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Flashcards in Intentionality Deck (23)
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1
Q

What are representations?

A

Entities that

1) Stand in and carry information about something
2) enable systems to direct it’s behaviour in response to that thing

2
Q

What was Brentano’s thesis that distinguished mental phenomena from physical?

A

All mental phenomena exhibits directedness, but no physical phenomena does

3
Q

What is intentionality (with 3 examples)

A

The ability to represent something:

  • A photo of a person represents them
  • A noun/verb refers to a thing/its properties
  • A belief represents some putative fact
4
Q

What has happened since Brentano introduced the concept of intentionality?

A

The connection between the representation of something and what it represents has been mysterious

Especially since the represented thing may not exist at all

5
Q

What is a common strategy used to help the connection between representation and represented?

A

Appeal to how representations carry info that’s causally dependent on what they represent. (e.g. a photo of a person is causally dependent on the person themselves)

6
Q

How does the brain access the world?

A

Only through representations of the world provided by the senses

7
Q

What are the assumptions of the traditional view of representation? (3)

A

1) There is a reliable correlation between what is represented and the representation
2) The structure of the phenomenon represented is preserved in the representations
3) The senses offer servile reports and do not impose their own interpretation

8
Q

Does the traditional view of representation require that the senses function perfectly?

A

No, but error should not be widespread

9
Q

Explain the beach example (3)

A
  • Imagine you’re on the beach and somebody asks you what you think the temperature is. You reply “It’s hot, probably around 30C”,
  • Akins traditional view of the senses explains this by saying that our senses are good indicators of temperature but generally less reliable than thermometers, reporting values such as hot, cold etc.
  • BUT this may be a bit misleading, our senses tend to report changes in temperature (e.g. if we spend prolonged amounts of time in the heat we get used to it)
10
Q

What does it mean to have a narcissist sensory system?

A

A sensory system what interprets everything in terms of significance to oneself

11
Q

Explain narcissism with respect to thermoreception (3)

A
  • Receptors do not objectively report what’s going on in the world, but rather their own response to it
  • Different parts of the body have different concentrations of warm and cold receptors, and so are more sensitive to one or the other
    e. g. some parts of the body may respond to extreme heat, whereas others may just detect it as hot
12
Q

What does the traditional view think of thermoreception?

A
  • It is a poor sensory system if it is supposed to provide accurate information about the temperature
  • Due to the fact that it reports the same temperature in diff ways depending on how many receptors are in a given tissue
13
Q

Explain how the warm spots dynamically respond to changes in temperature (3)

A
  • When temperature first increases, the response first spikes then gradually drops back to new static response
  • When temperature decreases, the response first drops, then gradually increases back to new static response
  • Size of spike depends on size of change

(Obvz cold is the reverse system)

14
Q

Explain the 4 types of thermoreceptors

A

2 for detecting temp: warm spots and cold spots

2 for detecting pain: extreme hot and extreme cold

15
Q

Explain how thermoreceptors will report same stimulus differently (2)

A
  • They’ll do it is the temperature is changing differently for different parts of the body
  • e.g. put one hand in cold water, and one hand in warm water, then put them both in bucket of tepid water, the hand that was initially in warm water will report the tepid water as colder than the hand initially in cold water
16
Q

Quote Akins’ own assessment of the usefulness of narcissistic sensory systems

A

They generate distortions and so are a serious impediment to our ability to understand the world around us

It seems that our minds/brains do not represent the world

17
Q

Explain what Akins means by intentional grounding

A
  • Akins doesn’t have a problem with the occurrence of representations in the brain, but the nature of them (They don’t represent objective features of the external world, but narcissistic ones)
  • Our sensory perceptions do not ground our conscious representational states
18
Q

How do we come to have these representational states? (+ Akins’ response)

A
  • We extract them from what is represented by the senses (e.g. I use my vision to see green grass, therefore I have a conscious representation of green grass)
  • Akins rejects this because it “amounts to little more than an expression of one’s faith in the traditional view”
19
Q

Explain Akins’ objection to sensory systems as detectors of specific properties

A
  • Internal systems in an organism regularly modify the response properties of the senses, so that they’re not fixed detectors (they become context sensitive)
  • This means that whatever utilises the response of the detector must also be receptive to the way that the receptor was calibrated
20
Q

Name two supports of radical anti-respresonationalism

A
  • Van Gelder

- Kelso

21
Q

What did Val Gelder say?

A

Motivated by physics to say that we should categorise cognitive systems in terms of differential equations in order to measure how much they’ve changed

22
Q

Briefly explain Kelso’s finger wagging task (3)

A
  • Wag your index finger on both hands
  • They can either move out of out of phase (parallel/180) or in phase (antiparallel/0)
  • The faster you get, they can only move in phase (antiparallel/0)
23
Q

Explain phenomenon 2 of Kelso’s finger wagging task (2)

A
  • 0 is more stable than 180
  • If you begin at 180 and steadily increase the frequency, 180 gets progressively more unstable and the person will spontaneously shift from 180 to 0, but the reverse is not true