UoW 2021 Postgraduate Conference: Perspectives on Intentionality and Consciousness
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
08:00 am to 8:10 am Welcome
Keynote: Joe Ulatowski- Charity and Intentionality in Twardowski’s 08:10 am to 09:05 am Critique of Relative Truth
Enrico Postiglione- Embodied Intentionality: What an Octopus Tells us 09:10 am to 10:05 am About the Unity of Consciousness and Hylomorphism
10:05 am to 10:20 am Break
Marta Miguel- The Self in Emotions: The Intentionality of So-called 10:20 am to 11:15 am Reflexive Emotions
11:20 am to 12:15 am Lorenzo Buscicchi- Hedonic Intentionalism: A Critique 12:15 am to 12:30 am Break
12:30 am to 13:25 pm Ray Cheung- Phenomenality: Indication Without Representation
Thursday, March 25, 2021
08:00 am to 08:55 am Sevgi Demiroğl- Reclaiming Pain’s Intentionality After a Century
09:00 am to 09:55 am Cristiano Vidali- Pay attention to Intentionality!
09:55 am to 10:10 am Break
10:10 am to 11:05 am Andrea Gianotta- Embodying and Naturalizing Phenomenal Intentionality
Christopher Stratman- Phenomenal Intentionality and Imaginative 11:10 am to 12:05 am Presence
12:05 am to 12:20 am Break
12:20 am to 13:15 pm Tristan James Heine- Kant, McDowell & the Myth of the Given
Friday, March 26, 2021 Bruno Cortesi- The Early Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on Intentionality: A 08:00 am to 08:55 am Brief Review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Our Pre-reflective Encounter With the Environment
09:00 am to 09:55 am Keynote: Imogen Dickie- Mind Seeks World
09:55 am to 10:10 Break
10:10 am to 11:05 Maria Corrado- The Objects of Auditory Perceptual Experience 11:10 am to 12:05 am Thomas Froy-What Are Abstract Thoughts Not About?
12:05 am to 12:20 am Break
12:20 am to 13:15 pm Benjamin D. Young- Thinking About The Past
13:15 pm to 13: 25 Closure pm
Joe Ulatowski- Charity and Intentionality in Twardowski’s Critique of Relative Truth
On Brentano’s notion of intentionality the characteristic mark of mental phenomenon is its having an object. Accordingly, so do judgements. Impersonal judgments like “It is raining” lack any subject term in the usual sense. What Brentano thought was essential for impersonal judgments to be true involved the acceptance or rejection of something by someone. This allows for impersonal judgments to be relatively true and false since “It is raining” may be true at one time and place but not at another. Kazimierz Twardowski, a student of Brentano, argued for an absolute concept of truth. On Twardowski’s view judgments were the bearers of truth, so he dispenses with Brentano’s overly psychologised truth-concept. To supplement Twardowski’s absolute conception of truth he put some purchase in the speaker’s intentions and speaker meaning. In this paper, I show that an integral but often overlooked part of Twardowski’s absolute view of truth and his critique of relative truth is the principle of charity.
Enrico Postiglione- Embodied Intentionality: What an Octopus Tells us About the Unity of Consciousness and Hylomorphism
This paper explores the possibility of consciousness in animals with radically different neural structures, in the hope of gaining insight into the nature of human intentionality and consciousness. It results form the observation of Octopus vulgaris in the wild and/or housed in enriched environment, and investigates their behavioural responses to problem-solving and play-like tests. Integrating philosophical and neuro-ethological remarks and analysing some properties of the Octopus - which in certain circumstances seems to produce a cognitive-laden response, with no involvement of the brain - I infer that, like a body that is its own controller, Octopus represents a perfect case-study for hylomorphism, ruling out other theories. Indeed, the metaphysical structure and physiological organisation of an octopus put pressure on many contemporary views about both intentionality and the unity of consciousness. If an octopus has mental states, some of them must be embodied somehow. If they are intentional, its intentionality must be embodied as well. Hence, consciousness of different kinds may be distributed through the phylogenetic tree. I try to argue in favour of this possibility and highlight how it could inform our conception of human consciousness in many surprising ways.
Marta Miguel- The Self in Emotions: The Intentionality of So-called Reflexive Emotions
The present work deals with the problem of reflexivity in emotional experience, more precisely, with the distinction that many philosophers have traced between reflexive and non-reflexive emotions. According to this distinction, the main difference between the emotions of shame, pride, guilt and embarrassment, and the rest of our emotions – such as fear, anger, sadness, joy or gratitude – is that the former are necessarily directed at the self as the intentional object of the experience, while the latter are directed at objects, people, states of affairs and events in the world other than the self (Helm 2001, Zinck 2008, Deonna and Teroni 2012, Teroni 2016 and Tietjen 2020). In this paper, I wish to provide some reasons that may hopefully show that such contrast constitutes an important mischaracterisation of both our so-called reflexive and non-reflexive emotions. I will be defending the idea that the reflexive/non-reflexive distinction construes the emotions of shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment under a narcissistic reconfiguration that contrasts with the fundamental configuration of these emotions. Attention to the criteria that help individuate what an emotion is about – what its intentional object is – show that shame, pride, guilt and embarrassment are normatively directed at objects in the world other than the self and that when this is not the case, what we have is the degraded or narcissistic version of such emotions. If these ideas are plausible, it seems that we would have to revise whether the reflexive/non-reflexive distinction, as described above, makes sense after all.
Lorenzo Buscicchi- Hedonic Intentionalism: A Critique
What is pleasure? Has pleasure a characteristic phenomenology? Has it an intentionality? In response to these questions, philosophical understandings of pleasure can be grouped in two classes. Phenomenalism holds pleasure to correspond to a distinct feeling (or hedonic tone). Intentionalism holds pleasure to be an attitude. Hedonic Intentionalism is sometimes considered the leading view among contemporary accounts of pleasure. In my presentation, I advance some doubts concerning Hedonic Intentionalism by addressing some prominent theories: Chris Heathwood’s Motivational Theory of pleasure and Fred Feldman’s Attitudinal Theory of pleasure. By doing so, I advance that the heterogeneity problem—the claim that pleasures appear very different one from the other and we cannot therefore identify only one thing as “pleasure”—might not be a genuine issue. This is important because Hedonic Intentionalism descends from the heterogeneity problem because it was developed to solve it and is sometimes considered a viable solution to it.
Ray Cheung- Phenomenality: Indication Without Representation
A mental state is possibly phenomenally conscious without being access conscious. Consider a meditative state in which one has a reflexive awareness without any conscious thoughts. Perceptual knowledge has intentionality, and is about the object of perception, but experience need not. Some experience covaries with some states of affairs, without such relation being intentional because not epistemic. The number of tree rings track the cycles of seasons the tree has survived, without such tracking constituting an intentional relation. The evidence of the tree rings, upon epistemic agent’s understanding, justifies knowledge of the age of the tree. The tree, with the number of tree rings that instantiates on it, does not by itself constitute an informational state. It is the evidence that encodes the information, and it is in virtue of understanding the evidence correctly that one comes to process the information correctly. The indicative relation between the tree rings and its age to the experiential in the following way with fittingness. It is fitting that one be angry upon injustice, without the anger being intentional; thoughts through the anger are. Phenomenality is thus prior to intentionality with regard to mentality. Interpretation of experience constitutes intentional states.
Sevgi Demiroğl- Reclaiming Pain’s Intentionality After a Century
The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience” (IASP 2019). Considering the subjective value of the emotional content, clinical studies emphasise self-reports and researchers conduct experiments on changing the way pain feels with the help of experiences that are felt pleasant. Yet, what is unpleasant in/of pain? Is it what pain feels like as a sensation and it gets diverted with another? Is it a referential content of pain that differs with an appraisal of a represented bodily damage? Especially in the cases of pain asymbolia, there are reports of sensing but not minding pain, which raises the question of whether pain as felt sensation and as intentional feeling can exist separately as “an unpleasant sensory” and/or “emotional experience”. Taking experimental studies on healthy individuals and the strongest debates in the contemporary philosophy of pain into its interdisciplinary approach, the present paper examines unpleasantness as an inseparable emotional character of pain which may give pain its intentional status Brentano found deserved a century ago. The paper then puts forward the objects of this intentionality as necessary elements for the study of pain both in clinics and in theory.
Cristiano Vidali- Pay attention to Intentionality!
Phenomenology is one of the traditions that, more than any other, has emphasized the importance of intentionality. It has been rarely noticed that, in his early works, while Edmund Husserl outlines the phenomenological method and illustrates the meaning of “intentionality”, he repeatedly focuses on attention (Manuscripts 1898 in Hua XXXVIII §20-23, §28; Course in 1904-05; Ideen I 1911 §37, §92).Whereas attention has become a usual theme for psychology, starting with theoretical considerations (Ribot 1889; James 1890) up to ever more empirical researches (Broadbent 1958; Kahenman 1973; Treisman et al. 1980), the slippery notion of intentionality has been seen by cognitive sciences with suspicion. Our aim will be to contrast intentionality and attention by considering both classic phenomenologists who have questioned the latter in dialogue with psychology (Merleau-Ponty 1945; Gurwitsch 1964, 1966) and more recent ones working between cognitive sciences and neurophenomenology (Arvidson 2006; Depraz 2014; Wu 2014). The emerging differences will enable us to clarify the structures of intentionality and attention respectively and to understand the insufficiency of the second in the absence of the first. This will justify why intentionality should be taken into account by the cognitive sciences, providing a concrete example of the contribution of phenomenology to scientific research.
Andrea Giannotta- Embodying and Naturalizing Phenomenal Intentionality
Proponents of the “phenomenal intentionality theory” (PIT) motivate it by appealing to internalist arguments such as the “brain in a vat” and the “disembodied mind” hypotheses. However, this leads us to raise sceptical issues concerning the role of the body in cognition and the existence of the external world. In order to address these problems, I propose to investigate the temporal structure of phenomenal intentionality. The investigation of the “macro-temporal” structure of experience comes into play in those developments of PIT that conceive of phenomenal intentional states as constructing or constituting objects (Farkas, Masrour), but this still leads us to raise the problem of the external world. In order to solve it, we must investigate the “micro-temporal” structure of the experiences that underlie the constituting process. This analysis shows that the process of constituting objects is, at the same time, the process through which phenomenal intentional states themselves are generated. Then, I combine PIT with a neutral monist metaphysics, which admits at the core of experience a stream of qualities that are neutral to the distinction between subjective and objective, underlying their reciprocal constitution. This development of PIT allows us to embody and naturalize phenomenal intentionality.
Christopher Stratman- Phenomenal Intentionality and Imaginative Presence
Standard versions of the Phenomenal Intentionality Theory (PIT) claim that all genuine intentional mental states are either identical to, or are partly grounded in phenomenal intentional mental states. An adequate version of PIT must be able to give an adequate account of problem cases. The goal of this paper is to explore cases of what Kind (2018) calls "imaginative presence" in order to develop a novel challenge to PIT. In cases of imaginative presence, the content of what is imaginatively perceived in a single experience E outstrips the content of what is immediately perceived in E. Consider a case where in E a subject visually perceives a cup on the edge of the table and imagines it falling, such that E has both the immediately perceived content
Tristan James Heine- Kant, McDowell & the Myth of the Given
In Mind and World (1994), McDowell argues that the theory of cognition Kant presents in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) provides us with the essential ingredients required to avoid the ‘Myth of the Given’, the idea that our thoughts or concepts ultimately have their source in something that is fundamentally non-conceptual, sense-impressions or impacts from the world that lie beyond the mind’s own acts of spontaneity. McDowell takes Kant’s claim that ‘intuitions are blind without concepts’ to be his key insight but argues that this insight is ruined by his ‘transcendental story’, which posits there to be a supersensible world lying beyond the everyday empirical world. Like others before him, McDowell recommends excising this element of Kant’s theory. In this paper, I argue that it is not possible to do so without undermining Kant’s theory and losing what is most interesting about the account he gives of the relationship between consciousness and the world. Accordingly, I present an interpretation of Kant that avoids the Myth of the Given whilst retaining the transcendental elements of his theory.
Bruno Cortesi- The Early Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on Intentionality: A Brief Review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Our Pre-reflective Encounter With the Environment
Brentano described intentionality as reference to or direction towards an object, or topic, or content, those terms being implied in the broadest possible sense – i.e. as anything that could be thought of –. He also characterized mental events as real events occurring within the psychic domain and necessarily containing an object within themselves. Ever since he (re-)introduced the notion of intentionality within the philosophical debate, it has been interpreted either as the property mental states exhibit of ’being directed towards something’ – possibly different from themselves – or as their being of or about some object. Those two metaphors have often been seen as referring to the same range of phenomena. My main aim, though, is to argue that the alleged equivalence between ’directedness’ and ’about-ness’ should be rejected, as I believe it is indeed somehow mis-guided. I will address this issue mainly from an historical perspective. More specifically, I shall consider the early Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s respective conceptions of intentionality, in order to establish three main points: (a) That Merleau-Ponty seems to allow for the possibility of there being intentional states that are directed without therefore being about anything specific. (b) That the influence Gestalt Psychology had upon Merleau-Ponty’s thought overall, and in particular his rejection of the separation between matter and form, led him to significantly depart in many respects from Husserl’s – and Kant’s transcendental/constitutive model of intentionality. (c) That Merleau-Ponty’s account pays a debt towards the husserlian notion of The Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and the distinction made by Husserl in the late phase of his thought, between act-intentionality and operative-intentionality ((fungierende intentionalität).
Imogen Dickie- Mind Seeks World
I’ll argue that part of the aim of ordinary cognitive activity is to reach out with the ghostly hand of the mind and seize subject-matter for thought; use this conclusion to develop foundations for an account of intentionality; and indicate some applications.
Maria Corrado- The Objects of Auditory Perceptual Experience
The literature in auditory perceptual experience has been considering whether the objects of auditory perceptual experience are just sounds or whether they can also be ordinary material things other than sounds, such as the dog barking or the phone ringing. Some have argued that the only objects of auditory perceptual experience are sounds and that we hear material things other than sounds only indirectly via an association or an inference made on the basis of the sounds that we hear. Opponents to this thesis have attempted to show that ordinary material things are the direct objects of auditory perceptual experience by focusing on the ontological nature of sounds. For instance, by arguing that sounds are nothing other than events involving material things, some have argued that the direct objects of auditory perceptual experience are themselves material things. In order to understand what the objects of auditory perceptual experience are, the debate has thereafter revolved around what the correct account of the nature of sounds is. In my paper I propose a different approach to defend the thesis that material things are the direct objects of auditory perceptual experience. I present a positive argument for the thesis that auditory perceptual experience presents a subject with material things by exploiting the notion of force. I argue that we are auditorily aware of material things insofar as we are auditorily aware of episodes involving the operation of force and insofar as the operation of force is a mark of material things. Thomas Froy- What Are Abstract Thoughts Not About?
Tell me: what am I thinking about? I don’t bet you can’t tell me what I’m not thinking about, no? This presentation will ask what abstract thinking is not about according to Martin Buber. Buber’s place in twentieth century philosophy is currently undergoing something of a re-evaluation, with a particular focus on his political thought (Breslauer 2017, Löwy 2017, Brody 2019); his critique of Martin Heidegger’s conception has, until now, received little scholarly attention. Anticipating with extraordinary precision the post-Heideggerian critiques which would soon take shape in Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt among others, Buber argues that Heidegger’s conception of intersubjectivity is fundamentally impoverished and ‘lonely’ (Buber 2014). Heidegger – somewhat ironically – begins with a critique of ‘abstract’ thinking which fails to think about who we are; notably, Heidegger blames a certain ‘Pharisaism’. Buber, in turn, charges that Heidegger’s call to think about ‘us’ leads to thinking about ‘I’: thus, we return to abstract thought and fail – once again – to think, concrete about you and me. Buber’s abstract thinking, then, is not about my relationship with you, my obligations to you, and the work we do together.
Benjamin D. Young- Thinking About The Past Many mental states are intentional, they are about something, an intentional object. For example, if I have a thought about a (temporally) present object, ‘Jacinda Ardern’, then the intentional object is obvious, Jacinda Ardern. But, many mental states seem to be about objects that are not present and so it is not obvious what the intentional objects of such thoughts could be. For example, the intentional object of a thought about ‘Sherlock Holmes’ or ‘Julius Caesar’ is not obvious. Thus, a question arises. What is the intentional object of a thought about a non-present object? If the past is nonexistent, then is the intentional object of a thought about ‘Julius Caesar’ no more substantial than the intentional object of a thought about ‘Sherlock Holmes’? If the past is as nonexistent as a fictional character, then a thought about the past and a thought about a fictional character both involve the same kinds of objects, nonexistent. But, if a thought about the past involves something no more real than Sherlock Holmes, then is the past no more real than fiction?