This paper reviews the debate between Carnap and Schrödinger about Hypothesis P (It is not only I who have perceptions and thoughts; other human beings have them too)–a hypothesis that underlies the possibility of doing science. For Schrödinger this hypothesis is not scientifically testable; for Carnap it is. But Schrödinger and Carnap concede too much to each other and miss an alternative understanding: science does not depend on an explicit hypothesis concerning what other human beings see and think; it is simply a practice of communication which anticipates or presupposes the perfect interchangeability of positions amongst the members of the linguistic community. The mentalistic vocabulary of folk-psychology, used by Carnap and Schrödinger, does not take first but last place in this perspective; because it does nothing but express after the event the confidence to which the disputants bear witness regarding a generally successful practice of communication.

Key words: carnap, methodological solipsism, p-hypothesis, schrödinger, science

This article critiques recent enactivist attempts to bridge an epistemological divide between the individual and the social (i.e. to fill in the posited macro-micro gap) Its central claim is that an inflated view of ‘autonomy’ leads to error. Scrutinising two contributions, we find that methodological solipsism taints Varela’s model: It induces De Jaegher & Di Paolo to ascribe social knowledge to perturbances – contingencies whose logic arises from the closed organization of an individual (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) and Steiner & Stewart to posit that the pre-dispositions of an organizationally closed world prompt individuals to “receive” shared norms (Steiner & Stewart, 2009) On our deflated view, neither organizational closure nor participatory sense making apply to most human cognition. Rather, we invoke a developmental process based on the recursive self-maintenance that is found in all organism-environment systems (including bacteria) Humans differ in that infants discover ways of making skilled use of phenomenal experience: they learn to predicate something of lived experience. As observers, they connect impersonal resources of culture (artifacts, institutions, languages etc.) with on-going social and environmental activity. This human kind of heteronomy links social processes to agent-environment systems that sustain – and are sustained by – historically positioned modes of life. Far from being organisationally closed, human subjects depend on using sensorimotoric prompts to connect the phenomenal with the impersonal and open up a partly shared, partly lived, reality.

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.

Key words: agency, autonomy, cognitive gap, coordination, modeling, participatory sense-making, perceptual crossing, social interaction, social cognition

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined. The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes to itself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior. The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful.

Intentionality and consciousness are the fundamental kinds of mental phenomena. Although they are widely regarded as being entirely distinct some philosophers conjecture that they are intimately related. Prominently it has been claimed that consciousness can be best understood in terms of representational facts or properties. Representationalist theories vary in strength. At their core they seek to establish that subjective, phenomenal consciousness (of the kind that involves the having of first-personal points of view or perspectives on the world – perspectives that incorporate experiences with specific phenomenal characters) is either exhausted by, or supervenes on, capacities for mental representation. These proposals face several serious objections.

Key words: enactivism, externalism, intentionality, internalism, methodological solipsism, misrepresentation, mode of presentation, narrow content, phenomenal character, psychosemantics, qualia, representational content, subjectivity, supervenience, teleofunctions

Excerpt: Regrettably, phenomenologists who concentrate narrowly on the early Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900–1901; Husserl 2001a) and Ideas I (Husserl 1977a) often overemphasize his focus on the individual life of intentional consciousness as reconstructed from within (and even on the structure of individual, atomistic lived experiences [Erlebnisse]) and tend to overlook Husserl’s original, radical, and fundamentally groundbreaking explorations of intersubjectivity, sociality, and the constitution of historical cultural life (which would later influence Heidegger and Schütz, among others). In respect of this individualist misinterpretation, Husserl is often his own worst enemy, since he repeatedly and very publicly, for example, in his Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950, 1967; hereafter CM), compared his phenomenological breakthrough to subjectivity with Descartes’s discovery of the ego cogito and modeled his phenomenological epoché, albeit with important changes of emphasis, on Descartes’s radical doubt. As a result, Husserl’s phenomenology has too often been designated a methodological solipsism that proceeds through individualistic introspection of conscious experiences, and Husserl’s wider explorations of social and cultural life have been passed over (and many of his original discoveries have been attributed to others, e.g., Heidegger and Gadamer). It is worth reminding ourselves, therefore, of the originality of Husserl’s meditations on the nature of the self, its embodiment, and its intercorporeal, intersubjective communal relations with others. In this chapter, then, I want to focus on Husserl’s mature reflections (i.e., as specifically found in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s) on the intentional constitution of culture, particularly as he understood it to relate to lived embodiment and, especially, the specific relations that hold between lived bodies, their Ineinandersein, Füreinandersein, or what Husserl calls in Cartesian Meditations “a mutual being-for-one-another” (ein Wechselseitig-füreinander-sein; CM, 129; Hua I, 157). As he puts it elsewhere, in the Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl 1970, 1962), Husserl approaches human subjects not only as having “subject being for the world” (Subjektsein für die Welt) but also as possessing “object being in the world” (Objektsein in der Welt; Crisis, 178; Hua VI, 182). How humans can be both in the world and for the world is, for him, the riddle of transcendental subjectivity.