Kuei-Chen Chen

According to Crane (2024) neither the reduction of intentionality nor the accommodation of all its forms is among the essential tasks for a theory of intentionality. Here I question the claim about reduction by arguing that a complete theory of perceptual intentionality is likely to be reductive. Insofar as one is committed to making sense of direct perception—as Crane is in his joint work with French (2021)—reduction is a natural consequence. I defend my view by considering how content theorists and naïve realists might fulfil the commitment. On the one hand, to explicate the conditions on which something counts as a directly perceived object, content theorists would be well-advised to invoke ideas about information processing in perception. On the other hand, to spell out the sense in which directly perceived objects play the role of constituents in perception, naïve realists similarly need help from the cognitive sciences. I suggest that relying on the cognitive sciences for the above purposes makes it difficult for content theorists and naïve realists to avoid reduction. If so, Crane’s assessment of reduction is flawed.

[This article serves as the lead article for an article symposium. A call for commentaries is currently open at the journal.] In this lead article for an article symposium, we investigate the possible intersection between metaphysical naturalism and the phenomenological tradition. Our guiding hypothesis is that nature constitutes phenomenology, whereas phenomenology constitutes our access to nature. Pace renowned phenomenologists Gallagher and Zahavi’s call to replace “classic naturalism” with “non-classic conceptions,” we reconstruct “classic naturalism” by drawing on the seminal works of Armstrong, Lewis, Jackson, Braddon-Mitchell, Ney, and others. On this basis, we argue against the common assertion that metaphysical naturalism entails scientism and methodological naturalism and demonstrate their theoretical incompatibility, and thereby contend that a properly characterized classic naturalism could, in fact, accommodate phenomenological approaches. Then, we revise contemporary phenomenologists’ notions of “mutual constraints” and “mutual enlightenment” and reframe the subtle intersection between phenomenology and the naturalistic perspective. Finally, we address standard phenomenological criticisms of naturalism, which appeal to the primacy of the experiential perspective, and explore how the perspective can, in fact, accommodate and critically inform naturalism’s core theoretical commitments. This two-way discussion, which is grounded in both traditions, results in a phenomenology-friendly naturalism and a naturalism-friendly phenomenology that critically complement one another.

Progress in psychology and the cognitive sciences is often taken to vindicate physicalism and cast doubt on such extravagant metaphysical theses as dualism and idealism. The goal of this paper is to argue that cognitive science has no such implications—rather, evidence from cognitive science is largely (but not wholly) irrelevant to the mind-body problem. Our argument begins with the observation that data from cognitive science can be modeled by supervenience relations. We then show that supervenience relations are neutral, by showing how they can be coherently interpreted in physicalist, idealist, and dualist terms. We distinguish several types of supervenience relation, and show that each coheres better with some positions on the mind-body problem than the other. Since these variants of supervenience are not empirically equivalent, there is a possibility that data from cognitive science will end up supporting some positions on the mind-body problem more than others. It is in this sense that cognitive science is mostly, but not wholly, neutral.

The paper considers how phenomenologically-minded philosophers should think about the phenomenon Susanna Schellenberg (2016) calls perceptual particularity: in perception, we experience objects in their particularity. For example, if I see a pumpkin, I do not simply see the properties it shares with other objects, such as orange and roundness. What I see is a particular pumpkin that has all these properties. Much work has been done to investigate the phenomenon, but relatively few philosophers have addressed the concern of this paper: how should those sympathetic with Husserlian phenomenology approach perceptual particularity? I will explore this issue by engaging with two recent Husserlian accounts of perceptual particularity, i.e. those defended by A. D. Smith (2008) and Walter Hopp (2011). Both of them focus on a kind of perceptual particularity that Schellenberg describes as semantic. I will argue that this is not the best use of the theoretical resources offered by their theories. The Husserlian ideas invoked by Smith and Hopp are more fruitful when they are applied to a different kind of perceptual particularity, which Schellenberg describes as phenomenological. The nature of phenomenological particularity is itself a complex issue, and I shall argue that a satisfactory analysis of it can be formulated on the basis of Hopp’s Husserlian theory.