scholarly journals For Better And Worse: Taking phenomenalist accounts of intuition seriously

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Egler

The historically-influential perceptual analogy states that intuitions and perceptual experiences are alike in many important respects. Phenomenalists defend a particular reading of this analogy according to which intuitions and perceptual experiences share a common phenomenal character. The phenomenalist thesis has proven highly influential in recent years. However, insufficient attention has been given to the challenges that the phenomenalist thesis raises for theories of intuitions. In this paper, I first develop one such challenge. I argue that if we take seriously the idea that intuitions and perceptual experiences have a common phenomenal character, then an analogous version of the familiar problem of perceptual presence arises for intuitions. I call this the 'problem of intuitive presence'. In the second part of the paper I sketch a novel enactivist solution to this problem.

Author(s):  
Mohammad Karimi

Dental and oral health is an important part that plays a significant role in the quality of life of people in our society, especially children, but due to insufficient attention, tooth decay in the world is increasing every year. Promoting oral hygiene requires the people's easy access to primary oral health care and the use of these services should be classified.


Author(s):  
Rosemary Foot

Like the study of China itself, theorists of power transition have lately experienced a resurgence of interest in their arguments. As China has emerged as the world’s second-largest economy, with the second-largest military budget, and has become more assertive internationally under a seemingly more powerful president, the picture painted is one of growing morbidity: war between China, the putative rising dissatisfied power, and the United States, the declining hegemon, has allegedly become highly probable. This chapter critiques these arguments and highlights the restraints on conflict that generally are given insufficient attention in power transition approaches that deal with the Sino-American relationship. The chapter argues that historical awareness among leaders, state agency, and complex economic trends that are central to the understanding of this hybrid world order, together with the domestic preoccupations of these two central protagonists, are factors that work to inhibit the outbreak of war.


Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney

Carruthers proposes a subtle dispositionalist rendition of higher order theory regarding phenomenal character. The theory would distinguish unconscious movement management from conscious attitude management as perceptual processes. Each process takes perceptual representations as inputs. A representation subject to attitude management is apt to induce a higher order representation of itself that secures a self-referential aspect of its content supposedly determinative of phenomenal character. Unfortunately, the account requires a problematic cognitive ambiguity while failing to explain why attitude, but not movement, management, determines character. Moreover, normal variation in attitudinal management conflicts with the constancy typical of phenomenal character. And although an agent denied perceptual access to a scene about which she is otherwise well informed would suffer no phenomenal character, dispositionalist theory entails otherwise. Such problems, together with the results of the previous chapters, suggest that, whether cloaked under intentionalism or higher order theory, representationalism mistakes content for character.


Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney

Rosenthal's rendition of representationalism denies intentionalism. His higher order theory instead asserts that a perceptual state's phenomenal character is set by that state's being related to, because represented by, another, but higher order, cognitive state. The theory arises from the doubtful supposition of unconscious perception and mistakenly construes intrinsic phenomenal character extrinsically, as one state's serving as the content of another. Yet it remains mysterious how and why a higher order state might be so potent as to determine phenomenal character at all. Better to resist higher order theory’s embrace of dubious unconscious perceptual states and account for states so-called simply in terms of humdrum mnemonic malfeasance. Moreover, since the suspect theory allows higher order misrepresentation, it implies sufferance of impossible phenomenal character. Equally problematic, representationalism pitched at the higher order entails the existence of bogus phenomenal character when upstairs states represent downstairs nonperceptual states.


Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney

This chapter continues consideration of reductive intentionalism without embracing the doctrine, framing it in the context of cognitive science. Cognition, including perception, is representation. An agent’s cognitive, perhaps perceptual, state is a relation binding the agent to a proposition by means of her mental representation. Intentionalism would explicate the phenomenal character of a perceiver's experience in terms of the content of her prevailing perceptual representation. While minimal intentionalism maintains that the phenomenal character of the perceiver's experience merely supervenes on her representation's content, maximal intentionalism would reduce character to content. For maximal intentionalism maintains that phenomenal character is simply what introspection finds. Yet, according to maximal intentionalism, introspection, when tuned to conscious perception, detects only the content of experience. Hence, the maximalist identifies phenomenal character with the content carried by perceptual representation.


Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

Conscious attention performs two distinct roles in experience, a role of placing and a role of focusing, roles which match a distinction between selection and access endorsed in recent theories of attention. The intentionality of conscious experience consists in two sorts of attentional action, a focusing at and a placing on, the first lending to experience a perspectival categorical content and the second structuring its phenomenal character. Placing should be thought of more like opening a window for consciousness than as shining a spotlight, and focusing has to do with accessing the properties of whatever the window opens onto. A window is an aperture whose boundaries are defined by what is excluded—in this case, distractors.


Author(s):  
Joseph Levine

The papers presented in this volume cover topics, such as the “phenomenal concept strategy,” to defend materialism from anti-materialist intuitions, the doctrine of representationalism about phenomenal character, the modal argument against materialism, the nature of demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology. On the one hand, I argue that the phenomenal concept strategy cannot work and that representationalism has certain fatal flaws, at least if it’s to be joined to a materialist metaphysics. On the other, I defend materialism from the modal argument, arguing that it relies on a questionable conflation of semantic and metaphysical issues. I also provide a naturalistic theory of demonstrative thought, criticizing certain philosophical arguments involving that notion in the process. I argue as well that the peculiarly subjective nature of secondary qualities provides a window into the nature of the relation between phenomenal character and intentional content, and conclude that relation involves a robust notion of acquaintance.


Author(s):  
Amy Kind

When looking at an object, we perceive only its facing surface, yet we nonetheless perceptually experience the object as a three-dimensional whole. This gives us what Alva Noë has called the problem of perceptual presence, i.e. the problem of accounting for the features of our perceptual experience that are present as absent. Although he proposes that we can best solve this problem by adopting an enactive view of perception, one according to which perceptual presence is to be explained in terms of the exercise of our sensorimotor capacities, this chapter argues that this is a mistake. Rather, we can best account for presence in absence in terms of the exercise of our imaginative capacities.


Author(s):  
Richard McKirahan

David Sedley recently complained that despite the enormous amount of work on Parmenides in the past generation, the details of Parmenides' arguments have received insufficient attention. It is universally recognized that Parmenides' introduction of argument into philosophy was a move of paramount importance. It is also recognized that the arguments of fragment B8 are closely related. At the beginning of B8, Parmenides asserts that what-is has several attributes; he offers a series of proofs that what-is indeed has those attributes. This article undertakes a close analysis of fragment B8, teasing out the structure of the arguments, and showing what parts of the traditional and new interpretations of Parmenides those arguments do (or do not) support. It presents some surprising conclusions and opens up spaces for new interpretations.


Mindfulness ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madison Waller ◽  
Divya Mistry ◽  
Rakesh Jetly ◽  
Paul Frewen

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