Can Synaesthesia Present the World as it Really Is?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sollberger
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
The World

Can some synaesthetic experiences be treated as veridical perceptual experiences, i.e. as conscious mental states in which worldly objects and their features perceptually appear as they really are? Most empirical scientists and philosophers working on synaesthesia answer this question in the negative. Contrary to this prevailing opinion, Mohan Matthen’s ‘When is Synaesthesia Perception?’ (Chapter 8, this volume) argues that such a dismissive approach to the epistemic properties of synaesthetic experiences is not mandatory. Matthen claims that there is conceptual room for a more tolerant approach according to which at least one variety of synaesthesia, which he calls ‘direct synaesthesia’, is epistemically on a par with everyday non-synaesthetic perception. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the idea of ‘direct synaesthesia’ and to assess whether the accepted dogma that synaesthesia is always prone to error has to go.

scholarly journals How Many Concepts of Intentionality?

Studia Humana ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Andrzej Dąbrowski
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
The World

Abstract The current discussion of the intentionality nature has become more sophisticated and complex. In this paper I will delineate a number of approaches to intentionality in contemporary philosophy: 1 mentalistic; 2 semantic / linguistic; 3 pragmatic; 4 somatic; 5 and naturalistic. Although philosophers identify and analyse many concepts of intentionality, from the author point of view, there is only one intentionality: mentalistic intentionality (conscious mental states are intentional). Furthermore, there are the pre-intentionality in the physical world and the meta-intentionality (or the derived intentionality) in the world of culture.

Moral Disagreement and Reason-Giving

2021 ◽  
pp. 82-105
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
General Pattern ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Moral Claim ◽  
Moral Practice ◽  
Constitutive Function ◽  
Moral Attitude ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Attitudes

According to practical expressivism, moral disagreement is a species of disagreement in attitude whereby agents have moral commitments that advocate incompatible policies of action and reaction. This follows from a unified general account of disagreement as involving mental states that cannot collectively fulfil their constitutive functions, and the practical expressivist hypothesis that the constitutive function of moral attitudes is to advocate and reinforce collective patterns of action and reaction. To reason in favour of a moral claim is to cite a feature of the world to which the related moral attitude is a response, typically in order to alter the attitudes of others. Further, the constraint of ascriptive supervenience and a standing preference for ‘guiding’ over ‘goading’ in moral discussion make sense in light of the practical function that practical expressivism attributes to moral practice. A general pattern for some aspects of moral discourse can be discerned, and this pattern can be applied to the phenomenon of moral avoidability.

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology of Children’s Religious Beliefs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler S. Greenway ◽  
Justin L. Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Intuitive Ontologies

The pancultural presence of religious beliefs suggests that children’s ordinary development may incline them toward such beliefs. Various cognitive processes that mature during this time period may enable and encourage religion. Such processes include the ability to distinguish agents from objects, think about the mental states of other agents, see purpose in the world, and view agents dualistically. The generation and persistence of religious beliefs may also be a product of their violation of certain intuitive ontologies, as such violations are more memorable for younger individuals. The naturalness of religion is discussed, and evolutionary accounts of religion as an adaptation and byproduct are presented.

scholarly journals The Theory of Thinking and the Capacity to Mentalize: A Comparison of Fonagy's and Bion's Models

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Mantilla Lagos
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Developmental Line ◽  
The Way

This paper presents a comparison of two psychoanalytic models of how human beings learn to use their mental capacities to know meaningfully about the world. The first, Fonagy's model of mentalization, is concerned with the development of a self capable of reflecting upon its own and others' mental states, based on feelings, thoughts, intentions, and desires. The other, Bion's model of thinking, is about the way thoughts are dealt with by babies, facilitating the construction of a thinking apparatus within a framework of primitive ways of communication between mother and baby. The theories are compared along three axes: (a) an axis of the theoretical and philosophical backgrounds of the models; (b) an axis of the kind of evidence that supports them; and (c) the third axis of the technical implications of the ideas of each model. It is concluded that, although the models belong to different theoretical and epistemological traditions and are supported by different sorts of evidence, they may be located along the same developmental line using an intersubjective framework that maintains tension between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic domains of the mind.

scholarly journals CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD: THEOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENTS

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-64
Author(s):  
Михаил Мосиенко ◽  
Mikhail Mosienko
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Weak Version ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Physical Systems ◽  
The World ◽  
Previous Solution ◽  
Theological Argument ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy

The author poses a question of applicability of conceptual analysis as a tool of philosophical inquiry compared to conceptual analysis as a linguistic research tool. The article contains a critical analysis of the previous solution of this problem. This solution was to prove that the world of physical systems and the world of mental states are isomorphic. This was a solution used by Descartes and by a significant number of post-Cartesian philosophers who borrowed it from scholastic philosophy. The author analyses a strong and a weak version of the theological argument to show that both of these versions are inapplicable for proving the value of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. The article focuses on an alternative way to prove that philosophers can safely use conceptual analysis to benefit their studies. The alternative argument is the following: human language is an evolutionary adaptation, it implicitly contains ideas that adequately reflect non-verbal reality. Conceptual analysis allows one to explicate and structure these initially implicit ideas, which makes conceptual analysis a potent tool of philosophical studies.

scholarly journals The mental state of population of cities and towns during the COVID-19 pandemic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktoriya Edigareva ◽  
◽  
Yuliya Makarevskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Small Population ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All

In late 2019 - early 2020, the world was faced with a massive infection of COVID-19. The spread of the disease was quite high and affected almost all countries of the world. The infection was transmitted in a severe form, and therefore there were many deaths. Undoubtedly, the situation affected the mental state of people in many regions of the world and our country. Therefore, the aim of our research was to study the mental state of residents of cities and towns during the COVID-19. We assumed that during the spread of COVID-19 across Russia, the indicators of mental states, namely "frustration", "neurotization" and "energy" in cities and towns, will differ. However, the level of "anxiety" will not have significant differences. Particular hypotheses: the level of "frustration" will be higher in big cities, "neurotization" and "energy" will have a higher rate in small towns. The following methods were used in the research: Eysenck H.J. «Scale of mental states, Boyko V.V. «Method of neurotization diagnostics», method "Self-assessment of emotional states" A. Wessman and D. Ricks, nonparametric Mann-Whitney test. The research involved 83 people, 44 people lives in large cities, 39 – lives in small, 16 – males, 67 – females. Age: from 13 to 74. According to the results of the work, the hypothesis of the same level of anxiety in both groups was fully confirmed. The differences in the level of frustration and neurotization were not statistically confirmed. The hypothesis of a higher level of "energy" in regions with a small population was partially confirmed.

Color and Color Experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Levine
Keyword(s):  
Spectral Reflectance ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Surface Features ◽  
Color Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Internal Mental States

In this paper I investigate the problems for “locating” color in the world, surveying the various subjectivist and objectivist positions and finding them wanting. I then argue that the problem is that colors are “ways of appearing,” an odd kind of property that essentially implicates the mind and turns the problem of locating color into part of the mind–body problem. Rather than identify colors with objective surface features, such as surface spectral reflectance, or with dispositions to cause certain internal mental states, I treat them as relations holding between the subject and the objects of perception. This is seen to explain why colors are so hard to locate, and also accounts for several other features of color experience.

Transparency and Self-Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
First Person ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Gareth Evans ◽  
Weak Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Emotion Memory

T&SK sets out and defends a theory of self-knowledge—knowledge of one’s mental states. Inspired by Gareth Evans’ discussion of self-knowledge in his The Varieties of Reference, the basic idea is that one comes to know that one is in a mental state M by an inference from a worldly or environmental premise to the conclusion that one is in M. (Typically the worldly premise will not be about anything mental.) The mind, on this account, is “transparent”: self-knowledge is achieved by an “outward glance” at the corresponding tract of the world, not by an “inward glance” at one’s own mind. Belief is the clearest case, with the inference being from ‘p’ to ‘I believe that p.’ One serious problem with this idea is that the inference seems terrible, because ‘p’ is at best very weak evidence that one believes that p. Another is that the idea seems not to generalize. For example, what is the worldly premise corresponding to ‘I intend to ϕ‎,’ or ‘I feel a pain’? T&SK argues that both problems can be solved, and explains how the account covers perception, sensation, desire, intention, emotion, memory, imagination, and thought. The result is a unified theory of self-knowledge that explains the epistemic security of beliefs about one’s mental states (privileged access), as well as the fact that one has a special first-person way of knowing about one’s mental states (peculiar access).

Kant and the transparency of the mind

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (7) ◽  
pp. 890-915
Author(s):  
Alexandra M. Newton
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

AbstractIt has become standard to treat Kant'scharacterization of pure apperception as involving the claim that questions about what I think are transparent to questions about the world. By contrast, empirical apperception is thought to be non-transparent, since it involves a kind of inner observation of my mental states. I propose a reading that reverses this: pure apperception is non-transparent, because conscious only of itself, whereas empirical apperception is transparent to the world. The reading I offer, unlike the standard one, can accommodate Kant'sclaim that the I of pure apperception is the same as the I of empirical apperception.

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