Clark (2018) worries that predictive processing accounts of perception introduce a puzzling disconnect between the content of personal-level perceptual states and their underlying subpersonal representations. According to PP, in perception, the brain encodes information about the environment in conditional probability density distributions over causes of sensory input. But it seems perceptual experience only presents us with one way the world is at a time. If perception is at bottom probabilistic, shouldn’t this aspect of subpersonally represented content show up in consciousness? (...) To address this worry, Clark argues that representations underlying personal-level content are constrained by the need to provide a single action-guiding take on the environment. However, this proposal rests a conception of the nature of agency, famously articulated by Davidson (1980a,b), that is inconsistent with a view of the mind as embodied-extended. Since Clark and other enactivist PP theorists present the extended mind as an important consequence of the predictive framework, the proposal is in tension with his complete view. I claim that this inconsistency could be resolved either by retaining the Davidsonian view of action and abandoning the extended-embodied approach, or by adopting a more processual, world-involving account of agency and perceptual experience than Clark currently endorses. To solve the puzzle he raises, Clark must become a radical enactivist or a consistent internalist. (shrink)

The distinguishing feature of enactivist cognitive science is arguably its commitment to non-reductionism and its philosophical allegiance to first-person approaches, like phenomenology. The guiding theme of this article is that a theoretically mature enactivism is bound to be humanistic in its articulation, and only by becoming more humanistic can enactivism more fully embody the non-reductionist spirit that lay at its foundation. Our explanatory task is thus to bring forth such an articulation by advancing an enactivist theory of human personality. To (...) this end, we synthesize core concepts from cognitive science, personality theory, and phenomenological philosophy in order to develop an Enactivist Big-5 Theory of personality. According to EB5T, personality traits are dispositional tendencies for how we come to optimally grip our distinctly human worlds. Individual differences in personality are therefore reflective of stylistic differences in optimal gripping tendencies between human beings. EB5T affords a non-reductionist understanding of the immanent teleology of the autopoietically embodied human mind as a kind of full-scale optimal gripping process that is achieved along five major dimensions of personality. To the degree that these dimensions are universal, therefore, we argue that our theory offers a viable path forward in advancing enactivist cognitive science beyond the life of a cell and into the mind of a person, a longstanding hope and ambition held by proponents of the enactive approach. (shrink)

“4E” cognitive science has demonstrated that embodied coupling offers powerful resources for reasoning. Despite a surge of studies, little empirical attention is paid to discussing the precise scope of these resources and their possible complementariness with traditional knowledge-based inference. We use decision-making in Shiatsu practice – a bodywork method that employs hands-on interaction with a client – to showcase how the two types of cognitive resources can mesh and offer alternative paths to a task: “Local” resources such as embodied presence, (...) empathy, attunement, as well as skilled perception-action coupling are not only central for implementing a successful therapeutic intervention. The immediate coupling with a client also offers basic means of deciding about fitting and meaningful interventions. Yet, when comprehensive intervention strategies are at stake, Shiatsu decision making must be complemented through “non-local” resources, notably inferences rooted in anatomy/physiology knowledge, categories, heuristics, and mental models. To draw out implications for “4E” cognitive science, we argue that “local” embodied coupling and “non-local” conceptual inferences can functionally complement, inform, and scaffold each other in a dialectic process. (shrink)

Recent enactive approach to social cognition stresses the indispensability of social affordance with regard to social understanding and contends that it is affordance that primarily solicits one’s reaction to the other, such that one becomes affected by the other and attends to the other’s situated appearance in the first place. What remains to be explored, however, is the sense in which social affordance is delineated by an affective sphere and the extent to which the affective sphere serves as a meaning (...) constraint for social sense-making. In this paper, we analyze Husserl’s genetic theory of affection, so as to better understand the nature of the social affective sphere. And we argue that social understanding takes places at different levels and it is at the passive and pre-reflective level that the social surroundings are pre-delineated by a sort of affective ambience where the empathizer and the empathizee come into contact. Once this is appreciated, we can better articulate the affective structure of social affordance and its meaning constituents. And we show that, at the passive level, social coupling is in nature an affective intertwinement between oneself and the other and it consists of a particular kind of corporeal intentionality with which one adverts to the other’s presence and responds to the other’s appeal. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

One challenge faced by aesthetics is the development of an account able to trace out the continuities and discontinuities between general experience and aesthetic experiences. Regarding this issue, in this paper, I present an enactive model of some raw cognitive dynamics that might drive the progressive emergence of aesthetic experiences from the stream of general experience. The framework is based on specific aspects of John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and embodied aesthetic theories, while also taking into account research in ecological psychology, (...) cognitive sciences, and dynamic systems theory. The model focuses on dynamically relevant nodes at the pre-reflective and the reflective side of experience that would work as nested rhythmic constraints at different cognitive timescales with the potential to shunt experiences toward the aesthetic in everyday situations. My proposal constitutes a way to explore aesthetic experiences from an enactive perspective that regards them as transformative events in which cognitive processes entrain and are entrained by changes taking place in the environment, the brain, and the body. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of the perceptual account of bodily feelings, according to which having a feeling is feeling something about one’s body. But it rejects the idea, familiar in the work of William James, that what one feels when one has a feeling is something biological about one’s body. Instead it argues that to have a bodily feeling is to feel an apparent bodily indication of something – a bodily appearance. Being aware of what one’s body is apparently (...) indicating to one is being aware of something about one’s body, but the focus of attention is on what is apparently being indicated, which is not something about one’s body. This is one way of making sense of the idea in contemporary phenomenology that the body is conspicuous in feelings that do not take the body as an object of awareness. Bodily inclinations are apparent indications of what one is going to do, and it is argued that feeling one’s bodily inclinations constitutes an important class of bodily feelings – e.g. feeling like crying or feeling like being sick. Such inclinations are often felt through a process of resisting them. Bodily inclinations also have some intentionality, albeit quite limited, and this goes some way towards explaining Peter Goldie’s concept of feelings towards. (shrink)

Pain is often used as the paradigmatic example of a phenomenal kind with a phenomenal quality common and unique to its instantiations. Philosophers have intensely discussed the relation between the subjective feeling, which unites pains and distinguishes them from other experiences, and the phenomenal properties of sensory, affective, and evaluative character along which pains typically vary. At the center of this discussion is the question whether the phenomenal properties prove necessary and/or sufficient for pain. In the empirical literature, sensory, affective, (...) and evaluative properties have played a decisive role in the investigation of psychophysical correspondence and clinical diagnostics. This paper addresses the outlined philosophical and empirical issues from a new perspective by constructing a multidimensional phenomenal space for pain. First, the paper will construe the phenomenal properties of pains in terms of a property space whose structure reflects phenomenal similarities and dissimilarities by means of spatial distance. Second, philosophical debates on necessary and sufficient properties are reconsidered in terms of whether there is a phenomenal space formed of dimensions along which all and only pains vary. It is concluded that there is no space of this kind and, thus, that pain constitutes a primitive phenomenal kind that cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of its varying phenomenal properties. Third, the paper addresses the utility of continued reference to pain and its phenomenal properties in philosophical and scientific discourses. It is argued that numerous insights into the phenomenal structure of pain can be gained that have thus far received insufficient attention. (shrink)

Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naïvely the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal (...) suggests a novel interpretation of both the reasons behind younger children’s difficulty with false belief tasks, and the critical factors enabling children’s success in them. On the one hand, it proposes that younger children fail false belief tasks because they do not understand the importance of focusing on an agent’s mental states to infer her practical commitments. On the other hand, it suggests that children’s active engagement in conversations where the caregiver credits an agent with a belief is the critical factor integrating their initially scattered mastery of the pragmatics of belief reports, teaches them to track belief reports across contexts, and accordingly shapes their understanding of belief as a representational mental state. (shrink)

Research in psychopathology is booming in an unprecedented way, at least, in terms of increasing number of publications. Yet, a few questions arise: Does quantity also give us quality? Are the collected data generally of sound quality? How are data typically collected in psychopathology? Are the applied methods of data collection appropriate for this particular field of study? This article explores three different methods of data collection in psychopathology, namely self-rating scales, structured interviews, and semi-structured, phenomenological interviews. To identify the (...) most adequate methodological approach, we first establish the nature of the object of psychopathology and then we critically assess each method’s appropriateness to this field of study. We emphasize fundamental issues that make self-rating scales and structured interviews unfit for the task of adequately examining psychopathology. By contrast, we propose that a semi-structured, phenomenological interview presents a more appropriate method. Finally, we describe two types of semi-structured, phenomenological interviews that can be applied to assess and explore psychopathology, respectively. (shrink)

Research in psychopathology is booming in an unprecedented way, at least, in terms of increasing number of publications. Yet, a few questions arise: Does quantity also give us quality? Are the collected data generally of sound quality? How are data typically collected in psychopathology? Are the applied methods of data collection appropriate for this particular field of study? This article explores three different methods of data collection in psychopathology, namely self-rating scales, structured interviews, and semi-structured, phenomenological interviews. To identify the (...) most adequate methodological approach, we first establish the nature of the object of psychopathology and then we critically assess each method’s appropriateness to this field of study. We emphasize fundamental issues that make self-rating scales and structured interviews unfit for the task of adequately examining psychopathology. By contrast, we propose that a semi-structured, phenomenological interview presents a more appropriate method. Finally, we describe two types of semi-structured, phenomenological interviews that can be applied to assess and explore psychopathology, respectively. (shrink)

There is an eminent tradition of thought that sees in the phenomenon of time something contradictory. This tradition has been recently revived by some contemporary proponents of dialethism – the view that there are true contradictions. In this paper, I will contribute to this line of thinking by tracing the first steps of a dialethic account of time-consciousness. In particular, I will argue that the experiential flow of time can be accounted for in the framework of an intentionalist approach to (...) temporal perception if we conceive of time-consciousness as a quasi-multiplicity, i.e., a multiplicity of non-self-identical parts, hence the embrace of dialethism. Section 1 introduces dialethism, discusses Priest's dialethic theory of motion and time, and motivates the project of a dialethic account of time-consciousness. Section 2 introduces the intentionalist approach to time-consciousness and distinguishes pure intentionalism from sense-data intentionalism; both subscribes to a certain Principle of Simultaneous Awareness but interprets it differently. In Sect. 3, I offer an in-depth analysis of this principle and identify its core as the requirement of self-unification, i.e., the requirement that time-consciousness unifies itself in flowing without any higher-order act of unification. Section 4 then argues that pure intentionalism can satisfy this requirement by embracing dialethism. I conclude by noting how the dialethic account of time-consciousness incorporates a central extensionalist insight within an intentionalist outlook. (shrink)

The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that interviews cannot address the psychological, cognitive and biological correlates of experience. It argues that the skeptic must either heed the methodological and epistemological (...) justification of the phenomenological interview provided, or embrace a more fundamental skepticism, a “deep mistrust”, in which scientific discourse can have no recourse to conscious processes as explananda, with ensuing dire consequences for our conception of science. (shrink)

In two recent papers, I introduced the idea of embodied Rilkean movement knowledge and perception into the current philosophical debate on sports knowledge. In this paper, I offer a new analysis of how embodied movement knowledge and perception help us to identify and define movement consciousness. I develop a phenomenological account of embodied movement consciousness and show how it is closely linked to self-consciousness by generating anticipations and affordances that implicate pre-reflective self-awareness. I also expand Rowlands’ Rilkean memory notion to (...) include affective phenomenological properties that rely on the constitutive fault-lines between bodily material sensations and the ingrained recollections they are based on. From this perspective, embodied movement consciousness comprises empirical sensations that phenomenologically unfold as physical acts grounded in materiality. (shrink)

This paper outlines several of the challenges that are inherent in any attempt to communicate subjective experience to others, particularly in the context of a clinical interview. It presents the phenomenological interview as a way of effectively responding to these challenges, which may be especially important when attempting to understand the profound experiential transformations that take place in schizophrenia. Features of language experience in schizophrenia—including changes in interpersonal orientation, a sense of the arbitrariness of language, and a desire for faithful (...) communication of experience —are described, together with discussion of their relevance for the interview context. Furthermore, the interview presents a unique context in which both intersubjective and interpersonal aspects of experience will be described as well as evoked. It is proposed that phenomenological interviewers should not only be familiar with these and other experiences that can occur in schizophrenia, but also capable of applying the techniques of phenomenological and hermeneutic methods in order to understand the descriptions of interviewees with sensitivity and accuracy. (shrink)

Today, there is a considerable interest in phenomenology within psychiatric academic communities as well as among clinical practitioners; as a result, a growing number of institutions demonstrate their commitment to phenomenology as a privileged speculative companion. The main focus of existing teaching programs in phenomenology is usually placed on psychopathological issues and on describing the experience of mental illness from a non-naturalistic and person-centered perspective. In this article, I argue that phenomenological training should also be focused on the role of (...) the psychiatrist in providing such a phenomenologically informed patient-centered approach. In this perspective, phenomenological interviews such as EASE, EAWE and EAFI appear to be a particularly relevant form of training, as they allow the trainee to engage actively in the learning process. To focus on the person of the psychiatrist allows, however, to reconsider the meaning of the clinician’s neutrality, advocated by the authors of the phenomenological interviews. The attitude produced by adopting the phenomenological approach should instead be described as a particular reflective attitude which allows for paying attention to the embodied dimension of experience. This attitude differs from both the neutrality associated with the objectivity of classic psychiatry, and the neutrality to which a psychoanalyst strives. By taking into account embodied awareness as characteristic of phenomenological attitude, one then may address, through training, the specifics of phenomenological practice, such as its unstable and laborious nature, its integration in the lived experience, and the challenge that it poses to the psychiatrist’s scientific background. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal self-location and integrated self-location. The double aim of the paper is to use this distinction to deepen our understanding of spatial disorientation, and to use the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that integrated self-location plays in shaping self-consciousness. Section 2 starts by looking at the experience of being (...) “turned around”, which is a common experience of disorientation. This analysis leads to the conclusion that integrated self-location is transmodal and depends on all three egocentric axes, and that disorientation destabilizes this integrated self-location. Section 3 explores a corpus of reports of disorientation episodes and highlights four key characteristics of these experiences and their links to self-consciousness, focusing on the transformations in both the lived body and the experience of space. The central thesis of this paper is that during disorientation a destabilization of integrated self-location results in a diminished form of self-consciousness. (shrink)