Intentionality and the Externalism versus Internalism Debate

In this paper, I want to focus on the claim, prominently made by sensorimotor theorists, that perception is something we do. I will argue that understanding perceiving as a bodily doing allows for a strong non dualistic position on the relation between experience and objective physical events, one which provides insight into why such relation seems problematic while at the same time providing means to relieve the tension. Next I will show how the claim that perception is something we do does not stand in opposition to, and is not refuted by the fact that we often have perceptual experience without moving. In arguing that cases of motionless perception and perception-like experience are still doings it will be pointed out that the same interactive regularities which are engaged in in active perception still apply to them. Explaining how past interactive regularities can influence current perception or perception-like experience in a way which remains true to the idea that perception is a doing, so I will argue, can be done by invoking the past—the past itself, however, not its representation. The resulting historical, non-representational sensorimotor approach can join forces with Gibsonian ecological psychology—provided that such is also understood along lines that don't invoke externalist remnants of contents.

Gestalt Theory

Summary The paper presents the result of a collective reflection inspired by the individual suggestions of 30 researchers working in different research areas. They are all familiar with the Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, and are aware of the importance that this approach might represent nowadays in their specific research field. The picture that emerges from this ‘mosaic’ stimulates us to consider the potential future developments of this approach if we accept that we need to push its borders beyond the traditional aims of the study of perception (as masterfully developed by the historic Italian Maestri of this approach). If we take this broader view, the Experimental Phenomenology of Perception can extend its perimeters from an analysis of strictly perceptual aspects to an analysis of cognitive and metacognitive aspects (such as aesthetic evaluations, the perception of risk, the experience of certainty/uncertainty in a reasoning process, the perception of proximity to/di...

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2006

1 We focus on the visual case, leaving it to the reader to consider how the discussion generalizes to other modalities. 2 concerned how the transition from introspective beliefs to external--world beliefs could be rational. 2 In this entry, we assume without argument these positions are mistaken. We begin from the assumption that experiences (such as the one you have when you see the mustard) can justify external world beliefs about the things you see, such as beliefs that the mustard jar is in the fridge, and that the justification experience provides does not have to rely on justification for introspective beliefs. From now on, we often let it remain implicit that we are talking about external world beliefs, when we talk about the kind of beliefs that experiences justify. 3 Our main question is this: what features of experiences explain how they justify external world beliefs? The grammar of the question might suggest that experiences suffice all by themselves to provide justification for external world beliefs. But don't read this into the grammar of the phrase "experiences justify beliefs". We can distinguish between the claim that an experience can justify a belief that P, and the claim that an experience can justify a belief that P without help from other features it only contingently has. We clarify our question further in Part I, where we explain why we have chosen this point of departure, and highlight a range of theses about the role of experience in providing different types of justification. In Parts II and III, we consider the role of features of experience falling into two broad categories: constitutive features of experience, including its phenomenal character, its contents, its status as attentive or inattentive (sections 3--7); and causal features of experience such as its reliability, and the impact of other mental states on its formation (sections 8--10). Along the way, we discuss the relationships between visual experience and seeing (sections 1 and 8), and we contrast perceptual justification and perceptual knowledge (section 9).

In this commentary on Don Ihde's paper "Stretching the in-between: embodiment and beyond" I argue that perceptions and observations are based on tacit frames and these frames are expressed through pre-reflexive intuitions thus giving meaning to the perceived content of observations. However, if the objective or given information in perception is incomplete or missing our brain and nervous system will intuitively and unconsciously fill in the missing information in order to act-these particular pieces of added information may not be relevant to the decoding of the given content of perception at all.

In this paper I consider the uses to which certain psychological phe-nomena—e.g. cases of seeing as, and linguistic understanding—are put in the debate about cognitive phenomenology. I argue that we need clear definitions of the terms 'sensory phenomenology' and 'cognitive phenomenology' in order to understand the import of these phenomena. I make a suggestion about the best way to define these key terms, and, in the light of it, show how one influential argument against cognitive phenomenology fails.

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019

The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Physicalists who are realists about consciousness generally assume its objectivity: experience is something identical with physical processes or properties, perhaps the intrinsic nature of the physical, or perhaps some micro-physical, neural, or emergent property. I argue that this assumption wrongly reifies consciousness; it expects to find qualitative representational content-qualia-in the physical world as characterized using such content. Instead, we should grant that conscious experience constitutes a mind-dependent, subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and that the physical world described by science is a represented objective reality. The former, since it exists only for conscious subjects, won't be found as an entity in the latter. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the representational relation and the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behavior-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically-instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness on that basis, and suggest that a mature science of representation may eventually help explain why, perhaps as a matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon.

2020

Abstract. Recent philosophy of mind has tended to treat "inner" states, including both qualia and intentional states, as "theoretical posits" of either folk or scientific psychology. This article argues that phenomenology in fact plays a very different role in the most mature part of psychology, psychophysics. Methodologically, phenomenology plays a crucial role in obtaining psychophysical results. And more importantly, many psychophysical data are best interpreted as reporting relations between stimuli and phenomenological states, both qualitative and intentional. Three examples are used to argue for this thesis: the Weber-Fechner laws, the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet effect, and subjective contour figures. The phenomenological properties that play a role here do so in the role of data that ultimately constrain theoretical work (in this case theory of vision), and not as theoretical posits.

Communication and Cognition, 2001

ABSTRACT (first two sentences added for 2013 upload) This paper focuses on the ontology and intentionality of conscious states (what conscious states are and what they represent). It also gives a critique of reductive physicalism. Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world. Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to naturalise consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it. It is possible, however, to develop a natural, nonreductive, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. This paper introduces such a model and how it construes the nature of conscious experience. Within this model the physical world as perceived (the phenomenal world) is viewed as part of conscious experience not apart from it. While in everyday life we treat this phenomenal world as if it is the “physical world”, it is really just one biologically useful representation of what the world is like that may differ in many respects from the world described by physics. How the world as perceived relates to the world as described by physics can be investigated by normal science (e.g. through the study of sensory physiology, psychophysics and so on). This model of consciousness appears to be consistent with both third-person evidence of how the brain works and with first-person evidence of what it is like to have a given experience. According to the reflexive model, conscious experiences are really how they seem.

Velmans/The Blackwell, 2007

This dissertation is about phenomenal consciousness, its relation to intentionality, and the relation of both to issues in the philosophy of perception. My principal aim is (1) to defend an account of what it is for a perceptual experience to be phenomenally conscious and (2) to develop, within the terms set forth by this account, a particular theory of perceptual phenomenal consciousness. Given the way these matters are usually understood, it probably is not obvious why I distinguish two philosophical tasks here. One might ask: "Isn't defending an account of what it is for a perceptual experience to be phenomenally conscious the same thing as developing a particular theory of perceptual phenomenal consciousness?" I argue that it is not. In addition to my principal aim, I have three subsidiary aims. First, to shed some light on what it means for a perceptual experience to be an intentional mental event, one with representational content. Many philosophers regard the notion of perceptual intentionality as utterly unproblematic. Though I accept that experiences almost always have content, I subject this claim to more scrutiny than is usual. Second, to go some way towards better understanding the relationship between perceptual phenomenal consciousness and perceptual intentionality. In particular, I examine recent attempts to explain the former in terms of the latter. My conclusion is that there can be no such explanation. Finally, to show that, by improving our understanding of perceptual phenomenal consciousness, perceptual intentionality, and the relation between them, we can make headway on some very difficult problems in the philosophy of perception. I am especially interested in defending direct realism, the view that, in having perceptual experiences, subjects can be-and usually are-directly aware of material objects.

2016

My main aim in this paper is to consider what methodology is best suited to adopt for one who believes that there is cognitive phenomenology (CP) in order to argue for its irreducibility to sensory phenomenology. I shall first present and criticize a methodology widely adopted by the deniers of CP in order to reject the irreducibility claim, the so called “exclude-and-isolate” methodology. I shall use my criticisms against it as a lever for backing up a certain conception of the nature of cognitive phenomenal properties. The key notion in this conception is that of factual intimacy which I shall mobilize to put forward the idea that cognitive phenomenal properties are inseparable, in practice and in ordinary cases, from sensory phenomenal properties (leaving open the possibility of their explanatory and metaphysical independence). I shall then present a strategy to prove irreducibility which is compliant with the inseparability claim. One such strategy is in my view provided by comb...

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2007

Dualists believe that experiences have neither location nor extension, while reductive and ‘non-reductive’ physicalists (biological naturalists) believe that experiences are really in the brain, producing an apparent impasse in current theories of mind. Enactive and reflexive models of perception try to resolve this impasse with a form of “externalism” that challenges the assumption that experiences must either be nowhere or in the brain. However, they are externalist in very different ways. Insofar as they locate experiences anywhere, enactive models locate conscious phenomenology in the dynamic interaction of organisms with the external world, and in some versions, they reduce conscious phenomenology to such interactions, in the hope that this will resolve the hard problem of consciousness. The reflexive model accepts that experiences of the world result from dynamic organism-environment interactions, but argues that such interactions are preconscious. While the resulting phenomenal world is a consequence of such interactions, it cannot be reduced to them. The reflexive model is externalist in its claim that this external phenomenal world, which we normally think of as the “physical world,” is literally outside the brain. Furthermore, there are no added conscious experiences of the external world inside the brain. In the present paper I present the case for the enactive and reflexive alternatives to more classical views and evaluate their consequences. I argue that, in closing the gap between the phenomenal world and what we normally think of as the physical world, the reflexive model resolves one facet of the hard problem of consciousness. Conversely, while enactive models have useful things to say about percept formation and representation, they fail to address the hard problem of consciousness.

2009

Consciousness and Cognition, 2006

We review the use of introspective and phenomenological methods in experimental settings. We distinguish different senses of introspection, and further distinguish phenomenological method from introspectionist approaches. Two ways of using phenomenology in experimental procedures are identified: first, the neurophenomenological method, proposed by Varela, involves the training of experimental subjects. This approach has been directly and productively incorporated into the protocol of experiments on perception. A second approach may have wider application and does not involve training experimental subjects in phenomenological method. It requires front-loading phenomenological insights into experimental design. A number of experiments employing this approach are reviewed. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for both the cognitive sciences and phenomenology.