Page 134 - Contribution To Phenomenology

CONNECTIONISMAND PHENOMENOLOGY 127

beliefs and desires which we hold, but which we are not explicitly and
thematically aware of prior to the action, decision, or belief that issues
from them.
Under the assumption that mental states—^whether strictly determined
or not—are motivated by other mental states, we find ourselves
compelled to posit something, namely dispositions or habitualities, to fill
the gap. But even so, they present a problem. For they do not fit easily
into our paradigmatic examples of mental states. The way that we most
directly and certainly know of the existence of the mental is that there
are many beliefs and desires we ourselves have and are directly aware
of. The ones that philosophy—and especially Husserl—have typically
focussed on are those that also exhibit a propositional structure, that
predicate something of something else. To use Husserl's words, the
prototypical examples of beliefs as mental events are "judgments" (if we
focus on belief for second) of which we are immediately aware. However,
we know from Experience and Judgment for example that Husserl does
not consider judgments the fundamental building blocks of mental life,
since he maintains that predicative judgments—as well as decisions and
actions—are in turn founded upon the prepredicative experience of the
individual objects that predicative judgments are about (§§ 4-6), and that
underlying this realm is the more comprehensive and fundamental sphere
of the life-world as the ultimate horizon against which any experience of
individual objects is at all possible.
Nevertheless, even the prepredicative apprehension of such individuals
implicitly bears within itself structures resembling those of the judgments
which later arise out of it, since it contains within itself the tendency
towards a certain framework of explication and possesses a specific doxic
character, that makes it characterizable as a species of behef.^^ In this
regard each background behef seems something more hke a structured
image, with various aspects that are not explicitly spelled out but are
nevertheless implicitly contained within it—in Cog-Sci language: it is
syntactically structured. But in spite of this syntactic structure, and in spite
of the important role that this level of the experience of individual
objects plays in mental life as the "substrate" not only for predicative
judgments, but also for decisions and actions, we are normally not directly
aware of it, Husserl indicates, at least not completely and directly. He
says for example that at the basis of all judgment, decision, and action

•See §§10,12, and 16-21.