Reading One's Own Mind: Self-Awareness and Developmental Psychology

2004 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 297-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Nichols ◽  
Stephen Stich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Way

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper.

scholarly journals Metacognitive Development and Conceptual Change in Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-763
Author(s):  
Joulia Smortchkova ◽  
Nicholas Shea
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Mathematical Concepts ◽  
Metacognitive Development ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Way

AbstractThere has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children (c. 8–12 years) acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically.

scholarly journals Kazimir Malevich: Approaching The New System

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Lyubchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Set Theory ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Original Script ◽  
The World ◽  
New System ◽  
The Way

This dissertation examines Kazimir Malevich’s art and writing with a view to establishing that they combine a strain of strict methodological reductionism with an equally well-marked esotericism. It strives to prove that although this feature of Malevich’s work was common among vanguard artists and thinkers, there are also highly idiosyncratic qualities in the way Malevich reconciled these two threads. An ensuing goal of this work is to propose how to complete an unfinished 1927 film script by Kazimir Malevich titled “Artistic and Scientific Film—Painting and Architectural Concerns—Approaching the New Plastic Architectural System.” <div>The question regarding the confluence of science and mysticism in Malevich’s work— the primary concern of this dissertation—requires tracing in the artist’s art and writings the presence of ideas belonging to these worldviews traditionally considered to be antithetical to each other. This dissertation establishes Malevich’s relationship with mysticism and strains of thought that resemble scientific content and approach. Among the latter, this work investigates Malevich’s interest in the geometry of the fourth dimension, draws parallels between the artist’s concern for visualizing infinity and the problems of set theory, and examines the role of imaginary numbers in Malevich’s worldview. To complete the analysis of Malevich’s exploration of the concept of space prominent in the aforementioned mathematical themes, this dissertation examines the artist’s interest in investigating the space of the cosmos. It also establishes that Malevich’s ideas were not only influenced by the scientific advancements in electromagnetism but also by the theories of thermodynamics, which together with the former relay a view of the world where all processes, organic and inorganic, are understood as the product of the transformation of energy. In Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect, R. Bruce Elder draws attention to the early twentieth-century thinkers’ view of cinema as an electromagnetic machine. This dissertation examines Malevich’s relationship with the cinematic art and its reception in Russia during Malevich’s most productive years. This work concludes with having satisfied its larger objective: to envision a possible scenario of how Malevich’s unfinished script could unfold. It contains the copy of the original script, its proposed finale, and an essay that outlines how my investigation of Malevich’s intellectual landscape informed the decisions involved in inferring the concluding shot sequences of the artist’s only cinematic work.<br></div>

scholarly journals The problem of other minds and psychological notions

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Radenovic
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Philosophical Psychology ◽  
Primary Function ◽  
Skeptical Problem ◽  
Problem Of Other Minds ◽  
Psychological Concepts

Wittgensteinian solution to the problem of other minds is usually associated with Wittgenstein?s position that psychological concepts do not describe but express mental states. In his book An Essay on Philosophical Psychology An Essay on Philosophical Psychology L. Kojen (2009) develops an interpretation of Wittgenstein according to which Wittgenstein himself was aware that all psychological concepts cannot be analyzed in terms of the expression of inner states. My goal in this paper is to examine whether the admission that psychological concepts have descriptive uses involves a return to mentalism and a reintroduction of skepticism regarding other minds. By relying on developmental psychology, I hope to show: a) that expression is the primary function of psychological concepts as it occurs first in child?s development, and b) that the descriptive uses appear later with language acquisitioion but do not lead to the skeptical problem of other minds.

scholarly journals Developmental phenomenology: examples from social cognition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Vincini ◽  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Phenomenological Psychology ◽  
Developmental Science ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Psychological Models ◽  
Innate Ability

Abstract We explore relationships between phenomenology and developmental psychology through an in-depth analysis of a particular problem in social cognition: the most fundamental access to other minds. In the first part of the paper, we examine how developmental science can benefit phenomenology. We explicate the connection between cognitive psychology and developmental phenomenology as a form of constructive phenomenological psychology. Nativism in contemporary science constitutes a strong impulse to conceive of the possibility of an innate ability to perceive others’ mental states, an idea which also has a transcendental implication. In the second part, we consider how phenomenology can contribute to developmental science. Phenomenology can go beyond the necessary evaluation and reinterpretation of experimental results. Some phenomenological notions and theories can be put forward on a par with alternative cognitive-psychological models and compete with them on grounds of empirical adequacy. For example, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pairing can constitute a viable account of how infants access other minds. We outline a number of ways in which this account can be tested and can thus contribute to generating empirical knowledge.

Enquiries Concerning the Minds of Others

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Matthew Parrott
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
The Third ◽  
Everyday Knowledge ◽  
The Way

This chapter serves as substantive introduction to the topic of this volume. More specifically, it discusses three central problems relating to our everyday knowledge of other minds. The first is an epistemological problem concerning whether we are capable of knowing anything at all about the mental states of others and, if we are, how we are able to do this. The second is a conceptual problem, concerning our ability to have concepts of mental states that are applicable both to oneself and to others in a way that preserves unity of meaning. As we will see, this conceptual problem arises if we think that a subject typically acquires mental state concepts on the basis of her own experiences. The third problem is explanatory, and it concerns the psychological processes and mechanisms that underpin our ordinary attributions of mental states to others. These three problems are not only central to existing philosophical discussions of our knowledge of other minds, but they are also the primary questions addressed in this volume. As well as outlining the questions, this chapter serves as an introduction to the way in which each of the subsequent chapters chooses to address one or another of them. The chapter concludes with a proposal for how we might consider the answers to each of these problems as related to the others.

Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Kind
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Way

Imagination is a speculative mental state that allows us to consider situations apart from the here and now. Historically, imagination played an important role in the works of many of the major philosophical figures in the Western tradition – from Aristotle to Descartes to Hume to Kant. By the middle of the twentieth century, in the wake of the behavioristic mindset that had dominated both psychology and philosophy in the early part of the century, imagination had largely faded from philosophical view and received scant attention from the 1960s through the 1980s. But imagination returned to the limelight in the late twentieth century, as it was given increasing prominence in both aesthetics and philosophy of mind. In aesthetics, interest in imagination derives in large part from its role in our engagement with works of art, music, and literature. For example, some philosophers have called upon imagination to capture the essence of fiction, while others have called upon it to explain how listeners understand the expressive nature of musical works. Yet others have seen imagination as centrally involved in ontological questions about art; in particular, they take works of art to be best understood as in some sense imaginary objects. In philosophy of mind, imagination plays an especially important role in discussions of mindreading, that is, our ability to understand the mental states of others. While theory theorists claim that we do this by calling upon a folk theory of mind, simulation theorists claim that we mindread by simulating the mental states of others – with simulation typically cashed out in terms of imagination. More generally, philosophers of mind who are interested in questions of cognitive architecture tend to be especially interested in imagination and its relationship to belief and desire. In fact, imagination has come to play an important role in a wide variety of philosophical contexts in addition to aesthetics and philosophy of mind. It has traditionally been central to discussions of thought experimentation and modal epistemology, where an analogy is often drawn between the way perception justifies beliefs about actuality and the way imagination seems to justify beliefs about possibility. Imagination has also been invoked to explain pretence, dreaming, empathy, delusion, and our ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning.

scholarly journals Kazimir Malevich: Approaching The New System

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Lyubchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Set Theory ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Original Script ◽  
The World ◽  
New System ◽  
The Way

This dissertation examines Kazimir Malevich’s art and writing with a view to establishing that they combine a strain of strict methodological reductionism with an equally well-marked esotericism. It strives to prove that although this feature of Malevich’s work was common among vanguard artists and thinkers, there are also highly idiosyncratic qualities in the way Malevich reconciled these two threads. An ensuing goal of this work is to propose how to complete an unfinished 1927 film script by Kazimir Malevich titled “Artistic and Scientific Film—Painting and Architectural Concerns—Approaching the New Plastic Architectural System.” <div>The question regarding the confluence of science and mysticism in Malevich’s work— the primary concern of this dissertation—requires tracing in the artist’s art and writings the presence of ideas belonging to these worldviews traditionally considered to be antithetical to each other. This dissertation establishes Malevich’s relationship with mysticism and strains of thought that resemble scientific content and approach. Among the latter, this work investigates Malevich’s interest in the geometry of the fourth dimension, draws parallels between the artist’s concern for visualizing infinity and the problems of set theory, and examines the role of imaginary numbers in Malevich’s worldview. To complete the analysis of Malevich’s exploration of the concept of space prominent in the aforementioned mathematical themes, this dissertation examines the artist’s interest in investigating the space of the cosmos. It also establishes that Malevich’s ideas were not only influenced by the scientific advancements in electromagnetism but also by the theories of thermodynamics, which together with the former relay a view of the world where all processes, organic and inorganic, are understood as the product of the transformation of energy. In Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect, R. Bruce Elder draws attention to the early twentieth-century thinkers’ view of cinema as an electromagnetic machine. This dissertation examines Malevich’s relationship with the cinematic art and its reception in Russia during Malevich’s most productive years. This work concludes with having satisfied its larger objective: to envision a possible scenario of how Malevich’s unfinished script could unfold. It contains the copy of the original script, its proposed finale, and an essay that outlines how my investigation of Malevich’s intellectual landscape informed the decisions involved in inferring the concluding shot sequences of the artist’s only cinematic work.<br></div>

Developmental Psychology: One Myth Shot Down, But Is Another on the Way?

1991 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
William R. Charlesworth
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
The Way

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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