Intentionality and Interpersonal Experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Modal Structure ◽  
General Account ◽  
Interpersonal Experience

This chapter addresses several interrelated ways in which other people are implicated in the development, sustenance, and disruption of the modal structure of intentionality. It first considers some of the roles that relations with others play in shaping perceptual experience, focusing on how the cohesive, anticipatory structure of perceptual experience is interpersonally regulated. After that, it turns to belief, arguing that the structure of belief, the intelligibility of the distinction between what is and is not the case, rests on a more primitive sense of certainty. It then proceeds to develop a more general account of how the sense of being in a given type of intentional state is largely attributable to its distinctive anticipation-fulfilment profile. All such profiles, it is argued, depend on an overarching pattern of anticipation and fulfilment, in the guise of habitual confidence or certainty. This pattern is inextricable from a certain way of experiencing and relating to other people in general. When the overall anticipation-fulfilment structure of experience is disrupted, the boundaries between intentional state types become less clear. This renders a person susceptible to more pronounced and localized disruptions, of the kind involved in many delusions and hallucinations.

Schizophrenia and Selfhood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Illness ◽  
Interpersonal Trauma ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Recent Application ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Modal Structure ◽  
Minimal Self ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucination ◽  
Specific Sense

This chapter introduces some of the central concepts, themes, and issues addressed in the book. First of all, it discusses the concept of ‘minimal self’ and its recent application to schizophrenia and auditory verbal hallucination (AVH). Then it raises the question of whether minimal self includes only the sense of having some kind of experience or, in addition, a more specific sense of the type of intentional state one is in. A refined account of minimal self is proposed, according to which it centrally involves the latter: a grasp of the modalities of intentionality. It is further argued that certain anomalous experiences centrally involve disturbances of modal structure. Following this, the chapter considers an alternative account of AVHs, according to which they are diagnostically non-specific, meaningful symptoms of interpersonal trauma. In so doing, it stresses the need to place more emphasis on the interpersonal aspects of psychiatric illness, and shows how minimal self, as conceived of here, could turn out to be both developmentally and constitutively dependent on ways of relating to other people.

The Stream of Consciousness: IV. Adolf Grünbaum's Atomicity

1994 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Natsoulas
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
General Account ◽  
Mental Events

I devote most of the present article, which is the fourth in a series concerning the nature and characteristics of William James's stream of consciousness, to an examination of Adolf Grünbaum's case for the stream's atomicity. For this purpose, I use the lens provided by the objection that auditory perceptual experience of a continuous sound of unchanging pitch does not exhibit a discrete, pulsational temporal structure. Also, I discuss Izchak Miller's two criticisms of Grünbaum's claim that temporal awareness of present physical or mental events depends on a certain kind of conceptualized awareness of the stream. Miller argues that such conceptualized awareness, being a matter of judgment, requires rather than explains temporal awareness; and also that perceptual experience necessarily involves individuating the object perceived, which in turn already involves temporal awareness. I give cogent replies to these two criticisms, but I cast some doubt as well on Grünbaum's general account.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Modal Structure ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social

This chapter outlines the overall argument of the book, emphasizing its two principal theses. First of all, it sketches the position that thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the sense of being in one or another kind of intentional state, in the modal structure of intentionality (meaning our grasp of the various modalities of intentionality, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another). Second, it introduces the view that the integrity of human experience, including what we might term the most basic experience of self, depends on ways of relating to other people and to the social world as a whole. The chapter concludes with summaries of the seven chapters that follow.

Elements for a General Organology

Derrida Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-94
Author(s):  
Bernard Stiegler
Keyword(s):  
Organic Matter ◽  
Planetary Scale ◽  
General Account ◽  
Inorganic Matter ◽  
History Of

These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter. This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates's discussion of writing as a pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention. By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary-scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted.

Death of the General Account

1996 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Brian O'Neil
Keyword(s):  
General Account

Numerical symbols as explanations of human perceptual experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Number Words ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Why did humans develop precise systems for measuring experience, like numbers, clocks, andcalendars? I argue that precise representational systems were constructed by earlier generationsof humans because they recognized that their noisy perceptual systems were not capturingdistinctions that existed in the world. Abstract symbolic systems did not arise from perceptualrepresentations, but instead were constructed to describe and explain perceptual experience. Byanalogy, I argue that when children learn number words, they do not rely on noisy perceptualsystems, but instead acquire these words as units in a broader system of procedures, whosemeanings are ultimately defined by logical relations to one another, not perception.

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