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This chapter begins with an overview and a taxonomy of philosophical accounts of intentionality and conceptual understanding. Differences among these views often cause confusion: debates between John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus over whether practical and perceptual skills are conceptually articulated exemplify such confusion from different understandings of the “conceptual.” Two distinctions together provide an instructive taxonomy of four philosophical approaches to the topic. First, is the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual performances determined by an operative cognitive process, or does it mark a normative status within a larger pattern of practice? Second, does the analysis start with an “empty” conceptual content that is then fulfilled or disconfirmed in perception or action, or begin instead with an agent’s perceptual and practical interaction with the world before asking how that interaction is conceptually articulated? The chapter then builds upon John Haugeland’s arguments against several strategies in this taxonomy to show why the best approach is to analyze intentionality and conceptuality as a normative status that conceptually articulates an agent’s practical and perceptual engagement with the world. The chapter also introduces a third important distinction among philosophical approaches: is intentionality or conceptual understanding a distinctively human phenomenon, or are humans and non-human animals continuous in this respect?

Gilbert Ryle is well known for arguing that knowing how is not a kind of knowing that. The purpose of this chapter is to distinguish Ryle’s correct insights about action from his incorrect conclusions about the relation between knowing how to do something and knowing that something is the case. Ryle provides several different regress arguments to show that knowing how is not a kind of knowing that. Various versions of Ryle’s regress arguments are discussed, including his version of the Lewis Carroll argument. The morals of the discussion are applied a number of recent discussions in ethics and the philosophy of mind about what it is to act intelligently and what it is to act for a reason.

“California Heideggerianism,” as developed in the 1980‘s by Dreyfus, Haugeland, and Guignon, interprets Heidegger’s notion of the Anyone in Being and Time as a pattern of social normativity that establishes the contours of Dasein’s self-understanding and world. Specifically, the Anyone maintains a reservoir of “anonymous” or “generic” social roles, and individual cases of Dasein understand themselves by throwing themselves into one or several such social roles. Thus, the content of Dasein’s self-understanding is circumscribed by those possibilities of living on offer from Anyone. I argue that this reconstruction of the role of the Anyone is neither phenomenologically plausible nor exegetically required. To develop an alternative approach, I analyze the pragmatic normativity of those situations in which Dasein is called upon to deviate from everyday social norms. I draw upon Haugeland’s reconstruction of the phenomenon of conscience in Being and Time, which I argue can lead us to a conception of authentic self-understanding in which the content of self-understanding is neither some utterly novel and unprecedented form of originality nor provided by anonymous social norms. Rather, this owned content is the product of specifying impersonal possibilities of self-understanding that reside in the background culture in which one lives.

This chapter examines the important 1980s debate between Richard Lazarus and Robert Zajonc over the role of cognition in emotion. It emphasizes the role of information-processing theories of the mind in enabling Zajonc to propose a non-cognitive theory of the affects in terms not unlike those of Silvan S. Tomkins. It thus places the debate between Lazarus and Zajonc in the context of ideas about the automaticity and non-intentionality of many mental functions. It also analyses Lazarus's several attempts to rebut Zajonc, based in part on his criticisms of computer models of mentation, models to which, somewhat incoherently, his own thought also fell captive. Throughout this chapter, the goal is to make clear the difficulties facing Lazarus in his attempt to incorporate intentionality and meaning into a science of the emotions.

This chapter studies Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). In this movie, Deckard is a blade runner, a cop charged with capturing rebel androids (replicants). To find out whether a suspected replicant is really a replicant, Deckard deploys a sort of lie detector test: he poses emotionally loaded questions to them and uses a device to measure a telltale physiological response. Deckard's hard-cop detachment is deeply incompatible with the kinds of relationships—even romantic ones—that he himself carries on with replicants. This brings us to the argument of the movie: in treating others as if a physiological response is called for to decide if they count or not—in taking up a detached attitude that is willing to call their very humanity into question—Deckard convincingly puts his own humanity in jeopardy. This is driven home when we learn that Deckard himself, unbeknownst to him, is probably a replicant. Although Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly do not discuss Blade Runner in their important book All Things Shining, they might have. Deckard's is just the sort of perversion they investigate. Dreyfus and Kelly warns us not only of the dangers of our hubris but of its basic incoherence.

The American psychologist Richard Lazarus played an important role in the post-World War II history of research on the emotions. This chapter offers an analysis of the challenges he faced in his attempts to account for the meaning of the emotions. Lazarus's ideas about the role of "appraisal" or cognition in emotion were often tentative and confused, in part because of the difficulty he had in deciding what kind of claim it is that emotions are intentional states or actions. Is the claim fundamentally a constitutive-conceptual one, according to which it belongs to the very "grammar" of the emotions that they are intentional states? Or is the claim a causal argument about how emotions are aroused? Are those two kinds of claims incompatible, or can one adopt both a conceptual-grammatical and a causal explanation of the affects? Lazarus did not find it easy to answer these questions, even as he pursued a major research program designed to do so. The aim of this chapter is to examine Lazarus's experiments on the emotions and appraisal in the light of these difficulties.