Abstract
According to Husserl’s phenomenology, the intentional horizon is a general structure of experience. However, its characterisation beyond perceptual experience has not been explored yet. This paper aims, first, to fill this gap by arguing that there is a viable notion of cognitive horizon that presents features that are analogous to features of the perceptual horizon. Secondly, it proposes to characterise a specific structure of the cognitive horizon—that which presents possibilities for action—as a cognitive affordance. Cognitive affordances present cognitive elements as opportunities for mental action (i.e., a problem affording trying to solve it, a thought affording calculating, an idea affording reflection). Thirdly, it argues that postulating cognitive affordances helps to unfold a rational dimension of thinking by conceiving of them as motivating reasons for action, something that in turn provides an argument for the experienced character of cognitive affordances.
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Notes
With the notion of a horizon Husserl anticipates current predictive processing approaches to perception and cognition, such as Clark’s (2016), which are currently discussed in philosophy and cognitive science.
“For, in every phase we have genuine appearances, that is, a fulfilled intention, albeit only gradually fulfilled, since there remains an inner horizon that is unfulfilled and an inner horizon of indeterminacy that is still determinable.” (Husserl 2001, §2: 44).
Empty possibilities should not be confused with empty appearances. The former are possibilities not promoted by the actual experience, while the latter are just the unseen faces of the object.
For a detailed characterisation of the notion of ‘motivation’ in Husserl, see Walsh (2013).
Along similar lines, Horgan and Potrc (2010: 163–164) define ‘implicit’ as that which affects the character of what is there explicitly.
See Vygotsky (1987).
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting an example along these lines.
The idea that the cognitive horizon can involve perceptions suggests that both kinds of horizons are related. How they further relate and what is the nature of such a relation is a question that goes beyond the aims of this paper, which just presents an analogy between both kinds of horizon. One way to develop an answer to this is precisely Husserl’s (1973) view of the genesis of judgment from perceptual experience.
Other usual features of affordances according to Gibson are that they have a non-representational nature—as they provide the organism with direct contact with the environment—and that they avoid postulating internal mental processes to explain action. However, it is possible to conceptualize affordances without such commitments (see McClelland 2019).
Although not mentioned in Husserl’s work, the ‘horizon of doing’ would be an outer horizon, given that it primarily involves a relation of an experience with an action.
Although congenial to the idea that cognitive affordances are part of the intentional horizon and present a specific structure in relation to action, the accounts of the cognitive horizon and cognitive affordances offered in this article are quite independent from each other, and thus can be assessed on their own lights.
In general and as a working definition, an action is something a subject does in contrast with movements that the subject might perform as a reaction to something else or movements that merely happen to the subject. For the purposes of the present paper I need not enter into the discussions on the metaphysics of action and agency.
It is a generalised assumption within the school of ecological psychology that affordances are perceptual-based, essentially tied to the organism’s environment and a key notion in the dynamic process between perception and action. Extending affordances to the mental and cognitive domain may be regarded as an objectionable movement. However, as far as I know, there are no detailed views against such an extension, which might be due to the fact that there is only a scarce body of literature that deals with such a hypothesis.
McClelland (2019) characterises the mental affordance hypothesis as involving two main requirements: the perceptual and the potentiation requirement. According to the first, the subject perceives x as affording φ-ing, and according to the second, S perceiving x as affording φ-ing potentiates S φ-ing. That an affordance potentiates an action means that the affordance automatically prepares such an action and this explains why an action might be selected over another one.
One could think that mental events and objects are also internally perceived, and in fact Husserl talks about inner perception, as well as other theorists of consciousness such as Lycan (2004). I avoid talking of ‘inner perception’ here because it brings about a model of introspection in strict analogy with external perception, a view I do not want to commit to.
This argument has the form of a transcendental argument and as such it goes beyond the phenomenological descriptions and characterisations offered so far. In developing the argument, however, I offer a further characterisation of cognitive affordances in their connection to motivating reasons.
‘Motivating reasons’ in this context should not be confused with ‘motivated possibilities’ as they appear in Husserl’s description of the horizon as presented above.
See Jorba & Moran, 2016 for an argument to the conclusion that access to thought contents requires phenomenal consciousness.
It might be objected that ‘awareness’ in the previous quote just means having a belief about the reason, and under this reading my argument would be assuming the truth of cognitive phenomenology. This would be a problem because it is an argument for the experienced character of cognitive affordances, and assuming cognitive phenomenology would beg the question. One can argue, however, that simply having a belief about a reason is not sufficient for motivating one to act. The present point is precisely that some form of experiential awareness of reasons is required for a reason to motivate. (I’m thankful to Michele Palmira and Javier González de Prado for discussion on this point).
For the view that reasons are phenomenologically salient, see Dorsch (2016).
A further interesting question is whether such experiential character is cognitive in character or it is reducible to sensory and emotional kinds of phenomenal character, one of the main discussions within the cognitive phenomenology debate (see Bayne and Montague 2011; Breyer and Gutland 2016 and (Jorba 2016) for overviews). Without going deeper into this question here, there seems to be no way of characterising the cognitive horizon and cognitive affordances in terms of either inner speech, visual imagery or emotions (see Jorba 2016 for further defence and development of this claim in relation to the horizon).
Solicitations have to be understood as incentives to act, but not obligations to act (de Vignemont 2016).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Francesc Pereña and Agustín Vicente for their comments on this article, as well as the audiences of the events Intentionality and Consciousness: From Austrian to Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Fribourg, 2016), The Rational Role of Cognitive Phenomenology (Bergen, 2017), Summer School on Cognitive Phenomenology (Budapest, 2019) and the Ninth Meeting of the Spanish Society of Analytic Philosophy (SEFA) (Valencia, 2019), where parts or previous versions of this paper were presented. Many thanks also to the anonymous referees of this journal and to Nicola Oehl for linguistic correction.
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Jorba, M. Husserlian horizons, cognitive affordances and motivating reasons for action. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 847–868 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09648-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09648-z