Kuei-Chen Chen

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.