Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 6

Amy Kind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429019388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

While the philosophical study of mind has always required philosophers to attend to the scientific developments of their day, from the twentieth century onwards it has been especially influenced and informed by psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.

Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries provides an outstanding survey of the most prominent themes in twentieth-century and contemporary philosophy of mind. It also looks to the future, offering cautious predictions about developments in the field in the years to come.

Following an introduction by Amy Kind, twelve specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including:

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• the phenomenological tradition,
• the mind–body problem,
• theories of consciousness,
• theories of perception,
• theories of personal identity,
• mental causation,
• intentionality,
• Wittgenstein and his legacy,
• cognitive science, and
• future directions for philosophy of mind.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and cognitive science.

1

Philosophy of mind in the phenomenological tradition

Philip J. Walsh and Jeff Yoshimi

1. Introduction

Contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of mind are vast areas of research. In the PhilPapers database, phenomenology has over 34,000 entries, and philosophy of mind contains over 92,000 entries, distributed across consciousness, intentionality, perception, and metaphysics of mind, among others.¹ The two areas come together at many points – think of two galaxies colliding. But the metaphor is not quite apt. They are not independent bodies of research that happen to overlap but are rather two phases of a continuous tradition that diverged for a time and are now, at least partially, reintegrating (the image of a diverging and re-converging flock of starlings – a murmuration – comes to mind).

Philosophy of mind in the 20th century is typically understood in terms of a certain historical progression (cf. Chapter 2): after rejecting introspection as unreliable, the behaviorists of the 1930s–1950s sought to understand the mind strictly in terms of publicly available data. But behaviorism cannot account for certain inner feelings and states, so the identity theory emerged in the late 1950s as a viable physicalist alternative (Place 1956; Feigl 1958; Smart 1959). The identity theory posits a strict, reductive identity between brain states and mental states. However, the one-to-one link between psychological terms and corresponding physical terms was problematic, since terms like “pain” seem to have a one-many relation to physical kinds (many types of system can feel pain). To address this issue, functionalists described mental states as states of a kind of finite state machine or probabilistic automaton, defined by a pattern of relationships between inputs, outputs, and other internal states (Fodor 1974; Putnam 1967). These systems have the attractive feature that they can be multiply realized in different physical systems. Thus, octopi and humans can be in pain. It is “non-reductive” physicalism because it does not posit a 1–1 identity relation between mental states and brain state types, but rather a many-one implementation relation (Stoljar 2015). Functionalism continues to be a dominant theory of mind.

However, problems with functionalism – which were essentially phenomenological problems – emerged beginning in the 1970s. Nagel (1974), and later Block (1980), Searle (1980), and Jackson (1982), pointed out that purely formal relations between states leave out the first-person, subjective character of consciousness. By the 1990s, consciousness had become a central topic in philosophy of mind (Searle 1992; Flanagan 1992; Chalmers 1996; also see Chapter 3 on 20th-century theories of consciousness), and since then, more and more aspects of the mental are being addressed from a standpoint that does not try to reduce or analyze away consciousness.²

So contemporary philosophy of mind has rediscovered phenomenology, albeit in an (until recently) fairly impoverished form. Contemporary philosophers of mind often address “the phenomenology” of a particular form of experience by inquiring whether “there is something that it is like” to undergo it. The phrase is suggestive, but it has led to an austere phenomenology, an account of the “small mental residue” that materialist theories leave unexplained (Kim 2010, 333). This narrow conception of phenomenology has, however, been expanding. “Liberal” accounts of phenomenal character include emotional-affective, agentive, and cognitive experience (Bayne and Montague 2011). Intentionality has been pursued in an increasingly phenomenological way (Horgan and Tienson 2002; Kriegel 2013). These and related projects come closer to phenomenology as historically conceived, which was extremely rich in terms of its method, scope, and conceptual apparatus.

In what follows, we use the term “phenomenology” in two senses. In one sense, “phenomenology” is a method – the study of consciousness using first-person reflection. It studies the phenomenal character of mental states, or “what it is like” to experience them from the first-person perspective. In another sense, “phenomenology” is an explicit research program initiated by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and developed in different and sometimes inconsistent ways by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), and others.

In the next section, we give an overview of the phenomenological tradition. In section 3, we survey some of the many ways phenomenology overlaps philosophy of mind: they have shared historical origins in Brentano, Frege, and Husserl; there are numerous areas of thematic overlap; and there are also active collaborations, especially in the recent literature. In sections 4 and 5, we develop two case studies that show in more detail how phenomenology and philosophy mind can interact. In section 4, we describe a detailed phenomenological approach to perceptual content, and in section 5 we outline Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of mind-body relations.

2. Overview of phenomenology

Phenomenology is often defined as the study of consciousness, or sometimes, the study of phenomena, i.e. things as they appear as opposed to things as they really are. Although there are problems with this definition (Husserl and Heidegger would have quibbles with it), it is helpful as a first pass way of understanding what phenomenology is.

The first of the classical phenomenologists, Husserl, developed the following first-person reflective method. He begins with the phenomenological reduction (Husserl 2014, §32ff.). The idea is to focus on lived experience in the “natural attitude” of daily life, and to describe it as accurately as possible. To do this, take some episode of everyday life, put it in “brackets” (i.e. do not make any extraneous assumptions about it, but simply treat it as a phenomenon to be studied) and describe it. Perhaps you are aware of a book page or a computer screen as you read these words, as well as pictures or people in the background. Perhaps you are aware of music playing, an itch in your body, or a lingering emotional state. You arguably have some sense of yourself and your body as separate from the things around you. You probably assume the things around you exist. Most of us are thus naïve realists in the natural attitude (in this way the method is supposed to differ from Descartes’; there is no active doubting, there is simply a description of whatever our epistemic attitude happens to be at a time).

Husserl dissected these conscious states into their various kinds of parts, using mereology, the study of parts and wholes, which he helped to develop (Varzi 2015). For example, within the total field of consciousness he distinguishes intentional experiences or “acts” of consciousness as entities that can be further analyzed (which, following his teacher Brentano, were an emphasis throughout his career; cf. Chapter 8 on Intentionality). Within intentional experiences of physical objects, Husserl distinguishes their sensory character from their more cognitive components (the way the cup looks vs. my knowledge that it is a cup, that it was given to me at Christmas last year, etc.). He also distinguishes one’s sense of an object as an external object, from one’s sense of herself as perceiving the object. Several of the distinctions that Husserl made in his careful mereological analyses of perceptual experience foreshadow contemporary debates about the metaphysics and epistemology of perceptual experience. For example, Husserl claims that perceptual experience consists of non-intentional sensory stuff (which he referred to as hyle) in need of conceptual “interpretation” or “apprehension”, a topic that tracks several current debates (see section 4 below).

One of Husserl’s main innovations is his account of how the objects given in intentional experience are “constituted” in “webs of partial intentions”, characterized by “motivation” relations and “horizon” structures (Husserl 2001a, §10; 1989, §56).³ The idea is that my seeing a thing as being a certain way is founded on a pattern of counterfactual sensori-motor relationships between my current sensory experience and my immanent anticipations. As I turn the cup in my hands or move around it, my current sense of the front of the cup “motivates” a range of further perspectives (Walsh 2013). The totality of my motivated expectations forms a kind of “horizon” of understanding, which captures my overall sense of how I think the thing will look from different perspectives. When I move the cup, these motivated expectations will either be fulfilled or frustrated by what I actually do see. When expectations are frustrated, I update my horizon understanding of the cup. When I learn something about the cup this information is “sedimented” in to my understanding of it. These changes in how I see things are studied by “genetic phenomenology.” In these and other ways, reality is “constituted” for a person in flowing streams of experience. The study of how different features of experienced reality are related to conscious processes is what Husserl calls “constitutive phenomenology.” Much of Husserl’s vast output – 40,000 pages of research manuscripts – takes up questions relating to particular domains of constitutive phenomenology: the constitution of space, time, living beings, animals, other people, social, worlds, cultural institutions, fictional worlds, abstract domains like mathematics, etc. In section 5, we consider one of these areas – Husserl’s account of the constitution of mind-body relations relative to our experiences of minds, bodies, and mind-body interactions – in relation to the contemporary metaphysics of mind.

Husserl makes a distinction between two general types of phenomenological process (Yoshimi 2009). On the one hand, there is a level of passive or pre-predicative constitution, which does not involve attention (hence “passive”) or language (hence “pre-predicative”). Simply by interacting with things, we get a sense of how they work. As we walk around a neighborhood, interact with a cat, or practice skiing, we become familiar with how the neighborhood is laid out, or how the cat or skis tend to behave. As surprises occur, we update our knowledge of these things: we change what we expect at a turn in the neighborhood, or how we expect the cat to respond to a new person. Husserl refers to this as a process of “passive genesis”, by which our intuitive, pre-attentive understanding of things is updated (Husserl 1969; 1973; 2001c). Whenever we see a thing, we tacitly bring all this implicitly acquired understanding to it, via what Husserl calls “passive synthesis”. When, by contrast, we start to talk about things, using the explicit conceptual resources of a language, a second set of dynamics – which is active and predicative – becomes involved. Husserl describes in great detail how, in acts of comparing, contrasting, explicating, counting, relating, and so forth, we develop a more explicit, linguistically mediated sense of things. This cat is named Lily. She is a Balinese, and Balinese cats are known to be playful. These conceptual structures have their own horizon-structures, a kind of linguistic web of associations and patterns that further inform how we experience things. These two processes have been used to understand Husserl’s relation to social and embodied cognition (Walsh 2014), cognitive science (Yoshimi 2009), and perceptual content (Hopp 2008, see section 4 below).

Husserl also describes essences or eide, which are invariant features of a class of objects constituted in experience. He does so using a variational method, which may have derived from the mathematical theory of calculus of variations (Variationsrechnung) he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on (Yoshimi 2007). The idea is to take some object given in the field of experience, e.g. a perceived cup or passage of music, and then imagine arbitrary variations to it, while remaining in some larger region of being (e.g. physical things in general, sounds in general). The cup could be larger, a different color, etc., but still remain a physical thing. Features of the thing that remain constant through the variation are essences. Husserl says, for example, that it is an essence of perceived physical things that we never perceive them all at once: no matter how we alter the cup, we are always perceiving only one part of it. This is the essential “one-sidedness” of perception (Husserl 2014, 12; see also Husserl 2014, §42). Essences impose necessary constraints on how the members of a given class of objects or processes must appear in consciousness. Eidetic phenomenology studies these essences. Essences are known a priori and are necessarily true, according to Husserl. There are interesting questions about the viability of eidetic phenomenology (Kasmier 2010) and its relation to rationalism, conceptual analysis, and contemporary epistemology.⁴ In section 5, we consider Husserl’s eidetic analysis of the phenomenology of the mind-body problem, a kind of conceptual analysis of what is necessary, and what is left open, when one experiences minds in relation to bodies.

Husserl thought of phenomenology as an active, collaborative research program and not as a static doctrine. In Logical Investigations, he refers to the “zig-zag” (Zickzack) manner of phenomenological inquiry: “since the close interdependence of our various epistemological concepts leads us back again and again to our original analyses, where the new confirms the old...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• General introduction
• Introduction to volume 6: twentieth-century philosophy of mind: themes, problems, and scientific context
• 1 Philosophy of mind in the phenomenological tradition
• 2 The mind-body problem in 20th-century philosophy
• 3 A short history of philosophical theories of consciousness in the 20th century
• 4 20th-century theories of perception
• 5 20th-century theories of personal identity
• 6 Introspecting in the 20th century
• 7 The mental causation debates in the 20th century
• 8 Intentionality: from Brentano to representationalism
• 9 Wittgenstein and his legacy
• 10 The boundaries of the mind
• 11 The rise of cognitive science in the 20th century
• 12 How philosophy of mind can shape the future
• Index