Kinds Of Mental States Research Articles

A Rightness-Based Theory of Communicative Propriety

ABSTRACTWe express and communicate many attitudes beyond belief, such as amusement, joy, admiration, hatred, and desire. I consider whether there are any general norms that would cover all of these cases. The most obvious generalisation of the most popular norms for assertion, fittingness-based theories, fail in part because it is sometimes an intrinsic good to have certain kinds of mental states (amusement, say). I develop an alternative, rightness-based, approach, according to which it is appropriate to communicate a mental state to an interlocutor when it is right to make the interlocutor have that mental state because of the speech act. This view arises naturally from conversational participants’ common interests, and it helps to make sense of linguistic phenomena like expressives.

Investigating 'Persuasive Strategies' in Business English

Persuasion is the process of creating , reinforcing , or changing peoples' beliefs , values or actions . It is the art of convincing an audience , listeners or readers, to believe , think , or act as the speaker or writer wants them to.
 Persuasion constitutes a 'speech act' , an act performed in , or by speaking. . It describes when the persuader induces a particular kind of mental state in the persuadee.
 Persuasive strategies are the various means of persuasion available to any speaker.
 The present paper investigates Aristotle's three different persuasive strategies (ethos , pathos , and logos) in order to see whether these strategies in business English fulfill most or all of the speech acts.
 Results of the analysis show that assertive and directive speech acts constitute the highest population in the language of business English , and as for the persuasive strategies , 'logos' ─ causal reasoning ─ is most used .
 Repetition of words and long patterns of syntactic parallelism of clauses are recognized in this study as a means of persuasion.

Identifying Criteria for the Evaluation of the Implications of Brain Reading for Mental Privacy

Contemporary brain reading technologies promise to provide the possibility to decode and interpret mental states and processes. Brain reading could have numerous societally relevant implications. In particular, the private character of mind might be affected, generating ethical and legal concerns. This paper aims at equipping ethicists and policy makers with conceptual tools to support an evaluation of the potential applicability and the implications of current and near future brain reading technology. We start with clarifying the concepts of mind reading and brain reading, and the different kinds of mental states that could in principle be read. Subsequently, we devise an evaluative framework that is composed of five criteria-accuracy, reliability, informativity, concealability and enforceability-aimed at enabling a clearer estimation of the degree to which brain reading might be realistically deployed in contexts where mental privacy could be at stake. While accuracy and reliability capture how well a certain method can access mental content, informativity indicates the relevance the obtainable data have for practical purposes. Concealability and enforceability are particularly important for the evaluation of concerns about potential violations of mental privacy and civil rights. The former concerns the degree with which a brain reading method can be concealed from an individual’s perception or awareness. The latter regards the extent to which a method can be used against somebody’s will. With the help of these criteria, stakeholders can orient themselves in the rapidly developing field of brain reading.

Rethinking expressive theories of punishment: why denunciation is a better bet than communication or pure expression

Many philosophers hold that punishment has an expressive dimension. Advocates of expressive theories have different views about what makes punishment expressive, what kinds of mental states and what kinds of claims are, or legitimately can be expressed in punishment, and to what kind of audience or recipients, if any, punishment might express whatever it expresses. I shall argue that in order to assess the plausibility of an expressivist approach to justifying punishment we need to pay careful attention to whether the things which punishment is supposed to express are aimed at an audience. For the ability of any version of expressivism to withstand two important challenges, which I call the harsh treatment challenge’ and the ‘publicity challenge’ respectively. will depend on the way it answers them. The first of these challenges has received considerable discussion in the literature on expressive theories of punishment; the second considerably less. This is unfortunate. For careful consideration of the publicity challenge should lead us to favor a version of the expressive theory which has been under-discussed: the view on which punishment has an intended audience, and on which the audience is society at large, rather than—as on the most popular version of that view—the criminal. Furthermore, this view turns out to be better equipped to meet the harsh treatment challenge, and to be so precisely because of the way in which it meets the publicity challenge.

Which Mental States Are Rationally Evaluable, And Why?

AbstractWhat makes certain mental states subject to evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification, and others arational? In this paper, I develop and defend an account that explains why belief is governed by, and so appropriately subject to, evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification, one that does justice to the complexity of our evaluative practice in this domain. Then, I sketch out a way of extending the account to explain when and why other kinds of mental states are rationally evaluable. I argue that the cognitive or psychological mechanisms that give rise to and sustain our mental states help to render our mental states appropriate targets for evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification when the operation of these mechanisms is responsive, in a specific way, to our judgments about which kinds of considerations constitute rationalizing and justifying reasons for being in states of the relevant sort.

Self-knowledge and imagination

How do we know when we have imagined something? How do we distinguish our imaginings from other kinds of mental states we might have? These questions present serious, if often overlooked, challenges for theories of introspection and self-knowledge. This paper looks specifically at the difficulties imagination creates for Neo-Expressivist, outward-looking, and inner sense theories of self-knowledge. A path forward is then charted, by considering the connection between the kinds of situations in which we can reliably say that another person is imagining, and those in which we can say the same about ourselves. This view is a variation on the outward-looking approach, and preserves much of the spirit of Neo-Expressivism.

Legal Intuition. Precis of the Book 'Legal Intuition: Towards External Integration of Legal Theory'

The paper summarizes the argument I make in the book concerning the role played in lawyers' reasonings by their intuitive reactions, impression, inclinations, expectations and other similar kinds of mental states. The book examines the nature of intuition using the tools of contemporary cognitive science, evolutionary biology, empirical psychology and philosophy of mind. It points out to the inevitable dependence of reflective, deliberate reasoning and decison-making on nonconscious chains of cognitive-affective associations triggered by automatically detected situational cues. Simultaneously, I critisize the popular view that intuition plays a role in course of decision-making while deliberate reasoning provides post-hoc justification for decisions already taken. I find this view as distorting simplification of reality. In fact, intuition and reflective reasoning take part on both stages - making a decision and providing its justification. In real life there is strong continuity between the context of decision and context of justification. Both relate to the mental representation of the problem and its solution. Such representation emerges in course of dealing with a problem and normally remains as the crucial basis of its justification. The book highlights three main types of influence exerted by intuition on reflective reasoning - expert, routine intuition (easy cases or standard partial problems in course of complex reasoning), motivating the course and outcome of deliberate reasoning as well as insight (a-ha effect) accompanied by subjective experience of sudden complete solution popping up in the mind without mediation by conscious analytic effort.

Why “belief” is hard work

Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.

Without pretense: a critique of Goldman’s model of simulation

In this paper I criticize Alvin Goldman's simulation theory of mindreading which involves the claim that the basic method of folk psychologically predicting behaviour is to form pretend beliefs and desires that reproduce the transitions between the mental states of others, in that way enabling to predict what the others are going to do. I argue that when it comes to simulating propositional attitudes it isn't clear whether pretend beliefs need to be invoked in order to explain relevant experimental results, and whether pretend desires can be distinguished from 'real' ones as forming a separate kind of mental states. Since belief-desire model underlies the conception of pretend states in higher-level mindreading, dropping pretend attitudes from the picture isn't possible and, due to that, this model may be incoherent. Nevertheless, Goldman's theory could still survive because it includes an additional model of mindreading, but simulation is given much lesser role there.

History and Intentions in the Experience of Artworks

The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception.

States of mind: emotions, body feelings, and thoughts share distributed neural networks.

Scientists have traditionally assumed that different kinds of mental states (e.g., fear, disgust, love, memory, planning, concentration, etc.) correspond to different psychological faculties that have domain-specific correlates in the brain. Yet, growing evidence points to the constructionist hypothesis that mental states emerge from the combination of domain-general psychological processes that map to large-scale distributed brain networks. In this paper, we report a novel study testing a constructionist model of the mind in which participants generated three kinds of mental states (emotions, body feelings, or thoughts) while we measured activity within large-scale distributed brain networks using fMRI. We examined the similarity and differences in the pattern of network activity across these three classes of mental states. Consistent with a constructionist hypothesis, a combination of large-scale distributed networks contributed to emotions, thoughts, and body feelings, although these mental states differed in the relative contribution of those networks. Implications for a constructionist functional architecture of diverse mental states are discussed.

Resisting aliefs: Gendler on belief-discordant behaviors

This paper challenges T. S. Gendler's notion of aliefs, a novel kind of mental state which she introduces to explain a wide variety of belief-discordant behaviors. In particular, I argue that many of the cases which she uses to motivate such a mental state can be fully explained by accounts that make use only of commonplace attitudes such as beliefs and desires.

Experiential Awareness: Do You Prefer “It” to “Me”?

In having an experience one is aware of having it. Having an experience requires some form of access to one’s own state, which distinguishes phenomenally conscious mental states from other kinds of mental states. Until very recently, Higher-Order (HO) theories were the only game in town aiming at offering a full-fledged account of this form of awareness within the analytical tradition. Independently of any objections that HO theories face, First/Same-Order (F/SO) theorists need to offer an account of such access to become a plausible alternative. My aim in this paper is twofold. In the first place, I wish to widen the logical space of the discussion among theories of consciousness by offering a distinction, orthogonal to that between F/SO and HO theories, between what I will call ‘Self-Involving’ (SI) and ‘Mental-State-Involving’ (MSI) theories and argue in favor of the former one. In the second place, I will present the basics of a characterization of such a Self-Involving theory in Same-Order terms.

GRIEF: A NARRATIVE ACCOUNT

AbstractGrief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time. The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event.

Essere un soggetto è un fenomeno naturale?

As I define it, metaphysical naturalism (in the philosophy of mind) is the thesis according to which mental facts supervene in strong sense on neurophysiological states, i.e., the former can be deduced from the latter. In this paper I discuss this thesis by taking into consideration two different kinds of mental states: I shall argue that, while metaphysical naturalism is false for standard propositional attitudes (beliefs and desires), it can be defended in the case of low-level phenomenal states, or raw feelings. As a consequence, since the instantiation of high-order mental states requires those neurophysiological mechanisms that constitute raw feelings, the notion of self has a biological basis, and to this extent we can regard subjectivity as a natural phenomenon.

Mentalizing under Uncertainty: Dissociated Neural Responses to Ambiguous and Unambiguous Mental State Inferences

The ability to read the minds of others (i.e., to mentalize) requires that perceivers understand a wide range of different kinds of mental states, including not only others’ beliefs and knowledge but also their feelings, desires, and preferences. Moreover, although such inferences may occasionally rely on observable features of a situation, perceivers more typically mentalize under conditions of “uncertainty,” in which they must generate plausible hypotheses about a target's mental state from ambiguous or otherwise underspecified information. Here, we use functional neuroimaging to dissociate the neural bases of these 2 distinct social–cognitive challenges: 1) mentalizing about different types of mental states (beliefs vs. preferences) and 2) mentalizing under conditions of varying ambiguity. Although these 2 aspects of mentalizing have typically been confounded in earlier research, we observed a double dissociation between the brain regions sensitive to type of mental state and ambiguity. Whereas ventral and dorsal aspects of medial prefrontal cortex responded more during ambiguous than unambiguous inferences regardless of the type of mental state, the right temporoparietal junction was sensitive to the distinction between beliefs and preferences irrespective of certainty. These results underscore the emerging consensus that, rather than comprising a single mental operation, social cognition makes flexible use of different processes as a function of the particular demands of the social context.

Changes in the standing posture induced by a visual stimulus using moving images: inter-individual differences and effect of mindset on the projected image

Many studies have shown that optokinetic induces postural sway and that vision, in addition to vestibular and somatosensory inputs, plays an important role in postural control. In the present study, we examined individual differences in the postural sway induced by movement of visual images back and forth and the effect of the response to the projected image. Three kinds of visual images were used: normal (image moving backward), reverse (image moving forward), and images. Subjects received visual via a head-mounted display while standing on a stabilometer with their feet aligned in the Romberg position, and the postural sway was measured. The subjects initially maintained the standing position at rest for one minute (a static image was presented) and were then given visual for two minutes, followed by a 2-minute presentation of the static image. The period of visual is referred to as during stimulation and the 2-minute period of presentation of the static image is referred to as after stimulation. The postural sway was measured over time. In Experiment 1, the measurement was conducted 5 times under each condition. In many subjects, postural sway was induced in the direction of visual during stimulation and in the opposite direction after stimulation (normal type); however, some subjects showed the opposite postural sway (reverse type) or showed no induced postural sway at all (poor response type). Most subjects showed similar changes for each of the five stimulations. Individual differences in postural sway were considered to be induced by the effect of vision on the postural control system. In Experiment 2, the measurement was conducted using the same visual under two kinds of mental states: a sub-conscious condition, in which the subjects were instructed to watch the image without any assumption regarding their own motion, and a conscious condition, in which the subjects were instructed to assume that that they were moving in response to the projected image (although no actual walking motion occurred). Many subjects showed postural sway in the opposite direction when the state was changed, despite the image remaining the same. These results suggest that posture is smoothly controlled using visual information to allow adaptation to various environments.

Intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies

When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can think of it either from a functional standpoint or from a physical standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking difference between two kinds of states—those that involve phenomenal consciousness and those that do not. Specifically, it appears that ascriptions of states that involve phenomenal consciousness show a special sort of sensitivity to purely physical factors.

Telling the story of theory of mind: Deaf and hearing children's narratives and mental state understanding

Theory of mind (ToM) was examined in late‐signing deaf children in two studies by using standard tests and measures of spontaneous talk about inner states of perception, affect and cognition during storytelling. In Study 1, there were 21 deaf children aged 6 to 11 years and 13 typical‐hearing children matched with the deaf by chronological age. In Study 2, there were 17 deaf children aged 6 to 12 years and 17 typical‐hearing preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years who were matched with the deaf by ToM test performance. In addition to replicating the consistently reported finding of poor performance on standard false belief tests by late‐signing deaf children, significant correlations emerged in both studies between deaf children's ToM test scores and their spontaneous narrative talk about imaginative cognition (e.g. ‘pretend’). In Study 2, with a new set of purpose‐built pictures that evoked richer and more complex mentalistic narration than the published picture book of Study 1, results of multiple regression analyses showed that children's narrative talk about imaginative cognition was uniquely important, over and above hearing status and talking of other kinds of mental states, in predicting ToM scores. The same was true of children's elaborated narrative talk using utterances that either spelt out thoughts, explained inner states or introduced contrastives. In addition, results of a Guttman scalogram analysis in Study 2 suggested a consistent sequence in narrative and standard test performance by deaf and hearing children that went from (1) narrative mention of visible (affective or perceptual) mental states only, along with FB failure, to (2) narrative mention of cognitive states along with (1), to (3) elaborated narrative talk about inner states along with (2), and finally to (4) simple and elaborated narrative talk about affective/perceptual and cognitive states along with FB test success. Possible explanations for this performance ordering, as well as for the observed correlations in both studies between ToM test scores and narrative variables, were considered.

Reasoning with the Irrational

Moral Psychology in the Protagoras Rachel Singpurwalla We all, on occasion, experience motivational conflict and weakness of the will. When we diet, we desire to eat sweets, even while striving to check our impulses. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we succumb. Other times, we make decisions to improve our work habits, but then permit ourselves to be distracted by passing pleasures. Later, if we have allowed ourselves to indulge, we rebuke ourselves and feel remorse or regret. We describe ourselves as having been weak-willed, as having been overcome by our desires. What conception of the mental states that are capable of playing a role in motivating our actions explains the fact that we can have these sorts of experiences? In particular, do we need to posit non-rational or irrational desires – motivational states that arise independently of and so can conflict with our reasoned conception of the good – to explain the phenomena? And if so, exactly what kind of mental state is an irrational desire? It is widely held by commentators that in the Protagoras, Socrates attempts to give an account of the phenomena of psychic conflict and weakness of the will without positing irrational desires. This interpretation of Socrates’ position is largely due to the fact that he denies that we ever pursue actions that we either know or believe to be bad; instead, we always pursue what we think is best. On this account, if we do take an action that is in fact bad for us, it must be due to ignorance (358c-d). Penner 1990, 68, for example, infers from this Socratic position that ‘there are no desires that are not desires for what is the best option available in the