Shaun Gallagher

I review three answers to the question: How can phenomenology contribute to the experimental cognitive neurosciences? The first approach, neurophenomenology, employs phenomenological method and training, and uses first-person reports not just as more data for analysis, but to generate descriptive categories that are intersubjectively and scientifically validated, and are then used to interpret results that correlate with objective measurements of behaviour and brain activity. A second approach, indirect phenomenology, is shown to be problematic in a number of ways. Indirect phenomenology is generally put to work after the experiment, in critical or creative interpretations of the scientific evidence. Ultimately, however, proposals for the indirect use of phenomenology lead back to methodological questions about the direct use of phenomenology in experimental design. The third approach, 'front-loaded' phenomenology, suggests that the results of phenomenological investigations can be used in the design of empirical ones. Concepts or clarifications that have been worked out phenomenologically may operate as a partial framework for experimentation

Social robots are robots designed to interact with humans or with each other in ways that approximate human social interaction. It seems clear that one question relevant to the project of designing such robots concerns how humans themselves interact to achieve social understanding. If we turn to psychology, philosophy, or the cognitive sciences in general, we find two models of social cognition vying for dominance under the heading of theory of mind: theory theory and simulation theory. It is therefore natural and interesting to ask how a TT design for a social robot would differ from the ST version. I think that a much more critical question is whether either TT or ST provide an adequate explanation of social cognition. There is a growing although still minority consensus that, despite their dominance in the debate about social cognition, neither TT nor ST, nor some hybrid version of these theories, offers an acceptable account of how we encounter and interact with one another. In this paper I will give a brief review of the theory of mind debate, outline an alternative theory of social cognition based on an embodied interactive approach, and then try to draw out a few implications about social robotics.

W sytuacjach, gdy powinniśmy mieć do czynienia ze wzajemnym oświecaniem, w rzeczywistości często spotykamy się z obopólnym oporem między kognitywistyką a fenomenologią, gdzie ta druga rozumiana jest jako podejście metodologiczne, po raz pierwszy zarysowane przez Husserla. Filozofowie umysłu, z pierwszych szeregów kognitywistów, niejednokrotnie czynią lekceważące gesty w stosunku do fenomenologii, oparte na myleniu fenomenologii z niewykwalifikoną introspekcją psychologiczną (np. Dennett, 1991). Z kolei wielu fenomenologów podlega mylnemu wrażeniu, że kognitywistyce nie udało się wyjść poza tradycyjne modele komputacyjne (DSSI – „dobra staromodna sztuczna inteligencja” (GOFAI - „good old fashioned artificial inteligence”)). Odrzucają oni kognitywistykę, zarzucając jej nadmierny redukcjonizm, uniemożliwiający wyjaśnienie doświadczenia czy świadomości. O ile taki opór nie dziwi w przypadku tych, którzy znają i bronią antynaturalistycznego stanowiska Husserla, o tyle jest niezwykle zaskakujący w przypadku tych, którzy znają dzieła Merleau-Ponty’ego. Badania tego ostatniego łączyły bowiem analizy fenomenologiczne z rozważaniami pochodzącymi z nauk empirycznych, takich jak psychologia i neurologia, i to na długo, zanim kognitywistyka została skonstruowana jako model do uwzględniania tylko tych aspektów psychologii i neurologii, które skupiają się na doświadczeniu poznawczym. Zostawiając przykład Merleau-Ponty’ego, filozofowie po obu stronach stopniowo zdali sobie sprawę, że fenomenologia może być bezpośrednio przydatna do naukowego zrozumienia poznania. Wcześniej niejednokrotnie nawet sami naukowcy empiryczni dochodzili do tego wniosku i to pomimo filozofów. Dobry przykład stanowią tutaj badania Franisco Vareli z neurofenomenologii (Varela, 1996).

Some philosophers argue that Descartes was wrong when he characterized animals as purely physical automata – robots devoid of consciousness. It seems to them obvious that animals (tigers, lions, and bears, as well as chimps, dogs, and dolphins, and so forth) are conscious. There are other philosophers who argue that it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that robots and other artificial agents may someday be conscious – and it is certainly practical to take the intentional stance toward them (the robots as well as the philosophers) even now. I'm not sure that there are philosophers who would deny consciousness to animals but affirm the possibility of consciousness in robots. In any case, and in whatever way these various philosophers define consciousness, the majority of them do attribute consciousness to humans. Amongst this group, however, there are philosophers and scientists who want to reaffirm the idea, explicated by Shadworth Holloway Hodgson in 1870, that in regard to action the presence of consciousness does not matter since it plays no causal role. Hodgson's brain generated the following thought: neural events form an autonomous causal chain that is independent of any accompanying conscious mental states. Consciousness is epiphenomenal, incapable of having any effect on the nervous system. James (1890, 130) summarizes the situation

We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the ‘social mind’ is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached ‘social cognition’ is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of ‘social interaction’ in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research. Keywords: theory of mind; cognitive science; phenomenology; embodied cognition; dynamical systems theory; enactive approach; social cognition; interaction theory; evolutionary robotics.

ArgumentA number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. A review of these theories shows that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy. A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two other problems: the diversity problem and the starting problem. It is argued that a narrative approach to empathy obviates all these problems and offers a more parsimonious account.

I propose a distinction between two closely related problems: the problem of social cognition and the problem of participatory sense-making. One problem focuses on how we understand others; the other problem focuses on how, with others, we make sense out of the world. Both understanding others and making sense out of the world involve social interaction. The importance of participatory sense-making is highlighted by reviewing some recent accounts of perception that are philosophically autistic -- i.e., accounts that ignore the involvement of others in our perception of the world

The term phenomenology can be used in a generic sense to cover a variety of areas related to the problem of consciousness. In this sense it is a title that ranges over issues pertaining to first-person or subjective experience, qualia, and what has become known as "the hard problem" (Chalmers 1995). The term is sometimes used even more generally to signify a variety of approaches to studying such issues, including contemplative, meditative, and mystical studies, and transpersonal psychology.(1) Within the disciplines of philosophy and psychology, however, phenomenology has a more specialized meaning. In this case it refers to the methodology and philosophy initiated by the philosopher Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth-century and developed in various ways by theorists such as Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz. I restrict the scope of this review to phenomenology in this more specialized sense. In the light of several recent publications, the general questions I address are: What is and what ought to be the relationship between phenomenology and cognitive science? and What, if any, recent contributions has phenomenology made to the science of consciousness?

In cognitive psychology, studies concerning the face tend to focus on questions about face recognition, theory of mind (ToM) and empathy. Questions about the face, however, also fit into a very different set of issues that are central to ethics. Based especially on the work of Levinas, philosophers have come to see that reference to the face of another person can anchor conceptions of moral responsibility and ethical demand. Levinas points to a certain irreducibility and transcendence implicit in the face of the other. In this paper I argue that the notion of transcendence involved in this kind of analysis can be given a naturalistic interpretation by drawing on recent interactive approaches to social cognition found in developmental psychology, phenomenology, and the study of autism.

The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”

Per Aage Brandt, commenting on a passage from Merlin Donald, suggests that there is ‘a narrative aesthetics built into our mind.’ In Donald, one can find an evolutionary account of this narrative aesthetics. If there is something like an innate narrative disposition, it is also surely the case that there is a process of development involved in narrative practice. In this paper I will assume something closer to the developmental account provided by Jerome Bruner in various works, and Dan Hutto's account of how we learn narrative practices, and I'll refer to this narrative aesthetics as a narrative competency that we come to have through a developmental process. I will take narrative in a wide sense, to include oral and written communications and self-reports on experience. In this regard narrative is more basic than story, and not necessarily characterized by the formal plot structure of a story. A story may be told in many different ways, but always via narrative discourse. Also, having narrative competency includes not just abilities for understanding narratives, but also for narrative understanding, which allows us to form narratives about things, events and other people. To be capable of narrative understanding means to be capable of seeing events in a narrative framework.

Oni koji tvrde da je slobodna volja iluzija, u krivu su. Oni temelje svoju tvrdnju na znanstvenom dokazu koji testira pogrešnu razinu deskripcije intencionalnog djelovanja. Kod slobodne volje ne radi se o podosobnim neuronskim procesima, mišićnoj aktivaciji, ili temeljnim tjelesnim pokretima, već o kontekstualiziranim djelovanjima u sistemu koji je veći negoli što to mnogi suvremeni filozofi uma, psiholozi i neuroznanstvenici smatraju. U ovome članku opisujem vrstu intencionalnosti koja ide s vježbom slobodne volje.Those who argue that free will is an illusion – are wrong. They base their argument on scientific evidencethat tests the wrong level of description for intentional action. Free will is not about subpersonalneuronal processes, muscular activation, or basic bodily movements, but about contextualizedactions in a system that is larger than many contemporary philosophers of mind, psychologists,and neuroscientists consider. In this paper, I describe the kind of intentionality that goes with theexercise of free will

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions.

I present arguments against both explicit and implicit versions of the simulation theory for intersubjective understanding. Logical, developmental, and phenomenological evidence counts against the concept of explicit simulation if this is to be understood as the pervasive or default way that we understand others. The concept of implicit (subpersonal) simulation, identified with neural resonance systems (mirror systems or shared representations), fails to be the kind of simulation required by simulation theory, because it fails to explain how neuronal processes meet constraints that involve instrumentality and pretense. Implicit simulation theory also fails to explain how I can attribute a mental or emotion state that is different from my own to another person. I also provide a brief indication of an alternative interpretation of neural resonance systems

Psychology is dead. The self is a fiction invented by the brain. Brain plasticity isn?t all it?s cracked up to be. Our conscious learning is an observation post factum, a recollection of something already accomplished by the brain. We don?t learn to speak; speech is generated when the brain is ready to say something. False memories are more prevalent than one might think, and they aren?t all that bad. We think we?re in charge of our lives, but actually we are not. On top of all this, the common belief that reading to a young child will make her brain more attuned to reading is simply untrue

This chapter addresses two questions. First, can phenomenology be naturalized? Second, if so, how? It employs the term ‘phenomenology’, and understands the question in this second sense. At the same time, responses to the question about naturalising consciousness and the question about naturalising phenomenology, in this second sense, are interlaced. Edmund Husserl has been careful about how he defined phenomenology, distinguishing it from a naturalistic enterprise. The Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée proposal shows that a sufficiently complex mathematics can help the translation of data from phenomenological and naturalistic realms. Neuroscientists often attract to personal-level practices and phenomenological experiences in establishing their experiments, and in many cases the only way to define the explanadum is in terms of phenomenology. The ‘truth’ of naturalism is not the naturalism which Husserl cautioned against, but a redefined non-reductionist naturalism that correlates with a redefined phenomenology.

I want to explore one small corner of the concept of mental causality. It’s the corner where discussions about mind-body interactions and epiphenomenalism take place. My basic contention is that these discussions are framed in the wrong terms because they are infected by a mind-body dualism which defines the question of mental causality in a classic or standard way: How does a mental event cause my body to do what it does? Setting the question in this way has consequences for ongoing interdisciplinary (psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical) discussions of mental causation, as well as free will, and for our understanding of what we mean by a sense of agency for action. These concepts, in turn, have much to do with our understanding of what goes wrong in certain instances of psychopathology. I’ll try to get to this issue in the final part of my paper. Let me first set the historical scene of what I am calling this standard way of understanding the problem of mental causality.

A BSTRACT: I argue that theory theory approaches to autism offer a wholly inadequate explanation of autistic symptoms because they offer a wholly inadequate account of the non-autistic understanding of others. As an alternative I outline interaction theory, which incorporates evidence from both developmental and phenomenological studies to show that humans are endowed with important capacities for intersubjective understanding from birth or early infancy. As part of a neurophenomenological analysis of autism, interaction theory offers an account of interpersonal problems that is fully consistent with the variety of social and nonsocial symptoms found in autism.