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The Conscious Vs. the Intentional Stance. Folk Psychology Strategies in Attributing Conscious States to Other Persons

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The Conscious Vs. the Intentional Stance. Folk Psychology Strategies in Attributing Conscious States to Other Persons Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna´n Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science Michał Wyrwa The conscious vs. the intentional stance. Folk psychology strategies in attributing conscious states to other persons Nastawienie ´swiadomo´sciowea nastawienie intencjonalne. Strategie rozpoznawania cudzych stanów ´swiadomych w psychologii potocznej PhD thesis Supervisor: prof. UAM dr hab. Andrzej Klawiter Pozna´n2020 Acknowledgments I wish to express my sincere appreciation to my supervisor Professor Andrzej Klawiter for all the guidance he gave me throughout the years. With- out his wisdom, intellectual vigor, support, inquisitiveness, critical feedback, questions (that most of the time I did not even notice needed an answer), and frequent words of encouragement, I would have not finished this work. To other dramatis personae of this adventure: Mikołaj Buchwald, Szy- mon Chlebowski, Agnieszka Kubiak, Andrzej Gajda, Bartosz Michałowski, Weronika Potok, Maciej Ra´s,Dawid Ratajczyk, Piotr Styrkowiec. Had I not met you, I would be someone else, somewhere else: luckily I am not. I would also like to thank other colleagues, mentors, and coworkers at the Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science at AMU. Especially to all regular and irregular members of the Wednesday seminar group for creating an environment of critical and fruitful discussion, where every attendee is encouraged to speak out and to Professor Grzegorz Króliczak for giving me an opportunity to get a first-hand experience in cognitive neuroscience. Lastly, I am grateful to my family for their unconditional support through- out these very long grad studies of mine. Thank you, Ola, Mom, and Dad. Contents I Summary II Streszczenie Introduction 1 1 Background of the studies 5 1.1 Consciousness as a research problem . .5 1.2 Folk psychology as a jack of all trades . 12 1.3 The intentional stance . 19 1.4 The folk view about consciousness . 24 1.4.1 Experimental philosophy studies . 25 1.4.2 Mind perception . 31 1.4.3 Folk view about consciousness and the moral cognition 35 1.4.4 The conscious stance . 38 1.5 Current project. Hypotheses . 59 2 Linguistic forms of attributing consciousness in everyday English: three studies 65 2.1 Consciousness-related words . 67 2.2 Study 1. WordNet . 71 2.2.1 Methods . 72 2.2.2 Results and discussion . 74 2.3 Study 2. Word embeddings . 81 2.3.1 Methods . 82 2.3.2 Results and discussion . 82 2.4 Study 3. Corpus . 86 2.4.1 Data acquisition and hypotheses . 86 2.4.2 Methods . 88 2.4.3 Results and discussion . 90 2.5 Summary discussion . 98 3 Questionnaire studies on attributions of conscious states 105 3.1 Study 4. Explicit attributions of consciousness . 106 3.1.1 Methods . 109 3.1.2 Results . 111 3.1.3 Discussion . 115 3.2 Study 5. Consciousness and moral concern . 122 3.2.1 Methods . 125 3.2.2 Results and discussion . 128 3.3 Study 6. Consciousness and moral concern . 130 3.3.1 Methods . 130 3.3.2 Results and discussion . 131 3.4 Summary discussion . 134 4 General discussion 139 Conclusions 157 A Additional data from the language studies 159 B Additional data from the questionnaire studies 161 References 171 List of Figures 2.1 Similarity matrix for the synsets of CR-words. 77 3.1 Results from Sytsma and Machery (2010) and the two replications.107 3.2 Study 4. Responses vs neutral. 113 3.3 Study 4. Distribution of participants’ responses in each condition.114 3.4 Results of Jack and Robbins’ (2012) study. 124 B.1 Picture of Timmy. 164 B.2 Picture of Jimmy. 164 List of Tables 1.1 Summary of existing research on lay people’s intuitions on consciousness in terms of kinds of conscious states used. 41 2.1 Study 1. Synsets of CR-words along with their labels, ordered by their popularity . 76 2.2 Study 1. Mean similarities between words based on chosen synsets. 78 2.3 Study 1. Mean similarities between ‘awareness’ and ‘conscious- ness’ and other CR-words. 79 2.4 Study 2. Cosine similarities (cos(q)) between CR-words and reference pairs calculated on the fastText pre-trained model of the English language. 83 2.5 Study 2. Lists of fifteen most similar words from the pre-trained model to the CR-words. 84 2.6 Study 3. Total and normalized frequencies of CR-words. 90 2.7 Study 3. Percentage of overlap for collocation profiles of CR- words between corpora. 91 2.8 Study 3. Percentage of overlap for collocation profiles of CR- words within corpora. 92 2.9 Study 3. Most frequent collocates in the non-academic corpus. 94 2.10 Study 3. Differences in frequencies of collocates shared between corpora for each CR-word. 95 2.11 Study 3. Differences in frequencies of collocates shared within corpora for selected CR-word pairs. 96 2.12 Study 3. Overlapping collocates for selected CR-word pairs within each corpus. 97 3.1 Study 4. Post-hoc results. 111 3.2 Study 4. Responses vs neutral, Wilcoxon signed rank results. 113 3.3 Study 5. Participant responses vs baseline. 128 3.4 Study 6. Participant responses vs baseline. 132 A.1 Study 1 additional data. 160 Summary In this dissertation, I try to answer whether attributing conscious mental states to others consists of attributing phenomenal states to them. For many scholars of consciousness, the basic type of consciousness is phenomenal consciousness, which is supposed to be obvious for and graspable by each person. Despite the popularity of this view, it was never subjected to an exhaustive empirical examination. Moreover, while the few studies on the subject of conscious mental state attributions did focus on phenomenal state ascriptions, they raise validity concerns. For these reasons, the main aim of my research was to test the fundamental assumptions of the phenomenal reading of consciousness: the phenomenal and the obviousness claims. To do this, I performed a series of linguistic tests on the usage of consciousness-related words and questionnaire studies on attributions of conscious mental states. The former was to determine whether lay persons use words with which experts describe phenomenal states the way experts use them. The results indicate that they do not. The outcomes of questionnaire studies, on the other hand, corroborate the validity concerns regarding earlier studies on the subject and indicate that lay persons do not view consciousness as phenomenal. What is then the folk view about consciousness? Based on the analysis of the study of folk psychology, with the emphasis put on Daniel Dennett’s idea of the intentional stance, and the empirical results, I postulate to replace the phenomenal stance, i.e., tendency to attribute phenomenal states to others, with a more broadly understood conscious stance. The dissertation contributes to the field of cognitive sciences by providing empirical evidence for rejecting the belief that phenomenal view about consciousness is widespread and by introducing a future, positive research on the consciousness component of folk psychology. Key words: consciousness, folk psychology, cognitive science, conscious stance, experimental philosophy Streszczenie Tematem niniejszej rozprawy jest próba odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy przypisy- wanie innym osobom ´swiadomychstanów mentalnych polega na przypisy- waniu im stanów fenomenalnych. Zdaniem wielu badaczy ´swiadomo´scijej podstawow ˛aodmian ˛ajest ´swiadomo´s´cfenomenalna, która ma by´coczywista i uchwytna przez ogół ludzi. Mimo popularno´scitego stanowiska nie było ono dot ˛adgruntownie przebadane. Cho´cw nielicznych dotychczasowych ba- daniach nad przypisywaniem innym stanów ´swiadomychrówniez˙ skupiano si˛ena atrybucji stanów fenomenalnych, to budz ˛aone w ˛atpliwo´scico do swojej trafno´sci.Z tych powodów, celem przeprowadzonych przeze mnie bada´n było przetestowanie podstawowych załoze´nfenomenalnego˙ uj˛ecia´swiado- mo´sci:tez o fenomenalno´scii o oczywisto´sci´swiadomegodo´swiadczenia. Aby tego dokona´czaprojektowałem seri˛etestów lingwistycznych oraz bada´n kwestionariuszowych nad przypisywaniem ´swiadomychstanów mentalnych. Pierwsze miały ustali´c,czy laicy, osoby bez eksperckiej wiedzy na temat ´swia- domo´sci,posługuj ˛asi˛ewyrazeniami˙ stosowanymi do opisu stanów fenome- nalnych tak jak eksperci. Uzyskane wyniki udzielaj ˛ana to pytanie negatywnej odpowiedzi. Rezultaty bada´nkwestionariuszowych, natomiast, potwierdzaj ˛a w ˛atpliwo´scico do trafno´sciwcze´sniejszych bada´noraz wskazuj ˛a, ze˙ laicy nie podzielaj ˛afenomenalnego uj˛ecia´swiadomo´sci z ekspertami. Jaki jest zatem potoczny obraz ´swiadomo´sci?Opieraj ˛acsi˛ena analizie sposobów badania psychologii potocznej, ze szczególnym uwzgl˛ednieniemkoncepcji nastawie- nia intencjonalnego Daniela Dennetta, oraz wyników eksperymentalnych, postuluj˛ezast ˛apienierozwazanego˙ w literaturze nastawienia fenomenalnego, polegaj ˛acegona przypisywaniu innym stanów fenomenalnych, rozumianym znacznie szerzej nastawieniem ´swiadomo´sciowym.Wkładem dysertacji w ob- szar bada´nkognitywistycznych jest zatem dostarczenie empirycznego uza- sadnienia dla odrzucenia przekonania o powszechno´scifenomenalnego uj˛ecia ´swiadomo´scioraz nakre´sleniekształtu przyszłego, pozytywnego programu badania ´swiadomo´sciowegoskładnika psychologii potocznej. Słowa kluczowe: ´swiadomo´s´c,psychologia potoczna, kognitywistyka, nasta- wienie ´swiadomo´sciowe,filozofia eksperymentalna Introduction The freshness of the autumn air, the sweetness of the tea with honey in the morning, the soothingness of a cat’s purring, the mellow mood created by late- night cityscapes, and the paradoxically reassuring thought that in the cosmic scale of things we are all equally insignificant. These are some of my most cher-
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