Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination is a surprisingly fruitful nexus of explanation for the prima facie disparate characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially the sub-spectrum best characterized by the Sensory Integration (SI) and Intense World (IW) theories of ASD. According to the psychological theories that underpin these approaches to autism, upstream effects of sensory processing atypicalities explain a cascade of downstream effects that have been characterized in the diagnostic triad, e.g., poor sensory integration contributes to weak central coherence, which (...) in turn contributes to difficulty participating in a back and forth conversation. To see why Kant’s theory of imagination might be useful, consider that ASD is neither a sensory disorder nor an intellectual disorder per se. Cognitive dysfunction is a common comorbidity of ASD, not a characteristic of it. If we exclude sense and intellect, what’s left? According to Kant, imagination is a synthesizing faculty that mediates between sense and understanding. It does so by transforming intuition from the canonic and vital senses. The uses of imagination include our spatially formative, temporally associative, and communicatively affinitive production, where affinitive production includes sympathy and fantasy. Imagination is thus the faculty of sensory integration, embodied subjectivity, empathy, mindreading, and social cooperation. The wide range of how autism presents and how it is experienced can thus be understood in terms of the atypical development of specific functions of imagination. Kant’s theory of imagination provides a new perspective on how to organize our understanding of autism at the psychological level, one that makes sense of how some of the disparate characteristic phenomena of autism are systematically related and which might lead to novel predictions, research targets, or intervention recommendations. (shrink)

Is the epistemology of moral intuitions compatible with admitting a role for emotion? I argue in this paper that moral intuitions and emotions can be partners without creating an epistemic threat. I start off by offering some empirical findings to weaken Singer’s (and Greene’s and Haidt’s) debunking argument against moral intuition, which treat emotions as a distorting factor. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake. Moral intuitions and (...) emotions are not contestants if we construe moral intuition as non-doxastic intellectual seeming and emotion as a non-doxastic perceptual-like state. This will show that emotions support, rather than distort, the epistemic standing of moral intuitions. (shrink)

The present paper will be primarily concerned with criticizing the defense of cognitive phenomenology presented by David Pitt’s (2011) self knowledge argument, focusing on his response to Joseph Levine (2011). In this essay, I argue that Pitt’s self-knowledge argument appears to presuppose that a person makes voluntary judgments about their beliefs on the basis of recognition of distinctive phenomenal states, the way we recognize what we see, hear, or smell. However, many of those who reject the existence of cognitive phenomenology (...) (e.g., those who endorse Non-Phenomenal Functional Representationalism) would deny this assumption. Thus, I argue Pitt’s self-knowledge arguments do not seem to be as general as may have been intended, as only a relatively narrow audience who already endorse Pitt’s controversial assumptions will find the arguments convincing. However, while Pitt is unable to argue decisively that there exists a distinctive cognitive phenomenology, the same might be said of Levine’s argument that no cognitive phenomenology is required to explain how a person comes to have knowledge of her thoughts. I attempt to offer a defense of Levine’s account of self-knowledge of one’s thoughts, but I ultimately suggest that the literature surrounding the self-knowledge argument for cognitive phenomenology appears to collapse into an argumentative impasse, as both sides appear to rely on controversial assumptions that their opponents take to be false. In the last section of this essay, I discuss the implications of these conclusions. (shrink)