engleski

Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Action, Cognition, and the Phenomenon of the Background

Modern philosophy of mind addresses many mysteries, but it seems that maybe the most mysterious is how human agents become involved in worldly affairs without having to think and deliberate ; how beliefs and desires are brought about before they ‘come to word’ ; how actions get their course before the ‘self’ can report on their emergence ; and how mental contents and motives for action can be generated often with no concepts in sight and seemingly no representations in mind. The actual trends are, however, predominantly conscious- and thought-centred, and largely insensitive to all that cannot be captured in intellectualist terms. They are marked by the hegemony of thought, conceptual chauvinism, repressions of representationalism, the dictate of volition, and the dogma of deliberation. Consequently, they take for granted that thoughts are consciously controlled, that actions originate in deliberation, and that behaviour is basically a result of some sort of propositional plan. As such, they are hardly in a position to provide an adequate account of the implicit, nonconceptual, skilled, and automatic. To be critical of intellectualism and question the omnipotence of thought in this context should by no means suggest that the background is merely the elusive taciteness or the cognitive ‘junk’. On the contrary, the background provides a competence that is crucial for the conduct of our behaviour, both motor and mental. However, philosophy has been largely insensitive to its import, being mostly concerned with the ‘foreground’ of reason and propositionality. The fact that the background mostly remains ‘invisible’ to the human agent is no excuse for the short-sightedness of philosophers who have systematically turned their attention away from this aspect. We nowadays know (also thanks to the empirical research) that what is happening in the backstage of the mind has a cognitive import even if it is not assisted by thought or language processes. This collection is an attempt to convince the reader that what happens in the backstage of the mind is essential for how we figure out what is going on in our surroundings, and how we respond to it. We then also come to realise that it is routine which rules behaviour more than reasoning, that habit is a reliable guide to habituation, that unconscious desires are as effective as deliberative ones, and that automatism, more than the authority of volition, enables our participation in the natural and cultural setting in an easy and effortless way which we refer to as ‘just doing’.

background; implicit knowledge; mind; action; unconscious; skill; intentionality

Contributors: Hubert L. Dreyfus (Introductory Essay) ; M. Cappuccio and M. Wheeler ; D. D. Hutto ; M. Schmitz ; S. Gallagher ; J. Margolis ; D. Schmicking ; J. T. Gendlin ; R. Shusterman ; M. Sheets-Johnstone ; S. Stuart ; Z. Radman ; K. Mainzer