Intentional Objects Research Articles

The intentional object of romantic jealousy

Three studies tested the hypothesis derived from evolutionary psychological considerations of sex differences in the intentional object of romantic jealousy. In Studies 1 and 3, participants had to indicate in a forced choice whether their jealousy would be primarily directed towards the partner or the rival. In Study 2, participants rated separately the extent to which their jealousy would be primarily aimed at the partner and the rival. In Studies 1 and 2, the participants' answers referred to either a mate's actual emotional or sexual infidelity; in Study 3 they referred to suspected infidelity. As predicted, in each study, significantly more women than men reported that their jealousy would be primarily directed at the rival. Also, as predicted, these sex differences were especially pronounced when confronted with the adaptively primary infidelity type (i. e., male emotional and female sexual infidelity, respectively). Finally, Study 3 additionally showed that these sex differences are moderated by the participants' current relationship status and their own unfaithfulness. Limitations and implications of the findings are discussed.

CONSTRUCTING NORMATIVE OBJECTIVITY IN ETHICS

This essay explains the inescapability of moral demands. I deny that the individual has genuine reason to comply with these demands only if she has desires that would be served by doing so. Rather, the learning of moral reasons helps to shape and channel self- and other-interested motivations so as to facilitate and promote social cooperation. This shaping happens through the “embedding” of reasons in the intentional objects of motivational propensities. The dominance of the instrumental conception of reason, according to which reasons must be based in desires of the individual, has made it harder to recognize that reasons shape desires. I attempt to undermine this dominance by arguing that the concept of a self that extends over time is constructed to meet the demands of social cooperation. Prudential reasons to act on behalf of the persisting self's desires are often taken to constitute the paradigm of reasons based on desires of the individual. But such reasons, along with the very concept of the persisting self, are constructed to promote human cooperation and to shape the individual's desires.

AQUINAS ON ATTACHMENT, ENVY, AND HATRED IN THE SUMMA THEOLOGICA

ABSTRACTThis essay examines Aquinas's discussions of hatred in Summa Theologica I‐II, Q. 29 and II‐II, Q. 34, in order to retrieve an account of what contemporary theorists of the emotions call its cognitive contents. In Aquinas's view, hatred is constituted as a passion by a narrative pattern that includes its intentional object, beliefs, perceptions of changes in bodily states, and motivated desires. This essay endorses Aquinas's broadly “cognitivist” account of passional hatred, in line with his way of treating passions in general. I suggest that Aquinas's account of hatred's arising out of attachment is compelling. However, I also argue that if Aquinas's treatment of hatred is to help us understand the phenomenon of hate, where classes of people are abominated for an identity they bear, and to avoid equating an oppressor's hatred with that of the oppressed for the oppressor, the cognitive pathway to hatred must be broader than through envy.

Emotions and feelings in the Bible: analysis of the Pentateuch's affective lexicon

English This study aims to investigate how affective states are described in the Old Testament. Three psychology researchers were asked to read the first five books of the first Italian version (from the 18th century) of the Old Testament (Pentateuch, or Torah) and to select all the terms that referred to an emotion or a feeling. For each selected term, they also had to pinpoint its position in the text (i.e. book, chapter) and the various characteristics of the affective episode in which it appeared (i.e. experiencing subject, situational antecedent, intentional object, instrumental behaviors). The textual analysis showed that the affective terms most frequently cited referred to four categories: “fear, awe”, “anger, hate”, “affliction, pain, sadness” and “love, joy, happiness”. These categories were significantly associated with specific instrumental behaviors and characters of the narration. Multivariate analysis also indicated that the frequency of citation of the affective categories varied significantly as a function of the book in which they appeared. In the conclusions, the authors discuss the conception of emotions and feelings issuing from the Pentateuch analysis. French L'article se propose d'analyser de quelle manière les expériences affectives sont décrites et évaluées dans la Bible. On a demandé à trois chercheurs psychologues de lire les cinq premiers livres de la première version italienne (du 18ème siècle) de la Bible (le Pentateuque, ou Torah) et d'y sélectionner tous les termes se référant à des expériences affectives (émotions et sentiments). Pour chaque terme sélectionné, ils devaient aussi indiquer sa position dans le texte (livre, chapitre) et les différentes composantes de l'épisode au cours duquel l'émotion ou le sentiment étaient expérimentés (le sujet qui expérimentait l'expérience affective, la situation qui la causait, l'objet intentionnel auquel elle se référait, le comportement réactif du sujet, l'évaluation morale de l'expérience). Les résultats de la sélection ont mis en évidence que les termes affectifs les plus fréquents se réfèrent à quatre catégories d'émotions, à savoir, dans l'ordre, la peur, la colère, la tristesse, la joie. Ces émotions sont expérimentées à des fréquences différentes par les principaux personnages de la narration (Dieu, les hommes, le Peuple d'Israël). L'émotion le plus souvent expérimentée par Dieu est la colère et par les différents personnages humains, la peur. Aucune évaluation morale négative quant aux expériences affectives n'émerge de l'analyse du texte. L'analyse multivariée met en évidence le fait que la fréquence des citations des catégories émotionnelles change sensiblement en fonction des cinq livres du Pentateuque. Dans leurs conclusions, les auteurs examinent la conception implicite des émotions et des sentiments qui semble émerger du Pentateuque.

Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives

In the first part of this paper I characterize a minimal form of self-consciousness, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. It is a constant structural feature of conscious experience, and corresponds to the consciousness of the self-as-subject that is not taken as an intentional object. In the second part, I argue that contemporary cognitive neuroscience has by and large missed this fundamental form of self-consciousness in its investigation of various forms of self-experience. In the third part, I exemplify how the notion of pre-reflective self-awareness can be of relevance for empirical research. In particular, I propose to interpret processes of sensorimotor integration in light of the phenomenological approach that allows the definition of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

Putting Adam Ferguson in his place1

This paper re-conceptualizes the relationship between Ferguson's life and work by locating him in his biographical and geographical context for the purposes of better understanding his proto-sociological writings. Ferguson's work is relatively unknown outside limited sets of literature and current representations of the link between his life and work risk misplacing him as both Scotsman and sociologist. The popular portrayal suggests there is a strong connection between his Highland background and his famous book An Essay on the History of Civil Society. It will be argued that this claim reproduces the social construction of space in Scottish society and is based on stereotypical views of his birthplace and upbringing. Ferguson did not construct an autobiographical narrative to offer his own understanding of the link between his life and work. This reflects the strengths and weaknesses of sociology as it was developing in the eighteenth century. The 'self' was not recognized as an object of intention or symbolic construction. Ferguson's writings analysed modernity as it was emerging in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland and contrary to common opinion, there was no self-identity as a Highlander to shape his understanding of that social process.

Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Language (review)

Reviewed by: Vowels and consonants: An introduction to the sounds of languageby Peter Ladefoged Carolina González Vowels and consonants: An introduction to the sounds of language. 2nd edn.By Peter Ladefoged. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xvii, 206. ISBN 1405124598. $39.95. Vowels and consonantsis about ‘the sounds of languages’ (xiii). First published in 2001, it introduces some of the basic concepts of acoustic and articulatory phonetics, but unlike the author’s classic A course in phonetics(Ladefoged 2006), it focuses more on acoustics and the use of computers in phonetic and speech technology. Its author, Peter Ladefoged, was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Phonetics at UCLA and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California. L was one of the most admired and influential phoneticians in the world, and his passing in January 2006 is a tremendous loss for the linguistic community at large. A book notice on the first edition of Vowelswas written for Languagein 2002 by Alan Kaye, who remarked that this was the first book of its kind to have its own website. The second edition includes a new chapter on listening to speech, a revision of the sections on speech synthesis and speech recognition, and a more extensive discussion of endangered languages in Ch. 1. It has its own updated website (www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels.contents.html) and the accompanying CD-ROM has also been updated and enriched with data from over one hundred languages from the UCLA language archives. One striking characteristic of this volume, as with the first, is the unconventional presentation of topics. Acoustics is presented before articulation, and pitch and loudness are discussed well before vocalic and consonantal quality. L does not address these choices directly, but he comments: ‘we will begin our description of the sounds of languages by considering the sound waves that are produced when we talk. This is by far the most scientific way of describing speech available at the moment. We can see some of the actions of the tongue and lips that produce speech sounds, but we don’t really know how to quantify these actions’ (6). While some might object to mention of our supposed ignorance of empirical means to informatively investigate articulation, L is sure and consistent in teaching the importance of scientific quantification to arrive at accurate knowledge. [End Page 194] The focus of this book is clearly the presentation of sounds in as scientific and objective a way as possible. In L’s view this motivates the choice and presentation of topics and the amount of coverage given to acoustic phonetics. In fact, Chs. 2–10 are mostly devoted to acoustic description and Chs. 11–15 to gestural description, while IPA symbols are discussed mostly in the final chapter. Vowelsstarts with a chapter that briefly discusses the evolution of languages and sounds. Pitch and loudness are covered in Ch. 2, while the acoustics of vowels and consonants are the focus of Chs. 3–5 and 6, respectively. The next four chapters deal with various aspects of acoustic analysis. Speech synthesis is presented in Ch. 7, which discusses how speech can be synthesized from a limited set of parameters. ‘Talking computers’ and text-to-speech systems are introduced in Ch. 8, while Ch. 9 brings a consideration of ‘listening computers’ and machine speech recognition. Ch. 10 is for me the most fascinating chapter in this volume. It focuses on how people listen to speech, and it includes coverage of confusion matrices, categorical perception, and top-down vs. bottom-up processing, among other topics. The inclusion of these topics in an introductory phonetics textbook is unique and makes this chapter an excellent resource for use in phonetics and introductory linguistics courses. It is also in this chapter that L introduces the idea that ‘vowels and consonants may be simply convenient fictions for use in describing speech’ (109), a notion he follows up on in the final chapter. Chs. 11–13 describe various articulatory aspects of vowels, consonants, and the larynx. After this, consonants and vowels across the world’s languages are considered, while the final chapter (Ch. 16) deals with vowels and consonants in running speech. This...

AQUINAS'S ARGUMENT AGAINST SELF‐HATRED

ABSTRACTAquinas's argument against the possibility of genuine self‐hatred runs counter to modern intuitions about self‐hatred as an explanatorily central notion in psychology, and as an effect of alienation. Aquinas's argument does not deny that persons experience hatred for themselves. It can be read either as the claim that the self‐hater mistakes what she feels toward herself as hatred, or that, though she hates what she believes is her “self,” she actually hates only traits of herself. I argue that the argument fails on both readings. The first reading entails that all passions are really self‐love, and so is incompatible with Aquinas's own “cognitivist” view of what it is that distinguishes specific passions in experience. The second reading entails that persons have no phenomenal access to “self,” rendering self‐reference—how it is that the self can be an intentional object of conscious mental states—a mystery. Augustine's claim, which Aquinas accepts on authority, that all sin originates in inordinate self‐love seems to entail the impossibility of genuine self‐hatred because both thinkers fail to distinguish between two distinct forms of self‐love: amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae.

Mircea Eliade and the Perception of the Sacred in the Profane: Intention, Reduction, and Cognitive Theory

Building upon earlier analysis of Eliade's 'sacred' as 'the intentional object of human experience that is apprehended as the real' (Rennie 1996, 21) this article pursues the concept of the apprehension of the sacred in empirical experience as described by Eliade in his discussion of religious symbols. Using a vareity of visual analogies an attempt is made to understand what Eliade's understanding might imply and how this 'perception of the sacred' might come about. This necessitates some consideration of the status of 'intentional objects' and leads to a reflection on Eliadean claims concerning the 'irreducibility' of religion and of the relation of such claims to contemporary congnitive analyses of religion. The conclusion is that Eliade's understanding can be seen as complementary to recent cognitive theory, which demonstrates the coherence of that understanding.

Teleology in biology, chemistry and physics education: what primary teachers should know

Recent research in cognitive psychology suggests that children develop intuitions that may clash with what is accepted by scientists, thus making certain scientific concepts difficult to understand. Children possess intuitions about design and purpose that make them provide teleological explanations to many different sorts of tasks. One possible explanation for the origin of the bias to view objects as made for something derives from an early sensitivity to intentional agents and to their behavior as intentional object users and object makers. What is important is that teleological explanations may not be exclusively restricted in biological phenomena, as commonly assumed. Consequently, primary school teachers should take that into account when teaching biology, chemistry or physics concepts and try to refrain from enforcing students’ teleological intuitions

Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness

Empirical and experiential investigations allow the distinction between observational and non-observational forms of subjective bodily experiences. From a first-person perspective, the biological body can be (1) an "opaque body" taken as an intentional object of observational consciousness, (2) a "performative body" pre-reflectively experienced as a subject/agent, (3) a "transparent body" pre-reflectively experienced as the bodily mode of givenness of objects in the external world, or (4) an "invisible body" absent from experience. It is proposed that pre-reflective bodily experiences rely on sensori-motor integrative mechanisms that process information on the external world in a self relative way. These processes are identification-free in that the self is not identified as an object of observation. Moreover, it is defended that observational self-consciousness must be grounded on such identification-free processes and pre-reflective forms of bodily experience.

Husserl and externalism

It is argued that Husserl was an “externalist” in at least one sense. For it is argued that Husserl held that genuinely perceptual experiences—that is to say, experiences that are of some real object in the world—differ intrinsically, essentially and as a kind from any hallucinatory experiences. There is, therefore, no neutral “content” that such perceptual experiences share with hallucinations, differing from them only over whether some additional non-psychological condition holds or not. In short, it is argued that Husserl was a “disjunctivist”. In addition, it is argued that Husserl held that the individual object of any experience, perceptual or hallucinatory, is essential to and partly constitutive of that experience. The argument focuses on three aspects of Husserl’s thought: his account of intentional objects, his notion of horizon, and his account of reality.

Standing up for an affective account of emotion

This paper constitutes a defence of an affective account of emotion. I begin by outlining the case for thinking that emotions are just feelings. I also suggest that emotional feelings are not reducible to other kinds of feelings, but rather form a distinct class of feeling state. I then consider a number of common objections that have been raised against affective accounts of emotion, including: (1) the objection that emotion cannot always consist only of feeling because some emotions—for example, indignation and regret—necessarily have a cognitive component (say, the perception of a lost opportunity in the case of regret); (2) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because in order to explain how emotions have intentional objects we will have to recognise that emotion consists of cognition; and (3) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because emotion, but not feeling, can be variously assessed or evaluated. However, I demonstrate how an affective account of emotion might be successfully defended against all of the objections that are cited.

Basic Moods

The hypothesis that some moods are emotions has been rejected in philosophy, and is an unpopular alternative in psychology. This is because there is wide agreement that moods have a number of features distinguishing them from emotions. These include: lack of an intentional object and the related notion of lack of a goal; being of long duration; having pervasive or widespread effects; and having causes rather than reasons. Leading theories of mood have tried to explain these purported features by describing moods as global changes in the mind affecting such things as predispositions to holding certain beliefs or the thresholds for triggering a range of relevant behaviors. I show instead that our best understanding of emotions can show that basic emotions either have or can appear to have each of these features. Thus, a plausible hypothesis is that certain moods are emotions. This theory is more parsimonious than the global change theories, and for this reason is to be preferred as an explanation of some moods.

ARE THERE NON-EXISTENT INTENTIONALIA?

Tim Crane has maintained that intentional objects are to be conceived of as schematic entities, having no particular intrinsic nature. While I take this metaphysical thesis to be correct, I cast doubt on whether it excludes intentionalia, especially non-existent ones, from the general inventory of what there is, as Crane seems to think it does. There is a tension here, since Crane uses intentionalia in order to individuate intentional states, but at the same time attempts to dispense with them. If my doubts are grounded, the tension disappears.

Die Einheit der Intentionalitätskonzeption bei Brentano

The objective of this paper is to refute the widely held view that in the wake of his so-called reistic turn Brentano subjected his notion of intentionality to a deep-going revision, viz., that he turned from an ontological account of the intentional object by way of identifying it with the thought-of-thing, i.e., the intentional correlate, or by way of attributing to it a peculiar sort of existence, to a non-ontological account thereof. It will be shown that neither the pre-reistic Brentano espoused anything of an ontological account of the intentional object in that he both distinguished it sharply from the intentional correlate and definitely rejected the idea of there being different sorts of existence, and it will be argued that the apparently ineradicable inclination to ascribe to the pre-reistic Brentano an ontological account of the intentional object stems from ignoring the Aristotelian background of Brentano's thinking about relations.

Design in BME: Challenges, Issues, and Opportunities

Because engineering is an applied science that often aims to create tangible objects such as machines, electronic circuits, and buildings, the meaning of design has come to be synonymous with the object of intention, the Design. Thus, the goal of a design course has traditionally been the conceptualization and reduction to practice of a useful physical object. However, a definition of design limited to the object for an intended use, does not adequately recognize that design is a process and not necessarily an endpoint. Therefore, for the purpose of this paper: Design in biomedical engineering means the conception, creation, and/or fabrication of devices, instruments, fixtures, procedures, methods, algorithms, or simulations intended to benefit health and wellness, including means to interrogate, analyze, or otherwise define operating or physical parameters. In BME, the design process occurs in the context of essential constraints, including regulatory, economic, environmental, sustainability, manufacturability, ethical, and socio-political factors.

Talking About Intentional Objects

Tim Crane has recently defended the view that all intentional states have objects, even when these objects do not exist. In this note I first set forth some crucial elements of Crane’s view: his reasons for accepting intentional objects, his rejection of certain ways of thinking about them, and his distinction between the ‘substantial’ and the ‘schematic’ notion of an object. I then argue that while Crane’s account successfully explains what intentional objects are not, it leaves unexplained how it could make sense to say that intentional objects need not exist. Finally I propose that we can do justice to Crane’s reasons for talking about intentional objects by re-interpreting talk about intentional objects as talk about the truth- or satisfaction-conditions of intentional states.

Система государственной власти в России: феноменологический транзит

On stating that the ever more evident inadequacy of the concept of democratic transit puts on the agenda the question of renewing the set of theoretical instruments of political science, the author presents to the readers’ attention an approach within which the state power system is looked upon as a collective thinking being, and applies it for explaining the processes developing in modern Russia. The transformations of the state power system in Russia of the 1980s to the 2000s are defined by the author as phenomenological transit. With resort to basing himself on E.Husserl’s “Cartesian Reflections”, he singles out three key constituents of phenomenological transit (the phenomenological reduction, the constituting of intentional object, and the constituting of other) and indicates the signs of the corresponding processes on the level of current Russian politics.

Activation of the Human Superior Temporal Gyrus during Observation of Goal Attribution by Intentional Objects

Previous functional imaging experiments in humans showed activation increases in the posterior superior temporal gyrus and sulcus during observation of geometrical shapes whose movements appear intentional or goal-directed. We modeled a chase scenario between two objects, in which the chasing object used different strategies to reach the target object: The chaser either followed the target's path or appeared to predict its end position. Activation in the superior temporal gyrus of human observers was greater when the chaser adopted a predict rather than a follow strategy. Attending to the chaser's strategy induced slightly greater activation in the left superior temporal gyrus than attending to the outcome of the chase. These data implicate the superior temporal gyrus in the identification of objects displaying complex goal-directed motion.