Individualism and the Mental

Franz Brentano’s Philosophy After One Hundred Years

This paper offers a phenomenological interpretation of Brentano's view of mentality. The key idea is that mental phenomena are not only characterized by intentionality; they also exhibit a distinctive way of appearing or being experienced. In short, they also have a distinctive phenomenology. I argue this view may be traced back to Brentano's theory of inner perception (hereafter IP). Challenging the self-representational reading of IP, I maintain the latter is best understood as a way of appearing, that is, in phenomenological terms. Section 1 addresses Brentano's claim that IP is one mark of the mental alongside intentionality. Sections 2 and 3 present support for a phenomenological interpretation of IP. And Section 4 briefly discusses two objections.

Descartes’ substance dualism can be plausibly seen as an ontological solution to epistemic puzzles surrounding the seemingly privileged, first-person access we have to our own minds. His is an attempt to answer the question: What must (or could) a Self be so that each of us could have the sort of privileged basic self-knowledge – knowledge of all (and only) our own present states of mind – that we appear to have? In this paper, I disentangle various semantic and epistemological issues surrounding uses of “I” to refer to ourselves and uses of non-evidential (or ‘base-less’) self-attributions of present states of mind – “avowals” – to produce true claims about our states of mind. I juxtapose two dilemmas that have informed my treatment of “I” and of avowals – one due to Elizabeth Anscombe, the other due to Richard Rorty. I use the juxtaposition to revisit certain (neglected) aspects of the motivation and defense I have provided for my neo-expressivist approach to the security of avowals, to self-knowledge, and to capturing the mental/nonmental divide. In Section 1, I outline Anscombe’s Dilemma – which concerns uses of “I” ‘as subject’ – and my preferred, non-Cartesian way of avoiding it. In Section 2, I discuss Rorty’s Dilemma – which concerns so-called first-person authority. In Section 3, I suggest that our discussion of the mental/nonmental divide should begin with a question that I take to be prior to the Cartesian question articulated above, namely: What must (or could) states of mind be so that, as subjects of such states, we could be in a position to express all (and only) our present states of mind through our behavior, thereby enabling others to have immediate uptake of them? I conclude with some comments on potential implications of neo-expressivism for our understanding of the metaphysical nature of mental states and the mental/nonmental divide.

2011

The Problem of Other (Group) Minds (Response to Schwitzgebel), 2017

In recent papers, Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophical Studies, 172, 1697-1721, 2015, Philosophia, 44, 877-883, 2016) argues that if physicalism is true, then the United States is probably conscious. My primary aim here is to demonstrate that the source of Schwitzgebel's conditional argument is the BProblem of Other Minds,^ which is a general problem; wherefore, Schwitzgebel's conclusion should be revised and applied not only to physicalism, but to most contemporary theories of the mind. I analyze the difference between Schwitzgebel's argument and other arguments against functionalism, arguing that the difference between them is rooted in referring to the causal role of the whole system, rather than referring to the casual role of the system's parts. This key difference between functionalism and behaviorism explains why the source of Schwitzgebel's argument stems from the problem of other minds.

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 1988

2015

Unlike psychologistic paradigms, the non-atomistic variant of methodological individualism discussed in this book explains society in terms of complex emergent structures that unintentionally result from human actions, and that in turn influence those actions. Friedrich Hayek is an emblematic representative of this approach, the origins of which date back to the Scottish Enlightenment. One of Hayek’s most original – but also less well-known – contributions is his linking of this non–atomistic methodological individualism to a cognitive psychology centered on the idea that mind is both an interpretative device and a self-organizing system. This book uses Hayek’s reflections on mind as a starting point to investigate the concept of action from the standpoint of non-atomistic methodological individualism, and it explores the connections between Hayek’s cognitive psychology and approaches employed in various fields, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, enactivism, neo-Weberian sociology and fallibilism. Focusing on the interpretative foundations of social life, the book conceives action as a product of the human mind’s cognitive autonomy, i.e. of its hermeneutic skills that are influenced by historical and socio-cultural factors.. “Di Iorio offers a new approach to Hayek’s Sensory Order, linking neuroscience to the old Verstehen tradition and to contemporary theories of self-organizing systems; this should be on the reading list of everyone who is interested in Hayek’s thought.” - Barry Smith, University at Buffalo, editor of The Monist

This paper deals with what Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi call “the social cognition” from the chapter How we know others in their book The Phenomenological Mind (Gallagher, Zahavi 2008), and what Adolf Reinach calls the “extraneous perception” in his university course Einleitung in die Philosophie (Reinach 1913) – that is, the possibility of intersubjectivity, according to these authors. My objective is to show how Gallagher and Zahavi’s analyses could profit from that of Reinach. I find that Reinach’s study could provide a particular heuristic value to Gallagher and Zahavi’s work, by furnishing it with a useful tool to clear up some issues which, in my opinion, remain rather vague. The first part of this article is devoted to outlining Gallagher and Zahavi’s thesis about how we know others, clarifying which points of their analyses could be cleared up by Reinach’s study; the second part presents Reinach’s arguments concerning the perception of the other subject; and finally, I will explain how Reinach’s analysis contributes to that of Gallagher and Zahavi’s work and remark on what accessing to others’ mental state from the second-person perspective by combining the two positions means.

2013

This piece is an extract from a recent publication entitled "Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity: The Extended Relational Field of the Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas, Mexico." I provide an overview of current research on Theory of Mind (ToM), with a focus on " social opacity ideologies " —local ethnotheories which claim that others' inner affective, cognitive, and motivational states are unknowable, or at the very least, difficult to access. In much of the literature on social opacity, these ethnotheories are taken at face value as descriptions of how people actually think, relate, and regard others. I argue that these hypercognized local understandings of mind often exist against a background of many everyday forms of " mind reading, " suggesting that mind is rarely viewed as uniformly opaque, even in cultural settings which highlight this particular understanding of relationality. In the Highland Maya context, interpersonally attuned cultural forms exist in tension with, and against a background of, social opacity—one which is experienced with some ambivalence, and which gives rise to countermeasures designed to circumvent the studied circumspection of everyday life. Here, where local language ideology posits a disjuncture between underlying motivation-intentionality and the speech act, one of the primary vehicles for coming to know the dispositional states of others is recast as largely irrelevant as a source of meaningful information. As a result—at least among the Tzotzil—people tend to look elsewhere in order to gain an ''intersubjective'' understanding of the motivational contours of their social world. On a methodological level, it is important to note that these " everyday forms of mind reading " can often only be accessed obliquely, by tapping into domains in which the social proscriptions against making over claims about the inner cognitive and affective states of others are minimized (or inoperant).