Postposition-like constructions

2020 ◽  
pp. 677-685
Author(s):  
Gerjan van Schaaik
Keyword(s):  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Case Marker ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Instrumental Case ◽  
Linguistic Structures ◽  
Predicate Position

There are a relatively small number of linguistic structures that seemingly consists of a noun expanded by a possessive suffix third-person singular and a locative, ablative, or instrumental case marker. They are used as adverbial phrases. The possessive element, however, has no antecedent, and that is why these constructions bear the semblance of postpositions more than that of real nouns. In particular, temporal constructions based on a noun denoting some moment, period, or duration behave like real postpositions in that they allow for indefinite and finite complements. Various postposition-like structures can also be used in predicate position and thus take a person marker. These constructions are typical for the description of mental states and mental content and of instances of intention, decision, and obligation.

Seeming to Seem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Higher Order Theory ◽  
The Third Person

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.

Disorders of consciousness, memory, and will

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-86
Author(s):  
Walter Glannon
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorder ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
External World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Disorders Of Consciousness ◽  
Action Plans ◽  
Flexible Behavior ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter examines major psychiatric disorders as disorders of consciousness, memory, and will. All of these disorders involve disturbances in how the brain processes and integrates information about the body and external world. Distorted mental content in these psychopathologies impairs the capacity to consider different action plans, and to form and execute particular plans in particular actions. Dysfunctional mental states correlating with dysfunctional neural states impair the capacity for flexible behavior and adaptability to the environment. This dysfunction also impairs the capacity for insight into a psychiatric disorder and understanding the need for and motivation to seek treatment.

Functionalism, Computationalism, and Mental Contents

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gualtiero Piccinini
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Functional Role ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Inferential Role ◽  
Functional Relations ◽  
Popular View ◽  
Functional Role Semantics ◽  
Mental Contents

Almost no one cites Sellars, while reinventing his wheels with gratifying regularity. (Dennett 1987, 349)In philosophy of mind, there is functionalism about mental states and functionalism about mental contents. The former — mental State functionalism — says that mentalstatesare individuated by their functional relations with mental inputs, Outputs, and other mental states. The latter — usually called functional or conceptual or inferential role semantics — says that mentalcontentsare constituted by their functional relations with mental inputs, Outputs, and other mental contents (and in some versions of the theory, with things in the environment). If we add to mental State functionalism the popular view that mental states have their content essentially, then mental state functionalism may be seen as a form of functional role semantics and a solution to theproblem of mental content,namely, the problem of giving a naturalistic explanation of mental content. According to this solution, the functional relations that constitute contents are physically realized — in a metaphysically unmysterious way — by the functional relations between mental inputs, outputs, and the mental states bearing those contents.

Why the Mind Wanders

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin Mills ◽  
Arianne Herrera-Bennett ◽  
Myrthe Faber ◽  
Kalina Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
Memory Efficiency ◽  
Random Fashion ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Episodic Memories ◽  
The Mind

This chapter offers a functional account of why the mind—when free from the demands of a task or the constraints of heightened emotions—tends to wander from one topic to another, in a ceaseless and seemingly random fashion. We propose the default variability hypothesis, which builds on William James’s phenomenological account of thought as a form of mental locomotion, as well as on recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and computational modeling. Specifically, the default variability hypothesis proposes that the default mode of mental content production yields the frequent arising of new mental states that have heightened variability of content over time. This heightened variability in the default mode of mental content production may be an adaptive mechanism that (1) enhances episodic memory efficiency through de-correlating individual episodic memories from one another via temporally spaced reactivations, and (2) facilitates semantic knowledge optimization by providing optimal conditions for interleaved learning.

scholarly journals First-person Folk Psychology: Mindreading or Mindshaping?

2017 ◽  
pp. 170-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon De Bruin
Keyword(s):  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
First Person ◽  
Behavior Prediction ◽  
The Core ◽  
Third Person

Proponents of mindshaping argue that third-person folk psychology (i.e., the ascription of mental states to others) is not primarily about "reading" mental states for the purpose of behavior prediction and explanation. Instead, they claim that third-person folk psychology is first and foremost a regulative practice -- one that "shapes" mental states in accordance with the norms of a shared folk psychological framework. This paper investigates to what extent the core assumptions behind the mindshaping hypothesis are compatible with an account of first-person folk psychology (i.e., the ascription of mental states to ourselves) that is based on the notion of "self-regulative agency."

Banishing “I” and “we” from accounts of metacognition

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryce Huebner ◽  
Daniel C. Dennett
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
First Person ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Person Model

AbstractCarruthers offers a promising model for how “we” know the propositional contents of “our” own minds. Unfortunately, in retaining talk of first-person access to mental states, his suggestions assume that a higher-order self is already “in the loop.” We invite Carruthers to eliminate the first-person from his model and to develop a more thoroughly third-person model of metacognition.

Subjective Probability and the Content/Attitude Distinction

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-57
Author(s):  
Jennifer Rose Carr
Keyword(s):  
Measurement System ◽  
Subjective Probability ◽  
Measure Theory ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Empirical Discovery ◽  
Imprecise Credences ◽  
Mental Contents

On an attractive, naturalistically respectable theory of intentionality, mental contents are a form of measurement system for representing behavioral and psychological dispositions. This chapter argues that a consequence of this view is that the content/attitude distinction is measurement system relative. As a result, there is substantial arbitrariness in the content/attitude distinction. Whether some measurement of mental states counts as characterizing the content of mental states or the attitude is not a question of empirical discovery but of theoretical utility. If correct, this observation has ramifications in the theory of rationality. Some epistemologists and decision theorists have argued that imprecise credences are rationally impermissible, while others have argued that precise credences are rationally impermissible. If the measure theory of mental content is correct, however, then neither imprecise credences nor precise credences can be rationally impermissible.

scholarly journals Subjetividad y privacidad

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (76-77) ◽  
pp. 185-203
Author(s):  
Guillermo Hurtado
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Unified Consciousness ◽  
Traditional Doctrine

The traditional doctrine of the privacy of the mental describes our mental lives as corridors without doors or windows. According to this view a mental state is private if: (1) one and only one person has direct access to that mental state, and (2) that person is the authority with respect to the content and character of such a mental state (i.e., has an incorregible and infallible knowledge of it). (2) has been rejected on the basis of externalist arguments concerning the nature of mental content. However, very few have put (1) into doubt. The purpose of this essay is to claim that (1) is not a necessary feature of our mental lives. Hence the traditional doctrine of the privacy of the mental must be rejected not only for being grounded on a false conception of mental content, but also for being grounded on a false conception of the nature of subjectivity. My argument is based on a Parfitian conception of persons and on a metaphysical distinction between persons and subjects of consciousness. I claim that if a momentary fusion of the streams of consciousness of two people is possible, the mental states that occur in that unified consciousness will be mental states of those two people —even if there is only one subject of consciousness involved. Hence, we can conclude that if two people can have the same mental state, they will also have the same direct access to that mental state. Finally, I suggest that the rejection of (1) —and hence of the view of mental life as a corridor— should be welcomed as liberating.

First Person and Third Person Reasons and the Regress Problem

2020 ◽  
pp. 320-332
Author(s):  
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
First Person ◽  
Theoretical Reason ◽  
Regress Problem ◽  
Third Person

This chapter distinguishes two kinds of reasons for a belief. First person reasons are unique to the person who has them. They include other mental states than beliefs and they do not aggregate with theoretical reason. There are third person reasons that can be laid out on the table for all to consider. Foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism are all views on the structure of third person (theoretical) reasons. But the chain of theoretical reasons bottoms out in a first person reason, epistemic self-trust, which is also the foundation of other first person reasons. The rationality of epistemic self-trust is a condition for the rationality of everything else.

Linguistic Convention and Shared Mental Content

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-147
Author(s):  
J. Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representation ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Radical Interpretation ◽  
Linguistic Representation ◽  
Linguistic Convention ◽  
Shared Content ◽  
First Case ◽  
Belief Attributions

This chapter is the second of three that sets out a metaphysics of linguistic representation, and here I turn to the key ingredient of linguistic convention. The focus is on a tension between the apparently individualistic character of the metaphysics of mental representation given by Radical Interpretation, and the presupposition of shared mental content apparently presupposed by appeals to linguistic convention. By considering the way in which beliefs about others’ beliefs influence the metaphysics of mental representation, the apparent tension is resolved. Either belief-attributions characterize others’ mental states indirectly, as having content somehow related to the contents used to characterize them, or they don’t. In the first case, there is no presupposition of shared mental content in the characterization of conventions. In the second case, there is such a presupposition, but Radical Interpretation will predict that there is metasemantic pressure to attribute shared content.

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