Phenomenal Holism and Cognitive Phenomenology

The cognitive phenomenology debate centers on two questions. (1) What is an apt characterization of the phenomenology of conscious thought? And (2), what role does this phenomenology play? I argue that the answers to the former question bear significantly on the answers to the latter question. In particular, I show that conservatism about cognitive phenomenology is not compatible with the view that phenomenology explains the constitution of conscious thought. I proceed as follows: To begin with, I analyze the phenomenology of our sensory experiences and argue for a weak phenomenal holism (WPH) about sensory phenomenology. Next, I explore how WPH can be integrated into the competing accounts of cognitive phenomenology. I argue that, given WPH, conservatism turns out to reduce phenomenal character to a merely concomitant phenomenon that has no explanatory power when it comes to the constitution of conscious thoughts. In contrast, liberalism is explanatorily more powerful in this respect. Finally, I propose a new version of liberalism that explains how phenomenology constitutes conscious thoughts and fits best with WPH.

In Quest of the Thinker of Science

The relationships among mind, self, conscious thought, discursive reasoning, and social context became central issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, sociology, and epistemology, with direct implications for the nature of scientific knowledge. Minds and selves can be conceptualized as expressions of interactions between an individual’s nervous system and their physical and social environment. Is conscious thought, and in particular discursive reasoning, under the control of the individual thinker, or does it reflect societal influences? Nineteenth-century experimental neurophysiology and psychology began to reveal the role that systemic features of the nervous system and the brain play in producing consciousness. Concurrently, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists were proposing roles for the unconscious, language, society, and innate gestalten in shaping and limiting conscious thought. These ideas converged in the theories of individual scientists.

Are media exposure and self-control related?

One critical dimension of self-control is attention control, the ability to willfully determine the content of conscious thought. It is argued here that the amount of effort required to exercise attention control while critically engaging in different media, specifically text and television, is significantly different. It is hypothesized that the amount of self-control exerted while reading will be significantly greater than while watching television. An experiment comparing a film clip with its screen play demonstrates that participants' self-control is more depleted after 30 minutes of reading than 30 minutes of viewing. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that differential habitual exposure to media will predict trait levels of self-control, respectively. An internet survey testing these relationships is reported in which a small but significant negative relationship between TV exposure and trait self-control is found.

Are media exposure and self-control related?

One critical dimension of self-control is attention control, the ability to willfully determine the content of conscious thought. It is argued here that the amount of effort required to exercise attention control while critically engaging in different media, specifically text and television, is significantly different. It is hypothesized that the amount of self-control exerted while reading will be significantly greater than while watching television. An experiment comparing a film clip with its screen play demonstrates that participants' self-control is more depleted after 30 minutes of reading than 30 minutes of viewing. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that differential habitual exposure to media will predict trait levels of self-control, respectively. An internet survey testing these relationships is reported in which a small but significant negative relationship between TV exposure and trait self-control is found.

REALISTIC RENDERING OF SELF-CONSCIOUS THOUGHT IN A. S. BYATT’S POSSESSION: THE PRESENTATION OF VICTORIAN VERSUS CONTEMPORARY IDEAS OF MAN, FAITH AND LOVE

The realistic rendering of Self-Conscious Thought in A. S. Byatt’s Possession is an evidence of Byatt’s success in making abstract ideas concrete. Possession, as an encyclopedia of theories and thoughts, Victorian or modern, is a novel in which ideas are less obtrusive and the author’s presence is intrusive. The twentieth-century part of the novel embodies Byatt’s confrontation with modern literary thoughts which are different in nature than the ideas incarnated in Victorians i.e. George Eliot’s fiction. Although such ideas are difficult to be turned into immediate daily concerns yet in Possession they fit into immediate personal dilemmas and gain a sense of urgency. A. S. Byatt, successfully, represents the universal ideas of man, faith and love, with a skeptic twentieth-century background in this novel. In addition, while George Eliot begins to generalize these ideas with an authorial voice, Byatt knows that these ideas have become equivocal, thus overthrowing authority of the author.

Hearing Water Temperature: Characterizing the development of nuanced perception of auditory events

Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being poured. How do these nuanced perceptual skills develop? Is extensive auditory experience required, or are these skills present in early childhood? In Exp.1, adults were exceptionally good at judging whether water was hot vs. cold from pouring sounds (M=93% accuracy; N=104). In Exp.2, we tested this ability in N=113 children aged 3-12 years, and found evidence of developmental change: Age significantly predicted accuracy (p<0.001, logistic regression), such that 3-5 year old children performed at chance while 85% of children age 6+ answered correctly. Overall our data suggest that perception of nuanced differences between auditory events is not part of early-developing cross-modal cognition, and instead develops over the first six years of life.

Conscious Thought

Conscious thought has been neglected, but it has not been entirely overlooked. Discussion of the topic has focused on three sets of questions. The first set of questions focuses on the kinds of states (events, episodes) that qualify as forms of conscious thought. What might a taxonomy of conscious thought look like? A second set of questions concerns the kind(s) of consciousness that characterizes thought. Are thoughts conscious in the same fundamental way that other mental phenomena are, or is ‘cognitive consciousness’—that is, the consciousness associated with thought—sui generis? A third set of questions concerns the relationship between consciousness and thought. Is consciousness essential to thought, or is it an accidental and contingent feature of thought—a feature that some thoughts possess but others lack? This chapter provides an opinionated point of entry into these and other questions.