This thesis is about consciousness and representation. More specifically, the big picture issue in the background throughout is the relationship between consciousness (or "phenomenology") and representation (or "intentionality") in the life of the mind. Phenomenology and intentionality are inarguably the two central topics in philosophy of mind of the last half-century. The question of phenomenology is, "how can there be something it feels like, from a subjective viewpoint, for a physical being to experience the world?" The question of intentionality is, "how can something physical, such as a brain state, be about, or represent, some other thing out in the world?" Not too long ago, the majority opinion was that these two questions addressed two essentially independent domains. However, in recent years the views of many philosophers have swung dramatically in the opposite direction. An important theme of analytic philosophy of mind in the last decade or two has been the exploration of the groundbreaking idea that these two domains might be fundamentally linked in previously unrecognized ways. Perhaps phenomenal properties are reducible to certain kinds of intentional properties. Perhaps the mind's non-derivative intentionality is grounded in phenomenology. Perhaps we should think of phenomenology and intentionality as "intertwined, all the way down to the ground" (Chalmers 2004, 32). This thesis addresses one crucial question within this larger framework: whether, and how, thoughts are phenomenally conscious. Thoughts are an important test case for theories about the relationship between phenomenology and intentionality, because they have long been considered paradigmatic intentional states, in contrast to perceptual and sensory experiences, which are paradigmatic phenomenal states. While there is something it is like, from the inside, for an individual to undergo a perceptual experience such as an olfactory experience of roasted coffee beans, by contrast entertaining a thought might seem to lack such a distinctive qualitative "feel". The thought is clearly intentional: it involves carrying informational content about objects and properties in the world. But is there also something it is like for a subject to experience thinking itself? To answer this question in the affirmative is to accept the existence of a phenomenology of thought, so-called "cognitive phenomenology" (CP). The literature on this topic so far has focused primarily on the question of whether CP exists. Here I will focus on the subtly different, and largely neglected, question of whether a kind of CP exists that is able to determine thought's intentional content. Many proponents of CP seem to be motivated by the hope that it can, since they believe that in the case of other conscious states, the phenomenology accounts for the intentionality. However, in what follows I argue that this ambitious project is doomed to fail, because CP is not suited to determine the intentional content of thought.

Research on theory of mind (ToM) has been dominated by the traditional False Belief tasks; however, recent work has established a developmental sequence for children’s mental-state understanding. Wellman and Liu (2004) formulated a ToM scale that tests four additional aspects of ToM abilities in the visual realm: Diverse Desires, Diverse Beliefs, Knowledge Access, and Real-Apparent Emotions. Our study extended the scale to include five parallel tasks assessing ToM in the auditory realm. Sixty-six typically developing preschoolers (30 female) between the ages of 3- and 5-years-old were tested using 10 ToM tasks (5 visual, 5 auditory). A 3(age) x 2(modality) x 2(gender) repeated measures ANOVA yielded significant effects for age and gender, where 4- and 5-year-olds demonstrated greater mental-state understanding than 3-year-olds and girls passed more tasks than boys. There was no effect of modality nor did any interactions emerge. Like the visual tasks in the theory-of-mind scale, the auditory tasks form a scalable set, with Diverse Desires and Diverse Beliefs occurring earlier in the scale than Knowledge Access, False Belief, and Real-Apparent Emotions. Our new scale provides researchers with five novel tasks to measure the progression of theory-of-mind development in the auditory realm and may be extended to assess preschoolers, such as children with visual impairments and children with autism spectrum disorder, who have shown delays in mental-state understanding when tested using predominantly visual tasks

On the heels of an older generation of Romantic poets concerned with the individual’s role in creating reality, Percy Shelley defines perception as a mandatory building block for countering an external physical world that is hostile to the individual. Consequently, the question of perception, both how it is defined and how it can be influenced, plays an important role in Shelley’s works that focus on political and social change. The question of perception, as it relates to the individual and as it relates to social change, is brought to the forefront in Prometheus Unbound and his drama, The Cenci.

This thesis aims to present and defend an account of affective perception. The central argument seeks to establish three claims. 1) Certain emotional bodily feelings (and not just psychic feelings) are world-directed intentional states. 2) Their intentionality is to be understood in perceptual terms: such feelings are affective perceptions of emotional properties of a certain kind. 3) These ‘emotion-proper properties’ are response-dependent in a way that entails that appropriate affective responses to their token instances qualify, ipso facto, as perceptions of those instances. The arguments for (1) and (2) appeal directly to the phenomenology of emotional experience and draw heavily from recent research by Peter Goldie and Matthew Ratcliffe. By applying Goldie’s insights into the intentional structure of psychic feelings to the case of emotional bodily feelings, it is shown that certain of the latter—particularly those pertaining to the so-called ‘standard’ emotions—exemplify world-directed intentionality analogous to the perceptual intentionality of tactile feelings. Adapting Ratcliffe’s account of the analogy between tactile feelings and what he terms ‘existential feelings’, it is argued that standard emotional bodily feelings are at the same time intrinsically intentional world-directed perceptual states (affective perceptions) through which the defining properties of emotional objects (emotion-proper properties) are apprehended. The subsequent account of these properties endorses a response-dependence thesis similar to that defended by John McDowell and David Wiggins and argues that tokening an appropriate emotional affective state in response to a token emotion-proper property is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for perception of that property (Claim (3)). The central claim is thus secured by appeal both to the nature of the relevant feelings and the nature of the relevant properties (the former being intrinsically intentional representational states and the latter being response-dependent in a way that guarantees the perceptual status of the former).

This thesis develops and explores a constitutive approach to colour vision, which serves as an alternative to the standard experiential view of colour vision operating in the philosophy of colour. The approach seeks to describe the nature or essence of colour vision qua psychological kind. I argue that it is constitutive of colour vision that an organism possesses the ability to achieve colour constancy. An important feature of my account is that colour constancy is characterised as the ability to discriminate differences in surface reflectance properties across changes in illumination conditions. This differs from the standard ‘appearance invariance view’, which characterises colour constancy by appealing to the phenomenology of apparent colour. I consider an important objection to the appearance invariance view posed by the argument from illumination, which might also seem to carry over to the reflectance discrimination view. The objection is based on the claim that in standard cases of colour constancy the phenomenology of apparent colour is partly illumination-dependent. I argue that the reflectance discrimination view is perfectly able to accommodate this point. As a case study in applying the constitutive approach to illuminate the distinctive nature of colour vision, I argue that a vivid feature of our ordinary experience of colour known as categorical perception should be dissociated from our colour vision abilities. Although colour ontology often is not at the forefront of discussion, these constitutive theses support the ontological view of colour known as reflectance physicalism. I critique the argument from colour similarity, which many take to pose the greatest threat to reflectance physicalism. The thrust of the argument is that colours phenomenally appear to stand in similarity relations that do not correlate with the similarities that are evident among reflectance properties. This argument lacks much force, however, as it fails to acknowledge the extreme context sensitivity of similarity and the presentation sensitivity of our knowledge of similarities.

Understanding others’ emotions and false beliefs, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), and to recognise and produce facial expressions of emotion has been linked to social competence. Deaf children born to hearing parents have commonly shown a deficit, or at best a delay in ToM. The emotion processing skills of deaf children are less clear. The main aims of this thesis were to clarify the ability of emotion recognition in deaf children, and to provide the first investigation in emotion production. While deaf children were poorer than hearing controls at recognising expressions of emotion in cartoon faces, a similar pattern was found in both groups’ recognition of real human faces of the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise). For deaf children, emotion recognition was better in dynamic rather than static, and intense rather than subtle, displays of emotion. With the exception of disgust, no differences in individual emotions were found, suggesting that the use of ecologically valid dynamic real faces facilitates deaf children’s emotion recognition. Deaf children’s ability to produce the six basic emotions was compared to hearing children by videoing voluntary encodings of facial expression elicited via verbal labels and emotion signed stories, and the imitation of dynamic displays of real facial expressions of emotion. With the exception of a poorer performance in imitation and the verbally elicited production of disgust, deaf children were consistently rated by human judges overall as producing more recognisable and intense expressions, suggesting that clarity and expressiveness may be important to deaf individuals’ emotion display rules. In line with previous studies, results showed a delay in passing the first and second order belief tasks in comparison to age matched controls, but not in comparison to a group of ‘age appropriate’ hearing control children. These findings encouragingly suggest that while deaf children of hearing parents show a delay in ToM and understanding disgust, emotion processing skills follow a broadly similar pattern of development to hearing control children. Language experience is implicated in difficulties faced in social and emotion cognition, with reduced opportunities to discuss more complex emotional and mental states.

This theoretical study is looking into consciousness, unconsciousness and concepts that are associated with it. It also goes back to the historical approach to these two terms, yet it points out the terminological obstacles that are inseparably connected with them. Both constructs are being discussed from an integrated perspective therefore neither mapping of the neurobiology of consciousness nor the summary of the major approaches to the philosophical mind-body problem, is left out of consideration. The unconsciousness research methods are divided according to the predominant focus into experimental and clinical. The study also covers an analysis as well as a review of significant theoretical approaches to consciousness and unconsciousness. These theoretical concepts were classified based on distinction of relevant scientific disciplines that are used to describe the problems in question. Neurobiological, psychological and philosophical theories were later categorized according to this method. The final conclusion brings a complex overview of these topics previously dealt with in the study. It attempts to integrate the findings into a comprehensive framework and to deal with some general issues that indicate possibilities and limits of the theoretical and practical research into both phenomena....

Mind-Mindedness, a parent’s tendency to attribute thoughts and intentions to his or her child, is related to numerous child outcomes including infant attachment security and child social-cognitive development. Despite established research, the construct is still developing and current research continues to provide clarification. This study sought to contribute to the clarification of mind-mindedness in three main ways. First, the present study examined within-parent consistency with respect to mind-mindedness, parenting stress, and parenting style. Results indicated that parenting stress and parenting style tended to covary for two children in the same family, whereas mind-mindedness did not. Additionally, parents tended to experience different levels of parenting stress or utilize different parenting strategies between their two children. By contrast, significant differences for mind-mindedness were not found. Secondly, the present study examined the relation between mind-mindedness and parenting stress. Results supported an inverse relation between mind-mindedness and parenting stress for the older child. Results also revealed a positive relation between mind-mindedness and parental distress for the younger child; this was specifically relevant for children age 30 months and younger. Multiple interpretations for this finding are explored. Third, this study examined the relations between parenting style, parenting stress, and mind-mindedness. Results indicated two general trends: For the younger children, when parents thought about their child in a more mind-minded manner, they also tended to utilize more authoritative parenting strategies; this parenting style was also related to lower parenting stress. For the older children, when parents thought about their child in a more mind-minded manner, they also tended to utilize less authoritarian parenting strategies as well as experience less parenting stress as related to parent-child dysfunctional interactions. The findings of this study support previous findings regarding mind-mindedness and parenting stress as well as contribute to an improved understanding of the consistency of parenting constructs between two children in the same family and the relation between parenting stress and parenting style. These findings also raise questions for future research with respect to mind-mindedness in very young children. Future research areas and implications are discussed. / Graduate

A Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts / The Epistemological Realist (ER)project, recently initiated by John McDowell in Mind and World and Hilary Putnam in his 1994 series of Dewey Lectures, is an extremely promising one. This project aims to show how a 'commonsense realism' about the world and our relationship to it can be made tenable in a philosophical climate increasingly dominated by various forms of anti-realism. At least part of the reason for the prevalence of anti-realism is the unsatisfactory way in which realism has traditionally been developed. Epistemological Realism departs from Traditional Realism in at least three key areas: (a) its account of how perception enables empirical knowledge, (b) its account of perception itself and (c) its account of how our empirical knowledge claims bear on reality. The ability of the ER theorist to give perfectly satisfactory accounts of (a)-(c) does much to reinstate 'commonsense realism' as a philosophically respectable position. Epistemological Realism 'commonsense realism' Traditional Realism antirealism perception empirical knowledge reality John McDowell Mind and World Hilary Putnam / AC2017

It is well understood that psychoanalysis began with Freud’s encounter with hysteria and his work with illnesses of the mind which manifested in bodily terms. However, despite its close connection to the body and the understanding that psychoanalytic theory and practice develop hand-in-hand, psychological conflict that expresses itself in physical terms and more especially the role of the two bodies in the therapy room has received relatively little attention. The topic of this research project is captured in its title: “Minding the Body”, and the four journal articles it presents interrogate the relationship between the mind and body of both the patient and therapist. The thesis begins with two published papers which focus on the body of the patient, rehearsing and extending the psychoanalytic theory of bodily psychopathology and the implications that the different understandings of the relationship between body and mind in different forms of psychosoma have for clinical interventions. The second two papers examine what the analyst’s interpretation of her somatic responses to the patient, and the patient’s engagement with the analyst’s body, can reveal about the dynamics of the therapeutic dyad. The project concludes with a discussion of the clinical implications of a greater focus on the two bodies in the room, suggesting that the techniques developed to make sense of the patient’s physical symptoms can be usefully applied to decode the somatic countertransference as it manifests in a particular therapeutic dyad. That process, coupled with an awareness of the patient’s engagement with the therapist’s body, can create conditions under which the analyst’s body may become an analytic object and this can add significantly to the analytic repertoire.