that content. Instead, the existential tradition offers an alternative view of human engagement with the world. According to this alternative view, the most fundamental variety of human action consists in the apparently unthinking, skilled action that makes up much of our everyday activities, and that does require mental guidance or intervention for its successful accomplishment.1 In essence, the existential critique of mentalism, as it might be called, is an attack on the notion that representational mediation defines and explains the most kind of human interaction with the environment. This interaction has been characterized as consisting in coping2 or in action.3 One of the most vigorous of recent exponents of the existential critique is Hubert Dreyfus, from whose work I have taken the expression and action. Dreyfus's rejection of mentalism arises in part because he believes it to be irrelevant to, and thus unable to account for the proper understanding of, the nondeliberate action characterizing absorbed coping. Accordingly, Dreyfus has over the course of his work sketched a phenomenology of nondeliberate action that, while explicitly based on insights found in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others, are addressed to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind as well. For this reason, Dreyfus's phenomenology of nondeliberate action stands as a significant contribution to the phenomenological tradition, and one worthy of consideration. With this essay, I will examine the phenomenon of absorbed coping, with a focus on the class of intentionality that it is said to embody. I will show that while the account of absorbed coping is phenomenologically compelling, the intentionality claimed for it implicates a rather complex conceptual foundation that renders questionable any claim that it embodies a direct response to the environment. I will conclude by suggesting that the phenomenon of absorbed coping, rather than undermining the representationalist position, in fact underscores the usefulness of representationalism in providing an adequate explanation for even the most basic, and seemingly thoughtless, of human behaviors. The Phenomenology of Nondeliberate Action The features of absorbed coping are set out in Being in the World, Dreyfus's major commentary on Division I of Heidegger's Being and Time. There, absorbed coping is described as a basic way of being with things, which does involve mental activity (BTW, 52). While it is conceded that the nondeliberate action associated with absorbed coping is characterized by a form intentional directedness, this directedness is understood to be non-representational, that is, it is not that of a mind with content directed toward objects (BTW, 69). Indeed, as a chapter section heading puts it, absorbed intentionality is posited as being prior to representational intentionality (BTW, 61). Developing the idea further, Dreyfus writes that Heidegger accepts intentional directedness as essential to human activity, but he denies that intentionality is mental, that it is ... the distinguishing characteristic of mental states (BTW, 51, emphasis in the original). In sum, absorbed coping is a mode of action that does require the mediation of mental representation for its successful execution. Although Dreyfus's remarks on absorbed coping in BTW are important statements of the anti-representationalist position, the most comprehensive yet compact account of this position in the context of nondeliberate action is to be found in a piece that Dreyfus, in collaboration with Jerome Wakefield, contributed to a critical volume on the philosophy of John Searle. …

Getting Heidegger Off the West Coast

According to Hubert L. Dreyfus, Heidegger's central innovation is his rejection of the idea that intentional activity and directedness is always and only a matter of having representational mental states. This paper examines the central passages to which Dreyfus appeals in order to motivate this claim. It shows that Dreyfus misconstrues these passages significantly and that he has no grounds for reading Heidegger as anticipating contemporary anti-representationalism in the philosophy of mind. The misunderstanding derives from lack of sensitivity to Heidegger's own intellectual context. The otherwise laudable strategy of reading Heidegger as a philosopher of mind becomes an exercise in finding a niche for Heidegger in Dreyfus's own unquestioned present. Heidegger is thereby mapped on to an intellectual context which, given its naturalistic commitments, is foreign to him. The paper concludes by indicating the direction in which a more historically sensitive, and thus accurate, interpretation of Heidegger must move.

Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy (review)

480 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 1997 epistemologist to provide an ontological model for how representations make known the world. This is a stimulating and entertaining book, not the least because so many of its points--both historical and philosophical--are debatable. It is also a good read. STEVEN NAOLER Universityof Wisconsin,Madison Suzanne Cunningham. Philosophyand the Darwinian Legacy. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1996. Pg. x + 293. Cloth, $45.oo. American philosophy's distinctive voice was first raised in a concerted effort to draw out the implications of evolution, and especially of Darwinism, for philosophy. That was, in fact, the explicit aim of James's and Dewey's pragmatism, which saw mind as a flexible evolutionary adaptation designed to deal with changing environments. Recently , this voice has been heard again. (See, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Complexityand theFunction ofMind in Nature.) For a long, long time, however, one could find very little of this legacy among professional philosophers, American or otherwise. The book under review helps explain why. There was always a considerable threat to philosophy in flirting with evolution, for if mind is an adaptation to a physical, biotic, and social environment, its reach for the noncontextually rational, universal, and transcendent must necessarily exceed its grasp. In consequence, both classical analytic philosophy and continental phenomenology fled from naturalism in all its forms, and were especially dismissive of evolutionary naturalism. In Cunningham's chapters on Moore, who fled from Spencer, and on Russell, who reacted against Bergson as well, it becomes clear just how thoroughly classical analytic philosophy was motivated by rejection of evolutionary naturalism. (The usual story concentrates on its reaction against idealism.) The tone of this rejection , moreover, is for the most part not one of reasoned refutation but of contemptuous dismissal. In 1928, for example, we hear Russell using the annoying rhetoric of self-evidence to trash Darwinian theories of the mind. "Everybody," he proclaims, "would agree with Wittgenstein that Darwin's theory of the origin of species.., has nothing more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis of natural science" (quoted, 53). Cunningham wants to do more, however, than merely bring this history into view. She wants to revive Darwinian approaches to mind in order to bring them to bear on what knowledge actually is. Her strategy is to begin from the fact that it is easier to believe that our perceptual and emotional capacities are products of, and oriented toward, evolutionary adaptation than that our cognitive ones are. To go on to show that at least some cognitive states necessarily depend on perceptual states and that in turn "perceptual meanings are the sorts of things that regularly (and perhaps always) incorporate emotions, values, desires, moods, and the like" (z 17) is to go a considerable distance toward bringing cognition itself within the adaptationist circle. Phenomenology, Cunningham argues, might have been a help here. For its descrip- BOOKS RECEIVED 481 tions of the intentional directedness of consciousness can show how deeply rooted in perceptual and emotional considerations anything that can count as knowledge actually must be. But Husserrs hostility to naturalism, like Moore's and Russell's, doomed such a project. (Cunningham might have said more than she does about MerleauPonty in this connection; Heidegger, for his part, has a rich phenomenology of perception , emotion, and cognition, but is as resolutely antinaturalistic as his mentor.) In general, Cunningham's inquiry into issues that are nowhere near being settled follows something like the following schema: (x) a phenomenological view of perception is preferable to an analytic view (where 'preferable' means 'truer to the phenomena'). (2) a naturalistic phenomenology is preferable to a nonnaturalistic phenomenology . (3) Darwinian naturalism is preferable to functionalist naturalism (sensu Putnam), and especially to computationalist versions of the latter. Cunningham concedes that cognition (unlike mere belief) requires objectivity. It is crucial to her program, then, to rebut the view that the indexical character of beliefs that spring from or facilitate an organism's relationship to its environment--that is, their ineliminable, idiosyncratic reference to the subject--undermines their objective orientation. She does so by arguing that the cognitions in question are objectively about the organism's own...