Hurleys’ stipulation is that they cannot. What induces the appearance of incoherence about unity is the short time scale. Suppose that it takes some time to achieve unified consciousness, perhaps because some complex reaction’s processes are involved. If that were the case, then we do not have a stable unity situation in Marcel's case. The subjects are not given enough time to achieve unified consciousness of any kind.
There is a great deal more to Hurley's work. She urges, for example, that theirs a normative dimension to unified consciousness - conscious states have to cohere for unified consciousness to result. Systems in the brain have to achieve her calls ‘dynamic singularity’ - being a single system - for unified consciousness to result.
A third issue that got philosophers working on the unity of consciousness again is binding. Here the connection is more distant because binding as usually understood is not unified consciousness as we have been discussing it. Recall the two stages of cognition laid out earlier. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. Then the mind ties these represented objects to one other to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. It is the first stage that is usually called binding. The representations that result at this stage need not be conscious in any of the ways delineating earlier - many perfectly good representations affect behaviour and even enter memory without ever becoming conscious. Representations resulting from the second stage need not be conscious, either, but when they are, we have at least some of the kinds of unified consciousness delineated.
In the past few decades, philosophers have also worked on how unified consciousness relates to the brain. Lockwood, for example, thinks that relating consciousness to matter will involve more issues on the side of matter than most philosophers think. (We mentioned that his work goes off in two new directions. This is the second one.) Quantum mechanics teach us that the way in which observation links to physical reality is a subtle and complex matter. Lockwood urges that our conceptions will have to be adjusted on the side of matter as much as on the side of mind if we are to understand consciousness as a physical phenomenon and physical phenomena as open to conscious observation. If it is the case not only that our understanding of consciousness is affected by how we think it might be implemented in matter but also that process of matter is affected by our (conscious) observation of them, then our picture of consciousness stands as ready to affect our picture of matter as vice-versa.
The Churchlands, Paul M. and Patricia S. and Daniel Dennett (1991) has radical views of the underlying architecture of unified consciousness. The Churchlands see unity itself much as other philosophers do. They do argue that the term ‘consciousness’ covers a range of different phenomena that need to be distinguished from another but the important point that presents to some attending characteristic is that they urge that the architecture of the underlying processes probably consist not of transformations of symbolically encoded objects of representations, as most philosophers have believed, but of vector transformations in what are called phase spaces. Dennett articulates an even more radical view, encompassing both unity and underlying architecture. For him, unified consciousness is simply a temporary ‘virtual captain’, a small group of related information-parcels that happens to gain temporary dominance in a struggle for control of such cognitive activities as self-monitoring and self-reporting in the vast array of microcircuits of the brain. We take these transient phenomena to be more than they are because each of them holds to some immediacy of ‘me’, particularly of the moment; The temporary coalition of conscious states winning at the moment is what I am, is the self. Radical implementation, narrowed range and transitoriness notwithstanding, when unified consciousness is achieved, these philosophers tend to see it in the way we have presented it.
Dennett's and the Churchlands' views fit naturally with a dynamic systems view of the underlying neural implementation. The dynamic systems view is the view that unified consciousness is a result of certain self-organizing activities in the brain. Dennett thinks that given the nature of the brain, a vast assembly of neurons receiving electrochemical signals from other neurons and passing such signals to yet other neurons, cognition could not take any form other than something like a pandemonium of competing bits of content, the ones that win the competitions being the ones that are conscious. The Churchlands nonexistence tends to agree with Dennett about this. They see consciousness as a state of the brain, the ‘wet-ware’, not a result of information processing, of ‘software’. They also advocate a different picture of the underlying neurological process. As we said, they think that transformations of complex vectors in a multi-dimensional phase space are the crucial processes, not competition among bits of content. However, they agree that it is very unlikely that the processes that subserve unified consciousness are sentence-like or language-like at all. It is too early to say whether these radically novel pictures of what the system that implements unified consciousness is like will hold any important implications for what unified consciousness is or when it is present.
Hurley is also interested in the relationship of unified consciousness to brain physiology. Saying it of her that she resists certain standard ways of linking them would be truer, however, than to say that she herself links them. In particular, while she clearly thinks that physiological phenomena have all sorts of implications and give rise to all sorts of questions about the unity of consciousness, she strongly resists any simplistic patterns of connection. Many researchers have been attracted by some variant of what she calls the isomorphism hypothesis. This is the idea that changes in consciousness will parallel changes in brain structure or function. She wants to insist, to the contrary, that often two instances of the same change in consciousness will go with very different changes in the brain. We saw an example in the last section. In most of us, unified consciousness is closely linked to an intact, functioning corpus callosum. However, in acallosal people, there may be the same unity but achieved by mechanisms such as cuing activity external to the body that are utterly different from communication though a corpus callosum. Going the opposite way, different changes in consciousness can go with the same changes to structure and function in the brain.
Two philosophers have gone off in directions different from any of the above, Stephen White (1991) and Christopher Hill (1991). White's main interest is not the unity of consciousness as such but what one might call the unified locus of responsibility - what it is that ties something together to make it a single agent of actions, i.e., something to which attributions of responsibility can appropriately be made. He argues that unity of consciousness is one of the things that go into becoming unified as such an agent but not the only thing. Focussed coherent plans, a continuing single conception of the good, with reason of a good autobiographical memory, certain future states of persons mattering to us in a special way (mattering to us because we take them to be future states of ourselves, one would say if it were not blatantly circular), a certain continuing kind and degree of rationality, certain social norms and practices, and so forth. In his picture of moral responsibility, unbroken unity of consciousness at and over time is only a small part of the story.
Hills’ fundamental claim is that a number of different relationships between psychological states have a claim to be considered unity relationships, including: Being owned by the same subject, being [phenomenally] next to (and other relationships that state in the field of consciousness appear to have to one another), as both embrace the singularity of objects contained of other conscious states, and jointly having the appropriate sorts of effects (functions). An interesting question, one that Hill does not consider, is whether all these relations are what interests us when we talk about the unity of consciousness or only some of them (and if only some of them, which ones). Hill also examines scepticism about the idea that clearly bounded individual conscious states exist. Since we have been assuming throughout that such states do exist, it is perhaps fortunate that Hill argues that we could safely do so.
In some circles, the idea that consciousness has a special kind of unity has fallen into disfavour. Nagel (1971), Donald Davidson (1982), and Dennett (1991) have all urged that the mind's unity has been greatly overstated in the history of philosophy. The mind, they say, works mostly out of the sight and the control of consciousness. Moreover, even states and acts of ours that are conscious can fail to cohere. We act against what we know perfectly well to be our own most desired courses of action, for example, or do things while telling ourselves that we must avoid doing them. There is an approach to the small incoherencies of everyday life that does not requires us to question whether consciousness is unified in this way, the Freudian approach (e.g., Freud 1916/17). This approach accepts that the unity of consciousness exists much as it presents itself but argues that the range of material over which it extends is much smaller than philosophers once thought. This latter approach has some appeal. If something is out of sight and/or control, it is out of the sight or control of what? The answer would seem to be, the unified conscious mind. If so, the only necessary difference among the pre-twentieth centuries visions of unified consciousness as ranging over everything in the mind and our current vision of unified consciousness is that the range of psychological phenomena over which unified consciousness ranges has shrunk.
A final historical note. At the beginning of the 21st century, work on the unity of consciousness continues apace. For example, a major conference was recently devoted to the unity of consciousness, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Conference assembled inside Brussels in 2000, and the Encyclopaedias of philosophy (such as this one) and of cognitive science are commissioning articles on the topic. Psychologists are taking up the issue. Bernard Baars (1988, 1997) notion of the global workspace is an example. Another example is work on the role of unified consciousness in precise control of attention. However, the topic is not yet at the centre of consciousness studies. One illustration of this is that it can still be missing entirely in anthologies of current work on consciousness.
With a different issue, philosophers used to think that the unity of consciousness has huge implications for the nature of the mind, indeed entails that the mind could not be made out of matter. We also saw that the prospects for this inference are not good. What about the nature of consciousness? Does the unity of consciousness have any implications for this issue?
There are currently at least three major camps on the nature of consciousness. One camp sees the ‘felt quality’ of representations as something unique, in particular as quite different from the power of representations to change other representations and shape belief and action. On this picture, representations could function much as they do without it being like anything to have them. They would merely not be conscious. If so, consciousness may not play any important cognitive role at all, its unity included (Jackson 1986; Chalmers 1996). A second camp holds, to the contrary, that consciousness is simply a special kind of representation (Rosenthal 1991, Dretske 1995, and Tye 1995). A third holds that what we label ‘consciousness’ are really something else. On this view, consciousness will in the end be ‘analysed away’ - the term is too coarse-grained and presents things in too unquantifiable a way to have any use in a mature science of the mind.
The unity of consciousness obviously has strong implications for the truth or falsity of any of these views. If it is as central and undeniable as many have suggested, its existence may cut against the eliminativist position. With respect to the other positions, in that the unity of consciousness seems neutral.
Whatever its implications for other issues, the unity of consciousness seems to be a real feature of the human mind, indeed central to it. If so, any complete picture of the mind will have to provide an account of it. Even those who hold that the extent to which consciousness is unified has been overrated owing us and account of what has been overrated.
To say one has an experience that is conscious (in the phenomenal sense) is to say, that one is in a state of its seeming to one some way. In another formulation, to say experience is conscious is to say that there is something that stands alone, like for only one to have. Feeling pain and sensing colours are common illustrations of phenomenally conscious states. Consciousness has also been taken to consist in the monitoring of one's own state of mind (e.g., by forming thoughts about them, or by somehow ‘sensing’ them), or else in the accessibility of information to one's capacity for rational control or self-report. Intentionality has to do with the directedness or aboutness of mental states - the fact that, for example, one's thinking is of or about something. Intentionality includes, and is sometimes taken to be equivalent to, what is called ‘mental representation.’
It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life -perhaps, but one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind. But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents, an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. Is one in some sense derived from or dependent on the other? Or are they perhaps quite independent and separate aspects of mind?
One frequent understanding among philosophers, that consciousness is a certain feature shared by sense-experience and imagery, perhaps belonging also to a broad range of other mental phenomena (e.g., episodic thought, memory, and emotion). It is the feature that consists in its seeming some way to one to have experiences. To put it another way: Conscious states are states of its seeming somehow to a subject.
For example, it seems to you some way to see red, and seems to you in another way, to hear a crash, to visualize a triangle, and to suffer pain. The sense of ‘seems’ relevant here may be brought out by noting that, in the last example, we might just as well speak of the way it feels to be in pain. And - some may say - in the same sense, it seems to you some way to think through the answer to a math problem, or to recall where you parked the car, or to feel anger, shame, or elation. (However, that it is not simply to be assumed that saying it seems some way to you to have an experience is equivalent to saying that the experience itself seems or appears some way to you - that it, is - an object of appearance. The point is just that the way something sounds to you, the way something looks to you, etc., all constitute ‘ways of seeming.’) States that are conscious in this sense are said to have some phenomenal character or other - their phenomenal character being the specific way it seems to one to have a given experience. Sometimes this is called the ‘qualitative’ or ‘subjective’ character of experience.
Another oft-used means for trying to get at the relevant notion of consciousness, preferable to some, is to say that there is, in a certain sense, always ‘something it is like’ to be in a given conscious state - something it has, in the like for one who is in that state. Relating the two locutions, we might say: There is something it is like for you to see red, to feel pain, etc., and the way it seems to you to have one of these experiences is what it is like for you to have it. The phenomenal character of an experience then, is what someone would inquire about by asking, e.g., ‘What is it like to experience orgasm?’ - and it is what we speak of when we say that we know what that is like, even if we cannot convey this to one who does not know. And, if we want to speak of persons, or other creatures (as distinct from their states) being conscious, we will say that they are conscious just if there is something it is like for them to be the creature they are - for example, something it is like to be a nocturnal creature as inferred too as a bat.
The examples of conscious states given comprise a various lot. But some sense of their putative unity as instances of consciousness might be gained by contrasting them with what we are inclined to exclude, or can at least conceive of excluding, from their company. Much of what goes on, but we would ordinarily believe is not (or at any rate, we may suppose is not) conscious in the sense at issue. The leaf's fall from a tree branch, we may suppose, is not a conscious state of the leaf - a state of its seeming somehow to the leaf. Nor, for that matter, is a person falling off a branch held of a conscious state - is rather the feeling of falling the sort of consciousness, if anything is. Dreaming of falling would also be a conscious experience in this sense. But, while we can in some way be said to sense the position of our limbs even while dreamlessly asleep, we may still suppose that this proprioception (though perhaps in some sense a mental or cognitive affair) is not conscious - we may suppose that it does not then seem (or feel) any way to us sleepers to sense our limbs, as ordinarily it does when we are awake.
The way of seeming’ or ‘what it is like’ conception of consciousness I have just invoked is sometimes marked by the term ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ But this qualifier ‘phenomenal’ suggests that there are other kinds of consciousness (or perhaps, other senses of ‘consciousness’). Indeed there are, at least, other ways of introducing notions of consciousness. And these may appear to pick out features or senses altogether distinct from that just presented. For example, it is said that some (but not all) that goes on in the mind is ‘accessible to consciousness.’ Of course this by itself does not so much specifies a sense of ‘conscious’ as put one in use. (One will want to ask: And just what is this ‘consciousness’ that has ‘access’ to some mental goings-on but not others, and what could ‘access’ efforts that mean in of having it anyway? However, some have evidently thought that, rather than speak of consciousness as what has access, we should understand consciousness as itself a certain kind of susceptibility to access. For example, Daniel Dennett (1969) once theorized that one's conscious states are just those whose contents are available to one's direct verbal report - or, at least, to the ‘speech centre’ responsible for generating such reports. And Ned Form (1995) has proposed that, on one understanding of ‘conscious,’ (to be found at work in many ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness) a conscious state is just a ‘representation poised for free use in reasoning and other direct ‘rational’ control of action and speech.’ Form labels consciousness in this sense ‘excess consciousness.’
Forms’ would insist that we should distinguish phenomenal consciousness from ‘excess consciousness’, and he argues that a mental representation's being poised for use in reasoning and rational control of action is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the state's being phenomenally conscious. Similarly he distinguishes phenomenal consciousness from what he calls ‘reflexive consciousness’ - where this has to do with one's capacity to represent one's mind's to oneself - to have, for example, thoughts about one's own thoughts, feelings, or desires. Such a conception of consciousness finds some support in a tendency to say that conscious states of mind are those one is ‘conscious of’ or ‘aware of’ being in, and to interpret this ‘of’ to indicate some kind of reflexivity is involved - wherein one represents one's own mental representations. On one prominent variant of this conception, consciousness is taken to be a kind of scanning or perceiving of one's own psychological states or processes - an ‘inner sense.’
Forming a threefold division of our phenomenon, whereby its access, and reflexive consciousness need not be taken to reflect clear and coherent distinctions already contained in our pre-theoretical use of the term ‘conscious.’ Form seems to think that (on the contrary) our initial, ordinary use of ‘conscious’ is too confused even to count as ambiguous. Thus in articulating an interpretation, or set of interpretations, of the term adequate to frame theoretical issues, we cannot simply describe how it is currently employed - we must assign it a more definite and coherent meaning than extant in common usage.
Whether or not this is correct, getting a solid ground here is not easy, and a number of theorists of consciousness would balk at proceeding on the basis of Form's proposed threefold distinction. Sometimes the difficulty may be merely terminological. John Searle, for example, would recognize phenomenal consciousness, but deny Form's other two candidates are proper senses of ‘conscious’ at all. The reality of some sort of access and reflexivity is apparently not at issue - just whether either captures a sense of ‘conscious’ (perhaps confusedly) woven into our use of the term. However, in contrast to both Form and Searle, there are also those who raise doubt that there is a properly phenomenal sense we can apply, distinct from both of the other two, for us to pick out with any term. This is not just a dispute about words, but about what there is for us to talk about with them.
The substantive issues here are very much bound up with differences over the proper way to conceive of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. If there are distinct senses in which states of mind could be correctly said to be ‘conscious’ (answering perhaps to something like Form's three-fold distinction), then there will be distinct questions we can pose about the relation between consciousness and intentionality. But if one of Form's alleged senses is somehow fatally confused, or if he is wrong to distinguish it from the others, or if it is the sense of no term we can with warrant apply to ourselves or our states, then there will be no separate question in which it figures we should try to answer. Thus, trying to work out a reasoned view about what we are (or should be) talking about when we talk about consciousness is an unavoidable and non-trivial part of trying to understand the relation between consciousness and intentionality.
To clarify further the disputes about consciousness and their links to questions about its relation to intentionality, we need to get an initial grasp of the relevant way the terms ‘intentionality’ and ‘intentional’ are used in philosophy of mind.
Previously, some indication of why it is difficult to get a theory of consciousness started. While the term ‘conscious’ is not esoteric, its use is not easily characterized or rendered consistent in a manner providing some uncontentious framework for theoretical discussion. Where the term ‘intentional’ is concerned, we also face initially confusing and contentious usage. But here the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the relevant use of cognate terms is simply not that found in common speech (as when we speak of doing something ‘intentionally’). Though ‘intentionality,’ in the sense here at issue, does seem to attach to some real and fundamental (maybe even defining) aspect of mental phenomena, the relevant use of the term is tangled up with some rather involved philosophical history.
One way of explaining what is meant by ‘intentionality’ in the (more obscure) philosophical sense is this: it is that aspect of mental states or events that consists in their being of or about things, as pertains to the questions, ‘What are you thinking of?’ And, what are you thinking about?’ Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects, states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square - your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense. This ‘directedness’ conception of intentionality plays a prominent role in the influential philosophical writings of Franz Brentano and those whose views developed in response to his.
But what kind of ‘aboutness’ or ‘of-ness’ or ‘directedness’ is this, and to what sorts of things does it apply? How do the relevant ‘intentionality-marking’ senses of these words (‘about,’ ‘of,’ ‘directed’) differ from? : the sense in which the cat is wandering ‘about’ the room; the sense in which someone is a person ‘of’ high integrity; the sense in which the river's course is ‘directed’ toward the fields?
It has been said that the peculiarity of this kind of directedness/aboutness/of-ness lies in its capacity to relate thought or experience to objects that (unlike San Francisco) do not exist. One can think about a meeting that has not, or will never occur; One can think of Shangri La, or El Dorado, or the New Jerusalem, as one may think of their shining streets, of their total lack of poverty, or their citizens' peculiar garb. Thoughts, unlike roads, can lead to a city that is not there.
But to talk in this way only invites new perplexities. Is this to say (with apparent incoherence) that there are cities that do not exist? And what does it mean to say that, when a state of mind is in fact directed toward’ something that does exist, that state nevertheless could be directed toward something that does not exist? It can well seem to be something very fundamental to the nature of mind that our thoughts, or states of mind more generally, can be of or about things or ‘point beyond themselves.’ But a coherent and satisfactory theoretical grasp of this phenomenon of ‘mental pointing’ in all its generality is difficult to achieve.
Another way of trying to get a grip on the topic asks us to note that the potential for a mental directedness toward the non-existent be evidently closely associated with the mind's potential for falsehood, error, inaccuracy, illusion, hallucination, and dissatisfaction. What makes it possible to believe (or even just suppose) something about Shangri La is that one can falsely believe (or suppose) that something exists? In the case of perception, what makes it possible to seem to see or hear what is not there is that one's experience may in various ways be inaccurate, non-existent, subject to illusion, or hallucinatory. And, what makes it possible for one's desires and intentions to be directed toward what does not and will never exist is that one’s desire and intentions can be unfulfilled or unsatisfied. This suggests another strategy for getting a theoretical hold on intentionality, employing a notion of satisfaction, stretched to encompass susceptibility to each of these modes of assessment, each of these ways in which something can either go right, or go wrong (true/false, veridical/nonveridical, fulfilled/unfulfilled), and speak of intentionality in terms of having ‘conditions of satisfaction.’ On John Searle's (1983) conception, intentional states are those having conditions of satisfaction. What are conditions of satisfaction? In the case of belief, these are the conditions under which the belief is true; Even so, the instance of perception, they are the conditions under which sense-experience is veridical: In the case of intention, the conditions under which an intention is fulfilled or carried out.
However, while the conditions of satisfaction approach to the notion of intentionality may furnish an alternative to introducing this notion by talking of ‘directedness to objects,’ it is not clear that it can get us around the problems posed by the ‘directedness’ talk. For instance, what are we to say where thoughts are expressed using names of nonexistent deities or fictional characters? Will we do away with a troublesome directedness to the nonexistent by saying that the thoughts that Zeus is Poseidon's brother, and that Hamlet is a prince, is just false? This is problematic. Moreover, how will we state the conditions of satisfaction of such thoughts? Will this not also involve an apparent reference to the nonexistent?
A third important way of conceiving of intentionality, one particularly central to the analytic tradition derived from the study of Frege and Russell whom asks us to concentrate on the notion of mental (or intentional) content. Often, it is assumed to have intentionality is to have content. And frequently mental content is otherwise described as representational or informational content - and ‘intentionality’ (at least, as this applies to the mind) is seen as just another word for what is called ‘mental representation,’ or a certain way of bearing or carrying information.
But what is meant by ‘content’ here? As a start we may note: The content of thought, in this sense, is what, is reported when answering the question, What does she think? By something of the form, ‘She thinks that p.’ And the content of thought is what two people are said to share, when they are said to think the same thought. (Similarly, that contents of belief are what two persons commonly share when they hold the same belief.) Content is also what may be shared in this way even while ‘psychological modes’ of states of mind may differ. For example: Believing that I will soon be bald and fearing that I will soon be a bald share in that the content of bald shares that I will soon be bald.
Also, commonly, content is taken as not only that which is shared in the ways illustrated, but that which differs in a way revealed by considering certain logical features of sentences we use to talk about states of mind. Notably: the constituents of the sentence that fills in for ‘p’ when we say ‘x thinks that p’ or ‘x believes that p’ are often interpreted in such a way that they display ‘failures of substitutivity’ of (ordinarily) co-referential or co-extensional expressions, and this appear to reflect differences in mental content. For example: if George W. Bush is the eldest son of the vice-president under Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush is the current US. President, then it can be validly inferred that the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president is the current US President. However, we cannot always make the same sort of substitutions of terms when we use them to report what someone believes. From the fact that you believe that George W. Bush is the current US. President, we cannot validly infer that you believe that the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president is the current US. President. That last may still be false, even if George W. Bush is indeed the eldest son. These logical features of the sentences ‘x believes that George W. Bush is the current US. President’ and ‘x believe that George W. Bush is the eldest son of Reagan's vice-president’ seem to reflect the fact that the beliefs reported by their use have different contents: these sentences are used by someone to state what is believed (the belief content), and what is believed in each case is not just the same. Someone's belief may have the one content without having the other.
Similar observations can be made for other intentional states and the reports made of them - especially when these reports contain an object clause beginning with ‘that’ and followed by a complete sentence (e.g., she thinks that p; He intends that p; She hopes that p and the fear that p; She sees that p). Sometimes it is said that the content of the states is ‘given’ by such a ‘that p’ clause when ‘p’ is replaced by a sentence - the so-called ‘content clause.’
This ‘possession of content’ conception of intentionality may be coordinated with the ‘conditions of satisfaction’ conception roughly as follows. If states of mind contrast in respect of their satisfaction (say, one is true and the other false), they differ in content. (One and the same belief content cannot be both true and false - at least not in the same context at the same time.) And if one says what the intentional content of a state of mind is, one says much or perhaps all of what conditions must be met if it is to be satisfied - what its conditions of truth, or veridicality, or fulfilment, are. But one should be alert to how the notion of content employed in a given philosopher's views is heavily shaped by these views. One should note how commonly it is held that the notion of the finding representation of content is of that way of an ambiguous or in need of refinement. (Consider, for example: Jerry Fodor's) defence of a distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ content, as Edward Zalta’s characterlogical distinction between ‘cognitive’ and ‘objective content’ (1988), and that of John Perry's distinction between ‘reflexive' and ‘subject-matter content’.
It is arguable that each of these gates of entry into the topic of intentionality (directedness, condition of satisfaction, and mental content) opens onto a unitary phenomenon. But evidently there is also considerable fragmentation in the conceptions of both consciousness and intentionality that are in the field. To get a better grasp of some of the ways the relationship between consciousness and intentionality can be viewed, without begging questions or trying to present a positive theory on the topic, it is useful to take a look at the recent history of thinking about intentionality, in a way that will bring several issues about its relationship with consciousness to the fore. Together with the preceding discussion, this should provide the background necessary for examining some of the differences that divide those who theorize about consciousness that is very intimately involved with views of the consciousness-intentionality relation.
If we are to acknowledge the extent to which the notion of intentionality is the creature of philosophical history, we have to come to terms with the divide in twentieth century western philosophy between so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical traditions. Both have been significantly concerned with intentionality. But differences in approach, vocabulary, and background assumptions have made dialogue between them difficult. It is almost inevitable, in a brief exposition, to give largely independent summaries of the two. We will start with the ‘continental’ side of the story - more, specifically, with the Phenomenological movement in continental philosophy. However, while these traditions have developed without a great deal of intercommunication, they do have common sources, and have come to focus on issues concerning the relationship of consciousness and intentionality that are recognizably similar.
A thorough look at the historical roots of controversies over consciousness and intentionality would take us farther into the past than it is feasible to go in this article. A relatively recent, convenient starting point would be in the philosophy of Franz Brentano. He more than any other single thinker is responsible for keeping the term ‘intentional’ alive in philosophical discussions of the last century or so, with something like its current use, and was much concerned to understand its relationship with consciousness. However, it is worth noting that Brentano himself was very aware of the deep historical background to his notion of intentionality: He looked back through scholastic discussions (crucial to the development of Descartes' immensely influential theory of ideas), and ultimately to Aristotle for his theme of intentionality. One may go further back, to Plato's discussion (in the Sophist, and the Theaetetus) of difficulties in making sense of false belief, and yet further still, to the dawn of Western Philosophy, and Parmenides' attempt to draw momentous consequences from his alleged finding that it is not possible to think or speak of what is not.
In Brentano's treatment what seems crucial to intentionality is the mind's capacity to ‘refer’ or be ‘directed’ to objects existing solely in the mind - what he called ‘mental or intentional inexistence.’ It is subject to interpretation just what Brentano meant by speaking of an object existing only in the mind and not outside of it, and what he meant by saying that such ‘immanent’ objects of thought are not ‘real.’ He complained that critics had misunderstood him here, and appears to have revised his position significantly as his thought developed. But it is clear at least that his conception of intentionality is dominated by the first strand in thought about intentionality mentioned above - intentionality as ‘directedness toward an object’ - and whatever difficulty that brings in the point.
Brentano's conception of the relation between consciousness and intentionality can be brought out partly by noting he held that every conscious mental phenomenon is both directed toward an object, and always (if only ‘secondarily’) directed toward itself. (That is, it includes a ‘presentation’ - and ‘inner perception’ - of itself). Since Brentano also denied the existence of unconscious mental phenomena, this amounts to the view that all mental phenomena are, in a sense ‘self-presentational.’
His lectures in the late nineteenth century attracted a diverse group of central European intellectuals (including that great promoter of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud) and the problems raised by Brentano's views were taken up by a number of prominent philosophers of the era, including Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, and Kasimir Twardowski. Of these, it was Husserl's treatment of the Brentanian theme of intentionality that was to have the widest philosophical influence on the European Continent in the twentieth century - both by means of its transformation in the hands of other prominent thinkers who worked under the aegis of ‘phenomenology’ - such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - and through its rejection by those embracing the ‘deconstructionism’ of Jacques Derrida.
In responding to Brentano, Husserl also adopted his concern with properly understanding the way in which thought and experience are ‘directed toward objects.’ Husserl criticized Brentano's doctrine of ‘inner perception,’ and did not deny (even if he did not affirm) the reality of unconscious mentation. But Husserl retained Brentano's primary focus on describing conscious ‘mental acts.’ Also he believed that knowledge of one's own mental acts rests on an ‘intuitive’ apprehension of their instances, and held that one is, in some sense, conscious of each of one's conscious experiences (though he denied this meant that every conscious experience is an object of an intentional act). Evidently Husserl wished to deny that all conscious acts are objects of inner perception, while also affirming that some kind of reflexivity - one that is, however, neither judgment-like nor sense-like - is essentially built into every conscious act. But the details of the view are not easy to make out. (A similar (and similarly elusive) view was expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in the doctrine that ‘All consciousness is a non-positional consciousness of itself.’
One of Husserl's principal points of departure in his early treatment of intentionality (in the Logical Investigations) was his criticism of (what he took to be) Brentano's notion of the ‘mental inexistence’ of the objects of thought and perception. Husserl thought it a fundamental error to suppose that the object (the ‘intentional object’) of a thought, judgment, desire, etc. is always an object ‘in’ (or ‘immanent to’) the mind of the thinker, judger, or desirer. The objects of one's ‘mental acts’ of thinking, judging, etc. are often objects that ‘transcend,’ and exist independently of these acts (states of mind) that are directed toward them (that ‘intend’ them, in Husserl's terms). This is particularly striking, Husserl thought, if we focus on the intentionality of sense perception. The object of my visual experience is not something ‘in my mind,’ whose existence depends on the experience - but something that goes beyond or ‘transcends’ any (necessarily perspectival) experience I may have of it. This view is phenomenologically based, for (Husserl says), the object is experienced as perspectivally given, hence as ‘transcendent’ in this sense.
In cases of hallucination, we should say, on Husserl's view, not that there is an object existing ‘in one's mind,’ but that the object intended does not exist at all. This does not do away with the ‘directedness’ of the experience, for that is properly understood (according to the Logical Investigations) as it is having a certain ‘matter’- where the matter of a mental act is what may be common to different acts, when, for example, one believes that it will not rain tomorrow, and hopes that it will not rain tomorrow. The difference between the mental acts illustrated (between hoping and believing) Husserl would term a difference in their ‘quality.’ Husserl was to re-interpret his notions of act-matter and quality as components of what he called (in Ideas, 1983) the ‘noema’ or ‘noematic structure’ that can be common to distinct particular acts. So intentional directedness is understood not as a relation to special (mental) objects toward which one is directed, but rather: as the possession by mental acts of matter/quality (or later, ‘noematic’) structure.
This unites Husserl's discussion with the ‘content’ conception of intentionality described above: he himself would accept that the matter of an act (later, its ‘noematic sense’) is the same as the content of judgment, belief, desire, etc., in one sense of the term (or rather, in one sense he found in the ambiguous German ‘Gestalt’). However, it is not fully clear how Husserl would view the relationship between either act-matter and noematic sense quite generally and such semantic correlates of ordinary language sentences that some would identify as the contents of states of mind reported in them. Nonetheless, this is a difficulty partly because of his later emphasis (e.g., in Experience and Judgment) on the importance of what he called ‘pre-predicative’ experience. He believed that the sort of judgments we express in ordinary and scientific languages are ‘founded on’ the intentionality of pre-predicative experience, and that it is a central task of philosophy to clarify the way in which such experience of our surroundings and our own bodies underlies judgment, and the capacity it affords us to construct an ‘objective’ conception of the world. Prepredicative experience’s are, paradigmatically, sense experience as it is given to us, independently of any active judging or predication. But did Husserl hold that what makes such experience pre-predicative is that it altogether lacks the content that is expressed linguistically in predicative judgment, or did he think that such judgment merely renders explicitly a predicative content that even ‘pre-predicative’ experience already (implicitly) has? Just what does the ‘pre-’ in ‘pre-predicative’ entail?
Perhaps this is not clear. In any case, the theme of a type of intentionality more fundamental than that involved in predicative judgments that ‘posit’ objects, and to be found in everyday experience of our surroundings, was taken up, in different ways, by later phenomenologists, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The former describes a type of ‘directed’ ‘comportment’ toward beings in which they ‘show themselves’ as ‘ready-to-hand. Heidegger thinks this characterizes our ordinary practical involvement with our surroundings, and regards it as distinct from, and somehow providing a basis for, entities showing themselves to us as ‘present-at-hand’ (or ‘occurrent’) - as they do when we take of less context-bound, and more in a theoretical stance toward the world. Later, Merleau-Ponty (1949-1962), influenced by his study of Gestalt psychology and neurological case studies describing pathologies of perception and action, held that normal perception involves a consciousness of place tied essentially to one's capacities for exploratory and goal-directed movement, which is indeterminate relative to attempts to express or characterize it in terms of ‘objective’ representations - though it makes such an objective conception of the world possible.
Whether Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's moves in these directions actually contradict Husserl, they clearly go beyond what he says. Another basic, exegetically complex, apparent difference between Husserl and the two later philosophers, pertinent to the relationship of consciousness and intentionality, there lies the disputation over Husserl's proposed ‘Phenomenological reduction.’ Husserl claimed it is possible (and, indeed, essential to the practice of phenomenology) that one conduct and investigation into the structure of consciousness that carefully abstains from affirming the existence of anything in spatial-temporal reality. By this ‘bracketing’ of the natural world, by reducing the scope of one's assertions first to the subjective sphere of consciousness, then to its abstract (or ‘ideal’) atemporal structure, one is able to apprehend what consciousness. Its various forms essentially are, in a way that supplies a foundation to the philosophical study of knowledge, meaning and value. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (along with a number of Husserl's other students) appear to have questioned whether it is possible to reduce one's commitments as thoroughly as Husserl appears to have prescribed through a ‘mass abstention’ from judgment about the world, and thus whether it is correct to regard one's intentional experience as a whole as essentially detachable from the world at which it is directed. Seemingly crucial to their doubts about Husserl's reduction is their belief that an essential part of intentionality consists in a distinctively practical involvement with the world that cannot be broken by any mere abstention from judgment.
The Phenomenological themes just hinted at (the notion of a ‘pre-predicative’ type of intentionality; the (un)detachability of intentionality from the world) link with issues regarding consciousness and intentionality as these are understood outside the Phenomenological tradition - in particular, the notion of non-conceptual content, and the internalism/externalism debate, to be considered in Section (4). But it is by no means a straightforward matter to describe these links in detail. Part of the reason lies in the general difficulty in being clear about whether what one philosopher means by ‘consciousness’ (or its standard translations) is close enough to what another means for it to be correct to see them as speaking to the same issues. And while some of the Phenomenological philosophers (Brentano, Husserl, Sartre) make thematically central use of terms cognate with ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality,’ and consider questions about intentionality first and foremost as questions about the intentionality of consciousness, they do not explicitly address much that (in the latter half of the twentieth century) came to seem problematic about consciousness and intentionality. Is their ‘consciousness’ the phenomenal kind? Would they reject theories of consciousness that reduce it to a species of access to content? If so, on what grounds? (Given their interest in the relation of consciousness, inner perception, and reflection, it may be easier to discern what their stances on reductive ‘higher order representation’ theories of consciousness would be.)
In some ways the situation is more difficult still in the cases of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. For the former, though he willingly enough uses’ words standardly translated as ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality,’ says little to explain how he understands such terms generally. And the latter deliberately avoid these terms in his central work, Being and Time, in order to forge a philosophical vocabulary free of errors in which they had, he thought, become enmeshed. However, it is not obvious how to articulate the precise difference between what Heidegger rejects, in rejecting the alleged error-laden understanding of ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality’, or their German translations, by what he accepts when he speaks of being to his ‘showing’ or ‘disclosing’ them to us, and of our ‘comportment’ directed toward them.
Nevertheless, one can plausibly read Brentano's notion of ‘presentation’ as equivalent to the notion of phenomenally conscious experience, as this is understood in other writers. For Brentano says, ‘We speak of presentation whenever something appears to us.’ And one may take ways of appearing as equivalent to ways of seeming, in the sense proper to phenomenal consciousness. Further, Brentano's attempt to state that through his analysis as described through that of ‘descriptive or Phenomenological psychology,’ became atypically based on how intentional manifestations are to present of themselves, the fundamental kinds to which they belong and their necessary interrelationships, may plausibly be interpreted as an effort to articulate the philosophical salient, highly general phenomenal character of intentional states (or acts) of mind. And Husserl's attempts to delineate the structure of intentionality as it is ‘given’ in consciousness, as well as the Phenomenological productions of Sartre, can arguably be seen as devoted to laying bare to thought the deepest and most general characteristics of phenomenal consciousness, as they are found in ‘directed’ perception, judgment, imagination, emotion and action. Also, one might reasonably regard Heideggerean disclosure of the ready-to-hand and Merleau-Ponty's ‘motor-intentional’ consciousness of place as forms of phenomenally conscious experience - as long as one's conception of phenomenal consciousness is not tied to the notion that the subjective ‘sphere’ of consciousness is, in essence, independent of the world revealed through it.
In any event, to connect classic Phenomenological writings with current discussions of consciousness and its relation to intentionality, more background is needed on aspects of the other main current of Western philosophy in the past century particularly relevant to the topic of intentionality - broadly labelled ‘analytic’.
It seems fair to say that recent work in philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition that has focussed on questions about the nature of intentionality (or ‘mental content’) has been most formed not by the writings of Brentano, Husserl and their direct intellectual descendants, but by the seminal discussions of logico-linguistic concerns found in Gottlob Frége's (1892) ‘On Sense and Reference,’ and Bertrand Russell's ‘On Denoting’ (1905).
But Frége and Russell's work comes from much the same era, and from much the same intellectual environment as Brentano and the early Husserl. And fairly clear points of contact have long been recognized, such as: Russell's criticism of Meinong's ‘theory of objects’, derived from the problem of intentionality, which led him to countenance objects, such as the golden mountain, that are capable of being the object of thought, although they do not exist. This doctrine was one of the principal theories of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions. However, it came as part of a complex and interesting package of concepts in the theory of meaning and scholars are not united in supposing that Russell was fair to it.
The similarities between Husserl's meaning/object distinction (in Logical Investigation I) and Frége's (prior) sense/reference distinction. Indeed the case has been influentially made (by Follesdal 1969, 1990) that Husserl's ‘meaning/object’ distinction is borrowed from Frege (though with a change in terminology) and that Husserl's ‘noema’ is properly interpreted as having the characteristics of Frégean ‘sense.’
Nonetheless, a number of factors make comparison and integration of debates within the two traditions complicated and strenuous. Husserl's notion of noema (hence his notion of intentionality) is most fundamentally rooted, not in reflections on the logical features of language, but in a contrast between the object of an intentional act, and the object ‘as intended’ (the way in which it is intended), and in the idea that a structure would remain to perceptual experience, even if it were radically non-veridical. And what Husserl seeks is a ‘direct’ characterization of this (and other) kinds of experience from the point of view of the experiencer. On the other hand, Frége and Russell's writings bearing on the topic of intentionality concentrate mainly and most explicitly on issues that grow from their own pioneering achievements in logic, and have given rise to ways of understanding mental states primarily through questions about the logic and semantics of the language used to speak of them.
Broadly speaking, logico-linguistic concerns have been methodologically and thematically dominant in the analytic Frége-Russell tradition, while the Phenomenological Brentano-Husserl lineage is rooted in attempts to characterize experience as it is evident from the subject's point of view. For this reason perhaps, discussions of consciousness and intentionality are more obviously intertwined from the start in the Phenomenological tradition than in the analytic one. The following sketch of relevant background in the latter case will, accordingly, most directly concern the treatment of intentionality. But by the end, the bearing of this on the treatment of consciousness in analytic philosophy of mind will have become more evident, and it will be clearer how similar issues concerning the consciousness-intentionality relationship arise in each tradition.
Central to Frége's legacy for discussions of mental or intentional content has been his distinction between ‘sense’ (Sinn) and ‘reference’ (Bedeutung), and his application in his distinction is to cope with an apparent failure of substitutivity to something of an ordinary co-referential expression. In that contexts created by psychological verbs, the sort mentioned in exposition of the notion of mental content - a task important to his development of logic. The need for a distinction between the sense and reference of an expression became evident to Frége, when he considered that, even if ‘a’ is identical to ‘b’, and you understand both ‘a’ and ‘b,’ still, it can be for you a discovery, an addition to your knowledge, that a = b. This is intelligible, Frege thought, only if you have different ways of understanding the expressions ‘a’ and ‘b’ - only if they involve for your distinct ‘modes of presentation’ of the self-same object to which they refer. In Frége's celebrated example: you may understand the expressions ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star’ and use them to refer to what is one and the same object - the planet Venus. But this is not sufficient for you to know that the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star. For the ways in which an object (‘the reference’) is ‘given’ to your mind when you employ these expressions (the senses or Sinne you ‘grasp’ when you use them) may differ in such a manner that ignorance of astronomy would prevent your realizing that they are but two ways in which the same object can be given.
The relevance of all this to intentionality becomes clearer, once we see how Frege applied the sense/reference distinction to whole sentences. The sentence, ‘The Evening Star = The Morning Star’ has a different sense than the sentence ‘The Evening Star = The Evening Star’, even if their reference (according to Frége, their truth value) is the same. The failure of substitutivity of co-referential expressions in ‘that p’ contexts created by psychological verbs can consequently be understood (Frége proposed) in this way: The reference of the terms shifts in these contexts, so that, for example, ‘the Evening Star’ no longer refers to its customary reference (the planet Venus), but to a sense that functions, for the subject of the verb (the person who thinks, judges, desires) as his or her mode of presentation of this object. The sentence occurring in this context no longer refers to its truth value, but to the sense in which the mode of presentation is embedded - which might otherwise be called the ‘thought’ - or, by other philosophers, the ‘content’ of the subject's state of mind. This thought or content representation is to be understood not as a mental image, or literally as anything essentially private is the assemblage of its thinking mind - but as one and the same abstract entity that can be ‘grasped’ by two minds, and that must be so grasped if communication is to occur.
While on the surface this story may appear to be only about logic and semantics, and though Frege did not himself elaborate a general account of intentionality, what he says readily suggests the following picture. Intentional states of mind - thinking about Venus, wishing to visit it - involve some special relation (such as ‘mental grasping’)- not ‘in one's mind,’ nor to any imagery, but to an abstractive entity, a thought, which also constitutes the sense of a linguistic expression that can be used to report one's state of mind, a sense that is grasped or understood by speakers who use it.
This style of account, together with the Frégean thesis that ‘sense determines reference,’ and the history of criticisms both have elicited, form much of the background of contemporary discussions of mental content. It is often assumed, with Frege, that we must recognize (as some thinkers in the empiricist tradition allegedly did not) that thoughts or contents cannot consist in images or essentially private ‘ideas.’ But philosophers have frequently criticized Frége's view of thought as some abstract entity ‘grasped’ or ‘present to’ the mind, and have wanted to replace Frége's unanalyzed ‘grasping’ with something more ‘naturalistic.’
Relatedly, it may be granted that the content of the thought reported is to be identified with the sense of the expression with which we report it. But then, it is argued, the identity of this content will not be determined individualistically, and may, in some respect’s lay beyond the grasp (or not be fully ‘present to’ the mind of) the psychological subject. For what determines the reference of an expression may be a natural causal relation to the world - as influentially argued is true for proper names, like ‘Nixon’ and ‘Cicero,’ and ‘natural kind’ terms like ‘gold’ and ‘water.’ Or (as Tyler Burge (1979) has influentially argued) two speakers who, considered as individuals, are qualitatively the same, may nevertheless each assert something different simply because of differing relations they bear to their respective linguistic communities. (For example, what one speaker's utterance of ‘arthritis’ means is determined not by what is ‘in the head’ of that speaker, but by the medical experts in his or her community.) And, if referentially truth conditions of expressions by which one's thought is reported or expressed are not determined by what is in one's head, and the content of one's thought determines their reference and truth conditions, then the content of one's thought is also not determined individualistically. Rather, it is necessarily bound up with one's causal relations to certain natural substances, and one's membership in a certain linguistic community. Both linguistic meaning and mental contents are ‘externally’ determined.
The development of such ‘externalist’ conceptions of intentionality informs the reception of Russell's legacy in contemporary philosophy of mind as well. Russell also helped to put in play a conception of the intentionality of mental states, according to which each such state is seen as involving the individual's ‘acquaintance with a proposition’ (counterpart to Fregean ‘grasping’) - which proposition is at once both what is understood in understanding expressions by which the state of mind is reported, and the content of the individual's state of mind. Thus, intentional states are ‘propositional attitudes.’ Also importantly, Russell's famous analysis of definite descriptions into phrases employing existential quantifiers and general predicates underlay many subsequent philosophers' rejection of any conception of intentionality (like Meinong's) that sees in it a relation to non-existent objects. And, Russell's treatment drew attention to cases of what he called ‘logically proper names’ that apparently defies such analysis in descriptive terms (paradigmatically, the terms ‘this’ and ‘that’), and which (he thought) thus must refer ‘directly’ to objects. Reflection on such ‘demonstratives’ and ‘indexical’ (e.g., ‘I,’ ‘here,’ ‘now’) reference has led some to maintain that the content of our states of mind cannot always be constituted by Fregean senses but must be seen as consisting partly of the very objects in the world outside our heads to which we refer, demonstratively, indexically - another source of support for an ‘externalist’ view of mental content, hence, of intentionality.
Yet another important source of externalist proclivities in twentieth century philosophy lies in the thought that the meaningfulness of a speaker's utterances depends on its potential intelligibility to hearers: language must be public - an idea that has found varying and influential expression in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Davidson. This, coupled with the assumption that intentionality (or ‘thought’ in the broad (Cartesian) sense) must be expressible in language, has led some to conclude that what determines the content of one's mind must lie in the external conditions that enable others to attribute content.
However, the movement from Frege and Russell toward externalist views of intentionality should not simply be accepted as yielding a fund of established results: it has been subject to powerful and detailed challenges, but without plunging into the details of the internalism/externalism debate about mental content, we can recognize, in the issues just raised, certain themes bearing particularly on the connection between consciousness and intentionality.
For example: it is sometimes assumed that, whatever may be true of content or intentionality, the phenomenal character of one's experience, at least, is ‘fixed internally’ -, i.e., it involves no necessary relations to the nature of particular substances in one's external environment or to one's linguistic community. But then the purported externalist finding that meaning nor contents are ‘in the head’ and, of course, be read as showing the insufficiency of phenomenal consciousness to determine any intentionality or content. Something like this consequence is drawn by Putnam (1981), who takes the stream of consciousness to comprise nothing more than sensations and images, which (as Frege saw) should be sharply distinguished from thought and meaning. This interpretation of the import of externalist arguments may be reinforced by a tendency to tie (phenomenal) consciousness to non-intentional sensations, sensory qualities, or ‘raw feels,’ and hence to dissociate consciousness from intentionality (and allied notions of meaning and reference), a tendency that has been prominent in the analytic tradition.
But it is not at all evident that externalist theories of content require us to estrange consciousness from intentionality. One might argue (as do Martin Davies (1997) and Fred Dretske (1997)) that in certain relevant respects the phenomenal character of experience is also essentially determined by causal environmental connections. By contrast, one may argue (as do Ludwig (1996b) and Horgan and Tienson (2002)) that since it is conceivable that a subject has experience is much like our own in phenomenal character, but radically different in external causes from what we take our own to be (in the extreme case, a mind bewitched by a Cartesian demon into massive hallucination), there must indeed be a realm of mental content that is not externally determined.
One other aspect of the Frége-Russell tradition of theorizing about content that impinges on the consciousness/intentionality connection is this. If ‘content’ is identified with the sense or the truth-condition determiners of the expressions used in the object-clause reporting intentional states of mind, it will seem natural to suppose that possession of mental content requires the possession of conceptual capacities of the sort involved in linguistic understanding - ‘grasping senses.’ But then, to the extent the phenomenal character of experience is inadequate to endow a creature with such capacities, it may seem that phenomenal consciousness has little to do with intentionality.
However, this raises large issues. One is this: it should not be granted without question that the phenomenal character of our experience could be as it is in the absence to the sorts of conceptual capacities sufficient for (at least some types of) intentionality. And this is tied to the issue of whether or not the phenomenal character of experience is (as some suppose) a purely sensory affair. Some would maintain, on the contrary, that thought (not just imagistic, but conceptual thought) has phenomenal character too. If so, then it is very far from clear that phenomenal character can be divorced from whatever conceptual capacities are necessary for intentionality.
Moreover, we may ask: Are concepts, properly speaking, always necessary for intentionality anyway? Here another issue rears its head: is there not perhaps a form of sensory intentionality, which does not require anything as distinctively intellectual or conceptual as is needed for the grasping of linguistic senses or propositions? (This presumably would be a kind of intentionality had by the pre-linguistic (e.g., babies) or by non-linguistic creatures (e.g., dogs).) Suppose that there is, and that this type of intentionality is inseparable from the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Then, even if one assumes that such phenomenal consciousness is insufficient to guarantee the possession of concepts, it would be wrong to say that it has little to do with intentionality. (Advocates of varying versions of the idea that there is a distinctively ‘non-conceptual’ kind of content include Bermudez 1998, Crane 1992, Evans 1982, Peacocke 1992, and Tye 1995 - for a notable voice of opposition to this trend, see McDowell 1994.) A deep difficulty in assessing these debates lies in getting an acceptable conception of concepts with which to work. We need to understand clearly what ‘having a concept of F’ does and does not require, before we can be clear about the content of and justification for the thesis of non-conceptual content.
These proposals about non-conceptual content bear some affinity with aspects of the Phenomenological tradition eluded too earlier: Husserl's notion of ‘pre-predicative’ experience as to Heidegger's procedures of ‘ready-to-hand;’ and Merleau-Ponty's idea that in normal active perception we are conscious of place, not via a determinate ‘representation’ of it, but rather, relative to our capacities for goal-directed bodily behaviour. Though to see the extent to which any of these are ‘non-conceptual’ in character would require not only more clarity about the conceptual/non-conceptual contrast, save that a considerable novel exegesis of these philosophers' works.
Also, one may plausibly try to find an affinity between externalist views in analytic philosophy, and the later phenomenologists' rejection of Husserl's reduction, based on their doubt that we can prise consciousness off from the world at which it is directed, and study its ‘intentional essence’ in solipsistic isolation. But if externalism can be defined broadly enough to encompass Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Kripke, and Burge, still the comparison is strained when we take account of the different sources of ‘externalism’ in the phenomenologists. These have to do it seems (very roughly) with the idea that the way we are conscious of things (or at least, for Heidegger, the way they ‘show themselves’ to us) in our everyday activity cannot be quite generally separated from our actual engagement with entities of which we are thus conscious (which show themselves in this way). Also relevant is the idea that one's use of language (hence one's capacity for thought) requires gearing one's activity to a social world or cultural tradition, in which antecedently employed linguistic meaning is taken up and made one's own through one's relation with others. All this is supposed to make it infeasible to study the nature of intentionality by globally uprooting, in thought, the connection of experience with one's spatial surroundings (and - crucially for Merleau-Ponty - one's own body), and one's social environment. Whatever the merits of this line of thought, we should note: Neither a causal connection with ‘natural kinds’ unmediated by reference-determining ‘modes of presentation,’ nor deference to the linguistic usage of specialists, nor belief in the need to reconstruct speakers’ meaning from observed behaviour, plays a role in the phenomenologists' doubts about the reduction.
The arduous exegesis required for a clearer and more detailed comparison of these views is not possible here. Nevertheless, following some of the main lines of thought in treatments of intentionality, descending on the one hand, primarily from Brentano and Husserl, and on the other, from Frége and Russell, certain fundamental issues concerning its relationship to consciousness have emerged. These include, first, the connection between consciousness and self-directed and self-reflexive intentionality. (It has already been seen that this topic preoccupied Brentano, Husserl and Sartre; its emergence as an important issue in analytic philosophy of mind will become more evident below, Second, there is concern with the way in which (and the extent to which) mind is world-involving. (In the Phenomenological tradition this can be seen in controversy over Husserl's Phenomenological reduction; That within Frégean cognitive traditions are exhibited through some formal critique as drawn upon sensationalism, in which only internalism/externalism are argued traditionally atypically in the passage through which are formally debated. Third, there is the putative distinction between conceptual and theoretical, and sensory or practical forms of intentionality. (In phenomenology this shows up in Husserl's contrast between judgment and pre-predicative experience, and related notions of his successors; In analytic philosophy this shows up in the (more recent) attention to the notion of ‘non-conceptual’ content.)
For more clarity regarding the consciousness-intentionality relationship and how these three topics figure prominently in views about it, it is necessary now to turn attention back to philosophical disagreements regarding consciousness that abruptly have of an abounding easy to each separate relation, til their distinctions have of occurring.
Consider the proposal that sense experience manifests a kind of intentionality distinct from and more basic than that involved in propositional thought and conceptual understanding. This might help form the basis for an account of consciousness. Perhaps conscious states of mind are distinguished partly by their possession of a type of content proper to the sensory subdivision of mind.
One source of the idea that a difference in type of content helps constitute a distinction between what is and is not phenomenally conscious, lies in the apparent distinction between sense experience and judgment. To have conscious visual experience of a stimulus - for it to look some way to you - is one thing. To make judgments about it is something else. (This seems evident in the persistence of a visual illusion, even once one has become convinced of the error.) However, on some accounts of consciousness, this distinction itself is doubtful, since conscious sense experience is taken to be nothing more than a form of judging. However, such to this view is expressed by Daniel Dummett (1991), who takes the relevant form of judging to consist in one's possession of information or mental content available to the appropriate sort of ‘probes’ - the availability of content he calls ‘cerebral celebrity.’ For Dummett what distinguishes conscious states of mind is not their possession of a distinctive type of intentional content, but rather the richness of that content, and its availability to the appropriate sort of cognitive operations. (Since the relevant class of operations is not sharply defined, neither, for Dummett, is the difference between which states of mind are conscious and which are not.)
Recent accounts of consciousness that, by contrast, give central place to a distinction between (conceptual) judgment and (non-conceptual - but still intentional) sense-experience includes Michael Tye's (1995) theory, holding that it is (by metaphysical necessity) sufficient to have a conscious sense-perception that some representation of sensory stimuli is formed in one's head, ‘map-like’ in character, whose (‘non-conceptual’) content is ‘poised’ to affect one's (conceptual) beliefs. This form of mental representation Tye would contrast with the ‘sentential’ form proper to belief and judgment - and in that way, he might preserve the judgment/experience contrast as Dummett does not. Consider also Fred Dretske's (1995) view, that phenomenally conscious sensory intentionality consists in a kind of mental representation whose content is bestowed through a naturally selected ‘function to indicate.’ Such natural (evolution-implanted) sensory representation can arise independently of learning (unlike the more conceptual, language dependent sort), and is found widely distributed among evolved lives.
Both Tye and Dretske's views of consciousness (unlike Dummett's) make crucial use of a contrast between the types of intentionality proper to sense-experience, and that proper to linguistically expressed judgment. On the other hand, there is also some similarity among the theories, which can be brought out by noting a criticism of Dummett's view, analogues of which arise for Tye and Dretske's views as well.
Some might think Dummett's account concerns only some variety of what Form would call ‘ascensive consciousness’. For on Dummett's account, it seems, to speak of visual consciousness is to speak of nothing over and above the sort of availability of informational content that is evinced in unprompted verbal discriminations of visual stimuli. And this view has been criticized for neglecting phenomenal consciousness. It seems we may conceive of a capacity for spontaneous judgment triggered by and responsive to visual stimuli, which would occur in the absence of the judger's phenomenally conscious visual experience of the stimuli: The stimuli do not look in any way impulsively subjective, and yet they trigger accurate judgments about their presence. The notion of such a (hypothetical) form of ‘blind-sight’ may be elaborated in such a way that we conceive of the judgment it affords for being at least as finely discriminatory (and as fine in informational content) as that enjoyed by those with extremely poor, blurry and un-acute conscious visual experience (as in the ‘legally blind’). But a view like Dummett's seems to make this scenario inconceivable.
However, this kind of criticism does not concern only those theories that would elide any experience/judgment distinction. For Tye and Dretske's theories, though they depend on forms of that contrast (and are offered as theories of phenomenal consciousness), can raise similar concerns. For one might think that the hypothetical blind-sighter would be as rightly regarded as having Tye ‘support’ some maplike representations in her visual system as would be someone with a comparable form of conscious vision. And one might find it unclear why we should think the visual system of such a blind-sighter must be performing naturally endowed indicating functions more poorly than the visual system of a consciously sighted subject would.
Whatever the cogency of these concerns, one should note their distinctness from the issues about ‘kinds of intentionality’ that appear to separate both Tye and Dretske from Dummett. The notion that there is a fundamental distinction to be drawn in kinds of intentional content (separating the more intellectual from the more sensory departments of mind) sometimes forms the basis of an account of consciousness (as with Dretske and Tye's, though not with Dummett's). But it is also important to recognize what unites Dummett, Tye, and Dretske. Despite their differences, all propose to account for consciousness by starting with a general understanding of intentionality (or mental content or representation) to which consciousness is inessential. Dummett is known for an uncompromising re-evaluation of the Western tradition, viewing writings before the rise of anaclitic philosophy as fatty and flawed by having take epistemology to be fundamental, whereas the correct approach, giving a foundational place to a concern with language, only took to a point-start with the work of Frége. Equally, the supposedly pure investigation of language in the 20th century has often kept some dubious epistemological and metaphysical company.
They then offer to explain consciousness as a special case of intentionality thus understood - so, in terms of the operations the content is available for, or the form in which it is represented, or the nature of its external source. The blind-sight-based objection to Dennett, and its possible extension to Dretske and Tye, helps bring this commonality to light. The last of these issues showed how some theories purport to account for consciousness on the basis of intentionality, in a way that focuses attention on attempts to discern a distinctively sensory type of intentionality. A different strategy for explaining consciousness via intentionality highlights the importance of clarity regarding the connection between consciousness and reflexivity. On such a view (roughly): Experiences or states of mind are conscious just insofar as the mind represents itself as having them.
In David Rosenthal's variant of this approach, a state is conscious just when it is a kind of (potentially non-conscious) mental state one has, which one (seemingly without inference) thinks that one is in. A theory of this sort starts with some way of classifying mental states that is supposed to apply to conscious and non-conscious states of mind alike. The proposal then is that such a state is conscious just when it belongs to one of those mental kinds, and the (‘higher order’) thought occurs to the person in that state that he or she is in a state of that kind. So, for example it is maintained that certain non-conscious states of mind can possess ‘sensory qualities’ of various sorts - one may, in a sense, be in pain without feeling pain, one may have a red sensory quality, even when nothing looks red to one. The idea is that one has a conscious visual experience of red, or a conscious pain sensation, just when one has such a red sensory quality, or pain-quality, and the thought (itself also potentially non-conscious) occurs to one that one has a red sensory quality, or pain-quality.
This way of accounting for consciousness in terms of intentionality may, like theories mentioned, provoke the concern that the distinctively phenomenal sense of consciousness has been slighted - though this time, not in favour of some ‘access’ consciousness, but in favour of reflexive consciousness. One focus of such criticism lies in the idea that such higher-order thought requires the possession of concepts - concepts of types of mental states - that may be lacking in creatures with first order mentality. And it is unclear (in fact it seems false to say) these beings would therefore have no conscious sensory experience in the phenomenal sense. Might that they enduringly exist in a way the world looks to rabbits, dogs, monkeys, and human babies, and might they agreeably feel pain, though they lack the conceptual wherewithal to think about their own experience?
One line of response to such concerns is simply to bite the bullet: dogs, babies and the like might altogether lack higher order thought, but that is no problem for the theory because, indeed, they also altogether lack feelings. Rosenthal, for his part, takes a different line: lack of cognitive sophistication need not instantly disqualify one for consciousness, since the possession of primitive mentalistic concepts requires so little that practically any organism we would consider a serious candidate for sensory consciousness (certainly babies, dogs and bunnies) would obviously pass conscription.
A number of additional worries have been raised about both the necessity and the sufficiency of ‘higher order thought’ for conscious sense experience. In the face of such doubts, one may preserve the idea that consciousness consists in some kind of higher order representation - the mind's ‘scanning’ itself - by abandoning ‘higher order thought’ for another form of representation: one that is not thought-like or conceptual, but somehow sensory in character. Maybe somewhat as we can distinguish between primitive sensory perception of things in our environment, and the more intellectual, conceptual operations based on them, so we can distinguish the thoughts we have about our own (‘inner’) mental goings-on from the (‘inner’) sensing of them. And, if we propose that consciousness consist in this latter sort of higher order representation, it seems we will escape the worries occasioned by the Rosenthalian variant of the ‘reflexivist’ doctrine. In considering such theories, two of the consciousness-themes that earlier discern had in coming together, namely the reflexivity of thought, or higher order representations, and, by contrast, between the conceptual and non-conceptual presentations, as sensory data,
Criticism of ‘inner sense’ theories is likely to focus not so much on the thought that such inner sensing can occur without phenomenal consciousness, or that the latter can occur without the former, as on the difficulty in understanding just what inner sensing (as distinct from higher order thought) is supposed to be, and why we should think we have it. It seems the inner sense theorist’s share with those who distinguish between conceptual and non-conceptual (or sensory) flavours of intentionality the challenge of clarifying and justifying some version of this distinction. But they bear the additional burden of showing how such a distinction can be applied not just to intentionality directed at tables and chairs, but at the ‘furniture of the mind’ as well. One may grant that there are non-conceptual sensory experiences of objects in one's external environment while doubting one has anything analogous regarding the ‘inner’ landscape of mind.
It should be noted that, in spite of the difficulties faced by higher order representation theories, they draw on certain perennially influential sources of philosophical appeal. We do have some willingness to speak of conscious states of mind as states we are conscious or aware of being in. It is tempting to interpret this as indicating some kind of reflexivity. And the history of philosophy reveals many thinkers attracted to the idea that consciousness is inseparable from some kind of self-reflexivity of mind. As noted, varying versions of this idea can be found in Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre, as well as we can go further back in which case of Kant (1787) who spoke explicitly of ‘inner sense,’ and Locke (1690) defined consciousness as the ‘perception of what passes in a man's mind.’ Brentano (controversially) interpreted Aristotle's enigmatic and terse discussion of ‘seeing that one sees’ in De Anima, as an anticipation of his own ‘inner perception’ view. However, there is this critical difference between the thinkers just cited and contemporary purveyors of higher order representation theories. The former does not maintain, as do the latter, that consciousness consists in one's forming the right sort of higher order representation of a possible non-conscious type of mental state. Even if they think that consciousness is inseparable from some sort of mental reflexivity, they do not suggest that consciousness can, so to speak, be analysed into mental parts, none of which they essentially require consciousness. (Some could not maintain this, since they explicitly deny mentality without consciousness.) There is a difference between saying that reflexivity is essential to consciousness and saying that consciousness just consists in or is reducible to a species of mental reflexivity. Advocacy of the former without advocacy of the latter is certainly possible.
Suppose one holds that phenomenal consciousness is distinguishable both from ‘access’ and ‘reflexivity,’ and that it cannot be explained as a special case of intentionality. One might conclude from this that phenomenal consciousness and intentionality are two composite structures exhibiting of themselves of distinct realms as founded in the psychic domain as called the mental, and embrace the idea that the phenomenal are a matter of non-intentional qualia or raw feels. One important current in the analytic tradition has evinced this attitude - it is found, for example, in Wilfrid Sellars' (1956) distinction between ‘sentience’ (sensation) and ‘sapience.’ Whereas the qualities of feelings involved in the former - mere sensations - require no cognitive sophistication and are readily attributable to brutes, the latter - involving awareness of, awareness that - requires that one have the appropriate concepts, which cannot be guaranteed by just having sensations; one needs learning and inferential capacities of a sort Sellars believed possibly only with language. ‘Awareness,’ Sellars says, ‘is a linguistic affair.’
Thus we may arrive at a picture of mind that places sensation on one side, and thought, concepts, and ‘propositional attitudes’ on the other. If one recognizes the distinctively phenomenal consciousness not captured in ‘representationalist’ theories of the kinds just scouted, one may then want to say: that is because the phenomenal belong to mere sentience, and the intentional to sapience. Other influential philosophers of mind have operated with a similar picture. Consider Gilbert Ryle's (1949) contention that the stream of consciousness contains nothing but sensations that provide ‘no possibility of deciding whether the creature that had these was an animal or a human being; An ignoramus, simpletons, or a sane man, only from which nothing is appropriately asked of whether it is correct or incorrect, veridical or nonveridical. And Wittgenstein's (1953) influential criticism of the notion of understanding as an ‘inner process,’ and of the idea of a language for private sensation divorced from public criteria, could be interpreted in ways that sever (phenomenal) consciousness from intentionality. (Such an interpretation would assume that if consciousness could secure understanding, understanding would be an ‘inner process,’ and if phenomenal character bore intentionality with it, private sensations could impart meaning to words.) Also recall Putnam's conviction that the (internal) stream of consciousness cannot furnish the (externally fixed) content of meaning and belief. A similar attitude is evident in Donald Davidson's distinction between sensation and thought (the former is nothing more than a causal condition of knowledge, while the latter can furnish reasons and justifications, but cannot occur without language). Richard Rorty (1979) makes a Sellarsian distinction between the phenomenal and the intentional key to his polemic against epistemological philosophy overall, and ‘foundationalism’ in particular (and takes a generally deflationary view of the phenomenal or ‘qualitative’ side of this divide).
But it is possible to reject attempts to subsume the phenomenal under the intentional as in the ‘representationalist’ accounts of consciousness variously exemplified in Dennett, Dretske, Lycan, Rosenthal, and Tye, without adopting this ‘two separate realms’ conception. We can believe that there is no conception of the intentional from which the phenomenal can be explanatorily derived that does not already include the phenomenal, but still believe also that the phenomenal character of experience cannot be separated from its intentionality, and that having experience of the right sort of phenomenal character is sufficient for having certain forms of intentionality.
Here one might leave open the question whether there is also some kind of phenomenal character (perhaps that involved in some kinds of bodily sensation or after-images) whose possession is not sufficient for intentionality. (Though if we say there is such non-intentional phenomenal character, this would give us a special reason for rejecting the representationalist explanations of phenomenal consciousness) on the other hand, we say phenomenal character always brings intentionality with it, that might be ‘representational’’ of a sort. But its endorsement is consistent with a rejection of attempts to derive phenomenality from intentionality, or reduce the former to a species of the latter, which commonly attract the ‘representationalist’ label. We should distinguish the question of whether the phenomenal can be explained by the intentional from the question of whether the phenomenal are separable from the intentional.
Closer consideration of two of the three themes earlier identified as common to Phenomenological and analytic traditions is needed to come to grips with the latter question. It is necessary to inquire: (1) whether an externalist conception of intentionality can justify separating phenomenal character from intentionality. And one needs to ask: (2) whether one's verdict on the ‘separability’ question stands or falls with acceptance of some version of a distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual (or distinctively sensory) form of intentionality.
The dialectical situation regarding (1) is complex. One way it may seem plausible to answer question (1) in the affirmative, and restrict phenomenal character and intentionality to different sides of some internal/external divide, is to conduct a Cartesian thought experiment, in which one conceives of consciousness with all its subjective riches surviving the utter annihilation of the spatial realm of nature. (Similarly, but less radical, one may conceive of a ‘brain in a vat’ generating an extended history of sense experience indistinguishable in phenomenal character from that of an embodied subject.) If one is committed to an externalist view of intentionality - but rejects the intentionalizing strategies for dealing with consciousness - one may conclude that phenomenal character is altogether separable from (and insufficient for) intentionality. However, one may draw rather different conclusions from the Cartesian thought experiment - turning it against externalism. It may seem to one that, since the intentionality of experience would apparently survive along with its phenomenal character, one may then infer that the causal tie between the mind's content and the world of objects beyond it that (according to some versions of externalism) fixes content, is in reality and in at least some cases (or for some contents), no more than contingent. Alternatively, whatever one relies on to argue that this or that relation of experience and world is essential to having any intentionality at all, one might take this to show that phenomenal character is also externally determined in a way that renders the Cartesian scenario of consciousness totally unmoored from the world an illusion. And, if Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger thinks that Husserl's Phenomenological reduction to a sphere of ‘pure’ consciousness cannot be completed, and their reasons make them externalists of some sort, it hardly seems to establish that they are committed to a realm of raw sensory phenomenal consciousness, devoid of intentionality. In fact their rejection of Husserl's notion of ‘uninterpreted’ sensory or ‘hyletic’ data in experience would seem to indicate them, at least, would strongly deny they held such views.
In this arena it is far from clear what we are entitled to regard as secure ground and what as ‘up for grabs.’ However, there do seem to be ways in which all would probably admit that the phenomenal character of experience and externally individuated content come apart, ways in which such content goes beyond anything phenomenal consciousness can supply. For the way it seems to me to experience this computer screen may be no different from the way it seems to my twin to experience some entirely distinct one. Thus where intentional contents are distinguished in such a way as to include the particular objects experienced or thought of, phenomenal character cannot determine the possession of content. Still, that does not show that no content of any sort is fixed by phenomenal character. Perhaps, as some would say, phenomenal character determines ‘narrow’ or ‘notional’ content, but not ‘wide’ (externally ‘fixed’) content. Nor is it even clear that we must judge the sufficiency of phenomenal character for intentionality by adopting some general account of content and its individuation (as ‘narrow’ or ‘wide’ for instance), and then ask whether one's possession of content so considered is entailed by the phenomenal character of one's experience. One may argue that the phenomenal character of one's experience suffices for intentionality as long as having it makes one assessable for truth, accuracy (or other sorts of ‘satisfaction’) without the addition of any interpretation, properly so-called, such as is involved in assessment of the truth or accuracy of sentences or pictures.
Even if one does not globally divide phenomenal character from intentionality along some inner/outer boundary line, to address questions of the sufficiency of phenomenal character for intentionality (and thus of the separability of the latter from the former), one still needs to look at question (2) as above, and the potential relevance of distinctions that have been proposed between conceptual and non-conceptual forms of content or intentionality. Again the situation is complex. Suppose one regards the notion of non-conceptual intentionality or content as unacceptable on the grounds that all content is conceptual. But suppose one also thinks it is clear that phenomenal character is confined to sensory experience and imagery, and that this cannot bring with it the rational and inferential capacities required for genuine concept possession. Then one will have accepted the separability of phenomenal consciousness from intentionality. However, one may, by contrast, take the apparent susceptiblity of phenomenally conscious sense experience to assessment for accuracy, without need for additional, potentially absent interpretation, to show that the phenomenal character of experience is inherently intentional. Then one will say that the burden lies on anyone who claims conceptual powers are crucial to such assessability and can be detached from the possession of such experience: They must identify those powers and show that they are both crucial and detachable in this way. Additionally, one may reasonably challenge the assumption that phenomenal consciousness is indeed confined to the sensory realm; One may say that conceptual thought also has phenomenal character. Even if one does not, one may still base one's confidence in the sufficiency of phenomenal character for intentionality on one's confidence that there is a kind of non-conceptual intentionality that clearly belongs essentially to sense experience.
These considerations, we can see that it is critical to answer the following questions in order to decide whether or not phenomenal character is wholly or significantly separable from intentionality. Does every sort of intentionality that belongs to thought and experiences require an external connection, for which phenomenal characters are insufficient?
Does every sort of intentionality that belongs to sense-experience and sensory imageries require conceptual abilities for which phenomenal character is insufficient? And does every sort of intentionality that belongs to thought require conceptual capacities for which phenomenal character is insufficient?
Suppose one finds phenomenal character quite generally inadequate for the intentionality of thought and sense-experience by answering ‘yes’ either to (i), or to both (ii) and (iii). And suppose one makes the plausible (if non-trivial) assumption that what guarantees’ intentionality for neither sensory experience, nor imagery, nor conceptual thought, guarantees no intentionality that belongs to our minds (including that of emotion, desire and intention - for these later presuppose the former). Then one will find phenomenal character altogether separable from intentionality. Phenomenal character could be as it is, even if intentionality were completely taken away. There is no form of phenomenal consciousness, and no sort of intentionality, such that the first suffices for the second.
A more moderate view might merely answer only one of either (ii) or (iii) in the affirmative (and probably (iii) would be the choice). But still, in that case one recognizes some broad mental domain whose intentionality is in no respect guaranteed by phenomenal character. And that too would mark a considerable limitation on the extent to which phenomenal consciousness brings intentionality with it.
On the other hand, suppose that one answer ‘no’ to (i), and to either (ii) or (iii). Now, external connections and conceptual capacities seem to be what we might most plausibly regard as conditions necessary for the intentionality of thought and experience that could be stripped away while phenomenal character remains constant. So if one thinks that actually neither are generally essential to intentionality and removable while phenomenal character persists unchanged, and one can think of nothing else that is essential for thought and experience to have any intentionality, but for which phenomenal character is insufficient, it seems reasonable to conclude that phenomenal character is indeed sufficient for intentionality of some sort. If one has gone this far, it seems unlikely that one will then think that actual differences in phenomenal character still leave massively underdetermined the different forms of intentionality we enjoy in perceiving and thinking. So, one will probably judge that some kind of phenomenal character suffices for, and is inseparable from, many significant forms of intentionality in at least one of these domains (sensory or cognitive): There are many differences in phenomenal character, and many in intentionality, such that you cannot have the former without the latter. If one also rejects both (ii) and (iii), then one will accept that appropriate forms of phenomenal consciousness are sufficient for a very broad and important range of human intentionality.
Suppose one rejects both the views that consciousness is explanatorily derived from a more fundamental intentionality, as well as the view that phenomenal character is insufficient for intentionality because it is a matter of a purely inward feeling. It seems one might then press farther, and argue for what Flanagan calls ‘consciousness essentialism’ - the view that the phenomenal character of experience is not only sufficient for various forms of intentionality, but necessary also.
This type of thesis needs careful formulation. It does not necessarily commit one to a Cartesian (or Brentanian or Sartrean) claim that all states of mind are conscious - a total denial of the reality of the unconscious. A more qualified thesis does seem desirable. Freud's waning prestige has weakened tendencies to assume that he had somehow demonstrated the reality of unconscious intentionality, the rise of cognitive science has created a new climate of educated opinion that also takes elaborate non-conscious mental machinations for granted. Even if we do not acquiesce in this view, we do (and long have) appealed to explanations of human behaviour that recognize some sort of intentional state other than phenomenally conscious experiences and thoughts.
The way of maintaining the necessity of consciousness to mind that can preserve some space for mind that is not conscious is Searle's agreement, roughly, that we should first distinguish between what he calls ‘intrinsic’ intentionality on the one hand, and merely ‘as if’ intentionality, and ‘interpreter relative’ intentionality, on the other. We may sometimes speak as if artifacts (like thermostats) had beliefs or desires - but this is not to be taken literally. And we may impose ‘conditions of satisfaction’ on our acts and creations (words, pictures, diagrams, etc.) by our interpretation of them - but they have no intentionality independent of our interpretive practices. Intrinsic intentionality, on the other hand - the kind that pertains to our beliefs, perception, and intentions - is neither a mere ‘manner of speech,’ nor our possession of it derived from others' interpretive stance toward us. But then, Searle asks, what accounts for the fact that some state of affairs in the world for which in having an intrinsic intentionality - that they are directed at objects under aspects - and why they are directed under the aspects they are (why they have the content they do)? With conscious states of mind, Searle says, their phenomenal or subjective character determines their ‘aspectual shape.’ Where non-conscious states of mind are concerned, there is nothing to do the job, but their relationship to consciousness. The right relationship, he holds, is this non-conscious state of mind and must be ‘potentially conscious.’ If some psychological theories (of language, of vision) postulated an unconscious so deeply buried that its mental representations cannot even potentially become conscious, so much the worse for those theories.
Searle's views have aroused a number of criticisms. Among the problems areas are these. First, how are we to explain the requirement that intrinsically intentional states be ‘potentially conscious,’ without making it either too easy or too difficult to satisfy? Second, just why is it that the intrinsic intentionality of non-conscious states need’s accounting for, while conscious states are somehow unproblematic. Third, it appears Searle's argument does not offer some general reason to rule out all efforts to give ‘naturalistic’ accounts of conditions sufficient to impose - without the help of consciousness - genuine and not merely interpreter relative intentionality.
Another approach is taken by Kirk Ludwig, who argues that there is nothing to determine whose state of mind a given non-conscious state of mind is, unless that state consists in a disposition to produce a conscious mental state of the right sort. Alleged mental processes that did not tend to produce someone's conscious states of mind appropriately would be no one's, which is to say that they would not be mental states at all. Roughly: consciousness is needed to provide that unity of mind without which there would be no mind. And Ludwig argues that it is therefore a mistake to attribute many of the unconscious inferences with which psychological theorists have long been wont to populate our minds.
The persuasiveness of Searle and Ludwig's arguments depends heavily on demonstrating the failure of alternative accounts of the job that they enlist consciousness to do (such as secure ‘aspectual shape,’ or ownership). One may grant (as does Colin McGinn 1991) that phenomenal character is inseparable from intentionality, but cannot be explained by it, while still maintaining that genuine intentionality (mental content) is quite adequately imposed on animal brains by their acquisition of natural functions of content-bearing - in which consciousness evidently plays no essential role. Or one may (like Jerry Fodor 1987) maintain a robust realist ‘representational theory of mind,’ proposing that the content of mental symbols is stamped on them by their being in the ‘right causal relation’ to the world - while despairing of the prospects for a credible naturalistic theory of consciousness.
The preceding discussion has conveyed some of the complexities and potential ambiguities in talk of ‘consciousness’ and ‘intentionality’ that must be appreciated if one is to resolve questions about the relationship between consciousness and intentionality with any clarity. Brief surveys of relevant aspects of Phenomenological and analytic traditions have brought out some shared areas of interest, namely: The relationship of consciousness to reflexivity and ‘self-directed’ intentionality manages to distinguish events between conceptual and non-conceptual (or sensory) forms of intentionality, and the concerns with which the extent is characterized by either conscious experience or intentional states of mind is essentially ‘world-involving.’ These concerns were seen to bear on attempts to account for consciousness in terms of intentionality, and on questions that arise even if those attempts are rejected - questions regarding the separability of phenomenal consciousness and intentionality. Some attention is given to views that, in some sense, reverse the order of explanation proposed by intentionalizing views of consciousness, and take the facts of consciousness to explain the facts of intentionality. Now it is possible to step back and distinguish four general views of the consciousness-intentionality relationship discernable in the philosophical positions canvassed above, as follows.
(1) Consciousness is explanatorily derived from intention
(2) Consciousness is explanatorily derived from intentionality.
(3) Consciousness is underived and separable from intentionality.
(4) Consciousness is underived but also inseparable from intentionality.
(5) Consciousness is underived from, inseparable from, and essential to intentionality.
To adopted view (1) is to accept some intentionalizing strategy with respect to consciousness, such as is variously represented by Dennett, Dretske, Lycan, Rosenthal, and Tye. These views differ importantly among themselves. Their differences have much to do with how they treat consciousness-reflexivity issues and the conceptual/non-conceptual (or conceptual/sensory) contrast, and how they view the intersection between the two. But if we accept (1), then our answer to the question of what consciousness has to do with intentionality will ultimately be given in some prior general account of content or intentionality. And there will be no special issue regarding the internal or external fixation of the phenomenal character of experience, over and above what arises for mental content generally.
On the other hand, suppose one reject (1), and holds that experiences are conscious in a phenomenal sense that does not yield to an approach in which one conceives of intentionality (or content, or information bearing) independently of consciousness, and then, by adverting to special operations, or sources, or contents, tells us what consciousness is. At this point, one would face a choice between (2) and (3).
By embracing (2) we yield the ‘raw feel’ in its conception of phenomenality seemingly implicit in Sellars and Ryle. If, on the other hand, we accept (3), we endorse a much more intimate relationship between consciousness and intentionality. Without proposing to account for the former on the basis of the latter, we would hold that phenomenal character is sufficient for intentionality.
But adoption of (3) leaves open a further basic question. Consciousness (of the appropriate sort) may be sufficient, but underived from intentionality. Yet, intentionality does not require consciousness. Thus we come to ask whether having conscious experience of an appropriate sort is necessary to having either sensory or more-than-sensory (conceptual) intentionality. Adopting theses (4), we say ‘yes’ - that such intentionality can come only with consciousness - we will probably have gone as far in making consciousness fundamental to mind as one reasonably can. Again, this is not necessarily to deny the reality of non-conscious mental phenomena. But it could, in a broad way, be interpreted as siding with Husserl, Ludwig and Searle in thinking of consciousness as the irreplaceable source of intentionality and meaning.
This abstract list of four options might leave one without a sense of what is at stake in adopting this or that view. Perhaps the positions themselves will become a little clearer if we make explicit four broad areas of philosophical concern to which the choice among them is relevant.
First, they are relevant to the issue of how to conceive of the mind or the domain of psychology as a whole. Is there some unity to the concept of mind or psychologically phenomenal? Is there something that deserves to be considered the essence of the mental? If consciousness can be thoroughly intentionalized (as (1) would have it), maybe (with suitable qualifications), we could uphold the thesis that intentionality is the ‘mark of the mental.’ If we disapprove of (1) and embrace (3), seeing intentionality as inseparable from the phenomenal character of experience, then we still might maintain that both consciousness and intentionality are necessary for real minds - at least, if we adopt (4) as well. But a unified view of the mind seems difficult (if possible) to maintain if one segregates phenomenal character to non-intentional sensation - as in (2). Even if one does not, one may lack a unifying conception of the mental domain, if one is not satisfied with arguments that show that phenomenal consciousness is essential to genuine (not merely ‘as if’ or ‘interpreter derived’) intentionality. In any case, both consciousness and intentionality signify a broad enough psychological categories, in that one's view of their extension and relationship will do much to draw one's map of psychology's terrain.
Second (and relatedly), views about the consciousness-intentionality relationship bear significantly on general questions about the explanation of mental phenomena. One may ask what kinds of things we might try to explain in the mental domain, what sorts of explanations we should seek, and what prospects of success we have in finding them. If we accept (1) and some intentionalizing account of consciousness, we will not suppose as do some (Chalmers 1996, Levine 2001, McGinn 1991, and Nagel 1974) those phenomenal consciousness poses some specially recalcitrant (maybe hopelessly unsolvable) problem for reductive physicalist or materialist explanations. Rather, we will see the basic challenge as that of giving a natural scientific account of intentionality or mental representation. And this indeed is a reason some are attracted to (1). One may believe that it offers us the only hope for a natural scientific understanding of consciousness. The underlying thought is that a science of consciousness must adopt this strategy: First conceive of intentionality (or content or mental representation) in a way that separates it from consciousness, and see intentionality as the outcome of familiar (and non-intentional) natural causal processes. Then, by further specifying the kind of intentionality involved (in terms of its use, its sources, its content), we can account for consciousness. In other words: ‘naturalize’ intentionality, then intentionalized consciousness, and mind has found its place in nature.
However, we should recognize a distinction between those whose envisioned naturalistic explanation would require underlying forms of necessity and impossibility stronger that pertaining to laws of nature generally - such as either conceptual or ‘metaphysical’ necessity - and those who see the link between explanans and explanandum as simply one of natural scientific law. David Chalmers' (1996) proposals for ‘naturalistic dualism’ (unlike those of the aforementioned naturalizers) put him in the second group. He argues that phenomenal consciousness in its various forms supervenes (not conceptually or metaphysically but only as a matter of nature's laws) on functional organization, and that this permits us to envisage (‘non-reductive’) ways of explaining consciousness by appeal to such organization.
Those who reject attempts to explain the phenomenal consciousness via a theory of intentionality still may reasonably proclaim allegiance to ‘naturalism.’ One may take phenomenal consciousness to be, in a sense, psychologically basic (if all that is mental is phenomenally either conscious or intentional, and no intentionalizing account of phenomenal character is feasible). But one might still hold that some non-intentional neuropsychological, or other recognizable physicalist, there to some explanation of the phenomenal character of experience is to be had, because the explanatory link is otherwise to exhibit an appropriately strong conceptual or metaphysical necessity. Only for measures for which are regarded to that of nothing stronger than psychophysical laws of nature are needed to give us the prospect of a natural scientific account of consciousness.
However, if we not only reject intentionalizing accounts of phenomenal character, but also see it as inseparable from intentionality (if we reject both (1) and (2) and agree to whatever problems are attached to physicalist explanations of consciousness will also infect prospects for explaining intentionality - to some extent at least. And this will hold, even if we remain aloof from (d), and do not claim that phenomenal consciousness is essential to intentionality. For if we think that much of the intentionality we have in perceiving, imagining, and thinking is integral to the phenomenal character of such experience, then without a reductive explanation of that phenomenal character, our possession of the intentionality it brings with it will not be reductively explained either.
Finally, it should be noted that if one holds (4), this may have important consequences for what forms of psychological explanation that once acceptably found the remaining agreement stems for that which one's mental processes must have the right relationship to one's conscious experiences to count as one's mental processes at all. If they are right, postulated processes that do not bear this relation to our experiential lives cannot be going on in our minds.
Regardlessly, another enlarging area of concern is of choice, in that between (1)-(4) tells of a direction among proven rights is to continue in having epistemological connections, in that if one is to embrace of (2), and something like a Sellarsian or Davidsonian distinction between sensation and thought, putting phenomenal character exclusively on the ‘sensation’ side, and intentionality exclusively on the ‘thought’ side of this divide, the place of consciousness in a philosophical account of knowledge will likely be meager - at most phenomenal character will be a causal condition, without a role to play in the warrant or justification of claims to knowledge. However, if one takes routes (1) or (3) the situation will appear rather different. If one is to consider the consequent for, either of which is to internationalize consciousness, or else views intentionality as inseparable from phenomenal character, there will then be more room to view consciousness as central to accounts of the warrant involved in first-person (‘introspective’) knowledge of mind, and empirical or perceptual knowledge. Though just how one goes about this, and with what success, will depend on how (if one chooses (1)) one intentionalizes consciousness, and (if one chooses (1) or (3), that will depend on what sort of intentionality or content one thinks phenomenal consciousness brings with it. The place of consciousness in one's understanding of introspective or empirical knowledge will be rather different, depending on how one resolves the issues regarding: Reflexivity, the conceptual/non-conceptual distinction, and externalisms.
A fourth area of philosophical concern we may indicate broadly, closely bound to our conception of the relation of consciousness and intentionality, has to do with value. How intimately is consciously bound up with those features of our own and others' lives that give them intrinsic or non-instrumental value for us? We may think that the pleasure and suffering that demand our ethical concern are necessarily phenomenally conscious - and that this evaluative significance remains even if phenomenal character is non-intentional. However, the more intentionality is seen as inherent to the phenomenal character of experience, the more the latter will be bound to manifestations of intelligence, emotion, and understanding that appear to give human (and perhaps at least another animal life) its special importance for us. It may seem that those opting for (3) share at least this much ground with their intentionalizing opponents who go for (1): They both (unlike those who adopt (2)) are in a position to claim consciousness is crucial to whatever special moral regard we think appropriate only toward those whose psychologies involve a kind of intentionality for which possession of painful or pleasant experience is not sufficient. However, this needs qualification on two counts. First, if one's embrace of (1) includes an intentionalizing strategy that limits phenomenal character to the sensory realm, one will limit the moral significance of phenomenal consciousness accordingly. Second, to those who hold, it may seem their opponents' intentionalizing theories remove from view those very qualities of experience that make life worth living, and so they will hardly seem like allies on the issue of value. Further, if the proponent of hesitant anticipations were in going insofar as to be taken on (4) - conscious essentialism - those who make that additional commitment might wonder how those who do not could ultimately accord the possession of consciousness much greater non-instrumental value than the possession of a sophisticated but totally non-conscious mind.
From this survey it seems fair to conclude that working out a detailed view of the relation between consciousness and intentionality is hardly a peripheral matter philosophically. Potentially it has extensive consequences for one's views concerning these four important, broad topics: (I) The unity of mental phenomena (Do consciousness or intentionality (or both together) somehow unifies the domain of the psychological?) (II) The explanation of mental phenomena (Can consciousness and intentionality are explained separately? (III) Is explaining the one key to explaining the other? Introspective and empirical knowledge (What relation to intentionality would give consciousness a central epistemological role in either?) (IV) The value of human and other animal life. (What relation of consciousness and intentionality (if any) underlies the non-instrumental value we accord ourselves and others?)
We collectively glorify our ability to think as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; We personally and mistakenly glorify our thoughts as the distinguishing pattern of whom we are. From the inner voice of thought-as-words to the wordless images within our minds, thoughts create and limit our personal world. Through thinking we abstract and define reality, reason about it, react to it, recall past events and plan for the future. Yet thinking remains both woefully underdeveloped in most of us, as well as grossly overvalued. We can best gain some perspective on thinking in terms of energies.
Automatic thinking draws us away from the present, and wistfully allows our thoughts to meander where they would, carrying our passive attention along with them. Like water running down a mountain stream, thoughts running on auto-pilot careens through the spaces of perception, randomly triggering associative links within our vast storehouse of memory. By way of itself, such associative thought is harmless. However, our tendency to believe in, act upon, and drift away with such undirected thought keeps us operating in an automatic mode. Lulled into an inner passivity by our daydreams and thought streams, we lose contact with the world of actual perceptions, of real life. In the automatic mode of thinking, I am completely identified with my thoughts, believing my thoughts are I, and believing that I am the conceptualization forwarded by me to think of thoughts that are sometimes thought as unthinkable.
Another mode of automatic thinking consists of repetitious and habitual patterns of thought. These thought tapes and our running commentary on life, unexamined by the light of awareness, keep us enthralled, defining who we are and perpetuating all our limiting assumptions about what is possible for us. Driving and driven by our emotions, these ruts of thought create our false persona, the mask that keeps us disconnected from others and from our own authentic self. More than any other single factor, automatic thinking hinders our contact with presence, limits our being, and Forms our path. The autopilot of thought constantly calls us away from the most recent or the current of immediacy. Thus, keeping us fixed on the most superficial levels of our being.
Sometimes we even notice strange, unwanted thoughts that we consider horrible or shameful. We might be upset or shaken that we would think such thoughts, but those reactions only serves to sustain the problematic thoughts by feeding them energy. Furthermore, that self-disgust is based on the false assumption that we are our thoughts, that even unintentional thoughts, arising from our conditioned minds, are we. They are not we and we need not act upon or react to them. They are just thoughts with no inherent power and no real message about whom we are. We can just relax and let them go - or not. Troubling thoughts that recur over a long period and hinder our inner work may require us to examine and heal their roots in our conditioning, perhaps with the help of a psychotherapist.
Sensitive thinking puts us in touch with the meaning of our thoughts and enables us to think logically, solve problems, make plans, and carry on a substantive conversation. A good education develops our ability to think clearly and intentionally with the sensitive energy. With that energy level in our thinking brain, no longer totally submerged in the thought stream, we can move about in it, choosing among and directing our thoughts based on their meaning.
Conscious thinking means stepping out of the thought stream altogether, and surveying it from the shore. The thoughts themselves may even evaporate, leaving behind a temporary empty streambed. Consciousness reveals the banality and emptiness of ordinary thinking. Consciousness also permits us to think more powerfully, holding several ideas, their meanings and ramifications in our minds at once.
When the creative energy reaches thought, truly new ideas spring up. Creative thinking can happen after a struggle, after exhausting all known avenues of relevant ideas and giving up, shaping and emptying the stage so the creative spark may enter. The quiet, relaxed mind also leaves room for the creative thought, a clear channel for creativity. Creative and insightful thoughts come to all of us in regard to the situations we face in life. The trick is to be aware enough to catch them, to notice their significance, and if they withstand the light of sober and unbiased evaluation, to act on them.
In the spiritual path, we work to recognize the limitations of thought, to recognize its power over us, and especially to move beyond it. Along with Descartes, we subsist in the realm of ‘thoughts‘, but thoughts are just thoughts. They are not we. They are not who we are. No thought can enter the spiritual realms. Rather, the material world defines the boundaries of thought, despite its power to conceive lofty abstractions. We cannot think our way into the spiritual reality. On the contrary, identification with thinking prevents us from entering the depths. As long as we believe that refined thinking represents our highest capacity, we shackle ourselves exclusively to this world. All our thoughts, all our books, all our ideas wither before the immensity of the higher realms.
A richly developed body of spiritual practices engages of thought, from repetitive prayer and mantras, to contemplation of an idea, to visualizations of deities. In a most instructive and invaluable exercise, we learn to see beyond thought by embracing the gaps, the spaces between thoughts. After sitting quietly and relaxing for some time, we turn our attention toward the thought stream within us. We notice thoughts come and go of their own accord, without prodding or pushing from us. If we can abide in this relaxed watching of thought, without falling into the stream and flowing away with it, the thought stream begins to slow, the thoughts fragment. Less enthralled by our thoughts, we begin to see that we are not our thoughts. Less controlled by, and at the mercy of, our thoughts, we begin to be aware of the gaps between thought particles. These gaps open to consciousness, underlying all thought. Settling into these gaps, we enter and become the silent consciousness beneath thought. Instead of being in our thoughts, our thoughts are in us.
There is potentially a rich and productive interface between neuroscience/cognitive science. The two traditions, however, have evolved largely independent, based on differing sets of observations and objectives, and tend to use different conceptual frameworks and vocabulary representations. The distributive contributions to each their dynamic functions of finding a useful common reference to further exploration of the relations between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychoanalysis/psychotherapy.
Recent historical gaps between neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy are being productively closed by, among other things, the suggestion that recent understandings of the nervous system as a modeler and predictor bear a close and useful similarity to the concepts of projection and transference. The gap could perhaps be valuably narrowed still further by a comparison in the two traditions of the concepts of the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘conscious’ and the relations between the two. It is suggested that these be understood as two independent ‘story generators’ - each with different styles of function and both operating optimally as reciprocal contributors to each others' ongoing story evolution. A parallel and comparably optimal relation might be imagined for neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy.
For the sake of argument, imagine that human behaviour and all that it entails (including the experience of being a human and interacting with a world that includes other humans) is a function of the nervous system. If this were so, then there would be lots of different people who are making observations of (perhaps different) aspects of the same thing, and telling (perhaps different) stories to make sense of their observations. The list would include neuroscientists and cognitive scientists and psychologists. It would include as well psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and social workers. If we were not too fussy about credentials, it should probably include as well educators, and parents and . . . babies? Arguably, all humans, from the time they are born, spend a considerable reckoning of time making observations of how people (others and themselves) behave and why, and telling stories to make sense of those observations.
The stories, of course, all differ from one another to greater or lesser degrees. In fact, the notion that ‘human behaviour and all that it entails . . . are a function of the nervous system’ is itself a story used to make sense of observations by some people and not by any other? It is not my intent here to try to defend this particular story, or any other story for that matter. Very much to the contrary, what I want to do is to explore the implications and significance of the fact that there are different stories and that they might be about the same (some)thing.
In so doing, I want to try to create a new story that helps to facilitate an enhanced dialogue between neuroscience/cognitive science, on the one hand, and psychotherapy, on the other. That new stories of itself are stories of conflicting historical narratives . . . what is within being called the ‘nervous system’ but others are free to call the ‘self,’ ‘mind,’ ‘soul,’ or whatever best fits their own stories. What is important is the idea that multiple things, evident by their conflicts, may not in fact be disconnected and adversarial entities but could rather be fundamentally, understandably, and valuably interconnected parts of the same thing.
‘Non-conscious Prediction and a Role for Consciousness in Correcting Prediction Errors’ by Regina Pally (Pally, 2004) is the take-off point for my enterprise. Pally is a practising psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychotherapist who have actively engaged with neuroscientists to help make sense of her own observations. I am a neuroscientist who recently spent two years as an Academic Fellow of the Psychoanalytic Centre of Philadelphia, an engagement intended to expand my own set of observations and forms of story-telling. The significance of this complementarity, and of our similarities and differences, is that something will emerge in this commentary.
Many psychoanalysts (and psychotherapists too, I suspect) feel that the observations/stories of neuroscience/cognitive science are for their own activities at best, find to some irrelevance, and at worst destructive or are they not the same probability that holds for many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists. Pally clearly feels otherwise, and it is worth exploring a bit why this is so in her case. A general key, I think, is in her line ‘In current paradigms, the brain has intrinsic activity, is highly integrated, is interactive with the environment, and is goal-oriented, with predictions operating at every level, from lower systems to . . . the highest functions of abstract thought.’ Contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science has indeed uncovered an enormous complexity and richness in the nervous system, ‘making it not so different from how psychoanalysts (or most other people) would characterize the self, at least not in terms of complexity, potential, and vagary.’ Given this complexity and richness, there is substantially less reason than there once was to believe psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are dealing with two fundamentally different things.
Pally suspect, more aware of this than many psychotherapists because she has been working closely with contemporary neuroscientists who are excited about the complexity to be found in the nervous system. And that has an important lesson, but there is an additional one at least as important in the immediate context. In 1950, two neuroscientists wrote that, ‘the sooner we recognize the certainty of the complexity that is highly functional, just as those who recognize the Gestalts under which they leave the reflex physiologist confounded, in fact they support the simplest functions in the sooner that we will see that the previous terminological peculiarities that seem insurmountably carried between the lower levels of neurophysiology and higher behavioural theory simply dissolve away.’
And in 1951 another said: ‘ I am coming more to the conviction that the rudiments of every behavioural mechanism will be found far down in the evolutionary scale and represented in primitive activities of the nervous system.’
Neuroscience (and what came to be cognitive science) was engaged from very early on in an enterprise committed to the same kind of understanding sought by psychotherapists, but passed through a phase (roughly from the 1950 through to the 1980's) when its own observations and stories were less rich in those terms. It was a period that gave rise to the notion that the nervous system was ‘simple’ and ‘mechanistic,’ which in turn made neuroscience/cognitive science seem less relevant to those with broader concerns, perhaps even threatening and apparently adversarial if one equated the nervous system with ‘mind,’ or ‘self,’ or ‘soul,’ since mechanics seemed degrading to those ideas. Arguably, though, the period was an essential part of the evolution of the contemporary neuroscience/cognitive science story, one that laid needed groundwork for rediscovery and productive exploration of the richness of the nervous system. Psychoanalysis/psychotherapy, and, of course, move through their own story of evolution over its presented time. That the two stories seemed remote from one another during this period was never adequate evidence that they were not about the same thing but only an expression of their needed independent evolutions.
An additional reason that Pally is comfortable with the likelihood that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are talking about the same thing is her recognition of isomorphisms (or congruities, Pulver 2003) between the two sets of stories, places where different vocabularies in fact seem to be representing the same (or quite similar) things. I am not sure I am comfortable calling these ‘shared assumptions’ (as Pally does) since they are actually more interesting and probably more significant if they are instead instances of coming to the same ideas from different directions (as I think they are). In this case, the isomorphisms tend to imply that rephrasing Gertrude Stein, that ‘there proves to be the actualization in the exception of there.’ Regardless, Pally has entirely appropriately and, I think, usefully called attention to an important similarity between the psychotherapeutic concept of ‘transference’ and an emerging recognition within neuroscience/cognitive science that the nervous system does not so much collect information about the world as generate a model of it, act in relation to that model, and then check incoming information against the predictions of that model. Pally's suggestion that this model reflects in part early interpersonal experiences, can be largely ‘unconscious,’ and so may cause inappropriate and troubling behaviour in current time seems to be entirely reasonable. So too, are those that constitute her thought, in that of the interactions with which an analyst can help by bringing the model to ‘consciousness’ through the intermediary of recognizing the transference onto the analyst.
The increasing recognition of substantial complexity in the nervous system together with the presence of identifiable isomorphisms that provide a solid foundation for suspecting that psychotherapists and neuroscientists/cognitive scientists are indeed talking about the same thing. But the significance of different stories for better understanding a single thing lies as much in the differences between the stories as it does in their similarities/isomorphisms, in the potential for differing and not obviously isomorphic stories to modify another productively, and yielding a new story in the process. With this thought in mind, I want to call attention to some places where the psychotherapeutic and the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific stories have edges that rub against one another than smoothly fitting together. And perhaps to ways each could be usefully further evolved in response to those non-isomorphisms.
Unconscious stories and ‘reality.’ Though her primary concern is with interpersonal relations, Pally clearly recognizes that transference and related psychotherapeutic phenomena are one (actually relatively small) facet of a much more general phenomenon, the creation, largely unconsciously, of stories that are understood to be but are not that any necessary thoughtful pronunciations inclined for the ‘real world.’ Ambiguous figures illustrate the same general phenomenon in a much simpler case, that of visual perception. Such figures may be seen in either of two ways; They represent two ‘stories’ with the choice between them being, at any given time, largely unconscious. More generally, a serious consideration of a wide array of neurobiological/cognitive phenomena clearly implies that, as Pally says, we do not see ‘reality,’ but only have stories to describe it that result from processes of which we are not consciously aware.
All of this raises some quite serious philosophical questions about the meaning and usefulness of the concept of ‘reality.’ In the present context, what is important is that it is a set of questions that sometimes seem to provide an insurmountable barrier between the stories of neuroscientists/cognitive scientists, who largely think they are dealing with reality, and psychotherapists, who feel more comfortable in more idiosyncratic and fluid spaces. In fact, neuroscience and cognitive science can proceed perfectly well in the absence of a well-defined concept of ‘reality’ and, without being fully conscious of it, committing to fact as they do so. And psychotherapists actually make more use of the idea of ‘reality’ than is entirely appropriate. There is, for example, a tendency within the psychotherapeutic community to presume that unconscious stories reflect ‘traumas’ and other historically verifiable events, while the neurobiological/cognitive science story says quite clearly that they may equally reflect predispositions whose origins reflect genetic information and hence bear little or no relation to ‘reality’ in the sense usually meant. They may, in addition, reflect random ‘play,’ putting them even further out of reach of easy historical interpretation. In short, with regard to the relation between ‘story’ and ‘reality,’ each set of stories could usefully be modified by greater attention to the other. Differing concepts of ‘reality’ (perhaps the very concept itself) gets in the way of usefully sharing stories. The mental/cognitive scientists' preoccupation with ‘reality’ as an essential touchstone could valuably be lessened, and the therapist's sense of the validation of stories in terms of personal and historical idiosyncracies could be helpfully adjusted to include a sense of actual material underpinnings.
The Unconscious and the Conscious. Pally appropriately makes a distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, one that has always been fundamental to psychotherapy. Neuroscience/cognitive science has been slower to make a comparable distinction but is now rapidly beginning to catch up. Clearly some neural processes generate behaviour in the absence of awareness and intent and others yield awareness and intent with or without accompanying behaviour. An interesting question however, raised at a recent open discussion of the relations between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, is whether the ‘neurobiological unconscious’ is the same thing as the ‘psychotherapeutic unconscious,’ and whether the perceived relations between the ‘unconscious’ and the’conscious’ are the same in the two sets of stories. Is this a case of an isomorphism or, perhaps more usefully, a masked difference?
An oddity of Pally's article is that she herself acknowledges that the unconscious has mechanisms for monitoring prediction errors and yet implies, both in the title of the paper, and in much of its argument, that there is something special or distinctive about consciousness (or conscious processing) in its ability to correct prediction errors. And here, I think, there is evidence of a potentially useful ‘rubbing of edges’ between the neuroscientific/cognitive scientific tradition and the psychotherapeutic one. The issue is whether one regards consciousness (or conscious processing) as somehow ‘superior’ to the unconscious (or unconscious processing). There is a sense in Pally of an old psychotherapeutic perspective of the conscious as a mechanism for overcoming the deficiencies of the unconscious, of the conscious as the wise father/mother and the unconscious as the willful child. Actually, Pally does not quite go this far, as I will point out in the following, but there is enough of a trend to illustrate the point and, without more elaboration, I do not think of many neuroscientists/cognitive scientists will catch Pally's more insightful lesson. I think Pally is almost certainly correct that the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious can achieve results unachievable by the unconscious alone, but think also that neither psychotherapy nor neuroscience/cognitive science are yet in a position to say exactly why this is so. So let me take a crack here at a new, perhaps bi-dimensional story that could help with that common problem and perhaps both traditions as well.
A major and surprising lesson of comparative neuroscience, supported more recently by neuropsychology (Weiskrantz, 1986) and, more recently still, by artificial intelligence, is that an extraordinarily rich repertoire of adaptive behaviour can occur unconsciously, in the absence of awareness of intent (be supported by unconscious neural processes). It is not only modelling the world and prediction. Error correction that can occur this way but virtually (and perhaps literally) the entire spectrum of behaviour externally observed, including fleeing from a threat, and of approaching good things, generating novel outputs, learning from doing so, and so on.
This extraordinary terrain, discovered by neuroanatomists, electrophysiologists, neurologists, behavioural biologists, and recently extended by others using more modern techniques, is the unconscious of which the neuroscientist/cognitive scientist speaks. It is the area that is so surprisingly rich that it creates, for some people, the puzzle about whether there is anything else at all. Moreover, it seems, at first glance, to be a totally different terrain from that of the psychotherapist, whose clinical experience reveals a territory occupied by drives, unfulfilled needs, and the detritus with which consciousness would prefer not to deal.
As indicated earlier, it is one of the great strengths of Pally's article to suggest that the two areas may in fact, turns out to be the same as in many ways that if they are of the same, then its question only compliments in what way are the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘conscious’ of showing to any difference? Where now are the ‘two stories?’ Pally touches briefly on this point, suggesting that the two systems differ not so much (or at all?) In what they do, but rather in how they do it. This notion of two systems with different styles seems to me worth emphasizing and expanding. Unconscious processing is faster and handles many more variables simultaneously. Conscious processing is slower and handles numerously fewer variables at one time. It is likely that their equalling a host of other differences in style as well, in the handling of number for example, and of time.
In the present context, however, perhaps the most important difference in style is one that Lacan called attention to from a clinical/philosophical perspective - the conscious (conscious processing) have in themselves forwarded by some objective ‘coherence,’ that it attempts to create a story that makes sense simultaneously of all its parts. The unconscious, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with bits and pieces lying around with no global order. To a neurobiologist/cognitive scientist, this makes perfectly good sense. The circuitry embodies that of the unconscious (sub-cortical circuitry?) Is an assembly of different parts organized for a large number of different specific purposes, and only secondarily linked together to try to assure some coordination? The circuitry, has, once, again, to involve in conscious processing (neo-cortical circuitry?) On the other hand, seems to both be more uniform and integrated and to have an objective for which coherence is central.
That central coherence is well-illustrated by the phenomena of ‘positive illusions,’ exemplified by patients who receive a hypnotic suggestion that there is an object in a room and subsequently walk in ways that avoid the object while providing a variety of unrelated explanations for their behaviour. Similar ‘rationalization’ is, of course, seen in schizophrenic patients and in a variety of fewer dramatic forms in psychotherapeutic settings. The ‘coherent’ objective is to make a globally organized story out of the disorganized jumble, a story of (and constituting) the ‘self.’
What all this introduces that which is the mind or brain for which it is actually organized to be constantly generating at least two different stories in two different styles. One, written by conscious processes in simpler terms, is a story of/about the ‘self’ and experienced as such, for developing insights into how such a story can be constructed using neural circuitry. The other is an unconscious ‘story’ about interactions with the world, perhaps better thought of as a series of different ‘models’ about how various actions relate to various consequences. In many ways, the latter are the grist for the former.
In this sense, we are safely back to the two stories that are ideologically central in their manifestations as pronounced in psychotherapy, but perhaps with some added sophistication deriving from neuroscience/cognitive science. In particular, there is no reason to believe that one story is ‘better’ than the other in any definitive sense. They are different stories based on different styles of story telling, with one having advantages in certain sorts of situations (quick responses, large numbers of variables, more direct relation to immediate experiences of pain and pleasure) and the other in other sorts of situations (time for more deliberate responses, challenges amenable to handling using smaller numbers of variables, more coherent, more able to defer immediate gratification/judgment.
In the clinical/psychotherapeutic context, an important implication of the more neutral view of two story-tellers outlined above is that one ought not to over-value the conscious, nor to expect miracles of the process of making conscious what is unconscious. In the immediate context, the issue is if the unconscious is capable of ‘correcting prediction errors,’ then why appeal to the conscious to achieve this function? More generally, what is the function of that persistent aspect of psychotherapy that aspires to make the unconscious conscious? And why is it therapeutically effective when it is? Here, it is worth calling special attention to an aspect of Pally's argument that might otherwise get a bit lost in the details of her article: . . . the therapist encourages the wife consciously to stop and consider her assumption that her husband does not properly care about her, and effortfully to consider an alternative view and inhibit her impulse to reject him back. This, in turn, creates a new type of experience, one in which he is indeed more loving, such that she can develop new predictions.’
It is not, as Pally describes it, the simple act of making something conscious that is therapeutically effective. What is necessary is to decompose the story consciously (something that is made possible by its being a story with a small number of variables) and, even what is more important, to see if the story generates a new ‘type of experience’ that in turn causes the development of ‘new predictions.’ The latter, is an effect of the conscious on the unconscious, an alteration of the unconscious brought about by hearing, entertaining, and hence acting on a new story developed by the conscious. It is not ‘making things conscious’ that is therapeutically effective; it is the exchange of stories that encourages the creation of a new story in the unconscious.
For quite different reasons, Grey (1995) earlier made a suggestion not dissimilar to Pally's, proposing that consciousness was activated when an internal model detected a prediction failure, but acknowledged he could see no reason ‘why the brain should generate conscious experience of any kind at all.’ Seemingly, in spite of her title, there seems of nothing really to any detection of prediction errors, especially of what is important that Pally's story is the detection of mismatches between two stories. One unconscious and the other conscious, and the resulting opportunity for both to shape a less trouble-making new story. That, briefly may be why the brain ‘should generate conscious experience,’ to reap the benefits of having a second story teller with a different style. Paraphrasing Descartes, one might say ‘I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am.’ It is not only the neurobiological ‘conscious’ that can undergo change; it is the neurobiological ‘unconscious’ as well.
Science, is nothing more than a description of facts, and ‘facts’ involve nothing more than sensations and the relationships among them. Sensations are the only real elements, as all other concepts are extra, they are merely imputed on the real, e.g., on the sensations, by us. Concepts like ‘matter’ and ‘atoms’ are merely shorthand for collection of sensations: They do not denote anything that exists, the same holds for many other words as ‘body’. Logically prevailing upon science may thereby involve nothing more than sensations and the relationships among them. Sensations are the only real elements, as all else, be other than the concepts under which are extra: They are merely imputed on the real, e.g., on the sensations, by us. Concepts like ‘matter’ and ‘atom’ are merely shorthand for collections of sensations, they do not denote anything that exists, still, the same holds for many other words, such as ‘body’, as science, carriers nothing more than a description of facts. ‘Facts’, accordingly, are devoted largely to doubtful refutations, such that, if we were to consider of a pencil that is partially submerged in water. It looks broken, but it is really straight, as we can verify by touching it. Nonetheless, causing the state or facts of having independent reality, the pencil in the water is merely two different facts. The pencil in the water is really broken, as far as the fact of sight is concerned, and that is all to this it.
First, and to the highest degree, there is no solid functional basis in the contemporary fields of thought for believing in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have moderately described as ‘the disease of the Western mind’. Dialectic orchestration will serve as the background for understanding a new relationship between parts and wholes in physics, with a similar view of that relationship that has emerged in the co-called ‘new biology’ and in recent studies of the evolution of a scientific understanding to a more conceptualized representation of ideas, and includes its allied ‘content’.
Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the issue of the creation of the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature’s contemplation. The contemplation of nature is obviously an immensely intricate affair, involving a myriad of possibilities, therefore one can look at actual entities as, in some sense, the basic elements of a vast and expansive process.
We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes’s merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternities’ are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism’, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. In that, the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason, causally by the traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality if only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.
The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau’s attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion’, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness’.
The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the ‘incommunicable powers’ of the ‘immortal sea’ empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.
The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual
A distinctive yet peculiar presence has of awaiting to the future, its foundational frame of a proposal to a new understanding of relationships between mind and world, within the larger context of the history of mathematical physics, the origin and extensions of the classical view of the fundamentals of scientific knowledge, and the various ways that physicists have attempted to prevent previous challenges to the efficacy of classical epistemology.
There is no basis in contemporary physics or biology for believing in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have moderately described as ‘the disease of the Western mind’. The dialectic orchestrations will serve as background for understanding a new relationship between parts and wholes in physics, with a similar view of that relationship that has emerged in the co-called ‘new biology’ and in recent studies of the evolution of a scientific understanding to a more conceptualized representation of ideas, and includes its allied ‘content’.
Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the issue of the creation of the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature’s contemplation. The contemplation of nature is obviously an immensely intricate affair, involving a myriad of possibilities, therefore one can look at actual entities as, in some sense, the basic elements of a vast and expansive process.
We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s 'Principia Mathematica' in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes’s merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternities' are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism’, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter, in that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason. The causality of historically accomplished Judeo-Christian theism had previously been based on both reason and revelation. It’s process of respondent challenges of deism through which the debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality, in that can be achieved only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.
The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau’s attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion’, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness’.
The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the 'incommunicable powers' of the 'immortal sea' empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.
The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined, and bases on or upon the speculative assumption that there is no real necessity for which the correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality can by means to deuce that which we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favors reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defense of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic paradigm of the late n nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, 'relativistic' notions.
Two theories unveiled and unfolding as their phenomenal yield held by Albert Einstein, attributively appreciated that the special theory of relativity ( 1905 ) and, also the tangling and calculably arranging affordance, as drawn upon the gratifying nature whom by encouraging the finding resolutions upon which the realms of its secreted reservoir in continuous phenomenons, in additional the continuatives as afforded by the efforts by the imagination were made discretely available to any the unsurmountable achievements, as remain obtainably afforded through the excavations underlying the artifactual circumstances that govern all principle ‘forms’ or ‘types’ in the involving evolutionary principles of the general theory of relativity (1915 ), because, the special theory gives a unified account of the laws of mechanics and of electromagnetism, including optics. Before 1905 the purely relative nature of uniform motion had in part been recognized in mechanics, although Newton had considered time absolute and postulated absolute space.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to a higher level of complexity, and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a singular point of significance as a whole that shows the ‘progressive principal order’ of complementary relations its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexities. Since human consciousness evinces of self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain, like all physical phenomena can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, concluding is reasonable, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
Nevertheless, since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, If one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific descriptions of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, which can be dismissed, undermined or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
Uncertain issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism’. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best methods in some area seem to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, so that questions of truth-realizations become disintegrations of the undefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.
As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue undecidable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptics conclude eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.
Fixed by its will for and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism that accepts every day or commonsense belief, is that, not s the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, giving us much more is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Despite the fact or the interpretation with which set the dramatization that the phrase ‘Cartesian scepticism’ is seldom used, Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the ‘method of doubt’ uses a sceptical scenario to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.
For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. Of course, they affirm of having being such beyond doubt that knowledge is not feigned to possibilities. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it is a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true being predictable is not necessary for an effect as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty, except alleged cases of things that are evident for one just by being true. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well for being true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by ‘deduction’ or ‘induction’, criteria will be specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of consideration that will make such standard in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.
Besides, there is another view - the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge whatsoever. In whatever manner, it is doubtful that any philosopher seriously entertains of absolute or the completed consummation of scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-evident standards that no such hesitancy about asserting to ‘the evident’, the non-evident are any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.
René Descartes (1596-1650), in his sceptical guise, never doubted the content of his own ideas. It’s challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they ‘corresponded’ to anything beyond ideas.
All the same, Pyrrhonism and Cartesian conduct regulated by an appearance of something as distinguished from which it is made of nearly global scepticism. Having been held and defended, that of assuming that knowledge is some form of true, sufficiently warranted belief, it is the warranted condition that provides the truth or belief conditions, in that of providing the grist for the sceptic’s mill about. The Pyrrhonist will call to mind that no non-evident, empirically deferring the sufficiency of giving in but warranted. Whereas, a Cartesian sceptic will agree that no inductive standard about anything other than one’s own mind and its contents is sufficiently warranted, because there are always legitimate grounds for doubting it. Accordingly, the essential difference between the two views concerns the stringency of the requirements for a belief being sufficiently warranted to take account of as knowledge.
A Cartesian requires certainty, but a Pyrrhonist merely requires that the standards in case are more warranted then its negation.
Cartesian scepticism was unduly an in fluence with which Descartes agues for scepticism, than his reply holds, in that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical standards, in that of anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason is roughly in the position that there is a legitimate doubt about all such standards, only because there is no way justifiably to deny that our senses are being stimulated by some sense, for which it is radically different from the objects that we normally think, in whatever manner they affect our senses. Therefrom, if the Pyrrhonist is the agnostic, the Cartesian sceptic is the atheist.
Because the Pyrrhonist requires much less of a belief in order for it to be confirmed as knowledge than do the Cartesian, the argument for Pyrrhonism are much more difficult to construct. A Pyrrhonist must show that there is no better set of reasons for believing to any standards, of which are in case that any knowledge learnt of the mind is understood by some of its forms, that has to require certainty.
The underlying latencies that are given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting their presence to the future that of specifying to the theory of knowledge, is, but, nonetheless, the possibility to identify a set of shared doctrines, however, identity to discern two broad styles of instances to discern, in like manners, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, nonetheless, of responding very differently but not fordone.
Repudiating the requirements of absolute certainty or knowledge, insisting on the connection of knowledge with activity, as, too, of pragmatism of a reformist distributing knowledge upon the legitimacy of traditional questions about the truth-unconductiveness of our cognitive practices, and sustain a conception of truth objectives, enough to give those questions that undergo of underlying the causalities that their own purposive latencies are yet given to the spoken word for which a dialectic awareness sparks too aflame from the ambers of fire.
Pragmatism of a determinant revolution, by contrast, relinquishing the objectivity of youth, acknowledges no legitimate epistemological questions over and above those that are naturally kindred of our current cognitive conviction.
It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be assembled to either a person or a belief. We can say that a person, ‘S’ are certain, or we can say that its descendable alinement is aligned as of ‘p’, are certain. The two uses can be connected by saying that ‘S’ has the right to be certain just in case the value of ‘p’ is sufficiently verified.
In defining certainty, it is crucial to note that the term has both an absolute and relative sense. More or less, we take a proposition to be certain when we have no doubt about its truth. We may do this in error or unreasonably, but objectively a proposition is certain when such absence of doubt is justifiable. The sceptical tradition in philosophy denies that objective certainty is often possible, or ever possible, either for any proposition at all, or for any proposition at all, or for any proposition from some suspect family (ethics, theory, memory, empirical judgement etc.) a major sceptical weapon is the possibility of upsetting events that Can cast doubts back onto what was hitherto taken to be certainties. Others include reminders of the divergence of human opinion, and the fallible source of our confidence. Fundamentalist approaches to knowledge look for a basis of certainty, upon which the structure of our system is built. Others reject the metaphor, looking for mutual support and coherence, without foundation.
However, in moral belief or procedure proposed or followed as the basis of some action of situational views, is that there are inviolable moral standards or absolute variable human desires or policies or prescriptions.
In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kantian ethics, a hypothetical imperative embeds a command that is in place of only a given antecedent desire or project: ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet’. The injunction to stay quiet only proves applicable to those with the antecedent desire or inclination. If one has no desire to look wise, the injunction cannot be so avoided: It is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination. It could be represented as, for example, ‘tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)’. The distinction is not always signalled by presence or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, do not become a bartender’ may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only to arouse to activity, animation, or life in case of those with the stated desire.
In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed five forms of the categorical imperative: (1) The formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same times will that it should become universal law: (2) The formula of the law of nature: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through the ‘willingness’ of a universal law of nature’: (3) The formula of the end-in-itself: ‘Acted’ in such a manner as that you always treat humanity by whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’: (4) the formula of autonomy, or considering ‘the will of every rational being as a will that makes universal law’: (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for the systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.
At the very time, as, perhaps, even now the moment has to come to the consideration as an intensive to emphasize the identity or character as to indicate an unlikely case or instance, for which it should change, that, insomuch as of making it equable in giving to a proposition that which it is not a conditional ‘p’. Moreover, the affirmative and negative, modern opinion is wary of this distinction, since what appears categorical may vary notation. Apparently, categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: ‘X’ is intelligent (categorical?) If ‘X’ is given a range of tasks, she does them better than many people (conditional?) The problem. Nonetheless, is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that seem to be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.
A limited area of knowledge or endeavour to which pursuits, activities and interests are a central representation held to a concept of physical theory. In this way, a field is defined by the distribution of a physical quantity, such as temperature, mass density, or potential energy y, at different points in space. In the particularly important example of force fields, such and gravitational, electrical, and magnetic fields, the field value at a point is the force that a test particle would experience if it were located at that point. The philosophical problem is whether a force field is to be thought of as purely potential, so the presence of a field merely describes the propensity of masses to move relative to each other, or whether it should be thought of in terms of the physically real modifications of a medium, whose properties result in such powers that are force field’s pure potential, fully characterized by dispositional statements or conditionals, or are they categorical or actual? The former option seems to require within ungrounded dispositions, or regions of space that differ only in what happens if an object is placed there. The law-like shape of these dispositions, apparent for example in the curved lines of force of the magnetic field, may then seem quite inexplicable. To atomists, such as Newton it would represent a return to Aristotelian entelechies, or quasi-psychological affinities between things, which are responsible for their motions. The latter option requires understanding of how forces of attraction and repulsion can be ‘grounded’ in the properties of the medium.
The basic idea of a field is arguably present in Leibniz, who was certainly hostile to Newtonian atomism. Although his equal hostility to ‘action at a distance’ muddies the water, and, of itself, it is usually credited to the Jesuit mathematician and scientist Joseph Boscovich (1711-87) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), both of whom led of their persuasive influenced, the scientist Faraday, with whose work the physical notion became established. In his paper ‘On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force’ (1852), Faraday was to suggest several criteria for assessing the physical reality of lines of force, such as whether they are affected by an intervening material medium, whether the motion depends on the nature of what is placed at the receiving end. As far as electromagnetic fields go, Faraday himself inclined to the view that the mathematical similarity between heat flow, currents, and electromagnetic lines of force was evidence for the physical reality of the intervening medium.
Once, again, our mentioning recognition for which its case value, whereby its view is especially associated the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), that the truth of a statement can be defined in terms of a ‘utility’ of accepting it. Communicative communications, insofar as a disconcerting position for which its situated place of valuation on may be extended or as an aim, end, or motive, only by which the mind is directed and discerned of its objective intention for which is seen or presented as a disagreement. Since there are things that are false, as it may be useful to accept, and conversely there are things that are true and that it may be damaging to accept. Nevertheless, there are deep connections between the idea that a representation system is accorded, and the likely success of the projects in progressive formality, by its possession. The evolution of a system of representation either perceptual or linguistic, seems bounded to connect successes with everything adapting or with utility in the modest sense. The Wittgenstein doctrine stipulates the meaning of use that upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion and the idea that belief in the truth on one hand, the action of the other. One way of binding with cement, wherefore the connection is found in the idea that natural selection becomes much as much in adapting us to the cognitive creatures, because beliefs have effects, they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant’s doctrine, and continued to play an influencing role in the theory of meaning and truth.
James, (1842-1910), although with characteristic generosity exaggerated in his debt to Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), he charted that the method of doubt encouraged people to pretend to doubt what they did not doubt in their hearts, and criticize its individuated insistence, that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individuals personalized consciousness.
From his earliest writings, James understood cognitive processes in teleological terms. Though, he held, assisted us in the satisfactory interests. His will to Believe doctrine, the view that we are sometimes justified in believing beyond the evidential relics upon the notion that a belief’s benefits are relevant to its justification. His pragmatic method of analysing philosophical problems, for which requires that we find the meaning of terms by examining their application to objects in experimental situations, similarly reflects the teleological approach in its attention to consequences.
Such an approach, however, sets’ James’ theory sets aim toward the idea that something conveys to the mind as been of acceptation to its meaning, nonetheless, the advanced approach has in coming to close quarters with the with-drawing from verification, dismissive of metaphysics. Variations are dissimulation among the succession of a progressive individuality and who appropriate such dissimulation, are, insofar as estranged by some alternative norm of cognitive meaning, as the verificationist examines the matters for which consequential implications can only evince that of the sensory experience. James’ took pragmatic meaning to include emotional and matter responses. Moreover, his, metaphysical standard of value, seems significantly relevant in not the way of dismissing them as meaningless. It should also be noted that in a greater extent, circumspective moments’ James did not hold that even his broad sets of consequences were exhaustive of a term meaning. ‘Theism’, for example, he took to have antecedently, definitional meaning, in addition to its varying degree of importance and chance upon an important pragmatic meaning.
James’ theory of truth reflects upon his teleological conception of cognition, by considering a true belief to be one that is compatible with our existing system of beliefs, and leads us to satisfactory interaction with the world.
However, Peirce’s famous pragmatist principle is a rule of logic employed in clarifying our concepts and ideas. Consider the claim the liquid in a flask is an acid, if, we believe this, we except that it would turn red: We accept an action of ours to have certain experimental results. The pragmatic principle holds that listing the conditional expectations of this kind, in that we associate such immediacy with applications of a conceptual representation that provides a complete and orderly sets clarification of the concept. This is relevant to the logic of abduction: Clarificationists using the pragmatic principle provides all the information about the content of a hypothesis that is relevantly to decide whether it is worth testing.
To a greater extent, and most important, is the famed apprehension of the pragmatic principle, in so that, Pierces’ account of reality: When we take something to be rea that by this single case, we think it is ‘fated to be agreed upon by all who investigate’ the matter to which it stand, in other words, if I believe that really ‘P’, then I except that if anyone were to look into the finding its measure into whether ‘p’ would arrive at the belief that ‘p’. It is not part of the theory that the experimental consequences of our actions should be specified by a warranted empiricist vocabulary - Peirce insisted that perceptual theories are abounding in latency. Even so, nor is it his view that the collected conditionals do or not clarify a notion as all analytic. In addition, in later writings, he argues that the pragmatic principle could only be made plausible to someone who accepted its metaphysical realism: It requires that ‘would-bees’ are objective and, of course, real.
If realism itself can be given a quick clarification, charting the various forms of supposition is more difficult, for they seem legendary. Other opponents deny that the conceptual reason or sustaining entities posited by the relevant discourse that exists or is the respondent plausibility that characterizes its own existence. The standard example is ‘idealism’, that a reality id somehow mind-curative or mind-co-ordinated - that real objects comprising the ‘external worlds’ are dependently of eloping minds, but only exist as in some way correlative to the mental operations. The doctrine assembled of ‘idealism’ enters on the conceptual note that reality as we understand this as meaningful and reflects the working of mindful purposes. It construes this as meaning that the inquiring mind itself makes of some formative constellations and not of any mere understanding of the nature of the ‘real’ bit even the resulting charger we attributed to it.
Because, the term is most straightforwardly used when qualifying another linguistic form of grammatik: a real ‘x’ may be contrasted with a fake, a failed ‘x’, a near ‘x’, and so on. To trat something as real, without qualification, is to suppose it to be part of the actualized world. To reify something is to suppose that we have committed by some indoctrinated treatise, as that of a theory. The central error in thinking of reality and all existence is to think of the ‘unreal’ as a separate domain of things, perhaps, unfairly to that of the benefits of existence.
Such that non-existence, as the product of logical confusion of treating the term ‘nothing’ as something of itself may be considered as a referring expression instead of a ‘quantifier’. (Stating informally as a quantifier is an expression that reports of a quantity of times that a predicate is satisfied in some class of things, i.e., in a domain.) This confusion leads the unsuspecting to think that a sentence such as ‘Nothing is all around us’ talks of a special kind of thing that is all around us, when in fact it merely denies that the predicate ‘is all around us’ have appreciations. The feelings that lad some philosophers and theologians, notably Heidegger, to talk of the experience of nothing, is not properly the experience of anything, but rather the failure of a hope or expectations that there would be something of some kind at some point. This may arise in quite everyday cases, as when one finds that the article of functions one expected to see as usual, in the corner has disappeared. The difference between ‘existentialist’’ and ‘analytic philosophy’, on the point of what, whereas the former is afraid of nothing, and the latter think that there is nothing to be afraid of, rather a different set of concerns arises when actions are specified about doing nothing, saying nothing may be an admission of guilt, and doing nothing in some circumstances may be tantamount to murder. Still, other substitutional problems arise over understanding empty space and time.
Whereas, the standard opposition between those who affirm and those who deny, the real existence of some kind of thing or some kind of fact or a state of interpretation as bringing attentive applicability the changes, from which something within thee realms of nothing seem of an area of discourse, and may be the focus of this dispute: The external world, the past and future, other minds, mathematical objects, possibilities, universals, moral or aesthetic properties are examples. There be to one influential suggestion, as associated with the British philosopher of logic and language, and the most determinative of philosophers centred round Anthony Dummett (1925), to which is borrowed from the ‘intuitivistic’ critique of classical mathematics, and suggested that the unrestricted use of the ‘principle of a bivalence’ be the trademark of ‘realism’. However, this has to overcome the counter-examples in one of two or yet, both ways: Although Aquinas exhibits of a moral ‘realist’, but held that ‘moral’ was really not sufficiently structured to make true or false every moral claim. Unlike Kant who believed that he could use the laws of bivalence happily in mathematics, precisely because it had only our own construction. Realism can itself be subdivided: Kant, for example, combines empirical realism (within the phenomenal world the realist says the right things - surrounding objects really exist and independent of us and our mental stares) with transcendental idealism (the phenomenal world as a whole reflects the structures imposed on it by the activity of our minds as they render it intelligible to us). In modern philosophy the orthodox opposition to realism has been from the philosopher such as Goodman, who, impressed by the extent to which we perceive the world through conceptual and linguistic lenses of our own making.
Assigned to the modern treatment of existence in the theory of ‘quantification’ is sometimes put by saying that existence is not a predicate. The idea is that the existent quantifying itself the eventful operator as placed on a predicate, showing that the property it expresses has circumstantial instances. Existence is therefore treated as a second-order property, or a property of properties. It is fitting to say, that in this it is like number, for when we say that these things of a kind, we do not describe the thing (ad we would if we said there are red things of the kind), but instead attribute a property to the kind itself. The parallelled numbers are exploited by the German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frége in the dictum that affirmation of existence is merely denied of the number nought. A problem, nevertheless, proves accountable for it is created by sentences like ‘This exists’, where some particular thing is undirected, such that a sentence seems to express a contingent truth (for this insight has not existed), yet no other predicate is involved. ‘This exists’ is. Therefore, unlike ‘Tamed tigers exist’, where a property is said to have an instance, for the word ‘this’ and does not designate a property, but only in the just character of an individual.
Possible worlds seem able to differ from each other purely in the presence or absence of individuals, and not merely in the distribution of exemplification of properties.
The philosophical ponderosity over which is to set on or upon the unreal, as belonging to the domain of Being, nonetheless, there is little for us that can be said within the philosopher’s self-inferential expedience. So it is not apparent that there can be such a subject for being by itself. Nevertheless, the concept had a central place in philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger. The essential question of ‘why is there something and not of nothing’? Prompting over logical reflection on what it is for a universal to have an instance, nd as long history of attempts to explain contingent existence, by which id to reference and a necessary ground.
In the transition, ever since Plato, this ground becomes a self-sufficient, perfect, unchanging, and external something, identified with the Well, Good or God, but whose relation with the everyday world remains to a finely grained residue of obscurity. The celebrated argument for the existence of God was first propounded by Anselm in his Proslogin. The argument by defining God as ‘something that which nothing is more immaculate or omnipotently greater than any possibility of being ever conceived’. God then exists in the understanding since we understand this concept. However, if he only existed in the understanding something greater could be conceived, for a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists in the understanding. However, we can conceive of something greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which is contradictory. Therefore, God cannot exist on the understanding, but exists in reality.
An influential argument (or family of arguments) for the existence of God, finding its premisses are that all natural things are dependent for their existence on something else. The totality of dependents brings much more then itself, depending on or upon a non-dependent, or necessarily existent cause in that which is God. Like the argument to design, the cosmological argument was attacked by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant.
Its main problem, nonetheless, is that it requires us to make sense of the notion of necessary existence. For if the answer to the question of why anything exists is that other things of a similar kind exist, the question merely arises again. So, that ‘God’ that serves the ‘Kingdom of Ends’ deems to question must that essentially in lasting through all time existing of necessity, in that of having to occur of states or facts as having an independent reality: It must not be an entity of which the same kinds of questions can be raised. The other problem with the argument is attributing concern and care to the deity, not for connecting the necessarily existent being it derives with human values and aspirations.
The ontological argument has been treated by modern theologians such as Barth, following Hegel, not so much as a proof with which to confront the unconverted, but as an explanation of the deep meaning of religious belief. Collingwood, regards the argument s proving not that because our idea of God is that of 'id quo maius cogitare viequit,' therefore God exists, but proving that because this is our idea of God, we stand committed to belief in its existence. Its existence is a metaphysical point or absolute pre-supposition of certain forms of thought.
In the 20th century, modal versions of the ontological argument have been propounded by the American philosophers Charles Hertshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga. One version is to define something as unsurpassably great, if it exists and is perfect in every ‘possible world’. So to allow that it is, at least, strongly possible that an unsurmountably greater being exists, as to mean that there is a possibility of other worlds that such a being does have of them an existence, least of mention, if proven to exist in one world, it exists in all (for the fact that such a being exists in a world that entails, in at least, it exists and is perfect in every world), so, it exists by means as, perhaps, a Territorians imperative. The correct response to this argument is to disallow the apparently reasonable concession that it is possible that such a being exists. This concession is much more dangerous than it looks, since in the modal logic, involved from possibly finding to the necessity held to ‘p’, we can formulate its essential possibility in condition of whether ‘p’. A symmetrical proof starting from the assumption that it is possibly that such a being does not exist would derive that it is impossible that it exists.
The doctrine making an ethical difference of whether an agent actively intervenes to cause a result, or omits to act in circumstances in which it is foreseen, that because of omnifarious knowledge the same result occurs. Thus, suppose that I wish you dead. If I act to cause your death, I am a murderer, however, if I happily discover you in danger of death, and fail to act to save you, I am not acting, and therefore, according to the doctrine of acts and omissions not a murderer. Critics implore that omissions can be as deliberate and immoral as I am responsible for your food and fact to feed you. Only omission is surely a killing, ‘Doing nothing’ can be a way of doing something, or in other worlds, absence of bodily movement can also constitute acting negligently, or deliberately, and defending on the context, may be a way of deceiving, betraying, or killing. Nonetheless, criminal law offers to find its conveniences, from which to distinguish discontinuous intervention, for which is permissible, from bringing about a result, which may not be, if, for instance, the result is death of a patient. The question is whether the difference, if there is one, is, between acting and omitting to act be discernibly or defined in a way that bars a general moral might.
The double effect of a principle attempting to define when an action that had both good and bad results are morally permissible. I one formation such an action is permissible if (1) The action is not wrong in itself, (2) the bad consequence is not that which is intended (3) the good is not itself a result of the bad consequences, and (4) two consequential effects are commensurate. Thus, for instance, I might justifiably bomb an enemy factory, foreseeing but intending that the death of nearby civilians, whereas bombing the death of nearby civilians intentionally would be disallowed. The principle has its roots in Thomist moral philosophy, accordingly. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), held that it is meaningless to ask whether a human being is two tings (soul and body) or, only just as it is meaningless to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one: On this analogy the sound is ye form of the body. Life after death is possible only because a form itself does not perish (pricking is a loss of form).
And, therefore, in some sense available to rescind of a new body, therefore, it is not I who remain indefinitely in existence or in a particular state or course of abiding to any-kind of body death, same personalized body that becomes reanimated by the same form, that which Aquinas’s account, as a person has no privileged self-understanding, we understand ourselves as we do everything else, by way of sense experience and abstraction, and knowing the principle of our own lives is an achievement, not as a given. Difficultly at this point led the logical positivist to abandon the notion of an epistemological foundation altogether, and to flirt with the coherence theory of truth, it is widely accepted that trying to make the connection between thought and experience through basic sentence s depends on an untenable ‘myth of the given
The special way that we each have of knowing our own thoughts, intentions, and sensationalist have brought in the many philosophical ‘behaviorist and functionalist tendencies, that have found it important to deny that there is such a special way, arguing the way that I know of my own mind inasmuch as the way that I know of yours, e.g., by seeing what I say when asked. Others, however, point out that the behaviour of reporting the result of introspection in a particular and legitimate kind of behavioural access that deserves notice in any account of historically human psychology. The historical philosophy of reflection upon the astute of history, or of historical, thinking, finds the term was used in the 18th century, e.g., by Volante was to mean critical historical thinking as opposed to the mere collection and repetition of stories about the past. In Hegelian, particularly by conflicting elements within his own system, however, it came to man universal or world history. The Enlightenment confidence was being replaced by science, reason, and understanding that gave history a progressive moral thread, and under the influence of the German philosopher, whom is in spreading Romanticism, Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and, Immanuel Kant, this idea took it further to hold, so that philosophy of history cannot be the detecting of a grand system, the unfolding of the evolution of human nature as attested by its successive sages (the progress of rationality or of Spirit). This essential speculative philosophy of history is given an extra Kantian twist in the German idealist Johann Fichte, in whom the extra association of temporal succession with logical implication introduces the idea that concepts themselves are the dynamic engines of historical change. The idea is readily intelligible in that their world of nature and of thought become identified. The work of Herder, Kant, Flichte and Schelling is synthesized by Hegel: History has a plot, as too, this to the moral development of man, accommodated with freedom within the state, this in turn is the development of thought, or a logical development in which various necessary moment in the life of the concept are successively achieved and improved upon. Hegel’s method is at it is most successful, when the object is the history of ideas, and the evolution of thinking may march in steps with logical oppositions and their resolution encounters red by various systems of thought.
Within the revolutionary communism, Karl Marx (1818-83) and the German social philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-95), there emerges a rather different kind of story, based upon Hefl’s progressive structure not laying the achievement of the goal of history to a future in which the political condition for freedom comes to exist, so that economic and political fears than ‘reason’ is in the engine room. Although, it is such that speculations upon the history may that it is continued to be written, notably: late examples, by the late 19th century large-scale speculation of tis kind with the nature of historical understanding, and in particular with a comparison between methos of natural science and with the historians. For writers such as the German neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband and the German philosopher and literary critic and historian Wilhelm Dilthey, it is important to show that the human sciences such. As history is objective and legitimate, nonetheless they are in some way deferent from the enquiry of the scientist. Since the subjective-matter is the past thought and actions of human brings, what is needed and actions of human beings, past thought and actions of human beings, what is needed is an ability to re-live that past thought, knowing the deliberations of past agents, as if they were the historian’s own. The most influential British writer on this theme, was the intellectual philosopher and historian George Collingwood (1889-1943). Whose idea of History (1946), contains an extensive defence of the Verstehe approach, but it is nonetheless, the explanation from their actions, however, by re-living the situation as our understanding that understanding others is not gained by the tactic use of a ‘theory’, enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentionality experienced, again, the matter to which the subjective-matters of past thoughts and actions, as I have a human ability of knowing the deliberations of past agents as if they were the historian’s own. The immediate question of the form of historical explanation, and the fact that general laws have other than no place or any apprentices in the order of a minor place in the human sciences, it is also prominent in thoughts about distinctiveness as to regain their actions, but by re-living the situation in or thereby an understanding of what they experience and thought.
The view that common attributional intentions, beliefs and meaning to other persons successive proceedings by way of a tactic use of a theory that enables one to construct the interpretations for which are the explanations in their doings. The view is commonly hld along with functionalism, according to which psychological states theoretical entities, identified by the network of their causes and effects. The theory-theory had different implications, depending on which feature of theories is being stressed. Theories may be though of as capable of formalization, as yielding predications and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as achieved by predictions and explanations, as achieved by a process of theorizing, as answering empirically to evince that is in principle describable without them, as liable to be overturned by newer and better theories, and o on. The main problem with seeing our understanding of others as the outcome of a piece of theorizing is the non-existence of a medium in which this theory can be couched, as the child learns simultaneously he minds of others and the meaning of terms in its native language.
Our understanding of others is not gained by the tacit use of a ‘theory’. Enabling us to infer what thoughts or intentions explain their actions, however, by re-living the situation ‘in their moccasins’, or from their point of view, and thereby understanding what hey experienced and thought, and therefore expressed. Understanding others is achieved when we can ourselves deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our own. The suggestion is a modern development of the ‘Verstehen’ tradition associated with Dilthey, Weber and Collngwood.
Much as much, it is therefore, in some sense available to reactivate a new body, however, we understand ourselves, just as we do everything else, that through the sense experience, in that of an abstraction, may justly be of knowing the principle of our own lives. It is obtainably to achieve, and not as a given. In the theory of knowledge that knowing Aquinas holds the Aristotelian doctrine that knowing entails some similarities between the Knower and what there is to be known: A human’s corporal nature, therefore, requires that knowledge start with sense perception. Anyway, the coinciding limitations that fortunately apply to furthering levels that accommodate the fixed standards as in the result of or exemplification for which perforce a stabilizing impression, that, in ways to stabilitate their standards to regain stability, the balancing permanency as such is to impress on or upon the mind, that this containment gives the analogousness of a mosaic structure as supported by the hierarchical steadiness of withstanding any material change, such as the celestial heavens that open in bringing forth to angels.
In the domain of theology Aquinas deploys the distraction emphasized by Eringena, between the existence of God in understanding the significance of five arguments: They are (1) Motion is only explicable if there exists an unmoved, a first mover (2) the chain of efficient causes demands a first cause (3) the contingent character of existing things in the wold demands a different order of existence, or in other words as something that has a necessary existence (4) the gradation of value in things in the world requires the existence of something that is most valuable, or perfect, and (5) the orderly character of events points to a final cause, or end that all things are directed, and the existence of this end demands a being that ordained it. All the arguments are physico-theological arguments, in that between reason and faith, Aquinas lays out proofs of the existence of God.
He readily recognizes that there are doctrines such that are the Incarnation and the nature of the Trinity, know only through revelations, and whose acceptance is more a matter of moral will. God’s essence is identified with his existence, as pure activity. God is simple, containing no potential. No matter how, we cannot obtain knowledge of what God is (his quiddity), perhaps, doing the same work as the principle of charity, but suggesting that we regulate our procedures of interpretation by maximizing the extent to which we see the subject s humanly reasonable, than the extent to which we see the subject as right about things. Whereby remaining content with descriptions that apply to him partly by way of analogy, God reveals of himself but not who is Himself.
The immediate problem availed of ethics is posed b y the English philosopher Phillippa Foot, in her ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect’ (1967). A runaway train or trolley comes to a section in the track that is under construction and impassable. One person is working on one part and five on the other, and the trolley will put an end to anyone working on the branch it enters. Clearly, to most minds, the driver should steer for the fewest populated branch. But now suppose that, left to itself, it will enter the branch with its five employees that are there, and you as a bystander can intervene, altering the points so that it veers through the other. Is it right or obligors, or even permissible for you to do this, thereby, apparently involving you in ways that responsibility ends in a death of one person? After all, who have you wronged if you leave it to go its own way? The situation is similarly standardized of others in which utilitarian reasoning seems to lead to one course of action, but a person’s integrity or principles may oppose it.
Describing events that haphazardly happen does not often in themselves permit us to talk of rationality and intention, which are the categories we may apply if we conceive of them as action. We think of ourselves not only passively, as creatures that make things happen. Understanding this distinction gives forth of its many major problems concerning the nature of an agency for the causation of bodily events by mental events, and of understanding the ‘will’ and ‘free will’. Other problems in the theory of action include drawing the distinction between an action and its consequence, and describing the structure involved when we do one thing ‘by’ doing another thing. Even the planning and dating where someone shoots someone on one day and in one place, whereby the victim then dies on another day and in another place. Where and when did the murderous act take place?
Causation, in at least, is not clear that only events are created by and for it. Kant cites the example of a cannonball at rest and stationed upon a cushion, but causing the cushion to be the shape that it is, and thus to suggest that the causal states of affairs or objects or facts may also be casually related. All of which, the fundamental problem is, least that in mention, is to understand the elements that necessitate or brings on or upon the necessitation for which the presence of the future anticipates. Events, Hume thought, are in themselves ‘loose and separate’: How then are we to conceive of others? The relationship seems not too perceptible, for all that perception gives us (Hume argues) is knowledge of the patterns that events do, actually falling into than any acquaintance with the connections determining the pattern. It is, however, clear that our conception of everyday objects is largely determined by their casual powers, and all our action is based on the belief that these causal powers are stable and reliable. Although scientific investigation can give us wider and deeper dependable patterns, it seems incapable of bringing us any nearer to the ‘must’ of causal necessitation. Particular examples’ o f puzzles with causalities are quite apart from general problems of forming any conception of what it is: How are we to understand the casual interaction between mind and body? How can the present, which exists, or its existence to a past that no longer exists? How is the stability of the casual order to be understood? Is backward causality possible? Is causation a concept needed in science, or dispensable?
The news concerning free-will, is nonetheless, a problem for which is to reconcile our everyday consciousness of ourselves as agent, with the best view of what science tells us that we are. Determinism is one part of the problem. It may be defined as the doctrine that every event has a cause. More precisely, for any event ‘C’, there will be one antecedent state of nature ‘N’, and a law of nature ‘L’, such that given L, N will be followed by ‘C’. But if this is true of every event, it is true of events such as my doing something or choosing to do something. So my choosing or doing something is fixed by some antecedent state ‘N’ an d the laws. Since determinism is universal, these are in turn, fixed and induce to come into being backwards to events, for which I am clearly not responsible (events before my birth, for example). So, no events can be voluntary or free, where that means that they come about purely because of my willing them I could have done otherwise. If determinism is true, then there will be antecedent states and laws already determining such events: How then can I truly be said to be their author, or be responsible for them?
Reactions to this problem are commonly classified as: (1) Hard determinism. This accepts the conflict and denies that you have real freedom or responsibility (2) Soft determinism or compatibility, whereby reactions in this family assert that everything you should and from a notion of freedom is quite compatible with determinism. In particular, if your actions are caused, it can often be true of you that you could have done otherwise if you had chosen, and this may be enough to render you liable to be held unacceptable - the fact that previous events will have caused you to choose as you did, and therefore deem irrelevantly on this contingent of the possibility. (3) Libertarianism, as this is the view that while compatibilism is only an evasion, there is a substantive amount as immeasurably real for which its notion of freedom can yet be preserved in the face of determinism (or, of indeterminism). In Kant, while the empirical or phenomenal self is determined and not free, whereas the noumenal or rational self is capable of being rational, free action. However, the noumeal self exists outside the categorical priorities of space and time, as this freedom seems to be of a doubtful value as other libertarian avenues do include of suggesting that the problem be badly framed, for instance, because the definition of determinism breaks down, or postulates by its suggesting that there are two independent but consistent ways of looking at an agent, the scientific and the humanistic, wherefore it is only through confusing them that the problem seems urgent. Nevertheless, these avenues have gained general popularity, as an error to confuse determinism and fatalism.
The dilemma for which determinism is for itself often supposes of an action that seems as the end of a causal chain, or, perhaps, by some hieratical set of suppositional actions that would stretch back in time to events for which an agent has no conceivable responsibility, then the agent is not responsible for the action.
Once, again, the dilemma adds that if an action is not the end of such a chain, then either of its causes occurs at random, in that no antecedent events brought it about, and in that case nobody is responsible for it’s ever to occur. So, whether or not determinism is true, responsibility is shown to be illusory.
Still, there is to say, to have a will is to be able to desire an outcome and to purpose to bring it about. Strength of will, or firmness of purpose, is supposed to be good and weakness of will or akrasia badly.
The admeasurement is partly to mean the magnitude for which the mentality of or relating to the mind, as to refer something or someone to ascertain of the mental act, especially of ones willingness or try in the presence of what might spatially be of its temporal intentionality and, as well of mere behaviour, its theory that there is such an act is problematic, and the idea that they make the required difference is a case of explaining a phenomenon by citing another that raises the same problem, since the intentional or voluntary nature of the set volition now needs explanation. For determinism to act in accordance with the law of autonomy or freedom, is that in ascendance with universal moral law and regardless of selfish advantage.
Categorical notions in the works as contrasted in Kantian ethics show of a hypothetical necessity that impresses upon a complementarity from which is placed only by giving to some antecedent desire or something predetermined, as, ‘If you want to look wise, stay quiet’. The injunction to stay quiet is only applicable to those with the antecedent desire or inclination: If one has no desire to look wise, the direction or condition of occurrence is that of an affectual cause that in service of an eventuality toward terminal possibilities. A categorical imperative cannot be so avoided, it is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination. It could be repressed as, for example, ‘Tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not)’. The distinction is not always mistakably presumed or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: ‘If you crave drink, don’t become a bartender’ may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in the case of those with the stated desire.
In Grundlegung zur Metaphsik der Sitten (1785), Kant discussed some of the given forms of categorical imperatives, such that of (1) The formula of universal law: ‘act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law’, (2) the formula of the law of nature: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become uninterruptedly of will - a universal law of nature, (3) the formula of the end-in-itself, ‘Act in such a way that you always trat humanity of whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as an end, but always at the same time as an end’, (4) the formula of autonomy, or the attentive considerations for one’s individuality that he discovers the ‘willfulness’ as founded of every rational being the ‘will’ in universal law’, and (5) the formula of the Kingdom of Ends, which provides a model for systematic union of different rational beings under common laws.
A central object in the study of Kant’s ethics is to understand the expressions of the inescapable, binding requirements of their categorical importance, and to understand whether they are equivalent at some deep level. Kant’s own application of the notions is always convincing: One cause of confusion is relating Kant’s ethical values to theories such as, 'expressionism', in that it is easy but imperatively must that it cannot be the expression of a sentiment, yet, it must derive from something ‘unconditional’ or necessary’ such as the voice of reason. The standard mood of sentences used to issue request and commands are their imperative needs to issue as basic the need to communicate information, and as such to animals signalling systems may as often be interpreted either way, and understanding the relationship between commands and other action-guiding uses of language, such as ethical discourse. The ethical theory of ‘prescriptivism’ in fact equates the two functions. A further question is whether there is an imperative logic. ‘Hump that bale’ seems to follow from ‘Tote that barge and hump that bale’, follows from ‘Its windy and its raining’: .But it is harder to say how to include other forms, does ‘Shut the door or shut the window’ follow from ‘Shut the window’, for example? The commonly standardized procedure for acquiring and further developments of some imperiously, overbearing imperative logic, is to work in terms of possibilities, particularly of satisfying the other commands without satisfying the oppositions, thereby turning it into a variation of ordinary deductive logic.
Despite the fact that the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage in that morality as such has that of the Kantian base, that on given notions as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning as based on the valuing notions that are characterized by their particular virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of ‘moral’ considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complicated and complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian. And Aristotle was more involved with a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests.
The Cartesian doubt is the method of investigating how much knowledge and its basis in reason or experience as used by Descartes in the first two Medications. It attempted to put knowledge upon secure foundation by first inviting us to suspend judgements on any proportion whose truth can be doubted, even as a bare possibility. The standards of acceptance are gradually raised as we are asked to doubt the deliverance of memory, the senses, and eve n reason, all of which are in principle capable of letting us down. This is eventually found in the celebrated 'Cogito ergo sum': I think, therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of a various counter-attack on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this priority are the Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly distinguishes that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a 'clear and distinct perception' of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance: A Hume drily puts it, 'to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.'
By dissimilarity, Descartes’s notorious denial that non-human animals are conscious is a stark illustration of dissimulation. In his conception of matter Descartes also gives preference to rational cogitation over anything from the senses. Since we can conceive of the matter of a ball of wax, surviving changes to its sensible qualities, matter is not an empirical concept, but eventually an entirely geometrical one, with extension and motion as its only physical nature.
Although the structure of Descartes’s epistemology, theory of mind and theory of matter have been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity and even their initial plausibility, all contrives to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.
The term instinct (Lat., instinctus, impulse or urge) implies innately determined behaviour, flexible to change in circumstance outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their outline was used in defence of this position as early as Avicennia. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalist such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense it may be instinctive in human beings to be social, and for that matter too reasoned on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds.
It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the 'otherness' of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger indivisible whole. Yet, the cosmological purpose of an unbroken evolution that governs all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was perpetually driven out by the primivities extractions along sides the instinctual impulses that are inherently the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
The subjectivity of our mind affects our perceptions of the world that is held to be objective by natural science. Create both aspects of mind and matter as individualized forms that belong to the same underlying reality.
Our everyday experience confirms the apparent fact that there is a dual-valued world as subject and objects. We as having consciousness, as personality and as experiencing beings are the subjects, whereas for everything for which we can come up with a name or designation, seems to be the object, that which is opposed to us as a subject. Physical objects are only part of the object-world. There are also mental objects, objects of our emotions, abstract objects, religious objects etc. language objectifies our experience. Experiences per se are purely sensational experienced that do not make a distinction between object and subject. Only verbalized thought reifies the sensations by conceptualizing them and pigeonholing them into the given entities of language.
Some thinkers maintain, that subject and object are only different aspects of experience. I can experience myself as subject, and in the act of self-reflection. The fallacy of this argument is obvious: Being a subject implies having an object. We cannot experience something consciously without the mediation of understanding and mind. Our experience is already conceptualized at the time it comes into our consciousness. Our experience is negative insofar as it destroys the original pure experience. In a dialectical process of synthesis, the original pure experience becomes an object for us. The common state of our mind is only capable of apperceiving objects. Objects are reified negative experience. The same is true for the objective aspect of this theory: by objectifying myself I do not dispense with the subject, but the subject is causally and apodeictically linked to the object. As soon as I make an object of anything, I have to realize, that it is the subject, which objectifies something. It is only the subject who can do that. Without the subject there are no objects, and without objects there is no subject. This interdependence, however, is not to be understood in terms of a dualism, so that the object and the subject are really independent substances. Since the object is only created by the activity of the subject, and the subject is not a physical entity, but a mental one, we have to conclude then, that the subject-object dualism is purely mentalistic.
The Cartesian dualism posits the subject and the object as separate, independent and real substances, both of which have their ground and origin in the highest substance of God. Cartesian dualism, however, contradicts itself: The very fact, which Descartes posits the 'I,' that is the subject, as the only certainty, he defied materialism, and thus the concept of some 'res extensa.' The physical thing is only probable in its existence, whereas the mental thing is absolutely and necessarily certain. The subject is superior to the object. The object is only derived, but the subject is the original. This makes the object not only inferior in its substantive quality and in its essence, but relegates it to a level of dependence on the subject. The subject recognizes that the object is a 'res’ extensa' and this means, that the object cannot have essence or existence without the acknowledgment through the subject. The subject posits the world in the first place and the subject is posited by God. Apart from the problem of interaction between these two different substances, Cartesian dualism is not eligible for explaining and understanding the subject-object relation.
By denying Cartesian dualism and resorting to monistic theories such as extreme idealism, materialism or positivism, the problem is not resolved either. What the positivists did, was just verbalizing the subject-object relation by linguistic forms. It was no longer a metaphysical problem, but only a linguistic problem. Our language has formed this object-subject dualism. These thinkers are very superficial and shallow thinkers, because they do not see that in the very act of their analysis they inevitably think in the mind-set of subject and object. By relativizing the object and subject in terms of language and analytical philosophy, they avoid the elusive and problematical aporia of subject-object, since which has been the fundamental question in philosophy ever. Shunning these metaphysical questions is no solution. Excluding something, by reducing it to a more material and verifiable level, is not only pseudo-philosophy but actually a depreciation and decadence of the great philosophical ideas of mankind.
Therefore, we have to come to grips with idea of subject-object in a new manner. We experience this dualism as a fact in our everyday lives. Every experience is subject to this dualistic pattern. The question, however, is, whether this underlying pattern of subject-object dualism is real or only mental. Science assumes it to be real. This assumption does not prove the reality of our experience, but only that with this method science is most successful in explaining our empirical facts. Mysticism, on the other hand, believes that there is an original unity of subject and objects. To attain this unity is the goal of religion and mysticism. Man has fallen from this unity by disgrace and by sinful behaviour. Now the task of man is to get back on track again and strive toward this highest fulfilment. Again, are we not, on the conclusion made above, forced to admit, that also the mystic way of thinking is only a pattern of the mind and, as the scientists, that they have their own frame of reference and methodology to explain the supra-sensible facts most successfully?
If we assume mind to be the originator of the subject-object dualism, then we cannot confer more reality on the physical or the mental aspect, as well as we cannot deny the one in terms of the other.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system. Only after the emergence of hominids were to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. We still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the wold. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured pre-adaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
If we also concede that an indivisible whole contains, by definition, no separate parts and that a phenomenon can be assumed to be 'real' only when it is 'observed' phenomenon, we are led to more interesting conclusions. The indivisible whole whose existence is inferred in the results of the aspectual experiments that cannot in principle is itself the subject of scientific investigation. There is a simple reason that this is the case. Science can claim knowledge of physical reality only when the predictions of a physical theory are validated by experiment. Since the indivisible whole cannot be measured or observed, we confront the 'event horizon' or knowledge where science can say nothing about the actual character of this reality. Why this is so, is a property of the entire universe, then we must also conclude that an undivided wholeness exists on the most primary and basic level in all aspects of physical reality. What we are dealing within science per se, however, are manifestations of tis reality, which are invoked or 'actualized' in making acts of observation or measurement. Since the reality that exists between the space-like separated regions is a whole whose existence can only be inferred in experience. As opposed to proven experiment, the correlations between the particles, and the sum of these parts, do not constitute the 'indivisible' whole. Physical theory allows us to understand why the correlations occur. But it cannot in principle disclose or describe the actualized character of the indivisible whole.
The scientific implications to this extraordinary relationship between parts (qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of human observers or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear fairly self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. And it is also not necessary to attribute any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be 'proven' in scientific terms and what can be reasonably 'inferred' in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet those responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so, for a simple reason - the implications of the amazing new fact of natures neutrality in the form designated as non-locality, and, least of mention, that cannot be properly understood without some familiarity with the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what be most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, the fewer amounts of back-ground extremities, yet feel free to ignore it. But this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close the circle; Resolve the equations of eternity and realize that the universe is an obtainable gain in its unification for which it holds.
A major topic of philosophical inquiry, especially in Aristotle, and subsequently since the 17th and 18th centuries, when the ‘science of man’ began to probe into human motivation and emotion. For such as these, the French moralistes, or Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Kant, a prime task as to delineate the variety of human reactions and motivations. Such an inquiry would locate our propensity for moral thinking among other faculties, such as perception and reason, and other tendencies as empathy, sympathy or self-interest. The task continues especially in the light of a post-Darwinian understanding of us.
In some moral systems, notably that of Immanuel Kant, ‘real’ moral worth comes only with interactivity, justly because it is right. However, if you do what is purposely becoming, equitable, but from another equitable motive, such as the fear or prudence, no moral merit accrues to you. Yet, that in turn seems to discount other admirable motivations, as acting from main-sheet benevolence, or ‘sympathy’. The question is how to balance these opposing ideas and how to understand acting from a sense of obligation without duty or rightness, through which their beginning to seem a kind of fetish. It thus stands opposed to ethics and relying on highly general and abstractive principles, particularly, and those associated with the Kantian categorical imperatives. The view may go as far back as to say that taken in its own, no consideration point, for that which of any particular way of life, that, least of mention, the contributing steps so taken as forwarded by reason or be to an understanding estimate that can only proceed by identifying salient features of a situation that weighs on one’s side or another.
As random moral dilemmas set out with intense concern, inasmuch as philosophical matters that exert a profound but influential defence of common sense. Situations, in which each possible course of action breeches some otherwise binding moral principle, are, nonetheless, serious dilemmas making the stuff of many tragedies. The conflict can be described in different was. One suggestion is that whichever action the subject undertakes, that he or she does something wrong. Another is that his is not so, for the dilemma means that in the circumstances for what she or he did was right as any alternate. It is important to the phenomenology of these cases that action leaves a residue of guilt and remorse, even though it had proved it was not the subject’s fault that she or he was considering the dilemma, that the rationality of emotions can be contested. Any normality with more than one fundamental principle seems capable of generating dilemmas, however, dilemmas exist, such as where a mother must decide which of two children to sacrifice, least of mention, no principles are pitted against each other, only if we accept that dilemmas from principles are real and important, this fact can then be used to approach in them, such as of ‘utilitarianism’, to espouse various kinds may, perhaps, be centred upon the possibility of relating to independent feelings, liken to recognize only one sovereign principle. Alternatively, of regretting the existence of dilemmas and the unordered jumble of furthering principles, in that of creating several of them, a theorist may use their occurrences to encounter upon that which it is to argue for the desirability of locating and promoting a single sovereign principle.
Nevertheless, some theories into ethics see the subject in terms of a number of laws (as in the Ten Commandments). Th status of these laws may be that they are the edicts of a divine lawmaker, or that they are truths of reason, given to its situational ethics, virtue ethics, regarding them as at best rules-of-thumb, and, frequently disguising the great complexity of practical representations that for reason has placed the Kantian notions of their moral law.
In continence, the natural law possibility points of the view of the states that law and morality are especially associated with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), such that his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian doctrine was eventually to provide the main philosophical underpinning of the Catholic church. Nevertheless, to a greater extent of any attempt to cement the moral and legal order and together within the nature of the cosmos or the nature of human beings, in which sense it found in some Protestant writings, under which had arguably derived functions. From a Platonic view of ethics and its agedly implicit advance of Stoicism. Its law stands above and apart from the activities of human lawmakers: It constitutes an objective set of principles that can be seen as in and for themselves by means of ‘natural usages’ or by reason itself, additionally, (in religious verses of them), that express of God’s will for creation. Non-religious versions of the theory substitute objective conditions for humans flourishing as the source of constraints, upon permissible actions and social arrangements within the natural law tradition. Different views have been held about the relationship between the rule of the law and God’s will. Grothius, for instance, sides with the view that the content of natural law is independent of any will, including that of God.
While the German natural theorist and historian Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94) takes the opposite view. His great work was the De Jure Naturae et Gentium, 1672, and its English translation are ‘Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 1710. Pufendorf was influenced by Descartes, Hobbes and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, his ambition was to introduce a newly scientific ‘mathematical’ treatment on ethics and law, free from the tainted Aristotelian underpinning of ‘scholasticism’. Like that of his contemporary - Locke. His conception of natural laws includes rational and religious principles, making it only a partial forerunner of more resolutely empiricist and political treatment in the Enlightenment.
Pufendorf launched his explorations in Plato’s dialogue ‘Euthyphro’, with whom the pious things are pious because the gods love them, or do the gods love them because they are pious? The dilemma poses the question of whether value can be conceived as the upshot o the choice of any mind, even a divine one. On the fist option the choice of the gods crates goodness and value. Even if this is intelligible, it seems to make it impossible to praise the gods, for it is then vacuously true that they choose the good. On the second option we have to understand a source of value lying behind or beyond the will even of the gods, and by which they can be evaluated. The elegant solution of Aquinas is and is therefore distinct from its will, but not distinct from him.
The dilemma arises whatever the source of authority is supposed to be. Do we care about the good because it is good, or do we just call well those things that we care about? It also generalizes to affect our understanding of the authority of other things: Mathematics, or necessary truth, for example, are truths necessary because we deem them to be so, or do we deem them to be so because they are necessary?
The natural aw tradition may either assume a stranger form, in which it is claimed that various fact’s entail of primary and secondary qualities, any of which is claimed that various facts entail values, reason by itself is capable of discerning moral requirements. As in the ethics of Kant, these requirements are supposed binding on all human beings, regardless of their desires.
The supposed natural or innate abilities of the mind to know the first principle of ethics and moral reasoning, wherein, those expressions are assigned and related to those that distinctions are which make in terms contribution to the function of the whole, as completed definitions of them, their phraseological impression is termed ‘synderesis’ (or, syntetesis) although traced to Aristotle, the phrase came to the modern era through St. Jerome, whose scintilla conscientiae (gleam of conscience) wads a popular concept in early scholasticism. Nonetheless, it is mainly associated in Aquinas as an infallible natural, simple and the immediate grasp of first moral principles. Conscience, by contrast, is, more concerned with particular instances of right and wrong, and can be in error, under which the assertion that is taken as fundamental, at least for the purposes of the branch of enquiry in hand.
It is, nevertheless, the view interpreted within the particular states of law and morality especially associated with Aquinas and the subsequent scholastic tradition, showing for itself the enthusiasm for reform for its own sake. Or for ‘rational’ schemes thought up by managers and theorists, is therefore entirely misplaced. Major o exponent s of this theme include the British absolute idealist Herbert Francis Bradley (1846-1924) and Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. The notably the idealism of Bradley, there ids the same doctrine that change is contradictory and consequently unreal: The Absolute is changeless. A way of sympathizing a little with his idea is to reflect that any scientific explanation of change will proceed by finding an unchanging law operating, or an unchanging quantity conserved in the change, so that explanation of change always proceeds by finding that which is unchanged. The metaphysical problem of change is to shake off the idea that each moment is created afresh, and to obtain a conception of events or processes as having a genuinely historical reality, Really extended and unfolding in time, as opposed to being composites of discrete temporal atoms. A step toward this end may be to see time itself not as an infinite container within which discrete events are located, bu as a kind of logical construction from the flux of events. This relational view of time was advocated by Leibniz and a subject of the debate between him and Newton’s Absolutist pupil, Clarke.
Generally, nature is an indefinitely mutable term, changing as our scientific conception of the world changes, and often best seen as signifying a contrast with something considered not part of nature. The term applies both to individual species (it is the nature of gold to be dense or of dogs to be friendly), and to the natural world as a whole. The sense in which it applies to species that are instantly linked with ethical and aesthetic ideals: A thing ought to realize its nature, what is natural is what it is good for a thing to become, it is natural for humans to be healthy or two-legged, and departure from this is a misfortune or deformity. The association of what is natural with what it is good to become is visible in Plato, and is the central idea of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. Unfortunately, the pinnacle of nature in this sense is the mature adult male citizen, with the rest of what we would call the natural world, including women, slaves, children and other species, not quite making it.
Nature overall can, however, function as a foil to any idea inasmuch as a source of ideals: In this sense fallen nature is contrasted with a supposed celestial realization of the ‘forms’. The theory of ‘forms’ is probably the most characteristic, and most contested of the doctrines of Plato. In the background ie the Pythagorean conception of form as the key to physical nature, bu also the sceptical doctrine associated with the Greek philosopher Cratylus, and is sometimes thought to have been a teacher of Plato before Socrates. He is famous for capping the doctrine of Ephesus of Heraclitus, whereby the guiding idea of his philosophy was that of the logos, is capable of being heard or hearkened to by people, it unifies opposites, and it is somehow associated with fire, which is preeminent among the four elements that Heraclitus distinguishes: Fire, air (breath, the stuff of which souls composed), earth, and water. Although he is principally remembering for the doctrine of the ‘flux’ of all things, and the famous statement that you cannot step into the same river twice, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you. The more extreme implication of the doctrine of flux, e.g., the impossibility of categorizing things truly, do not seem consistent with his general epistemology and views of meaning, and were to his follower Cratylus, although the proper conclusion of his views was that the flux cannot be captured in words. According to Aristotle, he eventually held that since ‘regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing nothing ids just to stay silent and wag one’s finger. Plato ‘s theory of forms can be seen in part as an action against the impasse to which Cratylus was driven.
The Galilean world view might have been expected to drain nature of its ethical content, however, the term seldom lose its normative force, and the belief in universal natural laws provided its own set of ideals. In the 18th century for example, a painter or writer could be praised as natural, where the qualities expected would include normal [universal] topics treated with simplicity, economy, regularity and harmony. Later on, nature becomes an equally potent emblem of irregularity, wildness, and fertile diversity, but also associated with progress of human history, its incurring definition that has been taken to fit many things as well as transformation, including ordinary human self-consciousness. Nature, being in contrast within integrated phenomenons may include (1) that which is deformed or grotesque or fails to achieve its proper form or function or just the statistically uncommon or unfamiliar, (2) the supernatural, or the world of gods and invisible agencies, (3) the world of rationality and unintelligence, conceived of as distinct from the biological and physical order, or the product of human intervention, and (5) related to that, the world of convention and artifice.
Different conceptualized traits as grounded within the nature's continuous overtures that play ethically, for example, the conception of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ often provides a justification for aggressive personal and political relations, or the idea that it is women’s nature to be one thing or another is taken to be a justification for differential social expectations. The term functions as a fig-leaf for a particular set of stereotypes, and is a proper target of much feminist writings. Feminist epistemology has asked whether different ways of knowing for instance with different criteria of justification, and different emphases on logic and imagination, characterize male and female attempts to understand the world. Such concerns include awareness of the ‘masculine’ self-image, itself a social variable and potentially distorting pictures of what thought and action should be. Again, there is a spectrum of concerns from the highly theoretical to the relatively practical. In this latter area particular attention is given to the institutional biases that stand in the way of equal opportunities in science and other academic pursuits, or the ideologies that stand in the way of women seeing themselves as leading contributors to various disciplines. However, to more radical feminists such concerns merely exhibit women wanting for themselves the same power and rights over others that men have claimed, and failing to confront the real problem, which is how to live without such symmetrical powers and rights.
In biological determinism, not only influences but constraints and makes inevitable our development as persons with a variety of traits. At its silliest the view postulates such entities as a gene predisposing people to poverty, and it is the particular enemy of thinkers stressing the parental, social, and political determinants of the way we are.
The philosophy of social science is more heavily intertwined with actual social science than in the case of other subjects such as physics or mathematics, since its question is centrally whether there can be such a thing as sociology. The idea of a ‘science of man’, devoted to uncovering scientific laws determining the basic dynamic s of human interactions was a cherished ideal of the Enlightenment and reached its heyday with the positivism of writers such as the French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte (1798-1957), and the historical materialism of Marx and his followers. Sceptics point out that what happens in society is determined by peoples’ own ideas of what should happen, and like fashions those ideas change in unpredictable ways as self-consciousness is susceptible to change by any number of external event s: Unlike the solar system of celestial mechanics a society is not at all a closed system evolving in accordance with a purely internal dynamic, but constantly responsive to shocks from outside.
The sociological approach to human behaviour is based on the premise that all social behaviour has a biological basis, and seeks to understand that basis in terms of genetic encoding for features that are then selected for through evolutionary history. The philosophical problem is essentially one of methodology: Of finding criteria for identifying features that can usefully be explained in this way, and for finding criteria for assessing various genetic stories that might provide useful explanations.
Among the features that are proposed for this kind of interpretations that are such things as male dominance, male promiscuity versus female fidelity, propensities to sympathy and other emotions, and the limited altruism characteristic of human beings. The strategy has proved unnecessarily controversial, with proponents accused of ignoring the influence of environmental and social factors in moulding people’s characteristics, e.g., at the limit of silliness, by postulating a ‘gene for poverty’, however, there is no need for the approach to commit such errors, since the feature explained sociobiological may be indexed to environment: For instance, it may be a propensity to develop some feature in another environments (for even a propensity to develop propensities . . .) The main problem is to separate genuine explanation from speculative, just so stories that may or may not identify as really selective mechanisms.
Subsequently, in the 19th century attempts were made to base ethical reasoning on the presumed facts about evolution. The movement is particularly associated with the English philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). His first major work was the book Social Statics (1851), which advocate extreme political libertarianism. The Principles of Psychology was published in 1855, and his very influential Education advocating natural development of intelligence, the creation of pleasurable interest, and the importance of science in the curriculum, appeared in 1861. His First Principles (1862) was followed over the succeeding years by volumes on the Principles of biology and psychology, sociology and ethics. Although he attracted a large public following and attained the stature of a sage, his speculative work has not lasted well, and in his own time there were dissident voices. T.H. Huxley said that Spencer’s definition of a tragedy was a deduction killed by a fact. Writer and social prophet Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) called him a perfect vacuum, and the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) wondered why half of England wanted to bury him in Westminister Abbey, and talked of the ‘hurdy-gurdy’ monotony of him, and whose wholeness of system depicts itself for being wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock.
The premises regarded by a later elements in an evolutionary path are better than earlier ones, the application of this principle then requires seeing western society, laissez-faire capitalism, or another object of approval, as more evolved than more ‘primitive’ social forms. Neither the principle nor the applications command much respect. The version of evolutionary ethics called ‘social Darwinism’ emphasizes the struggle for natural selection, and drawn the conclusion that we should glorify such struggles, usually by enhancing competitive and aggressive relations between people in society or between societies themselves. More recently the relation between evolution and ethics has been re-thought in the light of biological discoveries concerning altruism and kin-selection.
In that, the study of the say in which a variety of higher mental functions may be adaptions applicable of a psychology of evolution, as formed in response to selection pressures on human populations through evolutionary time. Candidates for such theorizing include material and paternal motivations, capabilities for love and friendship, the development of language as a signalling system, cooperative and aggressive tendencies, our emotional repertoires, our moral reaction, including the disposition to direct and punish those who cheat on an agreement or of those that free-ride on the work of others, our cognitive structure and many others. Evolutionary psychology goes hand-in-hand with neurophysiological evidence about the underlying circuitry in the brain that subserves the psychological mechanisms it claims to identify.
For all that, an essential part of the British absolute idealist Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) was largely on the ground s that the self-sufficiency individualized through community and oneself is to contribute to social and other ideals. However, truth as formulated in language is always partial, and dependent upon categories that they are inadequate to the harmonious whole. Nevertheless, these self-contradictory elements somehow contribute to the harmonious whole, or Absolute, lying beyond categorization. Although absolute idealism maintains few adherents today, Bradley’s general dissent from empiricism, his holism, and the brilliance and styles of his writing continue to make him the most interesting of the late 19th century writers influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).
Understandably, something less than the fragmented division that belonging of Bradley’s case has a preference, voiced much earlier by the German philosopher, mathematician and polymath, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), for categorical monadic properties over relations. He was particularly troubled by the relation between that which ids known and the more that knows it. In philosophy, the Romantics took from the German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) both the emphasis on free-will and the doctrine that reality is ultimately spiritual, with nature itself a mirror of the human soul. To fix upon one among alternatives as the one to be taken, Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) who collectively forgathers nature of becoming a creative spirit whose aspiration is ever further and more to a completed self-realization, although its movement is more general to naturalization than responsive imperatives. Romanticism drew on the same intellectual and emotional resources as German idealism was increasingly culminating in the philosophy of Hegal (1770-1831) and of absolute idealism.
Being such in comparison with nature may include (1) that which is deformed or grotesque, or fails to achieve its proper form or function, or just the statistically uncommon or unfamiliar, (2) the supernatural, or the world of gods and invisible agencies, (3) the world of rationality and intelligence, conceived of as distinct from the biological and physical order, (4) that which is manufactured and artefactual, or the product of human invention, and (5) related to it, the world of convention and artifice.
Different conceptions of nature continue to have ethical overtones, for example, the conception of ‘natures - red in tooth and claw - often provide a justification for aggressive personal and political relations, or the idea that it is a women’s nature to be one thing or another, as taken to be a justification for differential social expectations. The term functions as a fig-leaf for a particular set of stereotypes, and is a proper target of much ‘feminist’ writing.
This brings to question, that most of all ethics are contributively distributed as an understanding for which a dynamic function in and among the problems that are affiliated with human desire and needs the achievements of happiness, or the distribution of goods. The central problem specific to thinking about the environment is the independent value to place on ‘such-things’ as preservation of species, or protection of the wilderness. Such protection can be supported as a mans to ordinary human ends, for instance, when animals are regarded as future sources of medicines or other benefits. Nonetheless, many would want to claim a non-utilitarian, absolute value for the existence of wild things and wild places. It is in their value that things consist. They put u in our proper place, and failure to appreciate this value is not only an aesthetic failure but one of due humility and reverence, a moral disability. The problem is one of expressing this value, and mobilizing it against utilitarian agents for developing natural areas and exterminating species, more or less at will.
Many concerns and disputed clusters around the idea associated with the term ‘substance’. The substance of a thing may be considered in: (1) Its essence, or that which makes it what it is. This will ensure that the substance of a thing is that which remains through change in properties. Again, in Aristotle, this essence becomes more than just the matter, but a unity of matter and form. (2) That which can exist by itself, or does not need a subject for existence, in the way that properties need objects, hence (3) that which bears properties, as a substance is then the subject of predication, that about which things are said as opposed to the things said about it. Substance in the last two senses stands opposed to modifications such as quantity, quality, relations, etc. it is hard to keep this set of ideas distinct from the doubtful notion of a substratum, something distinct from any of its properties, and hence, as an incapable characterization. The notion of substances tends an inclination or tendency to render by it vanquishing disappearance in empiricist thought in fewer of the sensible questions of things with the notion of that in which they infer of giving way to an empirical notion of their regular occurrence. However, this is in turn is problematic, since it only makes sense to talk of the occurrence of an instance of qualities, not of quantities themselves. So the problem of what it is for a value quality to be the instance that remains.
Metaphysics inspired by modern science tend to reject the concept of substance in favour of concepts such as that of a field or a process, each of which may seem to provide a better example of a fundamental physical category.
It must be spoken of a concept that is deeply embedded in 18th century aesthetics, but deriving from the first-century rhetorical treatise on the Sublime, by Longinus. The sublime is great, fearful, noble, calculated to arouse sentiments of pride and majesty, as well as awe and sometimes terror. According to Alexander Gerard’s writing in 1759, ‘When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that objects, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder, and administration’: It finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of its object, as enliven and invigorates which this occasions, it sometimes images itself present in every part of the sense that it contemplates, and from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.
In Kant’s aesthetic theory the sublime ‘raises the soul above the height of vulgar complacency’. We experience the vast spectacles of nature as ‘absolutely great’ and of irresistible might and power. This perception is fearful, but by conquering this fear, and by regarding as small ‘those things of which we are wont to be solicitous’ we quicken our sense of moral freedom. So we turn the experience of frailty and impotence into one of our true, inward moral freedom as the mind triumphs over nature, and it is this triumph of reason that is truly sublime. Kant thus paradoxically places our sense of the sublime in an awareness of ourselves as transcending nature, than in an awareness of ourselves as a frail and insignificant part of it.
Nevertheless, the doctrine that all relations are internal was a cardinal thesis of absolute idealism, and a central point of attack by the British philosopher’s George Edward Moore (1873-1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). It is a kind of ‘essentialism’, stating that if two things stand in some relationship, then they could not be what they are, did they not do so, if, for instance, I am wearing a hat mow, then when we imagine a possible situation that we would be got to describe as my not wearing the hat now, we would strictly not be imaging as one and the hat, but only some different individual.
The countering partitions a doctrine that bears some resemblance to the metaphysically based view of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) that if a person had any other attributes that the ones he has, he would not have been the same person. Leibniz thought that when asked that what would have happened if Peter had not denied Christ. That being that if I am asking what had happened if Peter had not been Peter, denying Christ is contained in the complete notion of Peter. But he allowed that by the name ‘Peter’ might be understood as ‘what is involved in those attributes [of Peter] from which the denial does not follow’. In order that we are held accountable to allow of external relations, in that these being relations which individuals could have or not depending upon contingent circumstances. The relations of ideas are used by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) in the First Enquiry of Theoretical Knowledge. All the objects of human reason or enquiring naturally, be divided into two kinds: To bring order and unity to all ‘relations of ideas’ and ‘matter of fact‘ (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) the terms reflect the belief that any thing that can be known dependently must be internal to the mind, and hence transparent and translucent as to allow the diffusing luminous appearances that distinguish beyond that which we can appreciably diffuse and succumbantly clear distortion, in so doing, objects beyond are entirely visible.
In Hume, objects of knowledge are divided into matter of fact (roughly empirical things known by means of impressions) and the relation of ideas. The contrast, also called 'Hume’s Fork’, is a version of the speculative deductivity distinction, but reflects the 17th and early 18th centauries behind that the deductivity is established by chains of infinite certainty as comparable to ideas. It is extremely important that in the period between Descartes and J.S. Mill that a demonstration is not, but only a chain of ‘intuitive’ comparable ideas, whereby a principle or maxim can be established by reason alone. It is in this sense that the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who believed that theologically and moral principles are capable of demonstration, and Hume denies that they are, and denies that scientific enquiries proceed in demonstrating its effectual results to assume of its finishing sequential considerations.
A mathematical proof is formally inferred as to an argument that is used to show the truth of a mathematical assertion. In modern mathematics, a proof begins with one or more statements called premises and demonstrates, using the rules of logic, that if the premises are true then a particular conclusion must also be true.
The accepted methods and strategies used to construct a convincing mathematical argument have evolved since ancient times and continue to change. Consider the Pythagorean theorem, named after the 5th century Bc Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, which states that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Many early civilizations considered this theorem true because it agreed with their observations in practical situations. But the early Greeks, among others, realized that observation and commonly held opinions do not guarantee mathematical truth. For example, before the 5th century Bc it was widely believed that all lengths could be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. But an unknown Greek mathematician proved that this was not true by showing that the length of the diagonal of a square with an area of one is the irrational number Ã.
The Greek mathematician Euclid laid down some of the conventions central to modern mathematical proofs. His book The Elements, written about 300 Bc, contains many proofs in the fields of geometry and algebra. This book illustrates the Greek practice of writing mathematical proofs by first clearly identifying the initial assumptions and then reasoning from them in a logical way in order to obtain a desired conclusion. As part of such an argument, Euclid used results that had already been shown to be true, called theorems, or statements that were explicitly acknowledged to be self-evident, called axioms; this practice continues today.
In the 20th century, proofs have been written that are so complex that no one person understands every argument used in them. In 1976, a computer was used to complete the proof of the four-colour theorem. This theorem states that four colours are sufficient to colour any map in such a way that regions with a common boundary line have different colours. The use of a computer in this proof inspired considerable debate in the mathematical community. At issue was whether a theorem can be considered proven if human beings have not actually checked every detail of the proof.
The study of the relations of deductibility among sentences in a logical calculus that benefits the prof theory. Deductibility is defined purely syntactically, that is, without reference to the intended interpretation of the calculus. The subject was founded by the mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) in the hope that strictly inffinitary methods would provide a way of proving the consistency of classical mathematics, but the ambition was torpedoed by Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.
What is more, the use of a model to test for consistencies in an ‘axiomatized system’ which is older than modern logic. Descartes’ algebraic interpretation of Euclidean geometry provides a way of showing that if the theory of real numbers is consistent, so is the geometry. Similar representation had been used by mathematicians in the 19th century, for example to show that if Euclidean geometry is consistent, so are various non-Euclidean geometries. Model theory is the general study of this kind of procedure: The ‘proof theory’ studies relations of deductibility between formulae of a system, but once the notion of an interpretation is in place we can ask whether a formal system meets certain conditions. In particular, can it lead us from sentences that are true under some interpretation? And if a sentence is true under all interpretations, is it also a theorem of the system? We can define a notion of validity (a formula is valid if it is true in all interpret rations) and semantic consequence (a formula ‘B’ is a semantic consequence of a set of formulae, written {A1 . . . An} ⊨B, if it is true in all interpretations in which they are true) Then the central questions for a calculus will be whether all and only its theorems are valid, and whether {A1 . . . An} ⊨ B if and only if {A1 . . . An} ⊢B. There are the questions of the soundness and completeness of a formal system. For the propositional calculus this turns into the question of whether the proof theory delivers as theorems all and only ‘tautologies’. There are many axiomatizations of the propositional calculus that are consistent and complete. The mathematical logician Kurt Gödel (1906-78) proved in 1929 that the first-order predicate under every interpretation is a theorem of the calculus.
The Euclidean geometry is the greatest example of the pure ‘axiomatic method’, and as such had incalculable philosophical influence as a paradigm of rational certainty. It had no competition until the 19th century when it was realized that the fifth axiom of his system (parallel lines never meet) could be denied without inconsistency, leading to Riemannian spherical geometry. The significance of Riemannian geometry lies in its use and extension of both Euclidean geometry and the geometry of surfaces, leading to a number of generalized differential geometries. Its most important effect was that it made a geometrical application possible for some major abstractions of tensor analysis, leading to the pattern and concepts for general relativity later used by Albert Einstein in developing his theory of relativity. Riemannian geometry is also necessary for treating electricity and magnetism in the framework of general relativity. The fifth chapter of Euclid’s Elements, is attributed to the mathematician Eudoxus, and contains a precise development of the real number, work that remained unappreciated until rediscovered in the 19th century.
The Axiom, in logic and mathematics, is a basic principle that is assumed to be true without proof. The use of axioms in mathematics stems from the ancient Greeks, most probably during the 5th century Bc, and represents the beginnings of pure mathematics as it is known today. Examples of axioms are the following: 'No sentence can be true and false at the same time' (the principle of contradiction); 'If equals are added to equals, the sums are equal'. 'The whole is greater than any of its parts'. Logic and pure mathematics begin with such unproved assumptions from which other propositions (theorems) are derived. This procedure is necessary to avoid circularity, or an infinite regression in reasoning. The axioms of any system must be consistent with one another, that is, they should not lead to contradictions. They should be independent in the sense that they cannot be derived from one another. They should also be fewer. Axioms have sometimes been interpreted as self-evident truths. The present tendency is to avoid this claim and simply to assert that an axiom is assumed to be true without proof in the system of which it is a part.
The terms 'axiom' and 'postulate' are often used synonymously. Sometimes the word axiom is used to refer to basic principles that are assumed by every deductive system, and the term postulate is used to refer to first principles peculiar to a particular system, such as Euclidean geometry. Infrequently, the word axiom is used to refer to first principles in logic, and the term postulate is used to refer to first principles in mathematics.
The applications of game theory are wide-ranging and account for steadily growing interest in the subject. Von Neumann and Morgenstern indicated the immediate utility of their work on mathematical game theory by linking it with economic behaviour. Models can be developed, in fact, for markets of various commodities with differing numbers of buyers and sellers, fluctuating values of supply and demand, and seasonal and cyclical variations, as well as significant structural differences in the economies concerned. Here game theory is especially relevant to the analysis of conflicts of interest in maximizing profits and promoting the widest distribution of goods and services. Equitable division of property and of inheritance is another area of legal and economic concern that can be studied with the techniques of game theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment