Page 133 - Contribution To Phenomenology

126 TOMNENON

human beings as persons, as centers of motivation, are founded in bodies,
and thus that the mental will depend for its existence on a non-mental,
natural stratum in human beings.^^ This does not involves a reduction of
the mental to the physical, but it does mean that a truly plausible
account of the mental must at least be compatible with what we think
we know about bodies and brains. If our views about these two realms
do not square up, that does not necessarily mean that it is our view of
the mental that must give way. In some cases that may mean that we
should go back and reexamine what we think we know about brains and
bodies. But in any case, it points to a closer connection between theories
about cognition as processes in machines and brains, on the one hand,
and the theories about mental life, on the other, than many who consider
themselves phenomenologists might want to recognize.
In the following section, I suggest how Connectionism can indeed help
phenomenologists better conceive of one phenomenon, namely dispositions
or—to use Husserl's term—"habitualities," that has traditionally posed
some problems for Phenomenology and most other approaches to a
philosophy of mind as well.

Ill

Finding an ontological home for dispositions, in particular for cognitive
dispositions that seem to function as the effective background for
explicitly held beliefs and for actions, has been a problem in analytic
philosophy of mind and to a certain extent for Husserl as well. We
certainly seem to need to find a place for them, since they perform a lot
of work in any plausible account of why and how we do the things we
do. We need something to explain what motivates many of the mental
states we are consciously and actively aware of, but the things that we
need to complete the explanation are often states that we are not directly
aware of. Thus, one posits a realm populated by unconscious beliefs and
desires, which as repeated and consistent sources of certain beliefs or
actions are seen as dispositions—or to use Husserl's term, habitualities.
Many of our directly observable actions, conscious decisions, and explicit
beliefs seem to follow patterns that can be explained in terms of other

^^ Cf. here for instance Experience and Judgment^ Paragraph 8, where Husserl
explains that the tendency toward our naturalistic conception of the mind has its
justification in the fact that everything worldly has its place in the spatio-temporal sphere.