In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what (...) in Plato is the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason. (shrink)

In this article I articulate how phenomenology can and should appropriate the theme of Platonic cognitive erôs. Erôs has two principal meanings: sexual passion and the desire for the whole that characterizes the philosophical life; in its cognitive sense, it implies dissatisfaction with partial truth and aiming at the givenness of the whole. The kind of lived-experience in which the being-true of the world is presented to and affectively allures the knower is a phenomenological analogue to what (...) in Plato is the contemplative communion with the Good. Cognitive desire is always motivated by the consciousness of the lack of knowledge and the recalcitranceon the part of the world to be fully revealed. Husserlian phenomenology confirms the fact that erotic perception is always beckoned by the world and its states of affairs from the outside, as opposed to physiologically reduced Cartesian wonder and internally motivated striving on the part of Kantian reason. (shrink)

This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hypothesis is thus incompatible with the more common thesis that perception is cognitively impenetrable. (...) It is of importance to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and general philosophy of science. The plausibility of orectic perception can be motivated by some classic experimental studies, and some new experimental research inspired by those same studies. The general suggestion is that orectic penetration thus defined, and evidenced by the relevant studies, cannot be deflected by the standard strategies of the cognitive impenetrability theorist. (shrink)

Deep appreciation of the relevance of emotion to epistemology requires a rich account of how emotional mental states such as happiness, sadness and desire interact with cognitive states such as belief and doubt. Analytic philosophy since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell has assumed that such mental states are propositional attitudes, which are relations between a self and a proposition, an abstract entity constituting the meaning of a sentence. This chapter shows the explanatory defects of the doctrine of propositional (...) attitudes, and proposes instead that beliefs, desires, and emotions should be construed naturalistically using current understanding of brain mechanisms. Mental states are patterns of neural activity, not relations between dubious entities such as selves and propositions. From this perspective, it becomes easy to see how cognition and emotion are intertwined, and hence how emotions can be integral to epistemology. I begin by reviewing some of the ways in which emotions are relevant to epistemology: as frequent contributors to the growth of knowledge, as sometime impediments to knowledge acquisition, and as components of knowledge about persons and morality. I then argue that propositional attitudes do not exist, because the selves and the propositions that they purportedly relate do not exist. Thus the doctrine of propositional attitudes is as useless for epistemology as it is for explaining human action. I argue for an alternative construal of mental states as patterns of neural activity, and July 23, 2007 describe how it is possible to give a theoretically rich and empirically supported account of the neurophysiological interconnections of cognition and emotion. Finally, I discuss the epistemological significance of this naturalistic, materialist reconstrual of cognitions and emotions. (shrink)

Duas das principais controvérsias que têm ocupado aqueles que se dedicam à teoria aris- totélica do movimento animal são a controvérsia acerca da forma da cognição através da qual um animal irracional apreende um objeto como um objeto de desejo e a controvérsia acerca da função desempenhada pela cognição na explicação aristotélica dos movimentos voluntários de locomoção animal. Neste artigo, eu apresento uma teoria acerca das formas como o desejo e a cognição se articulam na teoria aristotélica segundo a qual (...) um animal irracional apreende um objeto como um objeto de desejo através da percepção incidental deste objeto e, ao contrário do que a maioria parece acreditar, esta percepção não tem sempre a mesma função na produção destes movimentos. Se o que for dito aqui estiver correto, em alguns casos esta percepção é responsável tanto pela geração do desejo quan- to pela sua orientação, mas em outros ela é responsável apenas pela sua orientação. (shrink)

Finding out why we have beliefs and desires is important for a thorough understanding of the nature of our minds (and those of other animals). It is therefore unsurprising that several accounts have been presented that are meant to answer this question. At least in the philosophical literature, the most widely accepted of these are due to Kim Sterelny and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who argue that beliefs and desires evolved due to their enabling us to be behaviourally flexible in a way (...) that reflexes do not—which, they claim, is beneficial in epistemically complex environments. However, as I try to make clear in this paper, upon closer consideration, this kind of account turns out to be theoretically implausible. In the main, this is because it fails to give due credit to the powers of reflex-driven organisms, which can in fact be just as flexible in their behaviour as ones that are belief/desire-driven. In order to improve on this account, I therefore propose that beliefs and desires evolved, not due to their enabling us to do something completely different from what reflexive organisms can do, but rather due to their enabling us to do the same things better. Specifically, I argue that beliefs and desires evolved for making the generation of behaviour more efficient, since they can simplify the necessary cognitive labour considerably. I end by considering various implications of this account. (shrink)

Religious fundamentalism has been suspected as a product of simple cognitive structuring. On the other hand, recent publications have shown that cognitive structure formation is not as simple as was previously thought. The concept of the Ability to Achieve Cognitive Structure revealed that not everyone was able to form simple cognitive structure. This study employed a total of 187 Indonesian university students as participants. By the mean of Structural Equation Modeling, this study treated the desire (...) for simple cognitive structure as a “new” latent variable and examined its relation with intratextual fundamentalism using AACS as moderator. The desire for simple structure was reflected by the Need for Cognitive Structure, the Dogmatism, and the RWA. The fundamentalism was reflected by the Intratextual Fundamentalism Scale. The result showed that fundamentalism, among other things, was a product of desire for simple cognitive structure. This study also showed that AACS moderated the relation in which high AACS would lead to higher fundamentalism while low AACS would not. Implications of the findings for social psychology and cross-cultural understanding of religious fundamentalism were discussed. (shrink)

An examination of our preconceptions about desire, together with a comparison of these with the available empirical evidence, leads to a theory in which desire is characterized as a cognitive phenomenon which is heavily influenced by social learning. Following an introductory outline, the second section clarifies what exactly is at issue in attempting to reduce conation to cognition. Section 3 assesses the conditions required for knowledge of our own desires, and this concern is extended in 4 to (...) an appraisal of the role played by self-knowledge in the process of change through psychotherapy. The concluding section argues that the Social-cognitive Theory of Desire is compatible with contemporary neo-Dar-winian views of evolution. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant offers a revolutionary approach to cognition, wherein cognition can be understood as an action carried out by a cognitive agent. But giving the subject such an active role raises questions about Kant’s ability to account for objective cognition. In this paper, I will argue that the cognitive autonomy thesis central to Kant’s model renders it unable to account for the normativity required for objective cognition, and that G.W.F. Hegel makes just (...) this criticism in the Desire section of his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel proposes an alternative: some basic intersubjective structure must be built into cognition on a fundamental level. For Hegel, the possibility of disagreement is an a priori requirement for objective cognition in general. (shrink)

In both the academic and societal debates, it is widely assumed that cognitive advertising defenses can reduce children's susceptibility to advertising effects. Empirical evidence supporting this crucial assumption is however missing. It is precisely this gap that the present study aims to fill In a survey of 296 children, we investigate whether children's cognitive defenses reduce the relationship between the amount of television advertising they are exposed to and their desire for advertised product categories. Interaction analysis in (...) regression shows that of all the cognitive defense variables, only understanding advertising's persuasive intent was effective in reducing the impact of advertising exposure on children's advertised product desire. However, this only applies to the older children in the sample. For the younger children, understanding the persuasive intent even increased the impact of advertising. (shrink)

On Hume’s account of motivation, beliefs and desires are very different kinds of propositional attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive attitudes, desires emotive ones. An agent’s belief in a proposition captures the weight he or she assigns to this proposition in his or her cognitive representation of the world. An agent’s desire for a proposition captures the degree to which he or she prefers its truth, motivating him or her to act accordingly. Although beliefs and desires are sometimes entangled, (...) they play very different roles in rational agency. In two classic papers (Lewis 1988, 1996), David Lewis discusses several challenges to this Humean picture, but ultimately rejects them. We think that his discussion of a central anti-Humean alternative – the desire-as-belief thesis – is in need of refinnement. On this thesis, the desire for proposition p is given by the belief that p is desirable. Lewis claims that ‘[e]xcept in trivial cases, [this thesis] collapses into contradiction’(Lewis 1996, p. 308). The problem, he argues, is that the thesis is inconsistent with the purportedly plausible requirement that one’s desire for a proposition should not change upon learning that the proposition is true; call this the invariance requirement. In this paper, we revisit Lewis’s argument. We show that, if one carefully distinguishes between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions, the desire-asbelief thesis can be rendered consistent with the invariance requirement. Lewis’s conclusion holds only under certain conditions: the desire-as-belief thesis conflicts with the invariance requirement if and only if there are certain correlations between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions. But when there are such correlations, we suggest, the invariance requirement loses its plausibility. Thus Lewis’s argument against the desire-as-belief thesis appears to be valid only in cases in which it is unsound. (shrink)

Cognitive states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, may influence how we perceive people and objects. If this is the case, are those influences worse when they occur implicitly rather than explicitly? Here we show that cognitive penetration in perception generally involves an implicit component. First, the process of influence is implicit, making us unaware that our perception is misrepresenting the world. This lack of awareness is the source of the epistemic threat raised by cognitive penetration. Second, (...) the influencing state can be implicit, though it can also be or become explicit. Being unaware of the content of the influencing state, we argue, does not make as much difference to the epistemic threat as it does to the epistemic responsibility of the agent. Implicit influencers cannot be examined for their accuracy and justification, and cannot be voluntarily accepted by the perceiver. Conscious awareness, however, is not sufficient for attributing blame to the agent. An equally important condition is the degree of control that they can exercise to change the contents that influence perception or stop their influence. Here we suggest that such control can also result from social influence, and that cognitive penetrability of perception is therefore also a social issue. (shrink)

`Folk Psychology' - our everyday talk of beliefs, desires and mental events - has long been compared with the technical language of `Cognitive Science'. Does folk psychology provide a correct account of the mental causes of our behaviour, or must our everyday terms ultimately be replaced by a language developed from computational models and neurobiology? This broad-ranging book addresses these questions, which lie at the heart of psychology and philosophy. Providing a critical overview of the key literature in the (...) field, including the seminal work of Fodor and Churchland, the author explores the classic `Frame Problem' and assesses the future prospects of cognitive science. The scope of the frame problem, touching on connec. (shrink)

Does action always arise out of desire? G. F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished - roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes - apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken. Desire probes a fundamental issue in philosophy of mind, the nature of desires and how, if at all, they motivate and justify (...) our actions. At least since Hume argued that reason "is and of right ought to be the slave of the passions," many philosophers have held that desires play an essential role both in practical reason and in the explanation of intentional action. G. F. Schueler looks at contemporary accounts of both roles in various belief-desire models of reasons and explanation and argues that the usual belief-desire accounts need to be replaced. Schueler contends that the plausibility of the standard belief-desire accounts rests largely on a failure to distinguish "desires proper," like a craving for sushi, from so-called "pro attitudes," which may take the form of beliefs and other cognitive states as well as desires proper. Schueler's "deliberative model" of practical reasoning suggests a different view of the place of desire in practical reason and the explanation of action. He holds that we can arrive at an intention to act by weighing the relevant considerations and that these may not include desires proper at all. (shrink)

The predominant view in developmental psychology is that young children are able to reason with the concept of desire prior to being able to reason with the concept of belief. We propose an explanation of this phenomenon that focuses on the cognitive tasks that competence with the belief and desire concepts enable young children to perform. We show that cognitive tasks that are typically considered fundamental to our competence with the belief and desire concepts can (...) be performed with the concept of desire in the absence of competence with the concept of belief, whereas the reverse is considerably less feasible. (shrink)

The cognitive phenomenology thesis claims that “there is something it is like” to have cognitive states such as believ- ing, desiring, hoping, attending, and so on. In support of this idea, Goldman claimed that the tip-of-the-tongue phe- nomenon can be considered as a clear-cut instance of non- sensory cognitive phenomenology. This paper reviews Goldman's proposal and assesses whether the tip-of-the- tongue and other metacognitive feelings actually constitute an instance of cognitive phenomenology. The paper will show that (...) psychological data cast doubt on the idea that the tip-of-the-tongue and other metacognitive feelings are clear-cut instances of cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)

I argue that desires and emotions have a cognitive element that leaves them open to direct moral assessment. I maintain that a wide range of affects enter into moral reasoning as initial mappings of practical reasons onto the world. This suggests a way of characterizing conflicts between persistent desires and all-things-considered practical judgments. Such conflicts indicate that our considered judgments lack the status of wholehearted convictions. The dissertation culminates in a distinctive account of certain interpersonal obligations that builds upon (...) this idea of wholehearted conviction. ;In Chapter 1, I examine the conception of moral worth and the companion conception of virtue at work in Kant's seminal moral writings. I argue that these conceptions leave Kant without resources to explain the critical distinction between self-interested and malicious violations of duty. ;In Chapter 2, I ask how significant a revision must be made to Kantian moral theory in order to accommodate my criticisms. I argue that there are demanding affective preconditions for the full recognition of the equal moral standing of other humans, and that these provide the core of a more plausible conception of moral virtue than is usually associated with Kant. I maintain that the Kantian who accepts this picture of virtue must give up the attractive claim that we can always voluntarily will to do whatever morality requires. Such a Kantian might still preserve the essential Kantian equation of dutiful action and autonomy--here understood as self-governance in accordance with laws we wholeheartedly accept. ;In the course of Chapters 1 and 2, I argue that when there are conflicts between our desires and our all-things considered judgments of what we have reason to do, this shows that our considered beliefs are not wholehearted convictions. In Chapters 3 and 4, I attempt to show that the obligations which bind together intimates and fellow members of certain face-to-face communities are best analyzed in terms of wholehearted convictions. I argue that this approach is truer to the phenomenology of moral deliberation than rival analyses. (shrink)

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their plausibility, and explores their philosophical consequences. It connects the topic's multiple strands (the psychological findings, computationalist background, epistemological consequences of cognitive architecture, and recent philosophical developments) at a time when the outcome of many philosophical debates depends on knowing whether and how cognitive (...) states can influence perception. All sixteen chapters were written especially for the book. The first chapters provide methodological and conceptual clarification of the topic and give an account of the relations between penetrability, encapsulation, modularity, and cross-modal interactions in perception. Assessments of psychological and neuroscientific evidence for cognitive penetration are given by several chapters. Most of the contributions analyse the impact of cognitive penetrability and impenetrability on specific philosophical topics: high-level perceptual contents, the epistemological consequences of penetration, nonconceptual content, the phenomenology of late perception, metacognitive feelings, and action. The book includes a comprehensive introduction which explains the history of the debate, its key technical concepts (informational encapsulation, early and late vision, the perception-cognition distinction, hard-wired perceptual processing, perceptual learning, theory-ladenness), and the debate's relevance to current topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

Bering's analysis is inadequate because it fails to consider past and present adult soul beliefs and the psychological functions they serve. We suggest that a valid folk psychology of souls must consider features of adult soul beliefs, the unique problem engendered by awareness of death, and terror management findings, in addition to cognitive inclinations toward dualistic and teleological thinking.

Examines the nature of cognitive penetrability hypothesis, which holds that our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. Assesses both cognitive penetrability and impenetrability and explores their philosophical consequences.

‘Predictive Processing’ is an emerging paradigm in cognitive neuroscience that depicts the human mind as an uncertainty management system that constructs probabilistic predictions of sensory s...

In this paper I argue that it's possible that the contents of some visual experiences are influenced by the subject's prior beliefs, hopes, suspicions, desires, fears or other mental states, and that this possibility places constraints on the theory of perceptual justification that 'dogmatism' or 'phenomenal conservativism' cannot respect.

Hendrik Lorenz presents a comprehensive study of Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of non-rational desire. They see this as something that humans share with animals, and which aims primarily at the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. Lorenz explores the cognitive resources that both philosophers make available for the explanation of such desires, and what they take rationality to add to the motivational structure of human beings. In doing so, he finds conceptions of the mind that are coherent and (...) deeply integrated with both philosophers' views about such topics as the relation between body and soul, or the nature of the virtues. (shrink)

Andrew Woodfield; VI*—Desire, Intentional Content and Teleological Explanation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 82, Issue 1, 1 June 1982, Pages.

One way to defend humane animal agriculture is to insist that the deaths of animals aren’t bad for them. Christopher Belshaw has argued for this position in the most detail, maintaining that death is only bad when it frustrates categorical desires, which he thinks animals lack. We are prepared to grant his account of the badness of death, but we are skeptical of the claim that animals don’t have categorical desires. We contend that Belshaw’s argument against the badness of animal (...) death relies on overly simplistic thought experiments and isn’t sufficiently careful in how it attributes mental states to animals. We present some cases of animal behavior from recent work on animal cognition that are most plausibly understood as spurred by categorical desires and we show how an independently plausible account of mental content—Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics—supports our attribution of categorical desires in those cases. We end by arguing that even if you’re wary of our reliance on teleosemantics, you should still accept it due to considerations about moral risk. (shrink)

My concern here is with the Humean claim that no purely cognitive state could, in combination with appropriate other beliefs, but with nothing else, originate a process of rational motivation. The starting point of such motivation must always include some other element: a desire. Let's call this claim, following David McNaughton the belief-desire theory, or BDT for short. The theory is widely believed but intensely controversial. I argue here that it is true.

This paper responds to Sven Bernecker’s argument that agent reliabilism cannot accommodate internalist intuitions about clarvoyance cases. In section 1 we clarify a version of agent reliabilism and Bernecker’s objections against it. In section 2 we say more about how the notion of cognitive integration helps to adjudicate clairvoyance cases and other proposed counterexamples to reliabilism. The central idea is that cognitive integration underwrites a kind of belief ownership, which in turn underwrites the sort of responsibility for belief (...) required for subjective justification. In section 3 we say more about what cognitive integration amounts to, drawing on some recent accounts of desire ownership from the literature on autonomy and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Agency is an amazing thing: it transduces cognitivity into causality, it makes thought real. How it does so has been a matter of considerable dispute, the resolution of which has been hampered by moral complications. The supposition of a rational basis for morality can play an essential role in clarifying agency by providing a ground for legitimizing the objects of desire and the motivation they provide. The four-stage model of agency presented here – deliberation, calculation, intention, and enactment – (...) emerges when the moral concerns regarding desire have been detoxified. A crucial distinction is between the cognitive and causal aspects of desire, between the estimation of desirability (preference) and the actual motivation it may initiate (desire). Failure to recognize desire’s cognitive aspect preemptively disables its participation in practical reasoning. (shrink)

One of the most controversial theses of Jacques Lacan is his conviction that a very specific relationship links ethics and desire. The aim of the article is to present what this new relationship consists in, and, further on, to outline the weaknesses of this concept, which does not take into account the existence of the sovereign good as a category available to cognition. According to my thesis, Lacan believes that the ethics of Supreme Good, or simply traditional ethics of (...) goods, leads the human subject to remain, voluntarily, within the Imaginary dimension. The idea of the ethical postulate will be treated here not so much as something applied during psychoanalysis, but as a general clue as to how people should behave. (shrink)

This article argues that Epictetus employs the terms orexis and hormê in the same manner as the older Stoics. It then shows, on the basis of this claim, that the older Stoics recognized a distinction between dispositional and occurrent forms of motivation. On this account of Stoic theory, intentional action is in each instance the product of two forms of cognition: a value ascription that attributes goodness or badness to some object, conceiving of its possession as beneficial or harmful to (...) the agent, together with a situational judgment about appropriate action. The resulting interpretation suggests that the Stoic theory of motivation as a whole — and not merely the Stoic analysis of the pathê — has the basic shape of a practical syllogism, with more psychological depth than commentators have recognized. (shrink)

Increasingly, empirically minded moral philosophers are using data from cognitive science and neuroscience to resolve some longstanding philosophical questions about moral motivation, such as whether moral beliefs require the presence of a desire to motivate. These empirical approaches are implicitly committed to the existence of folk psychological mental states like beliefs and desires. However, data from the neuroscience of decision-making, particularly cellular-level work in neuroeconomics, is now converging with data from cognitive and social neuroscience to explain the (...) processes through which agents are moved to act on the basis of decisions, including decisions about social and moral norms. I argue that these developments are beginning to cast doubt on the prospect of finding nontrivial physical 'realizers' for the FP states invoked in the Humeanism dispute by posing two distinctive challenges that tend to work against each other: belief-desire directionality and causal relevance. (shrink)

A number of philosophers working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy” have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way.¹ In a series of papers these philosophers—who often work in collaboration with psychologists—have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In this paper, I contribute to this research program by (...) discussing the results of some new experiments that further probe folk intuitions about the relationship between desire, foresight, intent, intentional action, and moral considerations. (shrink)

Perceptual experience is one of our fundamental sources of epistemic justification—roughly, justification for believing that a proposition is true. The ability of perceptual experience to justify beliefs can nevertheless be questioned. This article focuses on an important challenge that arises from countenancing that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable. -/- The thesis of cognitive penetrability of perception states that the content of perceptual experience can be influenced by prior or concurrent psychological factors, such as beliefs, fears and desires. Advocates of (...) this thesis could for instance claim that your desire of having a tall daughter might influence your perception, so that she appears to you to be taller than she is. Although cognitive penetrability of perception is a controversial empirical hypothesis, it does not appear implausible. The possibility of its veracity has been adduced to challenge positions that maintain that perceptual experience has inherent justifying power. -/- This article presents some of the most influential positions in contemporary literature about whether cognitive penetration would undermine perceptual justification and why it would or would not do so. -/- Some sections of this article focus on phenomenal conservatism, a popular conception of epistemic justification that more than any other has been targeted with objections that adduce the cognitive penetrability of experience. (shrink)

Where is imagination in imaginative resistance? We seek to answer this question by connecting two ongoing lines of inquiry in different subfields of philosophy. In philosophy of mind, philosophers have been trying to understand imaginative attitudes’ place in cognitive architecture. In aesthetics, philosophers have been trying to understand the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. By connecting these two lines of inquiry, we hope to find mutual illumination of an attitude (or cluster of attitudes) and a phenomenon that have vexed philosophers. (...) Our strategy is to reorient the imaginative resistance literature from the perspective of cognitive architecture. Whereas existing taxonomies of positions in the imaginative resistance literature have focused on disagreements over the source and scope of the phenomenon, our taxonomy focuses on the psychological components necessary for explaining imaginative resistance. (shrink)

This is the first major textbook to offer a truly comprehensive review of cognitive science in its fullest sense. Ranging across artificial intelligence models and cognitive psychology through to recent discursive and cultural theories Rom Harre offers a breathtakingly original yet accessible integration of the field. At its core this textbook addresses the question "is psychology a science?" with a clear account of scientific method and explanation and their bearing on psychological research. A pivotal figure in psychology and (...) philosophy for many decades Rom Harre has turned his unmatched breadth of reference and insight for students at all levels. Whether describing, language, categorization, memory, the brain or connectionism the book always links our intuitions about beliefs, desires and their social context to the latest accounts of their place in computational and biological models. Fluently written and well structured, this an ideal text for students. The book is divided into four basic modules, with three lectures in each; the reader is guided with helpful learning points, study and essay questions and key readings for each chapter. (shrink)

Numerous empirical studies have been conducted to examine first-generation college students, those individuals whose parents have not attended college. Their personality characteristics, cognitive development, academic preparation, and first-year performance have all been topics of research; yet there appears to be little in the literature exploring the motivation of these individuals to seek higher education. There are even fewer studies targeting academic motivation in Hispanic students. The purpose of this study is to conduct a phenomenological examination of the desire (...) to attend college among first generation Hispanic students participating in an academic support program. One-hour taped interviews were conducted with three volunteer participants enrolled in the Student Support Services program at Sul Ross State University. Meaning units and constituents were extracted, and general structures were developed using the Descriptive Phenomenological Method . The phenomenological analysis resulted in two structures that address the effectiveness of academic outreach programming and identify the roles of self-efficacy, successful experiences in high school, a desire for improved socioeconomic status, a need to contribute to the well-being of others, a break with tradition, and the influence of respected role models in facilitating a desire for higher education in first-generation Hispanic college students. (shrink)

Recent accounts of pretense have been underdescribed in a number of ways. In this paper, we present a much more explicit cognitive account of pretense. We begin by describing a number of real examples of pretense in children and adults. These examples bring out several features of pretense that any adequate theory of pretense must accommodate, and we use these features to develop our theory of pretense. On our theory, pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, a (...) Possible World Box which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The representations in the Possible World Box can have the same content as beliefs. Indeed, we suggest that pretense representations are in the same representational ``code'' as beliefs and that the representations in the Possible World Box are processed by the same inference and UpDating mechanisms that operate over real beliefs. Our model also posits a Script Elaborator which is implicated in the embellishment that occurs in pretense. Finally, we claim that the behavior that is seen in pretend play is motivated not from a ``pretend desire'', but from a real desire to act in a way that ®ts the description being constructed in the Possible World Box. We maintain that this account can accommodate the central features of pretense exhibited in the examples of pretense, and we argue that the alternative accounts either can't accommodate or fail to address entirely some of the central features of pretense. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent literature on meta-cognitive processes in non-human animals, arguing that in each case the data admit of a simpler, purely first-order, explanation. The topics discussed include the alleged monitoring of states of certainty and uncertainty, knowledge-seeking behavior in conditions of uncertainty, and the capacity to know whether or not the information needed to solve some problem is stored in memory. The first-order explanations advanced all assume that beliefs and desires come in various different strengths, or (...) degrees. (shrink)

The property theory of content takes the content of each cognitive attitude (each belief, desire, and so on) to be a property to which the subject of the attitude is related in the appropriate psychological way. This view is motivated by standard cases of de se belief and other attitudes. In this paper, I consider a couple of related objections to the property theory of content. Both objections have to do with the possible non-existence of the subject. More (...) specifically, the objections are based on attitudes, the contents of which entail the non-existence of their subjects, and also on attitudes that commit their subjects to preferences regarding situations in which the subjects do not exist. I show that the property theory can answer these objections adequately, and I argue that my answer to the objections is more plausible than other possible responses. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent literature on meta-cognitive processes in non-human animals, arguing that in each case the data admit of a simpler, purely first-order, explanation. The topics discussed include the alleged monitoring of states of certainty and uncertainty, the capacity to know whether or not one has perceived something, and the capacity to know whether or not the information needed to solve some problem is stored in memory. The first-order explanations advanced all assume that beliefs and desires come (...) in various different _strengths_, or _degrees_. (shrink)