Elisabetta Sacchi

My main concern in this paper is to provide an account of the aspectuality of propositional attitudes. After having made the negative point that aspectuality cannot be accounted for in purely semantic terms, I shall maintain that what accounts for aspectuality are phenomenal modes of presentation. The fundamental difference between my modes of presentation and those employed in the several variants of the standard account of aspectuality is that while the latter are properties (taken to be true) of the objects which are involved in the content, my modes of presentation are properties of the subject’s experience of the objects and in this sense qualify as “subjective”. My thesis is that only phenomenal modes of presentation are suited to account for aspectuality because they incorporate that peculiar way of appearing of the object to the subject which explains whether or not he takes different attitudes towards contents which concern the same object. That modes of presentation have to play this role is an unquestioned point in the debate. That in order to do it they need to have a phenomenal nature is what I shall try to argue for here.

According to a position which has dominated the theoretical landscape in the philosophy of mind until recently, only sensory states exhibit a characteristic phenomenal dimension, whereas cognitive states either utterly lack it, or inherit it from some of their accompanying sensory states. This position has recently been challenged by several scholars who have stressed the irreducibility of cognitive phenomenology to a merely sensory one. The aim of this introductory paper is to provide a general overview of the debate on cognitive phenomenology in order to give the reader a flavor of the richness of the themes that surround this area of investigation centered on the relationship between consciousness and cognition.

My main aim in this paper is to consider what methodology is best suited to adopt for one who believes that there is cognitive phenomenology (CP) in order to argue for its irreducibility to sensory phenomenology. I shall first present and criticize a methodology widely adopted by the deniers of CP in order to reject the irreducibility claim, the so called “exclude-and-isolate” methodology. I shall use my criticisms against it as a lever for backing up a certain conception of the nature of cognitive phenomenal properties. The key notion in this conception is that of factual intimacy which I shall mobilize to put forward the idea that cognitive phenomenal properties are inseparable, in practice and in ordinary cases, from sensory phenomenal properties (leaving open the possibility of their explanatory and metaphysical independence). I shall then present a strategy to prove irreducibility which is compliant with the inseparability claim. One such strategy is in my view provided by combining the so-called phenomenal contrast methodology with a methodology that, instead of contrasting couples of cases, compares them in order to disclose the presence of phenomenological commonalities. What the comparison methodology shows is that experiences with different sensory features can share a common phenomenal component. Since this possibility obtains even by assuming that all of a subject’s sensory features differ, it follows that the common phenomenal component cannot be sensory in nature. This is enough to prove that the phenomenology in question is cognitive and that this phenomenology is irreducible to the sensory one.

Art and aesthetic experience, as well as the nature of depiction, representations and images, are crucial topics in the ongoing multifaceted debate at the interface between philosophy of perception, aesthetics, philosophy of mind and neuroscience.This issue collects the papers presented at San Raffaele Spring School of Philosophy and International Conference 2017 and investigates the mentioned topics, together with other related ones, by locating them in the more general framework concerning the relation between perception and cognition.In this introductory chapter, we provide some sketches of this multidisciplinary field of inquiry together with an overview of the materials collected in the issue.

There are many ways in which a subject can think about an object. One of these occurs when the subject can perceive the object: perceiving an object makes it possible to think about it in a very direct and straightforward way. This is so because perception of the object makes a subject aware of the object itself. But what is it to be (perceptually) aware of something? Moreover, how does such an awareness have to be accounted for? According to a very influential proposal leading back to Gareth Evans (1982), the kind of awareness that can home a subject’s thought on an object has to be cashed out in terms of singular object-dependent modes of presentation understood as ways of having discriminating (albeit non-descriptive) knowledge of the object. Contra Evans I shall claim that modes of presentation thus characterized do not account for perceptual awareness, but rather presuppose it.

This paper addresses the title question and provides an argument for the conclusion that so-called phenomenal intentionality, in both its relational and non-relational construals, cannot be identified with intentionality meant as the property for a mental state to be about something. A main premise of the argument presented in support of that conclusion is that a necessary requirement for a property to be identified with intentionality is that it satisfy the features taken to be definitory of it, namely: the possible non-existence of the intentional object (the fact that an intentional state may be directed towards something that does not exist) and aspectuality (the fact that what is intended is always intended in some way, under some specific aspect, from a particular perspective). By taking this premise on board, I attempt to show that phenomenal intentionality cannot be identified with intentionality because, appearances notwithstanding, it ultimately satisfies neither of the two above mentioned features.

Within the debate on the mark of the mental, disjunctivism holds that no unique feature is common to all mental phenomena. Although once popular among philosophers supporting the “two-separate realms” view of the mind, nowadays, disjunctivism has fallen out of favour, often seen as denying the very existence of a mental mark. However, given the challenges faced by the most popular current alternative proposals, disjunctivism appears increasingly attractive. In this paper, we develop a revised form of disjunctivism that overcomes the problems traditionally associated with it without encountering the limitations of the alternative proposals. On our account, all mental states exemplify either intentional presentationality or phenomenal presentationality (or both). These two features, while irreducible to each other, are nevertheless similar enough to be considered species of the common genus of presentationality as such: i.e., the feature of presenting something to the subject. The latter, thus, is what uniformly marks out the mental domain: mental states are mental in virtue of being presentational, either in the intentional or in the phenomenal sense (or both). As our account is in the spirit but not the letter of disjunctivism, we label it “sui generis disjunctivism”.

This paper deals with the issue of the admissible content of perceptual experience at the centre of the debate that opposes Conservatives and Liberals —who advocate, respectively, a Sparse and a Rich Content-View— and aims, specifically, to consider how this debate interacts with the Externalism/Internalism debate in philosophy of perception. Indeed, apart from a few exceptions (Siegel, 2006, 2010, 2013; Bayne, 2009; Ashby, 2020a; Raleigh, 2022), this issue has not yet been sufficiently addressed, and the present paper, in the wake of the aforementioned works, aims to focus on this issue in order to assess whether it would be more congenial for a Liberal to adopt content internalism or rather content externalism. In my paper I argue that the best move the Liberal should make is to endorse externalism with regard to the content of perceptual experience and internalism with regard to its phenomenal character. But, as it will turn out, this combination can only be sustained consistently if the Liberal discards the standard interpretation of one of its central claims, the so-called (Ashby, 2020a, p. 689) “phenomenal reflection claim” (PRC) —the claim according to which perceptual properties are reflected in/reverberate in the phenomenology of the experience— and adopts a different interpretation of it. To indicate what alternative interpretation of PRC the liberal should provide is one of the main goals of the paper.

This special issue of GPS collects 11 papers (and a long introduction), by leading philosophers and young researchers, which tackle more or less from close the topic of propositions by trying to provide the reader with a cross-section of the ongoing debate in this area. The raised issues range over the semantics, the ontology, the epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics and stimulate the reader to reflect on crucial problems such as the following: are propositions objects? In the positive case, what kind of objects are they? Can they be grasped by cognitive creatures such as we are? When can we say that two people entertain the same proposition? Have propositions any role to play in speech act theory? Even though the notion of proposition has received considerable attention in the past philosophical debate, it is still of great interest, in particular in connection with the attacks which have recently been launched against it in the theory of language. The volume, which is equipped with a long and detailed introduction that supplies the young reader with useful background information on the different stances in the debate, could prove useful also for didactic purposes.

P.T. Geach has maintained (see, e.g., Geach (1967/1968)) that identity (as well as dissimilarity) is always relative to a general term. According to him, the notion of absolute identity has to be abandoned and replaced by a multiplicity of relative identity relations for which Leibniz's Law - which says that if two objects are identical they have the same properties - does not hold. For Geach relative identity is at least as good as Frege's cardinality thesis which he takes to be strictly connected with relative identity - according to which an ascription of cardinality is always relative to a concept which specifies what, in any particular case, counts as a unit. The idea that there is a close connection between relative identity and Frege's cardinality thesis has been issued again quite recently by Alston and Bennett in (1984). In their opinion, Frege's cardinality thesis is not only similar to relative identity - as Geach maintains - but it implies it. Moreover, they agree with Geach in claiming that a commitment to Frege's cardinality thesis forces a parallel commitment to relative identity. Against Geach, Alston and Bennett we will claim that (Tl): "Frege's cardinality thesis is similar to relative identity" is false and that therefore (T2) "Frege's cardinality thesis implies relative identity" is false as well.

This paper addresses the title question and provides an argument for the conclusion that so-called phenomenal intentionality, in both its relational and non-relational construals, cannot be identified with intentionality meant as the property for a mental state to be about something. A main premise of the argument presented in support of that conclusion is that a necessary requirement for a property to be identified with intentionality is that it satisfy the features taken to be definitory of it, namely: the possible non-existence of the intentional object and aspectuality. By taking this premise on board, I attempt to show that phenomenal intentionality cannot be identified with intentionality because, appearances notwithstanding, it ultimately satisfies neither of the two above mentioned features.

The paper focuses on two claims widely held in the philosophy of mind, namely, content externalism and phenomenological internalism. The question it addresses is which picture, if any, of the relationship between representational and phenomenal properties makes the conjunction between the two claims tenable. The main thesis of the paper is that the conjunction is tenable only within an account which treats the two kinds of properties as distinct, irreducible and yet related to each other. The relationship between them is then articulated within a Frege-inspired framework that treats phenomenal properties as manners of presentation of representational properties.

There are two main ideas that inform the current reflection in the philosophy of mind, namely that the content of mental states is constitutively dependent on worldly, environmental facts and that phenomenology depends only on the intrinsic features of a subject. The question I shall address is whether it is possible to preserve both ideas within a strong intentionalist account. In other words, as the title goes: Can phenomenology be narrow if content is wide and phenomenology is claimed to depend on intentionality? The paper has the following structure: I shall start by presenting a triad which seems to rule out the possibility of preserving both content externalism and phenomenological internalism. Then, after having claimed that the only way in which a strong intentionalist could stick to those two ideas is to make the phenomenal character of a mental state independent for its individuation on the mental state’s content, I shall present what I take to be the only possible variety of which is compatible with such a move.

According to Frege a proposition—or, in his terms, a thought—is an abstract structured entity constituted by senses which satisfies, at least, the three following properties: it can be semantically assessed as true or as false, it is the object of so called propositional attitudes and it can be grasped. What Frege meant by 'grasping' is the peculiar way in which we can have epistemic access to propositions. The possibility for propositions to be grasped is put by Frege as a warrant for their existence: to challenge their graspability would amount to jeopardise their ontological reality. But is it true, as Frege uncritically maintained, that the "graspability requirement" is satisfied as far as propositions are concerned? This is the topic of the present work. A negative answer to the above mentioned question has been given in recent time by the representatives of what has come to be labelled the "cognitive turn" in analytical philosophy. People such as Fodor and Johnson-Laird patently denied the possibility for propositions, conceived Frege, to be accessed by the grasping relation. What grounds their position is, to put it roughly, the following train of thought: in order for something to be the target of the grasping relation it must enter the mind. Nothing which is different from a mental entity can enter the mind. Therefore, what can be grasped must be mental. The upshot of this move implies, among other things, the rejection of that radical anti-psychologism which was characteristic of the forefathers of the analytical tradition. In our work we shall try to resist their conclusion by showing that it is not necessary to zero the distinction between propositions and mental entities in order to provide an adequate account of the grasping relation. What one has to give up, instead, is only Frege's late Platonism of the "third realm" which, in our view, is a wholly unnecessary and dispensable accretion of his picture. For, as we shall show, if Platonism is in place it is difficult to provide an account of the grasping relation which makes no use of the "representationalist hypothesis" — i.e. of the hypothesis that mediate our access to whatever can be given to us. But representationalism, once in place, makes the theoretical role of the notion of sense dispensable or purely additional.

Queremos mostrar que ninguno de los argumentos conocidos a favor del externismo fenoménico es convincente. PE es la tesis de que las propiedades fenoménicas de nuestras experiencias se tienen que individuar en modo amplio en la medida en la que están constituidas por propiedades del mundo. Examinamos los que nos parecen los cinco mejores argumentos a favor de PE. Intentamos mostrar que ninguno de ellos puede establecer el resultado deseado. Mientras no aparezcan argumentos mejores en el debate, no tenemos razón para renunciar a una idea que parece intuitiva y atractiva para muchos psicólogos cognitivos: que la fenomenología es estrecha, es decir, que las propiedades fenoménicas son propiedades intrínsecas de nuestras experiencias. Esta idea subyace a la posición filosófica opuesta, el internismo fenoménico.

We maintain that no extant argument in favor of phenomenal external- ism is really convincing. PE is the thesis that the phenomenal properties of our experiences must be individuated widely insofar as they are constituted by worldly properties. We consider what we take to be the five best arguments for PE. We try to show that none of them really proves what it aims at proving. Unless better arguments in favor of phenomenal externalism show up in the debate, we see no reason to relinquish an idea that seems intuitive and appeals to many cognitive sci- entists: that phenomenology is narrow, i.e., that phenomenal properties are intrinsic properties of our experiences. This idea grounds the opposite philosophical position, phenomenal internalism.

__: In this paper, we want to support Kriegel’s argument in favor of the thesis that there is a cognitive form of phenomenology that is both irreducible to and independent of any sensory form of phenomenology by providing another argument in favor of the same thesis. Indeed, this new argument is also intended to show that the thought experiment Kriegel’s argument relies on does describe a genuine metaphysical possibility. In our view, Kriegel has not entirely succeeded in showing that his own argument displays that possibility. We present our argument in two steps. First, we attempt to prove that there is a cognitive phenomenology that is irreducible to any form of sensory phenomenology. Our proof relies on a kind of phenomenal contrast argument that however does not appeal to introspection. Second, by showing that the link between this form of cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of having thoughts, and sensory phenomenology in general is extrinsic, we also aim to demonstrate that the former is independent of the latter. _Keywords_: Cognitive Phenomenology; Irreduciblity; Independence; Having Thoughts; Grasping Thoughts _Un altro argomento in favore della fenomenologia cognitiva_ _Riassunto_: In questo articolo intendiamo corroborare l’argomento di Kriegel in favore dell’esistenza di una forma cognitiva di fenomenologia irriducibile a e indipendente da ogni altra forma di fenomenologia della sensibilità, avanzando un altro argomento a sostegno della stessa tesi. Nei fatti, questo nuovo argomento vuole anche mostrare che l’esperimento mentale su cui poggia l’argomento di Kriegel descrive effettivamente una genuina possibilità metafisica; e tuttavia crediamo che l’argomento di Kriegel non abbia mostrato fino in fondo proprio questa possibilità. Vogliamo presentare il nostro argomento in due passi. In un primo momento, tenteremo di provare l’esistenza di una fenomenologia cognitiva irriducibile a ogni altra forma di fenomenologia sensoriale. La nostra prova poggia su un tipo di argomento basato su un contrasto fenomenico che non si appella all’introspezione. In un secondo momento, mostrando che il legame tra questa forma di fenomenologia cognitiva, ossia la fenomenologia del possesso dei pensieri, e la fenomenologia sensoriale è un legame estrinseco, intendiamo dimostrare che la prima è indipendente dalla seconda. _Parole chiave_: Fenomenologia cognitiva; Irriduciblità; Indipendenza; Possesso dei pensieri; Afferramento dei pensieri

In this paper I shall address two main questions, namely: (1) Is Frege’s criticism against psychologism still relevant to the present debate on naturalism vs. anti-naturalism? And (2) Does Frege’s suggested alternative to reductive naturalism amount to a variety of supernaturalism? After having provided an answer to the above mentioned questions (a positive and a negative one respectively), I shall consider three possible non-Platonist proposals as regards the metaphysics of what Frege called the “unactual-objective realm”: (i) irrealism, (ii) objectivity without objects and (iii) objectuality without substantiality. I shall claim that, even though they all succeed in avoiding both Platonism and supernaturalism, it is the third that best fits Frege’s insight concerning the root of the reductive naturalist’s mistake.

According to Frege a proposition—or, in his terms, a thought—is an abstract structured entity constituted by senses which satisfies, at least, the three following properties: it can be semantically assessed as true or as false, it is the object of so called propositional attitudes and it can be grasped. What Frege meant by 'grasping' is the peculiar way in which we can have epistemic access to propositions. The possibility for propositions to be grasped is put by Frege as a warrant for their existence: to challenge their graspability would amount to jeopardise their ontological reality. But is it true, as Frege uncritically maintained, that the "graspability requirement" is satisfied as far as propositions (as he conceived them) are concerned? This is the topic of the present work. A negative answer to the above mentioned question has been given in recent time by the representatives of what has come to be labelled the "cognitive turn" in analytical philosophy. People such as Fodor and Johnson-Laird patently denied the possibility for propositions, conceived à la Frege, to be accessed by the grasping relation. What grounds their position is, to put it roughly, the following train of thought: in order for something to be the target of the grasping relation it must enter the mind. Nothing which is different from a mental entity can enter the mind. Therefore, what can be grasped must be mental. The upshot of this move implies, among other things, the rejection of that radical anti-psychologism which was characteristic of the forefathers of the analytical tradition. In our work we shall try to resist their conclusion by showing that it is not necessary to zero the distinction between propositions and mental entities in order to provide an adequate account of the grasping relation. What one has to give up, instead, is only Frege's late Platonism of the "third realm" which, in our view, is a wholly unnecessary and dispensable accretion of his picture. For, as we shall show, if Platonism is in place it is difficult to provide an account of the grasping relation which makes no use of the "representationalist hypothesis" — i.e. of the hypothesis that ideas mediate our access to whatever can be given to us. But representationalism, once in place, makes the theoretical role of the notion of sense dispensable or purely additional.

Along with a well-honoured tradition, we will accept that intentionality is at least a property a thought holds necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds that contain it; more specifically, a necessary relation, namely the relation of existential dependence of the thought on its intentional object. Yet we will first of all try to show that intentionality is more than that. For we will claim that intentionality is an essential property of the thought, namely a property whose predication to the thought is true in virtue of the identity, or nature, of such a thought. More particularly, for us intentionality will again be a relation, yet a relation of ontological dependence of the thought on its intentional object; specifically, the relation for the thought of being constituted by its object. Moreover, we will try to show that if intentionality is such a constitutive relation for the thought that has it, certain metaphysical consequences ensue. First, an objectual thought, a thought whose content basically consists in its intentional object, is nothing but that object in a certain cogitative modality, or, which is the same, as playing a certain motivational role for the subject entertaining the thought itself (at a certain time). Second, if an objectual thought is nothing but an intentional object in a cogitative modality, such a thought, not only as a type, but also as a token, is an abstract entity. More specifically, an objectual thought-type, an abstract object par excellence, is indeed instantiated by objectual thought-tokens which are again abstract particulars, yet of a specific kind: namely, tropes of a relational sort depending for their existence on their bearers (and possibly also on their temporal location).