On reading and writing

2017

, in "Chomsky on Analytic and Necessary Propositions", discusses Chomsky's view on the analytic-synthetic distinction and on necessary propositions. Cipriani underlines how Chomsky's defense of such a distinction can hold only under the assumption of conceptual innateness. Furthermore, Cipriani notes that, in Chomsky's view, the distinction between necessary and contingent truths is determined by the structure of the conceptual system and its relations with other systems of common-sense understanding. But such a hypothesis, Cipriani argues, seems to be incompatible with Chomsky's own objection to Kripke's essentialism. In "The Two-Way Relationship Between Language Acquisition and Simulation Theory", Hashem Ramadan (Boğaziçi University) draws a two-way connection between Simulation Theory and language acquisition. The idea is that, on the one hand, if an individual has better simulation capabilities, then she will be better when it comes to L2 acquisition; on the other hand, being exposed to different languages seems to lead to better simulation capacities and higher degrees of empathy. Drawing on an evolutionary explanation, Ramadan argues in favor of Simulation Theory over Theory Theory and discusses some studies involving children with ASD which provide support for it. Marco Fenici (University of Florence), in "Rebuilding the Landscape of Psychological Understanding After the Mindreading War", addresses the intricate net of connected debates in philosophy and cognitive sciences about the onset, the development, and the nature of mindreading mechanisms. Fenici discusses the contribution of each debate and the ways in which philosophy and cognitive sciences have or have not fruitfully interacted thus far. Alessandra Buccella (University of Pittsburgh), in "Naturalizing Qualia", puts forward an alternative to Hill (2014)'s naturalization of qualia. For Hill, perceptual qualia (i.e., the ways in which things look from a viewpoint) are physical properties of objects and are relational in nature-that is, they are functions of objects' intrinsic properties, viewpoints, and observers. After analyzing the weaknesses of Hill's account, Buccella builds upon Chirimuuta (2015)'s color adverbialism and argues for a broadly adverbialist view of perceptual qualia. "Carving Mind at Brain's Joints. The Debate on Cognitive Ontology", by Marco Viola (IUSS Pavia and Vita-Salute San Raffaele University), assesses the vexed mind-brain problem; in particular, he discusses the traditional hypothesis of a one-to-one mapping between mental states and neural activities and the shortcomings of this sort of "new phrenology". Viola explores two ways to avoid such weaknesses: the first endorses a many-to-many mapping model, whereas the second radically rethinks its relata. Joana Rigato (Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lisbon), in her paper "Looking for Emergence in Physics", discusses a topic on which philosophers and physicists often talk past each other: emergence. Emergentism, in its different forms, is the view that certain features of reality (be they objects, properties or laws) are irreducible to the lower-level bases they emerge on. After going through some examples of emergence in (classical and quantum) physics, Rigato concludes that paradigmatic examples of discontinuity between models in physics can back the emergentist philosopher's case up against reductionist theories. "Direct Social Perception of Emotions in Close Relations", by Andrea Blomqvist (University of Sheffield), explores the theory of Direct Social Perception with respect to perceiving the emotional states of our closest ones (spouses, friends, and family). Blomqvist argues that emotions are embodied and can be directly perceived. Moreover, she argues against a nonconceptual view of emotion recognition and claims instead that by attending to certain expressive patterns of emotions, we can learn "emotional concepts". This view predicts that we can directly perceive both basic and non-basic emotions of people we are close to. In "Me, You and the Measurement. Founding a Science of Consciousness on the Second Person Perspective", Niccolò Negro (University of Milan) critically assesses the methodologies 14 LAURA CAPONETTO, BIANCA CEPOLLARO involved in the study of consciousness while discussing whether they adopt a first-, second-or third-person perspective. In particular, he argues that Integrated Information Theory is the approach that is most likely to account for a measure and a mathematical analysis of conscious experience. Timothy A. Burns (Loyola Marymount University), in "Empathy, Simulation, and Neuroscience: A Phenomenological Case against Simulation-Theory", questions the claim that the discovery of mirror neurons provides empirical support for the simulation view of mindreading. In addition to formulating multiple objections against Simulation Theory, Burns draws on the works of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein and proposes a phenomenological account to mindreading. In "On Experiencing Meaning: Irreducible Cognitive Phenomenology and Sinewave Speech", John Joseph Dorsch (University of Tübingen) deals with the phenomenon of sinewave speech (i.e., a synthetic acoustic signal that replaces the original human voice's formants with pure tone whistles). When subjects first hear sinewaves, all that they can discern are beeps and whistles; however, after listening to the speech from which the sinewave is derived, beeps and whistles actually sound like speech. Granted that the two episodes (whistles vs. speech) differ in their phenomenal character, Dorsch investigates whether and to what extent such an alteration in phenomenal character may provide evidence for irreducible cognitive phenomenology. Joe Higgins (University of St. Andrews and University of Stirling-SASP) discusses the tension within cognitive scientific accounts of human selfhood between bodily processes and social processes in his paper "Embodied Mind-Ensocialled Body: Navigating Bodily and Social Processes within Accounts of Human Cognitive Agency". Drawing on a range of phenomenological and empirical insights, Higgins argues for the concept of an "ensocialled body", in which all organic bodily processes are at the same time also social processes.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2007

Plain phenomenology explains theoretically salient mental or psychological distinctions with an appeal to their first-person applications. But it does not assume (as does heterophenomenology) that warrant for such first-person judgment is derived from an explanatory theory constructed from the third-person perspective. Discussions in historical phenomenology can be treated as plain phenomenology. This is illustrated by a critical consideration of Brentano's account of consciousness, drawing on some ideas in early Husserl. Dennett's advocacy of heterophenomenology on the grounds of its supposed "neutrality" does not show it is preferable to plain phenomenology. In fact the latter is more neutral in ways we ought to want, and permits a desirable (and desirably critical) use of first-person reflection that finds no place in the former.

It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy. The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs— " believe " , " see " , etc.—does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to " the ghost in the machine "). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mind vis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related? René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem. After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person's brain at that time). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them— sensations, thoughts, emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.

2008

Focusing on the manifesto provided by Gallagher and Zahavi's The Phenomenological Mind, this paper critically examines how we should understand and asses the prospects of allying phenomenological approaches to mind with work in the cognitive sciences. It is argued that more radical and revolutionary adjustments to our standard conceptions of the mind than suggested by (at least some) the proponents of the phenomenological movement are required before such alliances will bear fruit.

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APLIKOVANÁ PSYCHOLOGIE/APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY, 2017

René Descartes in his Meditations on the first philosophy pointed out that our inner being and consciousness are given to us in a more immediate and certain way than the existence of nature. The gap between the soul and the world, however, could not be bridged by Descartes otherwise than through the so-called psychophysical dualism. The primary holding and evaluation of the “psychical” as independent of the physical environment – i.e. from the aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology persistence in a transcendental attitude, during the development of modern philosophy turned out to be increasingly untenable. The soul, objectively understood, came to be described in the same objective-exact way as nature and the road to empirical psychology became wide open. Husserl’s inclination toward the so-called pure psychology, even when supported by transcendental subjectivity, provided a stimulus to the development of a wide phenomenological stream, which tried to find the legitimacy of its claims in a return to the original meeting of man and things within the pre-scientific natural world.

Philosophers' Imprint, 2019

The phenomenal particularity thesis says that if a mind-independent particular is consciously perceived in a given perception, that particular is among the constituents of the perception's phenomenology. Martin (2002; 2002), Campbell (2002), Gomes et al. (2016) and others defend this thesis. Against them are Mehta (2014), Montague (2016, chp. 6), Schellenberg (2010) and others, who have produced strong arguments that the phenomenal particularity thesis is false. Unfortunately, neither side has persuaded the other, and it seems that the debate between them is now at an impasse. This paper aims to break through this impasse. It argues that we have reached the impasse because two distinct conceptions of phenomenology---a “narrow” conception and a “broad” conception---are compatible with our what-it-is-like characterizations of phenomenology. It also suggests that each of these two conceptions has its own theoretical value and use. Therefore, the paper recommends a pluralistic position, on which we acknowledge that there are two kinds of phenomenology: phenomenology-narrow (an entity conceived according to the narrow conception) and phenomenology-broad (an entity conceived according to the broad conception). The phenomenal particularity thesis is true only with respect to the latter.