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Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind
Elements of Mind provides a unique introduction to the main problems and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. Author Tim Crane opposes those currently popular conceptions of the mind that divide mental phenomena into two very different kinds (the intentional and the qualitative) and proposes instead a challenging and unified theory of all the phenomena of mind. In light of this theory, Crane engages students with the central problems of the philosophy of mind--the mind-body problem, the problem of intentionality (or mental representation), the problem of consciousness, and the problem of perception--and attempts to find solutions to these problems. A fresh and engaging exploration of the main issues in the philosophy of mind, Elements of Mind is easily accessible to students with no background in the subject.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
200 pages, Paperback
First published October 25, 2001
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180 people want to read
About the author
Tim Crane
37 books33 followersTim Crane is a professor of philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest and Vienna.
He works in the philosophy of mind, and attempts to address questions about the most general nature, or essence, of the human mind, and about the place of the mind in the rest of nature.
He works in the philosophy of mind, and attempts to address questions about the most general nature, or essence, of the human mind, and about the place of the mind in the rest of nature.
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December 25, 2023
This is a lovely introduction to the idea of intentionality in the philosophy of mind and some debates that this idea has been used to advance (e.g., whether hallucination and perception are of the same kind; how we can use empty referring terms; the relation between the contents of perception and of belief; internalism v. externalism regarding the contents of mental states; what the heck propositional content is.) It is lovely for how concise it is without sacrifice of honing in on the nuances of various theories and debates. Moreover, it is easy to read. I was asked to read this book because my background with major issues in the philosophy of mind is quite splotchy. I feel that gaps have narrowed, and a roundedness now glows, upon my background knowledge, after reading Crane’s book. I’ll first sum up some ideas found in it. Then, I’ll be chatty for a bit about what I see in these ideas.
The idea of intentionality which Crane starts off with in this book is derived from Franz Bretano’s coinage in the late nineteenth century. The intentionality of a mental state refers to the property of that state of being about something or directed towards something (e.g., a perception of a squirrel; a belief about that squirrel.) Crane’s position is that intentionality explains consciousness; all conscious states are intentional, and it is intentional properties that make mental states conscious. Intentionality, for Crane, goes hand-in-hand with the basic intuition that consciousness is a matter of beholding something in a certain way. A person’s perspective or point of view will shape whatever they behold (e.g., perceive, think about, imagine forth.) Crane proposes that we should call the way by which something is presented for a certain person its “aspectual shape.” The same object can have different aspectual shapes for different people or for the same person across different instances. This aspectual shape is tied up with the different thoughts, imaginings, behavioral inclinations, and so on a person is prone to having in light of encountering the object whose aspectual shape is under consideration. Crane proposes this schema for understanding intentionality: there is an intentional state, which is defined by its intentional object/content. Intentional content involves the way by which the intentional object is presented (i.e., aspectual shape), whereas the intentional object is defined in terms of the state’s directness towards it. Intentional objects need not be any particular sort of thing. It can be formally defined in terms of whatever that can serve as an intentional object for an intentional state (in other words, an intentional object just is whatever we are capable of encountering, whether it is perceptual, imaginative, thought-based, etc. experience.) Intentional objects need not exist or be real. Only intentional states whose intentional object is nonexistent exist and are real.
Crane nicely connects up these ideas about intentionality with other major ideas bubbling around Bretano’s time. This includes: Russell and Frege on narrow v. wide contents. Meinong’s solution of positing nonexistent objects to the problem of empty referring terms. The logical distinction between intensionality (with an “s”) and extensionality. The relation between intensionality and intentionality. (This is all found in chapter 1.)
In chapter 3, Crane deals with consciousness. There have been proposals for various concepts for explaining different aspects of consciousness. There is the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness; the intentional and the qualitative; and lower and higher-order states of consciousness. Some theorists argue that we must posit quaila, and that intentionality cannot explain all forms of phenomenal consciousness. For example, pain states don’t seem to be about anything; a pain doesn’t refer to anything beyond itself. Crane argues against this. A pain state can be understood as such: Pain is a kind of intentional attitude, whose intentional object is a location on one’s body, which is presented under a certain aspect/mode which is distinctive of pain. So the intentional content of this attitude may be understood as a part of one’s body as painful.
In chapter 4, Crane deals with thought. He motivates the position that thought should be distinguished from belief. Belief is intrinsically non-experience or non-conscious, and is either a disposition or a state. In contrast, thought is a mental act or an event. Judgment, a variety of thought, is a matter of forming a belief, and assertion is the expression of belief. A propositional attitude is an intentional state or event that has content that can be assessable for truth or falsity. Beliefs and judgments are equally propositional attitudes. Crane’s position on which intentionality explains consciousness requires a Fregean approach to propositional attitudes, over a Russellian approach. Propositional content is individuated by the way by which objects are represented by the subject who has the attitude under consideration, rather than by objects in the world. Crane acknowledges difficulties for this approach and addresses various objections (e.g., the issue of explaining demonstrative thought; defending internalism against externalist challenges.)
In chapter 5, Crane deals with perception. This chapter is devoted to two issues. First are the debates surrounding whether perception is “immediate” and essentially presents to us objects in the world, and the second are issues regarding whether the content of perception is conceptual or non-conceptual (which ties in with the relationship between perception and belief.) The first issue involves many thorny arguments, which I won’t re-present here. I will say, however, that Crane’s main reason for dismissing direct realism is that it is “implausible” that states of perception and hallucination which are phenomenally indistinguishable are of different kinds. I think this thesis can be shown to be plausible, when set up in certain ways (e.g., there are evolutionary reasons to think that perception consists on mechanisms that put us in contact with the world, whereas imagination (of which hallucination is a variety) does not; often there is no matter of what of how some experience stands phenomenally since this is influenced by how we remember and describe it - so phenomenal similarity isn’t a good criterion for identification of “kinds.”) Regarding the second issue, Crane nicely shows that the debate partially depends upon what we mean for some content to be conceptual. He distinguishes between conceptuality as defined on the basis of (1) you need concepts in order to have the relevant mental state, i.e., a perception or a belief, and (2) there is conceptual thinking phenomenally present during your having that mental state. Crane visits certain positions for making sense of (1): there is a debate over whether language skill is necessary for having concepts. Crane sides with that language isn’t necessary. I found this all quite interesting - but why not say that language is necessary for grasp of certain sorts of concept, but not others?
Here are some of my personal associations with some ideas here. I liked Crane’s setting up perception as on par with judgment, or the formation of belief, with respect to their common “aiming” at truth. This is a familiar idea, but I hadn’t considered it explicitly. It makes me wonder where emotion resides in this terrain. Emotion may be said to aim at truth as well, insofar as we regulate our emotions or come to see the world different by virtue of emotion. Emotion regulation is governed partially by our aim to know what’s happening in reality, since something is at stake which has instigated the emotion. Emotion changing the “coloration” of the world may be understood as a matter of our encountering new aspects of our situation which we implicitly take as real. But as everyday examples of emotion regulation show, much of our personal and social reality (where talk of emotion is properly anchored) is ambiguous or uncertain. Future possibilities are the necessary foundation of various aspects of our present situations, which are uncertain. There are different interpretations of the same event or action, and it is often the case that it’s practically feasible for us to change our interpretations, or to take different conflicting ones as truthful. In contrast, classic examples of perception involve content that is “concrete” or “physical” (e.g., is the ball red or not, does the ball exist or not?) Answers to these issues do not involve uncertainty and ambiguity of the same sort that is found in issues that instigate emotion. Something can be said of belief. While belief is intuitively taken to be directable upon a broader array of things than perception is, nevertheless belief is associated with propositional content and the binary of truth and falsity, which has led to a culture of thinking about belief in a way which is similar to the epistemology of perception. Moreover, emotion is tied up with desire and action. This means while emotion can be said to aim at the truth, it also aims at the good, relative to a perspective. If emotion is more psychologically primitive than propositional attitudes of belief and desire (and likely it is; it’s intuitive to think that nonhuman animals have emotion, while they need not be capable of language and the sort of propositional states humans have), then maybe there’s a different sort of “normatively” than the epistemic or the practical (defined on the paradigm of desire and action), which involves both mixed up. (This is just all rambling for reminding myself about big picture points I’ve been concerned with; sorry for its not being relevant to Crane’s book at all.)
I also feel intuitively suspicious of the clear-cut distinction between the intentional attitude/mode and object/content. While this is certainly a very useful theoretical apparatus, I wonder if it places conceptual constraints upon we thinkers, so that we miss out on certain observations and ideas that we’d otherwise have. Do I have anything in mind with this? Maybe. Here are some examples of moments of experience whose details might be lost if we are committed to the idea of intentionality. When reflecting upon having experience (where we’re not yet drawing the theoretical distinction between attitude and content), it’s intuitive to think that things change rapidly or are even ambiguous. I may imagine someone and feel an emotion towards them. This brings on memories of them, but perhaps these memories are so generalized in type or ambiguous that it’s more proper to call them imaginings (of narratives or schemas in which this person figures.) I may think and believe various things about them, but these thoughts are so emotion-driven that it’s unclear whether they’re about particular states of affairs assessable for truth/falsity, or whether they’re more like imaginings or hoping, not purporting to be about anything in particular.
Crane’s thesis of intentionality suggests that for any of these experiences there is a particular intentional attitude (or cluster of them) that is activated, and that which ones is a matter of fact. Or, it suggests that there can be a proliferation of kinds of intentional attitude, so perhaps it should be proposed that there’s imagination-memory and thought-imagination in addition to imagination, memory, and thought. But this misses out on how there are various dynamics as experience unfolds that are based upon how we as agents deal with what’s presented to us at any moment of experience. Our responses may change the character of our experience, and things may be unfolding in complex ways (e.g., we may be aware of different states or moments of experience simultaneously.) Another way of seeing this is that the way by which something shows up to us (what Crane calls “aspectual shape”) might be said to determine the character of the intentional attitude. But if we speak in this way, it’s a short ways away from the view that content/object and attitude are interdependent of co-constitutive in some manner. Then, it can be misleading to talk about them in the fashion that Crane does, by which attitude determines content, and it’s fair to think about experiences in terms of singular attitude and content descriptions.
Maybe I’m misconstruing Crane’s thought, however. Maybe the examples I give merely show that the theoretical apparatus of intentionality is right and just shows that practical experience is complicated; but all the aspects of this apparatus can be preserved and yield an adequate explanation of experience (e.g., while attitude determines content, new attitudes can come into place quite quickly, where their eliciting conditions involve what content was previously present among other variables.) But this is compatible with that focusing on intentionality before real life examples might not be the best way to go methodologically speaking (although this order of proceeding is obviously not part of any theory of intentionality.) Anyways, these my tentative thoughts on this issue.
The idea of intentionality which Crane starts off with in this book is derived from Franz Bretano’s coinage in the late nineteenth century. The intentionality of a mental state refers to the property of that state of being about something or directed towards something (e.g., a perception of a squirrel; a belief about that squirrel.) Crane’s position is that intentionality explains consciousness; all conscious states are intentional, and it is intentional properties that make mental states conscious. Intentionality, for Crane, goes hand-in-hand with the basic intuition that consciousness is a matter of beholding something in a certain way. A person’s perspective or point of view will shape whatever they behold (e.g., perceive, think about, imagine forth.) Crane proposes that we should call the way by which something is presented for a certain person its “aspectual shape.” The same object can have different aspectual shapes for different people or for the same person across different instances. This aspectual shape is tied up with the different thoughts, imaginings, behavioral inclinations, and so on a person is prone to having in light of encountering the object whose aspectual shape is under consideration. Crane proposes this schema for understanding intentionality: there is an intentional state, which is defined by its intentional object/content. Intentional content involves the way by which the intentional object is presented (i.e., aspectual shape), whereas the intentional object is defined in terms of the state’s directness towards it. Intentional objects need not be any particular sort of thing. It can be formally defined in terms of whatever that can serve as an intentional object for an intentional state (in other words, an intentional object just is whatever we are capable of encountering, whether it is perceptual, imaginative, thought-based, etc. experience.) Intentional objects need not exist or be real. Only intentional states whose intentional object is nonexistent exist and are real.
Crane nicely connects up these ideas about intentionality with other major ideas bubbling around Bretano’s time. This includes: Russell and Frege on narrow v. wide contents. Meinong’s solution of positing nonexistent objects to the problem of empty referring terms. The logical distinction between intensionality (with an “s”) and extensionality. The relation between intensionality and intentionality. (This is all found in chapter 1.)
In chapter 3, Crane deals with consciousness. There have been proposals for various concepts for explaining different aspects of consciousness. There is the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness; the intentional and the qualitative; and lower and higher-order states of consciousness. Some theorists argue that we must posit quaila, and that intentionality cannot explain all forms of phenomenal consciousness. For example, pain states don’t seem to be about anything; a pain doesn’t refer to anything beyond itself. Crane argues against this. A pain state can be understood as such: Pain is a kind of intentional attitude, whose intentional object is a location on one’s body, which is presented under a certain aspect/mode which is distinctive of pain. So the intentional content of this attitude may be understood as a part of one’s body as painful.
In chapter 4, Crane deals with thought. He motivates the position that thought should be distinguished from belief. Belief is intrinsically non-experience or non-conscious, and is either a disposition or a state. In contrast, thought is a mental act or an event. Judgment, a variety of thought, is a matter of forming a belief, and assertion is the expression of belief. A propositional attitude is an intentional state or event that has content that can be assessable for truth or falsity. Beliefs and judgments are equally propositional attitudes. Crane’s position on which intentionality explains consciousness requires a Fregean approach to propositional attitudes, over a Russellian approach. Propositional content is individuated by the way by which objects are represented by the subject who has the attitude under consideration, rather than by objects in the world. Crane acknowledges difficulties for this approach and addresses various objections (e.g., the issue of explaining demonstrative thought; defending internalism against externalist challenges.)
In chapter 5, Crane deals with perception. This chapter is devoted to two issues. First are the debates surrounding whether perception is “immediate” and essentially presents to us objects in the world, and the second are issues regarding whether the content of perception is conceptual or non-conceptual (which ties in with the relationship between perception and belief.) The first issue involves many thorny arguments, which I won’t re-present here. I will say, however, that Crane’s main reason for dismissing direct realism is that it is “implausible” that states of perception and hallucination which are phenomenally indistinguishable are of different kinds. I think this thesis can be shown to be plausible, when set up in certain ways (e.g., there are evolutionary reasons to think that perception consists on mechanisms that put us in contact with the world, whereas imagination (of which hallucination is a variety) does not; often there is no matter of what of how some experience stands phenomenally since this is influenced by how we remember and describe it - so phenomenal similarity isn’t a good criterion for identification of “kinds.”) Regarding the second issue, Crane nicely shows that the debate partially depends upon what we mean for some content to be conceptual. He distinguishes between conceptuality as defined on the basis of (1) you need concepts in order to have the relevant mental state, i.e., a perception or a belief, and (2) there is conceptual thinking phenomenally present during your having that mental state. Crane visits certain positions for making sense of (1): there is a debate over whether language skill is necessary for having concepts. Crane sides with that language isn’t necessary. I found this all quite interesting - but why not say that language is necessary for grasp of certain sorts of concept, but not others?
Here are some of my personal associations with some ideas here. I liked Crane’s setting up perception as on par with judgment, or the formation of belief, with respect to their common “aiming” at truth. This is a familiar idea, but I hadn’t considered it explicitly. It makes me wonder where emotion resides in this terrain. Emotion may be said to aim at truth as well, insofar as we regulate our emotions or come to see the world different by virtue of emotion. Emotion regulation is governed partially by our aim to know what’s happening in reality, since something is at stake which has instigated the emotion. Emotion changing the “coloration” of the world may be understood as a matter of our encountering new aspects of our situation which we implicitly take as real. But as everyday examples of emotion regulation show, much of our personal and social reality (where talk of emotion is properly anchored) is ambiguous or uncertain. Future possibilities are the necessary foundation of various aspects of our present situations, which are uncertain. There are different interpretations of the same event or action, and it is often the case that it’s practically feasible for us to change our interpretations, or to take different conflicting ones as truthful. In contrast, classic examples of perception involve content that is “concrete” or “physical” (e.g., is the ball red or not, does the ball exist or not?) Answers to these issues do not involve uncertainty and ambiguity of the same sort that is found in issues that instigate emotion. Something can be said of belief. While belief is intuitively taken to be directable upon a broader array of things than perception is, nevertheless belief is associated with propositional content and the binary of truth and falsity, which has led to a culture of thinking about belief in a way which is similar to the epistemology of perception. Moreover, emotion is tied up with desire and action. This means while emotion can be said to aim at the truth, it also aims at the good, relative to a perspective. If emotion is more psychologically primitive than propositional attitudes of belief and desire (and likely it is; it’s intuitive to think that nonhuman animals have emotion, while they need not be capable of language and the sort of propositional states humans have), then maybe there’s a different sort of “normatively” than the epistemic or the practical (defined on the paradigm of desire and action), which involves both mixed up. (This is just all rambling for reminding myself about big picture points I’ve been concerned with; sorry for its not being relevant to Crane’s book at all.)
I also feel intuitively suspicious of the clear-cut distinction between the intentional attitude/mode and object/content. While this is certainly a very useful theoretical apparatus, I wonder if it places conceptual constraints upon we thinkers, so that we miss out on certain observations and ideas that we’d otherwise have. Do I have anything in mind with this? Maybe. Here are some examples of moments of experience whose details might be lost if we are committed to the idea of intentionality. When reflecting upon having experience (where we’re not yet drawing the theoretical distinction between attitude and content), it’s intuitive to think that things change rapidly or are even ambiguous. I may imagine someone and feel an emotion towards them. This brings on memories of them, but perhaps these memories are so generalized in type or ambiguous that it’s more proper to call them imaginings (of narratives or schemas in which this person figures.) I may think and believe various things about them, but these thoughts are so emotion-driven that it’s unclear whether they’re about particular states of affairs assessable for truth/falsity, or whether they’re more like imaginings or hoping, not purporting to be about anything in particular.
Crane’s thesis of intentionality suggests that for any of these experiences there is a particular intentional attitude (or cluster of them) that is activated, and that which ones is a matter of fact. Or, it suggests that there can be a proliferation of kinds of intentional attitude, so perhaps it should be proposed that there’s imagination-memory and thought-imagination in addition to imagination, memory, and thought. But this misses out on how there are various dynamics as experience unfolds that are based upon how we as agents deal with what’s presented to us at any moment of experience. Our responses may change the character of our experience, and things may be unfolding in complex ways (e.g., we may be aware of different states or moments of experience simultaneously.) Another way of seeing this is that the way by which something shows up to us (what Crane calls “aspectual shape”) might be said to determine the character of the intentional attitude. But if we speak in this way, it’s a short ways away from the view that content/object and attitude are interdependent of co-constitutive in some manner. Then, it can be misleading to talk about them in the fashion that Crane does, by which attitude determines content, and it’s fair to think about experiences in terms of singular attitude and content descriptions.
Maybe I’m misconstruing Crane’s thought, however. Maybe the examples I give merely show that the theoretical apparatus of intentionality is right and just shows that practical experience is complicated; but all the aspects of this apparatus can be preserved and yield an adequate explanation of experience (e.g., while attitude determines content, new attitudes can come into place quite quickly, where their eliciting conditions involve what content was previously present among other variables.) But this is compatible with that focusing on intentionality before real life examples might not be the best way to go methodologically speaking (although this order of proceeding is obviously not part of any theory of intentionality.) Anyways, these my tentative thoughts on this issue.
February 3, 2023
(In italiano: Fenomeni mentali. Un’introduzione alla filosofia della mente)
Ripreso e finito nel corso dell’ultimo mese. Libro estremamente complesso e denso per chi non si occupi di filosofia della mente. Non è quindi una vera e propria introduzione, nel senso che partire da questo libro per esplorare la filosofia della mente contemporanea sarebbe scoraggiante. Ogni paragrafo espone un nuovo contenuto concettuale.
Non è neanche un libro “neutrale”, che espone le diverse teorie in maniera del tutto equilibrata. Ma in questo senso, Crane gioca a carte scoperte. Propone una variante “liberale” dell’intenzionalismo (partendo dalla cosiddetta tesi di Brentano), è un emergentista (sui generis) e si schiera contro il fisicalismo. Naturalmente espone in modo chiaro le tesi che avversa, anche se, per esempio, molti troveranno sottovalutato il contributo di Quine a proposito dei qualia.
Ciò detto, il modo di procedere e argomentare di Crane è di una linearità e di una consequenzialità ammirevoli. Potrebbe essere senz’altro un manuale ideale (non per un corso base, ma per un corso avanzato di filosofia della mente).
Ripreso e finito nel corso dell’ultimo mese. Libro estremamente complesso e denso per chi non si occupi di filosofia della mente. Non è quindi una vera e propria introduzione, nel senso che partire da questo libro per esplorare la filosofia della mente contemporanea sarebbe scoraggiante. Ogni paragrafo espone un nuovo contenuto concettuale.
Non è neanche un libro “neutrale”, che espone le diverse teorie in maniera del tutto equilibrata. Ma in questo senso, Crane gioca a carte scoperte. Propone una variante “liberale” dell’intenzionalismo (partendo dalla cosiddetta tesi di Brentano), è un emergentista (sui generis) e si schiera contro il fisicalismo. Naturalmente espone in modo chiaro le tesi che avversa, anche se, per esempio, molti troveranno sottovalutato il contributo di Quine a proposito dei qualia.
Ciò detto, il modo di procedere e argomentare di Crane è di una linearità e di una consequenzialità ammirevoli. Potrebbe essere senz’altro un manuale ideale (non per un corso base, ma per un corso avanzato di filosofia della mente).
September 1, 2013
One of the best introduction books on this subject
February 6, 2018
Didn't read the whole thing, but was a handy reference whilst studying Philosophy of Mind
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