Radical Enactivism rejects representationalism but nonetheless allows the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as supervening on brain bound elements. In this paper, I argue that Radical Enactivism should reject the possibility of wholly brain-bound phenomenal experience. I propose a way of individuating perceptual experiences that does not depend on representationalism and raises a problem to the view defended by Hutto and Myin (Radicalizing Enactivism: basic minds without content. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2012) according to which, with respect to phenomenality, it is possible to adopt a view that partly construes experience in terms of engagement with the environment. I argue that Radical Enactivism should change: either deny that the environment plays any role in an account of the phenomenal character or embrace the view that the phenomenal properties of experiences are at least partly constituted by the environment itself.
Gallagher S. (2017) Phenomenological approaches to consciousness. In: Schneider S. & Velmans M. (eds.) The Blackwell companion to consciousness. Second edition. Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ: 711–725.
Phenomenology involves a first‐person approach to consciousness. Husserl initiated phenomenology as a transcendental investigation in opposition to naturalism. It includes a methodologically guided analysis of intentionality as the primary characteristic of consciousness. Phenomenology also addresses the issue of the phenomenal character of consciousness tied to the notion of pre‐reflective self‐awareness, to embodiment, and to variations in intentional structures. It also offers a detailed analysis of the temporal nature of consciousness which helps to explain not only how one can have a coherent experience of an object, but also how the subject of experience – a pre‐reflective self – can maintain identity over time. Husserl and later phenomenologists, like Merleau‐Ponty, emphasized the embodied nature of consciousness in a way that foreshadowed recent enactivist accounts.
Gärtner K. (2017) Conscious experience and experience externalization. In: Hipólito I., Gonçalves J. & Pereira J. G. (eds.) Schizophrenia and Common Sense: Explaining madness and social values. Springer, Cham: 97–112.
According to Sass and Parnas, schizophrenia is essentially a self-disorder which leads to the externalization or alienation of experience. This view is based on the phenomenological assumption that subjects suffering from schizophrenia manifest disturbances in the most basic presentation of the self, i.e. in the sense of being the experiential subject of experience. Interestingly, recent interpretations of the phenomenal character within the study of consciousness involve a similar claim. Just like Neo-Phenomenologists (including Sass and Parnas), proponents of such a view argue that, rather than overemphasizing the qualitative features of phenomenal properties, we need to turn to the most basic feature of experience, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. In this paper, I will reflect on Sass and Parnas’s phenomenological account of schizophrenia and show how a particular model of conscious experience fits their claims. My aim is to give a road map to naturalizing phenomenal consciousness and present a way to ground the phenomenological view of schizophrenia.
Hutto D. D. (2009) Mental representation and consciousness. In: Banks W. P. (ed.) Encyclopedia of consciousness. Volume 2. Academic Press, New York: 19–32.
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.
Although enactive approaches to cognition vary in terms of their character and scope, all endorse several core claims. The first is that cognition is tied to action. The second is that cognition is composed of more than just in-the-head processes; cognitive activities are (at least partially) externalized via features of our embodiment and in our ecological dealings with the people and things around us. I appeal to these two enactive claims to consider a view called “direct social perception” (DSP): the idea that we can sometimes perceive features of other minds directly in the character of their embodiment and environmental interactions. I argue that if DSP is true, we can probably also perceive certain features of mental disorders as well. I draw upon the developmental psychologist Daniel Stern’s notion of “forms of vitality” – largely overlooked in these debates – to develop this idea, and I use autism as a case study. I argue further that an enactive approach to DSP can clarify some ways we play a regulative role in shaping the temporal and phenomenal character of the disorder in question, and it may therefore have practical significance for both the clinical and therapeutic encounter.
The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, their phenomenal character, such as the often-remarked vivacity or immediacy of perception. Second, the way in which they represent the world, e.g. the non-propositional nature of the contents, or non-discursive character of the vehicles, that have been held to characterise perceptual representation. Third, their place in cognitive architecture, i.e., roughly, in the information-flow of the mind, such as their alleged (non-)modularity. Fourth, their mind-world relations, e.g. the way in which perceptions seem to be tightly causally linked with distal or proximal stimuli. Against this background, we distinguish some main options for an account of the perception/cognition distinction, in particular concerning whether there is one, several, or no interesting and principled distinction(s) to be drawn here.
Thompson E. (2005) Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(4): 407–427. https://cepa.info/4152
The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related (the body-body problem) via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O’Regan, Noë, and Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness.
Representationalism is a thesis about the phenomenal character of experiences, about their immediate subjective ‘feel’. 1 At a minimum, the thesis is one of supervenience: necessarily, experiences that are alike in their representational contents are alike in their phenomenal character. So understood, the thesis is silent on the nature of phenomenal character. Strong or pure representationalism goes further. It aims to tell us what phenomenal character is. According to the theory developed in Tye 1995, phenomenal character is one and the same as representational content that meets certain further conditions. One very important motivation for this theory is the so-called “transparency of experience.” The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the appeal to transparency more carefully than has been done hithertofore, to make some remarks about the introspective awareness of experience in light of this appeal, and to consider one problem case for transparency at some length, that of blurry vision. Along the way, I shall also address some of the remarks Stephen Leeds makes in his essay on transparency