Volume 20 (2007), Issue 4
Articles:
Gary Hatfield
Did Descartes Have a Jamesian Theory of the Emotions?
René Descartes and William James had "body first" theories of the passions or emotions, according to which sensory stimulation causes a bodily response that then causes an emotion. Both held that this bodily response also causes an initial behavioral response (such as flight from a bear) without any cognitive intervention such as an "appraisal" of the object or situation. From here they differ. Descartes proposed that the initial processes that produce fear and running are entirely mechanical. Even human beings initially run from the bear as a result of physiological processes alone, without mental contribution. These physiological processes also cause a mental passion, which is a cognitive representation of the situation (as regards novelty, benefit, or harm), and which motivates the will to continue the behavior already in progress. According to James, emotions are caused by instinctive bodily responses that are triggered by noncognitive but nonetheless conscious perceptual states. Emotions are bare feelings of internal physiological stirrings that accompany an instinctual response that has evolved through Darwinian natural selection. Jamesian emotions initially have no motivational or cognitive content, which they subsequently acquire through learning. The methodological legitimacy of comparing these positions across the centuries is defended, and the two theories are compared to recent theories.
Jack Martin
Interpreting and Extending G. H. Mead’s “Metaphysics” of Selfhood and Agency
G. H. Mead developed an alternative “metaphysics” of selfhood and agency that underlies, but is seldom made explicit in discussions of, his social developmental psychology. This is an alternative metaphysics that rejects any pregiven, fixed foundations for being and knowing. It assumes the emergence of social psychological phenomena such as mind, self, and deliberative agency through the activity of human actors and interactors within their biophysical and sociocultural world. Of central importance to the emergence of self-consciousness and deliberative forms of human agency is the ability of developing individuals to take the perspectives of others within their own conduct. However, precisely what is involved in this process, and whether or not it assumes the preexistence of exactly those forms of selfhood and agency, the emergence of which it seeks to explain, have been much disputed. In this essay, recent reinterpretations of Mead’s “metaphysics” are used to argue that his overall theoretical program contains resources necessary to overcome charges of ontological and epistemological circularity. In particular, once his interactionism, perspectivism, emergentism, and compatibilism are explicated, it is possible to see that Mead’s “taking the perspective of the other” is not primarily a process of internalization that requires a preexisting “internalizer,” but a process of participation with others within conventionalized sequences of interactivity. This participatory process enables the development of prereflective forms of perspective taking and self–other differentiation that serve as necessary conditions for the further emergence of more reflective forms of perspective taking, self-consciousness, and deliberative agency. Compatibilist interpretations of deliberative agency, thus understood, also are discussed.
Dorothée Legrand
Naturalizing the Acting Self: Subjective vs. Anonymous Agency
This paper considers critically the enterprise of naturalizing the subjective experience of acting intentionally. I specifically expose the limits of the model that conceives of agency as composed of two stages. The first stage consists in experiencing an anonymous intention without being conscious of it as anybody’s in particular. The second stage disambiguates this anonymous experience thanks to a mechanism of identification and attribution answering the question: “who is intending to act?” On the basis of phenomenological, clinical, methodological and empirical considerations, I contrast the two-stage anonymity-attribution model of agency with an alternative view that intends to bypass these problems by defining agency as intrinsically subjective at the pre-reflective level.
Xiang Chen
The Object Bias and the Studies on Scientific Revolutions:
Lessons from Developmental Psychology
I propose a new perspective on the study of scientific revolutions. This is a transformation from an object-only perspective to an ontological perspective that properly treats objects and processes as distinct kinds. I begin my analysis by identifying an object bias in the studies on scientific revolutions, where it takes the form of representing scientific revolutions as changes in classification of physical objects. I further explore the origins of this object bias. Findings from developmental psychology indicate that children cannot distinguish processes from objects until the age of 7, but they have already developed a core system of object knowledge as early as 4 months of age. The persistence of this core system is responsible for the object bias among mature adults, i.e., the tendency to apply knowledge of physical objects to temporal processes. In light of the distinction between physical objects and temporal processes, I redraw the picture of the Copernican revolution. Rather than seeing it as a taxonomic shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric cosmology, we should understand it as a transformation from a conceptual system that was built around an object concept to one that was built around a process concept.
Symposium: Alva Noë's Action in Perception
Ryan Hickerson
Perception as Knowing How to Act: Alva Noë’s Action in Perception
Fred Keijzer
Evolution in Action in Perception
Alva Noë
Understanding Action in Perception: Replies to Hickerson and Keijzer
Reviews:
John Sarnecki
Review of Todd Tremlin, Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion
Bertram F. Malle
Review of Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Johannes Roessler (Eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds
Christopher H. Ramey
Review of Colin McGinn, Consciousness and Its Objects
Marion Ledwig
Review of Jean-Marc Fellous & Michael A. Arbib (Eds.), Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot