Parentheticalism and Action Explanation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Henning
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Action Explanation ◽  
Typical Action ◽  
Points Of View

This chapter discusses the nature of action explanation. Against so-called psychologist accounts, it is argued that the reasons cited as explanantia are usually not mental states but worldly states of affairs. Against so-called Anti-Psychologist accounts (such as Dancy’s), it is argued that the factivity of such explanations is not easily cancelled, and that verbs like “believe” and “want” are not mere devices for cancelling factive implicatures (even though there can be ellipsis). In fact, it is argued that simply citing the relevant worldly reasons leaves out an important part of typical action explanations. The correct view is given by parentheticalism: We must explain actions by citing worldly reasons from subjective points of view.

Mental Changes in Cardiac Disease

1930 ◽  
Vol 76 (315) ◽  
pp. 632-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander George Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Present State ◽  
Cardiac Disease ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Rare Complication ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Mental Change ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Circulatory Apparatus ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Points Of View

Mental change in cardiac disease, though a rare complication, is a subject that can be properly and usefully discussed at a meeting of psychiatrists at which physicians are asked to take part. For while the physician may be able to assess accurately the physical defect in the circulatory apparatus, he is trained only in a rough-and-ready way to interpret different types of character, and the way in which they react to disease, and is liable to go astray in his interpretation of mental states. There is also this advantage—that in the present state of uncertainty as to the physical basis of mental disease we cannot look at the subject from too many points of view.

scholarly journals The Dry Revolution: Evaluation of Three Different EEG Dry Electrode Types in Terms of Signal Spectral Features, Mental States Classification and Usability

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluca Di Flumeri ◽  
Pietro Aricò ◽  
Gianluca Borghini ◽  
Nicolina Sciaraffa ◽  
Antonello Di Florio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Signal Quality ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Dry Electrodes ◽  
Dry Electrode ◽  
Common Opinion ◽  
Comprehensive Comparison ◽  
The Common ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Neuroimaging Techniques

One century after the first recording of human electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, EEG has become one of the most used neuroimaging techniques. The medical devices industry is now able to produce small and reliable EEG systems, enabling a wide variety of applications also with no-clinical aims, providing a powerful tool to neuroscientific research. However, these systems still suffer from a critical limitation, consisting in the use of wet electrodes, that are uncomfortable and require expertise to install and time from the user. In this context, dozens of different concepts of EEG dry electrodes have been recently developed, and there is the common opinion that they are reaching traditional wet electrodes quality standards. However, although many papers have tried to validate them in terms of signal quality and usability, a comprehensive comparison of different dry electrode types from multiple points of view is still missing. The present work proposes a comparison of three different dry electrode types, selected among the main solutions at present, against wet electrodes, taking into account several aspects, both in terms of signal quality and usability. In particular, the three types consisted in gold-coated single pin, multiple pins and solid-gel electrodes. The results confirmed the great standards achieved by dry electrode industry, since it was possible to obtain results comparable to wet electrodes in terms of signals spectra and mental states classification, but at the same time drastically reducing the time of montage and enhancing the comfort. In particular, multiple-pins and solid-gel electrodes overcome gold-coated single-pin-based ones in terms of comfort.

scholarly journals Theory of Minds: Managing mental state inferences in working memory is associated with the dorsomedial subsystem of the default network and social integration

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan L. Meyer ◽  
Eleanor Collier
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Default Network ◽  
Network Integration ◽  
State Information ◽  
Points Of View

AbstractWe often interact with multiple people at a time and consider their various points-of-view to facilitate smooth social interaction. Yet, how our brains track multiple mental states at once, and whether skill in this domain links to navigating real-world social interactions, remains underspecified. To fill this gap, we developed a novel social working memory paradigm in which participants manage two- or four-people’s mental states in working memory, as well as control trials in which they alphabetize two- or four-people’s names in working memory. In Study 1, we found that the dorsomedial subsystem of the default network shows relative increases in activity with more mental states managed in working memory. In contrast, this subsystem shows relative decreases in activity with more non-mental state information (the number of names alphabetized) managed in working memory. In Study 2, only individual differences in managing mental states in working memory, specifically on trials that posed the greatest mental state load to working memory, correlated with social network integration. Collectively, these findings add further support to the hypothesis that social working memory relies on partially distinct brain systems and may be a key ingredient to success in a social world.

Bat or Batman?

Philosophy ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 64 (248) ◽  
pp. 207-217
Author(s):  
David Pugmire
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Thomas Nagel ◽  
The World ◽  
Theories Of Mind ◽  
Points Of View

Thomas Nagel claimed that subjectivity is what distinguishes those states known in the vernacular as conscious or as experiences. And he argued that subjectivity eludes reductivist theories of mind, which are obliged to ignore it and hence to fail. I shall be concerned here primarily with the formulation of the concept of subjectivity. Nagel tried to delineate subjectivity in a well known phrase: ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. Nagel offers to explain this condition of being host to conscious experience as the organism's having a point of view on the world, a point of view which is its own and nothing else's, however much or little the world as disclosed by it may agree with what is presented from other points of view.

scholarly journals The function of consciousness is to generate experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Cleeremans ◽  
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The Core ◽  
Core Function ◽  
Functional Advantage ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
In Virtue Of

Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us? In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that the core function of consciousness is precisely to enable subject-level experience. “What it feels like” is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why we do certain things and avoid others. Thus, we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents experience things and care about those experiences that they are motivated to act in certain ways and that they prefer some states of affairs vs. others. In this sense, conscious experience functions as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows mental states with intrinsic value, but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centered space — a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is unified. If, as we argue, the function of consciousness is to endow agents with subjective experience, then the hard problem of consciousness seems to dissolve.

Content: wide and narrow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Bach
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Mental States ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Turn On ◽  
External Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrow Content

A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. The contents of these mental states pertain to things in the world (water and the tap), and yet it would seem that their causal efficacy should depend solely on their internal characteristics, not on their external relations. That is, a person could be in just those states and those states could play just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to suppose that there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow. Wide content comprises the referential relations that mental states bear to things and their properties. Narrow content comprises the determinants of psychological role. Philosophers have debated whether both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they are connected.

scholarly journals Theory of minds: managing mental state inferences in working memory is associated with the dorsomedial subsystem of the default network and social integration

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-73
Author(s):  
Meghan L Meyer ◽  
Eleanor Collier
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Integration ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Default Network ◽  
State Information ◽  
Points Of View

Abstract We often interact with multiple people at a time and consider their various points of view to facilitate smooth social interaction. Yet, how our brains track multiple mental states at once, and whether skill in this domain links to social integration, remains underspecified. To fill this gap, we developed a novel social working memory paradigm in which participants manage two- or four-people’s mental states in working memory, as well as control trials in which they alphabetize two- or four-people’s names in working memory. In Study 1, we found that the dorsomedial subsystem of the default network shows relative increases in activity with more mental states managed in working memory. In contrast, this subsystem shows relative decreases in activity with more non-mental state information (the number of names alphabetized) managed in working memory. In Study 2, only individual differences in managing mental states in working memory, specifically on trials that posed the greatest mental state load to working memory, correlated with social integration. Collectively, these findings add further support to the hypothesis that social working memory relies on partially distinct brain systems and may be a key ingredient to success in a social world.

What are Propositions?

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 702-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Richard
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Complement Clauses ◽  
Scott Soames ◽  
The One

This paper defends the view that propositions – that is, what are picked about by complement clauses and the range of quantifiers like that in ‘Sanna believes all that Matti said’ – are states of affairs. States of affairs – and thus propositions – are not, in the primary sense, representational; what is representational and what is true or false in the first instance are mental states and sentence tokens that represent propositions. There is, it is argued, a derivative sense in which propositions are bearers of truth, but truth in that sense is a derivative, non-explanatory notion. This view is contrasted with views like the one Scott Soames develops in What is Meaning?. It’s argued that this view is superior to Soames’ in various ways.

Personalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith E. Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Personal Survival ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul

Personalism is the thesis that only persons (self-conscious agents) and their states and characteristics exist, and that reality consists of a society of interacting persons. Typically, a personalist will hold that finite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition. Personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics and construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness. They tend to be nonutilitarian in ethics and to place ultimate value in the person as a free, self-conscious, moral agent, rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of affairs. Typically, holding that a good God will not allow what has intrinsic value to lose existence, they believe in personal survival of death. The term ‘personalism’, even as a term for philosophical systems, has myriad uses. There is said to be, for example, atheistic personalism (as in the case of McTaggart, famous for embracing both atheism and the immortality of the soul), absolute idealistic personalism (Hegel, Royce, Calkins), and theistic personalism (Bowne, Brightman, Bertocci). Leibniz and Berkeley are seen as early personalists; both were theists and idealists. Kant, while not strictly a personalist, was influential in personalism’s history. In particular, B.P. Bowne (1847–1910) borrowed freely from Kant, while refusing to accept a Kantian transcendentalism in which our basic concepts or categories apply in a knowledge-giving way only to appearances and not to reality. R.H. Lotze made personality and value central to his worldview, and was a European precursor of American personalism.

Perception

2020 ◽  
pp. 1027-1055
Author(s):  
Christopher Peacocke
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter argues that the perception of music involves more than the syntactic and other relations recognized in most music theory. More precisely, the perception of music involves hearing features of the music metaphorically-as mental states and other states of affairs. It also involves hearing the musical event as an action. There are many examples of the aesthetic exploitation by composers of the capacity for perception of various relational properties of these general kinds. There are also differences and similarities between music and poetry, for which there is an account in the presented framework. The account also explains the possibility of music communicating new and unnamed emotions. The perception of relational properties is equally crucial in articulating the distinctive features of live performance. Music also contrasts with other art forms, in that the perception of relational properties, unlike literature, depiction or dance, is almost the only resource available to the composer. This makes the perception of relational properties of music uniquely significant for this art form.

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