Merleau-Ponty: Motor Intentionality
When talking about motor intentionality, it’s important to have an understanding of Merleau-Ponty and his thoughts on schemas and representations. Merleau-Ponty fuses contemporary psychology with philosophy to create his ideas. According to Merleau-Ponty, humans are embodied beings that are involved in the world as embodied beings. Embodied coping is thus intentionality, or aboutness, to be about something. A couple examples of states of the mind that have intentionality are wanting, belief, and desire. For example, “I believe that the chalk is white” is a propositional attitude. A propositional attitude is a state of the mind. The essence of thoughts can be considered intentionality and when this claim is taken to be true or logic for motor intentionality can be made. Our bodily movement exhibit intentionality to be about something or for some intended purpose in other words. This bodily movement paired with thought forms a relationship that creates intentionality. In this paper, I’m going to discuss what motor intentionality is and explain how motor intentionality is relevant to the understanding of athletic agency.
In his dissertation, Merleau-Ponty coins the phrase “motor intentionality” as the intentional activities that essentially involve our bodily, situational understanding of space and spatial features. Motor intentionality entails bodily movements that have both a “mental” and “physical” dimension. This paradigmatic phenomenon can be seen in grasping. In motor intentionality the body is aimed at or directed toward an object. Grasping occurs toward the location of the object within reach. Our body has an understanding that our mind does not and vice versa. The “mental” and “physical” ...
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...hing they wanted and desired since the beginning of the College Basketball season. My final example of how motor intentionality is relevant to the understanding of athletic agency is when a soccer player is going to take a penalty shot. In my opinion, I feel that before a player takes the penalty shot, they are fully embodied and absorbed in the situation. Before they shoot, they have in their mind which direction they are going to shoot, which puts all of the pressure on the goalie. I think penalty shots are a great representation of motor intentionality because both the player and goalie are embodied beings that are involved in the world as embodied beings. There is no separation between the mind and the body. In my opinion, I feel like these three examples I provided above explain how motor intentionality is relevant to understanding the nature of athletic agency.
For our focal point of this assignment, intentional stances is where Daniel Dennett has assumed that objects are treated as an agents with beliefs and desires and given the rationality to do what it is supposed to do according to its beliefs and desires. In the article, Daniel Dennett said that in playing chess game with the computer, you have the prediction that it will move in a smarter way where it can beats you.
Aristotle will ultimately say that almost everything we do is in our control, but when we are young and ignorant, we cannot always fully grasp the concept of what we are doing. Aristotle’s response to an objection would be that there are different types of actions, involuntary and voluntary, that define the actions that we do. I will elaborate upon Aristotle’s argument, find plausible objections to it, discuss how he would react to this objection, and finally evaluate the whole process.
Some scholars think they are all “learned, like speech, without any special effort on the part of the learner or the teacher; consequently, their importance and influence are often overlooked” (DeVito, 1968). This does not account for all nonverbal behavior like the self-touch gesture. The self-touch gesture happens when someone is nervous or intimidated, and looking for some self-assurance. While trained speakers can be taught to not to do this, who taught anyone to start doing this in the first place? These unconscious behaviors, especially body movements and gestures are what make nonverbal and kinesics interesting and important to understand
In order to make sense of the ambiguous and complicated world we live in we need a way in which to perceive phenomena. For any given event there could be numerous causes, and instinctively we choose the cause of most significance. These causes are generally ones that represents a humanlike agent. As these agents are not always easy to detect - we often assume there is a humanlike agent behind phenomena regardless of whether we can identify their presence. He notes that Wegner and Mar and Marcae propose we are inclined to see agency even in things such a geometric figures or 'abstract non living
Goodale, M.A. (1995) Perceiving the World and Grasping It: Is there a difference? Lancet, 343, 930.
There are side effects to almost every action people take. Getting rid of insects in a home can cause harm to the environment, or even poison pets within the household. Studying for a test can cause lack of sleep, and ultimately poorer health. Throwing away the remains of an unfinished dinner plate discards what could have been valuable nutrients for starving children in Africa. How one determines intentionality of an action has been a controversial topic for many. Joshua Knobe has conducted experiments for explaining the proper analysis of intentional action, while Uttich and Lombrozo have conducted experiments exploring the relationship between norms and mental state ascriptions in terms of intentional actions. This paper will review the results of one of Knobe’s studies, explain the side-effect effect in the perspective of Uttich and Lombrozo, and offer an alternative explanation to the side-effect effect.
"At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness” (Haynes). This studies reveals that fact that although we may be unaware the notion of free will is prevalent throughout everyday life in the actions we believe we choose to do.
Physicalism, or the idea that everything, including the mind, is physical is one of the major groups of theories about how the nature of the mind, alongside dualism and monism. This viewpoint strongly influences many ways in which we interact with our surrounding world, but it is not universally supported. Many objections have been raised to various aspects of the physicalist viewpoint with regards to the mind, due to apparent gaps in its explanatory power. One of these objections is Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. This argument claims to show that even if one has all of the physical information about a situation, they can still lack knowledge about what it’s like to be in that situation. This is a problem for physicalism because physicalism claims that if a person knows everything physical about a situation they should know everything about a situation. There are, however, responses to the Knowledge Argument that patch up physicalism to where the Knowledge Argument no longer holds.
The most famous series of experiments to empirically address the problem of free will were those conducted by Benjamin Libet and colleagues (Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983; Libet, 1985). He analyzed the timing of conscious awareness of movement, and concluded that voluntary action begins with unconscious activity in the brain. Libet’s findings have been replicated in several more recent studies, such as those by Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes (2008) and Bode, He, Soon, Trampel, Turner, Haynes (2011). Collectively, these results have almost conclusively determined that the conscious decision to act is preceded by unconscious neural action; however, the application of these findings to the problem of free will is still a subject of debate. To some experimental neuroscientists (Libet, 1985; Soon et al., 2008; Haggard, 2011; Fried, Mukamel, & Kreiman, 2011), these studies indicate that free will, or the conscious will ...
Motor skills are motions carried out when the brain, nervous system, and muscles work together. The body must effectively use mind/body connection and awareness of their surroundings for the muscles and bones to develop fine and gross motor skills. Both of these motor skills start out as reflexes, the body has not learned them but they are uncontrollable movements. That is then later learned and perfected making large and...
One much discussed issue in contemporary philosophy is the relation between consciousness and intentionality. Philosophers debate whether consciousness and intentionality are somehow "connected" (see Searle, chap. 7); whether the one or the other is the "theoretically fundamental" one (see Dennett); and whether we have reason to be more optimistic about an "objective" or "scientific," or "third-person" "account" of intentionality ...
Are minds physical things, or are they nonmaterial? If your beliefs and desires are caused by physical events outside of yourself, how can it be true that you act the way you do of your own free will? Are people genuinely moved by the welfare of others, or is all behavior, in reality, selfish? (Sober 203). These are questions relevant to philosophy of the mind and discussed through a variety of arguments. Two of the most important arguments with this discussion are Cartesian dualism and logical behaviorism, both of which argue the philosophy of the mind in two completely different ways. Robert Lane, a professor at the University of West Georgia, define the two as follows: Cartesian dualism is the theory that the mind and body are two totally different things, capable of existing separately, and logical behaviorism is the theory that our talk about beliefs, desires, and pains is not talk about ghostly or physical inner episodes, but instead about actual and potential patterns of behavior. Understanding of the two arguments is essential to interpret the decision making process; although dualism and behaviorism are prominent arguments for the philosophy of the mind, both have their strengths and weaknesses.
This umbrella term compromises ‘various complex cognitive processes and sub-processes (Elliott, 2003). It refers to ‘the set of abilities that allows an individual to select an action that is appr...
Does this mean that mental imagery is linked to motor performance? Would athletes achieve the same or different results if they mentally prepare themselves or not? To answer these questions, I looked at the neurological aspect of mental imagery and motor preparation.
Behavior is quite an interesting aspect of man to observe. All day long we demonstrate diverse types of behavior, from eating certain foods to speaking in certain ways. But of most interest is rational behavior. Behavior is rational "if, and only if, it can be influenced, or inhibited by the adducing of some logically relevant consideration." (p.297) In his essay MacIntyre tries to show us that rational behavior is not causally determined, but that it comes out of our free will.