Mind Workshop: Smith

Joel Smith, How is Intersubjectivity Possible?, took issue with Strawson’s well-known idea that behaviour constitutes logically adequate criteria for mental state attribution rather than being just a sign of mentality. In his view, this is not simply due to Strawson’s generality constraint on the ascription of mental states to certain entities, but results from Strawson’s conviction that the “sign” view cannot tell consistently how subjects develop the ability to deploy mental concepts. What undermines this argument, however, is that “sign” views are not committed to first person developmental accounts. Joel’s alternative is based on the phenomenological notion that what is perceived in visual experience is not just the (presented) front aspect of an object, but includes (co-presented) invisible aspects of the entire object as well. Similarly, he suggests, mentality is co-presented in seeing others. There are reservations against the idea of a visual experience of mentality--it is intuitive to treat mentality as an invisible function--and against the idea of a mere co-presence of mentality--co-presentation implies that we can get a better view of it. If certain mental states can be picked out by their functions, however, co-presenting them means anticipating the structure of the functional roles that the appropriate mental properties have. By merging co-presentation and functional accounts, Joel concludes, we can get a better view of mental co-presence without making mental functioning present, and thus we get logically adequate criteria for mental state attribution.

Johannes Haag at the TI workshop

Johannes Haag gave a paper entitled 'Transcendental Realism'. In it he argued that Sellars' conception of the scientific image as the ultimate telos of human knowledge is not driven, as is commonly supposed, by scientism. Rather, it is driven by his analysis of the phenomenology of perception on the one hand, and transcendental methodology on the other. The former analysis leads him to make the 'sense impression inference': because normal and abnormal (false) perceptions have the same representational content, something must explain this fact, and sensations are posited as sub-intentional entities that guide conscious perception in normal and abnormal cases. But this phenomenologically driven point leads to the empirical objects of conscious experience becoming 'ideal'. Johannes' main claim was that Sellars does not posit sensations simply owing to a desire for a scientific explanation of perception, but owing to a desire to explain the coherence of empirical knowledge. Sellars accepts Kant's claim in the Transcendental Deduction that unified experience requires an empirical object: but he sees experience as being unified and coherent only if there is an explanation at the level of transcendental reality that accounts for the sensations that guide us at the level of empirical reality. Experiential coherence is maintained because the successor concepts of the scientific image retain as much as is possible of the content of the concepts employed at the latter level.

One question that came up in discussion concerned whether experience being unified as a coherent whole at the level of the scientific image really had much in common with Kantian transcendental philosophy. Another asked whether we might reject the philosophy of perception that yields the sense-impression inference rather than going as far as bifurcating experience into empirically ideal and transcendentally real aspects.