Philosophy of Mind in Latin America

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Introduction

The philosophy of mind developed in Latin America belongs mainly to the Analytic Philosophy, “broadly construed.” So, I think it makes plain sense to begin with a brief description of the main organizations and institutions that promote analytic philosophy in Latin America. The analytic tradition started sooner in Mexico and Argentina, where it is well-consolidated. In Brazil and other countries, that tradition gains strength from the seventies up to today. I will focus particularly on the disciplines that underpin the philosophy of mind: specifically, the philosophy of logic and language (relevant for the propositional attitudes or mental states with conceptual content and the relations between them), and the philosophy of science (relevant for the kinds of reduction involve in the mind-body debate). Metaphysics, of course, is also relevant (for instance, the mind-body problem and free will are clearly metaphysical problems) and will be treated in the next section devoted to the philosophy of mind, as well as the epistemological aspects (knowledge of our own mental states or the mental states of other people). I will present some representative works in philosophy of mind in the following countries, in alphabetic order: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. I limit myself to the very last decades and do not consider works before 1950. I give more attention to the current research. Latin America is huge; it includes 20 countries. As it is virtually impossible to mention all the philosophical contributions to the theory of mind in so many countries, I apologize in advance for my failures and limited knowledge.

Analytic philosophy in Latin America: a very short overview

Analytic philosophers, since the very beginning of the movement in Germany and England, put logic and philosophy of language at the very center of their philosophical project. This intellectual strategy is combined with a respectful attitude toward scientific knowledge and a general down-to-earth and sober style of philosophizing, even in ethics and metaphysics.

In the last decades, there has been a strong development of the analytic movement in Latin America. Scientific societies have been created like the Latin American Association for Analytic Philosophy (ALFAn) founded in 2006 in Mexico, the Brazilian Society for Analytic Philosophy (SBFA, founded in 2008 in Porto Alegre), and the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis (SADAF, founded in the late sixties). SADAF maintains a journal, Analísis Filosófico, since 1981. Eduardo Rabossi † was a leading figure for the development of analytic philosophy in Argentina and South America. Donald Davidson described Rabossi and Genaro Carrió † as “brave soul” for their resistance to the dictature.^[1] Tomás M. Simpson [2; 3] was an important philosopher of language in Argentina, one of the first in the analytic tradition. Eduardo Rabossi, among his many philosophical interests, also wrote a book on language a few years later [4]. The Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas of the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM), founded in 1940, counts many important analytic philosophers; it has a journal, Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía, since 1967. Maite Ezcurdia † was very active as a founder of ALFAn and editor of Crítica. The Brazilian State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) with its Centre for Logic and Epistemology (CLE) is another important foyer for analytic philosophy since 1977, thanks to Oswaldo Porchat Pereira’s dedication, a philosopher famous to defend a version of Scepticism. CLE has an international journal, Manuscrito, rated as one of the best in Latin America. Logic and Philosophy of Logic have famous exponents in Brazil, with Newton da Costa †, Walter Carnielli, Itala M. Loffredo D’Ottaviano, and Oswaldo Chateaubriand.^[2] Non-classical logic, especially paraconsistent logic, is the most important da Costa’s legacy, which is developed today by many followers. Raul Landim Filho wrote on classical philosophers, namely Aquino, Descartes, Kant, with an analytic gaze. Danilo Marcondes Filho and Arley Moreno wrote on pragmatics and philosophy of language. A notable fact was Willard van Orman Quine’s teachings at the University of São Paulo, in 1944, where he wrote a book in Portuguese, O Sentido da Nova Lógica [10]. Marcelo Dascal, a famous Leibniz scholar, founder of the journal Pragmatics & Cognition, gave important contributions to the theory of language and mind. Philosophy of logic and philosophy of language are important for the philosophy of mind, especially for the so-called propositional attitudes or mental states with conceptual content. The content of these states is usually specified by using a sentence of a public language, the semantic properties of which are used to specify the so-called “mental content.” Important figures of the analytic movement, like Donald Davidson, Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke, visited Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, hereafter IIF), Brazil (UNICAMP) and Argentina (SADAF). Moreover, most Latin American countries have organized groups studying Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In Brazil, Wittgenstein’s philosophy counts many scholars, like Mauro Engelmann, Paulo Faria, João Vergilio Cuter, Edgar da Rocha Marques, but these have many other philosophical interests. Edgar Marques is editor responsible for the journal Analytica of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, that publishes papers in the analytic tradition. Working in the UNICAMP, Marco Ruffino is a Frege scholar who recently used speech acts theory to resolve Kripke’s enigmas about contingent a priori truths [11]. Ernesto Perini Frizzera de Mota Santos (Federal University of Minas Gerais) works on analytic philosophy in Middle Ages, contextualism in the philosophy of language, and cognitive science.

As to the analytic philosophy of science, the Argentine Mario Bunge † was a pioneer in South America [12]. He left Argentina in the sixties, running away from the dictature, and went to Canada, where he lived until his death at 100 years old. He was a member of the McGill Philosophy Department in Montreal and produced 80 books and hundreds of papers defending scientific realism; he also founded the Society for Exact Philosophy, which counts many Latin American philosophers of science as members. In Mexico, a well-known philosopher of science and technology, León Olivé Morret † [13], worked at the IIF. The Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in Brazil has a regular conference on epistemology and philosophy of science in the analytic tradition and an international journal, Principia. Luiz Henrique de A. Dutra was very active as writer, creator and organizer of the regular symposia of the journal. Argentines Alberto Cupani and Gustavo Caponi (philosophy of biology) became members of the philosophy department of the UFSC. Paulo C. Abrantes (University of Brasília) and Karla Chediak (State University of Rio de Janeiro) are also exponent of the philosophy of biology. Newton da Costa, Décio Krause and Oswaldo Frota Pessoa Jr. gave important contributions to the philosophy of quantum mechanics. Otavio Bueno, today at the University of Miami, studied with da Costa and still works regularly with Brazilian philosophers of science. He is editor of Synthese and is now a renowned philosopher of science.

Philosophy of mind in Latin America

Philosophy of mind is the reflexive study of the basic categories which form the foundation on which are anchored the concepts and principles we use to describe our intelligent performances. The domain of the mental comprises sensorial experiences, perceptions, emotions, mental images, mental acts and activities, the so-called propositional attitudes, and dispositions of different kinds (capacities, abilities, inclinations, competences, tastes, etc.). These mental acts, events, and states are subjective, conscious (or can turn conscious), and intentional. The main philosophical disciplines put to work in the philosophy of mind are metaphysics, logic and philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of science.

As I said earlier, I will describe some important contributions in Latin American countries, following alphabetic order, and focusing on the research currently in development.

Argentina

Eduardo Rabossi is certainly the central figure in Argentina when it comes to philosophy of mind. He has been organizing, translating, promoting, and publishing relentlessly for decades. His influence could have been greater were it not for the fact that the dictature obliged him to leave his position at the University of Buenos Aires. He went to Oxford in 1966 where he studied philosophy and came back to Argentina in 1970. One good example of his influence is the publication of Filosofia de la Mente y Ciencia Cognitiva, a collection of essays, translated in Spanish, written by notorious North American philosophers, like Ned Block, Tyler Burge, Jerry Fodor, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Dan Dennett, and many others [14]. Rabossi wrote on folk psychology, on the perspective of the second person (just a few years after Davidson), and on mental causation. He was an original thinker. His anti-foundationalist views on human rights are famous. He was very active until his sudden death in Cuzco in 2005.

Diana I. Perez is by now the leading figure in the philosophy of mind in Argentina. A former student of Rabossi, she is full time professor at the University of Buenos Aires, director of SADAF, and one of the main researchers of CONICET (Nacional Council for Scientific Research and Technics). She organized and published several collections; in 1999, she published an original book, La mente como eslabón causal (The Mind as a Causal Link), and then, in 2013, Sentir, desar, creer. Una aproximación filosófica a los conceptos psicológicos [15] (Sensing, Desiring, Believing. A Philosophical Approach to Psychological Concepts). Her last book, with Antony Gomila, is especially important: Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction [16].^[3] She defends an interactive (second person) perspective on social cognition, in which emotions ground our interactions and hence the genesis of psychological concepts through which we think and behave in our daily life. She adopts a post-cognitive, anti-cartesian point of view, which she is trying to develop, generalizing the view she holds about social cognition. Recently, this corresponded to an important “turn” in philosophy of mind, cognition and psychology, sometimes referred to, with a pinch of humour, as the “You Turn.” As a matter of fact, we all start our lives in a state of total dependency; we all need to be nursed and nurtured by other persons, whose existence is not inferred or reconstructed from a first-person perspective, but is something given in a very primitive way, like a presence that imposes itself from the very beginning.

When it comes to folk psychology, Patricia Brunsteins is an important reference in Latin America. She published in 2010 La psicologia folk. Teorias, practices y perspectivas [18]. She takes as her starting point the three theories considered by Alvin Goldman in Simulating Minds (2006): the theory-theory, the theory of rationality, and the theory of simulation. She criticizes all three and considers the second person perspective as a promising theoretical representation of our metarepresentational capacities to attribute attitudes for explaining and understanding behaviour.

Carolina Scotto was the first woman Rector of the National University of Córdoba. She is also a CONICET researcher. She situates her research in the philosophical naturalist movement, instead of adopting the classical conceptual analysis style. Her main research concerns are the theories of intentional attributions of mental states and social cognition in the perspective of the second person [19]. She studies attribution of mental states to non-human animals [19; 20]. She defends that the perspective of the second person is more fundamental and irreducible to the first-person and third-person perspectives. The second-person perspective is a necessary complement to the other two. The first-person perspective is subjective, the third-person perspective is objective, and the second-person perspective is intersubjective. Objectivity is an intersubjective construction that presupposes abilities grounded in the first-person perspective. According to Scotto, we have here a genuine interaction that could explain phenomena like social cognition, empathy, and mutual understanding in interactive, public and practical contexts. She is also interested in mindreading, especially something that she calls “facereading,” associated to Wittgenstein’s philosophy [21] and the role it plays in social interaction.

Finally, Mariela Aguilera, also working at the National University of Córdoba (also a CONICET researcher) is interested in non-linguistic forms of representations and thinking [22], also in the relations between language, thought and concepts. She is currently working on the relations between cartographic and linguistic representations. [23]. Also, at Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades of the National University of Cordoba, Laura Danón (CONICET) is currently on a research project entitled: “Intentionality in non-human animals: propositional and non-propositional contents.” She works on animal cognition and normativity in non-human animals.

Brazil

In Brazil, the development of analytic philosophy started a bit later than Mexico or Argentina. But after a slow beginning in the seventies, it developed rapidly. The country is huge and counts 69 federal universities and 54 post-graduated programs in philosophy where many researchers are working today in the analytic tradition. In the nineties, philosophy of mind developed at a quick pace, in different regions of the country.

Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez works at the State University of São Paulo (Unesp) in Marilia. She got a degree in physics and a PhD in cognitive science in England. She has many research interests; she was among the pioneers in Brazil when it comes to self-organization, the informational semantics and Dretske philosophy of mind, autonomous actions, complex systems, Gibson’s ecological psychology, personal identity, and artificial intelligence.^[4] She works a lot with her colleague and good friend Mariana Claudia Broens (Unesp). They both organized many conferences in Brazil on the theory of mind and cognitive sciences and published together many papers. They founded the Brazilian Society for Cognitive Sciences, which organizes regularly the meetings of the Society. Mariana Broens recently worked on self-deception, and ethical questions raised by today’s Big Data, direct perception, affordances, etc.^[5]

Wilson John Pessoa Mendonça studied in Germany and then taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) for decades. He defends a strong reductionist version of physicalism. He has many papers on supervenience, mental causation, the problem of causal exclusion, and on ethical matters and philosophical semantics. He created a centre on Ethics and Philosophy of Mind.^[6]

Maria Clara Dias also works at the UFRJ. She got her PhD in Germany, with Ernst Tugendhat as a supervisor. She started working on Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Then, she discussed the question of qualia defending a functionalist perspective, and the notion of person and personal identity. After that, she turns to the idea of extended mind, following the lead of Andy Clark and David Chalmers. Finally, she is currently working on biotechnology and posthumanism. She is developing a perspective on moral and justice that could include, not only human beings as moral agents, but also non-human animals and some inanimate beings, like works of art and coupled systems.^[7]

João de Fernandes Teixeira studied in England, at the University of Essex, and then made post-doctoral research at Tufts University with Dan Dennett. He worked at the Federal University of São Carlos, in the state of São Paulo. He wrote many books, starting in 1990, many of them of scientific diffusion, and was the first to present the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences to the Brazilian public. Recently, he also wrote on posthumanism.^[8]

 There is a strong movement of young philosophers developing Enactivism in Brazil. They form an active group, CLEA (Cognition, Language, Enactivism and Affectivity), gathering researchers of 7 federal universities, whose members are André J. Abath (UFMG) [55; 56], Giovanni Rolla (UFBA) [57; 58], César Meurer (UFABC), Nara Figueiredo (UFSM) [59; 60], Eros Carvalho (UFRGS) [61; 62], Felipe Carvalho, Marco Aurélio Alves (UFSJ) [63], Felipe De Carvalho (UFMG) [64], and Raquel Krempel (UFABC). The basic idea is that cognitive, Linguistic and affective processes, can be fully understood only if we consider the situated activities of an agent in his physical and social environment. Enactivism is a form of naturalism that combines ideas of Francisco Varela (biology) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenology) which were developed more recently by renown researchers like Alva Noë, Daniel Hutto, and many others.

Luiz Henrique de Araújo Dutra (Federal University of Santa Catarina), mentioned earlier as a philosopher of science, is also philosopher of mind. His books on the theory of mind exposes a conception of mind largely inspired by the behaviourist tradition, but Dutra goes further and add many original details to that tradition. In Dutra [65], traditional conceptions of mind are presented in the first part, and the second part explores recent conceptions like that of distributed cognition and extended mind. In Dutra [66], some traditional conceptions are described (Hobbes, La Mettrie, Bernard), and then he discusses the contemporary conceptions of Gilbert Ryle and Donald Davidson, Clarck and Chalmers, etc. The last chapter discusses consciousness much in line with Gerald Edelman. Finally, in Dutra [67], his emergentism is exposed as well as the category of perspectivity, which he conceives of as more fundamental than intentionality.

André Leclerc (University of Brasília) is Canadian and has been teaching in Brazil since 1995. He soon got involved in the organization of the research in analytic philosophy and philosophy of mind. He was one of the founders of the Brazilian Society for Analytic Philosophy and second president of the entity. Furthermore, he was also treasurer of the ALFAn. He organized many events of the series of international colloquia in the philosophy of mind, inviting to Brazil renown researchers from Europe and North America. Leclerc published mainly in the philosophy of language and mind. He defended contextualism in the philosophy of language, and an anti-intellectualist version of Intentionalism and Dispositionalism in the philosophy of mind, in a way that is compatible with some versions of Enactivism. He is currently working on mental causation, but also wrote on action theory, and externalism in philosophy of mind.^[9] Leclerc is the leader of research group, Mind in Action, in which many people work (Dutra, Maria Eunice Gonzalez, Mariana Broens, Herivelto Pereira de Souza – specialist in psychoanalysis –, Beatriz Marques Sorrentino, to mention but a few). Beatriz Sorrentino (Federal University of Mato Grosso), Leclerc’s former student, is specialist in the theory of action and is also very active in Feminist Philosophy. She studied with Alfred Mele in Miami and currently works on the epistemic conditions necessary for the attributions of moral responsibility in action theory.^[10]

 Chile

Francisco Pereira Gandarillas (Universidad Alberto Hurtado) works in Philosophy of mind and perception. He got his PhD in King’s College, London. In recent years, he dedicated his research to the following topics: (1) the debate between relational/disjunctive and representational theories in the field of the metaphysics of perception; (2) the debate between conceptualist and non-conceptualist theories regarding the intentional contents of visual perception; (3) the nature of attention and its relationship to the emergence of perceptual consciousness; (4) the phenomenon of cognitive penetrability of perception; (5) the admissibility of higher order properties in perceptual representation; (6) the boundaries between cognitive and perceptual processes in contemporary philosophy of mind. He also studies Hume’s thought.^[11]

Also at the Alberto Hurtado University, Federico Burdman’s current research project applied philosophy of mind and action to typical cases of addiction. It is titled ‘The ambivalence of behavioural control in addiction: theoretical aspects and ethical implications.’ Burdman describes his project in the following terms: “The project addresses several philosophical issues surrounding how to properly understand and evaluate the behavior of people with addictions. The central feature of addictive agency that gives rise to these problems is its ambivalent status as intentional action. On the one hand, the consumption actions performed by a person with addiction appear to be explicable in the usual terms for motivated behavior, involving beliefs, desires, intentions, and decision-making processes instrumentally aligned with the ends the person is pursuing. At the same time, it is a behavioural pattern with some features that clearly distance it from ordinary action, in that it is a behavior that is not fully under the control of the individual. Behavioural control is impaired but also retained to some relevant degree. The actions of a person with addiction are thus located in a difficult to conceptualize middle ground between full voluntariness and total lack of it, which raises a few conceptual difficulties that can be analysed from a philosophical perspective. How can we make sense of the very idea of someone doing something intentionally and, at the same time, having diminished control over the actions they perform? Can a person be fully responsible for their actions under such conditions? And is a person in such conditions fully capable of making decisions about eventual treatments for their condition? Starting from such questions, the general objective of the present project is to illuminate, using the conceptual tools of philosophical analysis, three axes of problems linked to this ambivalence.”^[12]

Once again at the Alberto Hurtado University, Juan Loaiza works on philosophy of science and philosophy of emotions, thinking about how to construct scientific concepts of emotions that are suitable for investigation in psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. In his publications, he argued for a functionalist approach to emotion kinds (Loaiza [84; 85]) and to consider the role folk psychological concepts play in fixing the explananda of emotion research (Loaiza [86; 87]). Currently he is interested in how cultural variation of emotions affects both folk and scientific concepts of emotion (Loaiza [88]). Lastly, some of his other works were devoted to Molyneux’s question in philosophy of perception (Loaiza [89]; Loaiza Arias, Montenegro & Cardona Suárez [90]). Recently he published on implicit bias and externalism (Loaiza [91]).

Colombia

Santiago Arango-Muñoz got his PhD in Germany. He also studied at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris with Joëlle Proust. He is associate professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Antioquia. His work has focused on philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He published some papers on metacognition. In “Two levels of metacognition” (2011), he revised the debate between Peter Carruthers and Joëlle Proust on the nature of metacognition and claimed that the debate can be solved by understanding this capacity as involving two different levels – each having a different structure, a different content and a different function within the cognitive architecture. In 2013, he published “Scaffolded memory and metacognitive feelings”; in that paper, he tried to show how metacognitive feelings help us to understand the use of external memory tools for remembering. Then Arango-Muñoz published “The nature of epistemic feelings” (2014), where he tried to characterize these experiences according to their intentional content and phenomenal character, and described the nature of these mental states as nonconceptual in the case of animals and infants, and as conceptual mental states in the case of adults living beings. Finally, he described the cognitive mechanism that elicits these feelings. More recently, he published the paper “Cognitive phenomenology and metacognitive feelings” (2019), where he claimed that metacognitive feelings do not seem to constitute a case of cognitive phenomenology. In 2019, he moved a bit out of his main research area and started studying mind-wandering. He finally published in 2021 a paper with his colleague Juan Pablo Bermúdez, where they tried to explain how it is possible for the mind to wander intentionally: “Intentional mind-wandering as intentional omission: The surrealist method.”^[13]

Juan Pablo Bermúdez is a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on the issue of control; he tries to describe and explain how we exert control over our actions, and what are the limits of that control. Moreover, he tries to answer the following question: what are the ethical and political implications of our limitations, as they intersect with social contexts and new technologies? He is Lecturer at the University of Southampton’s Department of Philosophy, and Researcher at Externado de Colombia University, where he leads the “Self-Control in Context” project. Self-control in intentional action is his main research interest, something of a decisive importance for action theory. Control is a basic presumption and a necessary condition for the correct attribution of any intentional action.^[14]

Miguel Ángel Pérez Jiménez (hereafter Pérez) is full time professor at the Pontifical Javeriana University in Bogota. For the last fifteen years he has been working on various problems related to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of emotions. The main lines along which he worked are: 1) A critical assessment of the Theory-Theory and Simulation-Theory models from the point of view of developmental psychology, especially focused on the joint attention debate, pointing out their explanatory impertinence, given that the former requires conceiving infants as beings with cognitive capacities that are above what development allows them (Pérez [98; 99]), and given that the latter misunderstands affective states, sometimes as sensations and sometimes as emotions (Pérez and Suárez [100]). 2) From a more philosophical point of view, he discussed some logical, linguistic and anthropological presuppositions that these two models have, especially their requirement of complex propositional attitude states, the requirement of counterfactual inference and the instrumentalist conception of human interaction, which is not a datum coming from empirical research, but a presupposition of the explanatory principles proposed by the theorists (Pérez and Suárez [101]). 3) From a constructive perspective, Pérez has been emphasizing the communicative dimension of emotional expressions, perceptions and evaluations, as an alternative resource that allows the attribution of mental states, albeit not attitudes with propositional content, but with objectual content (Pérez and Liñán [98; 102–105]). This work has led him to understand the second-person perspective of mental attribution as an alternative to the Theory of Mind (ToM), which involves enactively understanding mental attribution as a way of guiding infant-adult interaction, rather than as a way of interpreting a behavior, as proposed by cognitivist interpretivism (Pérez [105; 106]). 4) In recent years, he proposed an understanding of the second-person perspective of mental attribution in normative rather than cognitive terms, so that infant-caregiver interactions could be seen as ongoing negotiations of authorizations and prohibitions, articulating the second-person perspective with affective pragmatics theory and some approaches from developmental psychology. This has allowed him to enrich recent proposals on interactions between first, second and third person perspectives, based on a normative analysis of these interactions in terms of the information provided by one perspective, authorizing the interpreter to reaffirm, complement, modulate or cancel the information coming from another, which entails a modification of the commitments and authorities of both the interpreter and the interpretee (Pérez [106; 107]).

In all these works Pérez has collaborated a lot with Camila Suárez Acevedo, Alejandro Mantilla and José Luis Liñán.

Mexico

Today in México the researchers are more inclined to work in the so-called cognitive sciences. But there are still important works done in the philosophy of mind strictly speaking. Philosophers working in the cognitive sciences regularly and unavoidably engage in philosophical discussions.

Maite Ezcurdia died she was only 52 years old. It’s a pity, because she put so much energy in everything she did and was a great organizer of analytic philosophy in Latin America. She worked at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas da UNAM, was an editor of Crítica, and a founder of ALFAn. She wrote mainly in the philosophy of language, more precisely on the fluctuating frontier between semantics and pragmatics, on proper names and demonstratives. In the philosophy of mind, she published two collections with Olbeth Hansberg, one on sensations [108] and then then on perceptions. She also worked on concepts and conceptions [109].

Olga Elizabeth Hansberg Torres, a.k.a. Olbeth Hansberg, worked at the Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She was a founder and first president of ALFAn. She wrote^[15] mainly on emotions and their variety, on action theory, and responsibility. She organized, with Maite Ezcurdia, two big collections on sensations and perceptions. She translated many important works, particularly Davidson’s works.

Santiago Echeverri has worked in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science. He dedicated much of his work to the mechanisms, format, and content of perceptual object representations. On that topic, he engaged in a discussion with Pylyshyn. Echeverri explains that Pylyshyn, in a series of influential writings, developed a referentialist account of object perception based on the concept of a “visual index”, namely, a primitive mechanism that enables the visual system to individuate and keep track of objects over time. This mechanism bears some similarities to linguistic demonstratives like “this” or “that”: it acquires a different semantic value depending on the perceptual context and it does not represent any properties. For Pylyshyn, the processes responsible for visual reference are wholly bottom-up and they are implemented in a Fodorian module. In Echeverri [113], he argues that this account has trouble explaining top-down forms of attention, where the current goals or cognitive states of the subject modulate the selection of information. From Echeverri’s perspective, top-down attention is best explained if one restricts bottom-up causal relations to the pre-objective level of transduction; that leaves room for the introduction of accessibility relations between cognitive and indexing systems in subsequent processing stages. In other articles, Echeverri further develops this approach with a semantic account of the correctness conditions of the representations underlying object perception. In Echeverri [114], he defends a view he dubs “representational singularism.” This view is best understood in contrast with its two main competitors: descriptivism and referentialism. While descriptivists hold that the visual system represents an object just in case that object uniquely satisfies at least one property, representational singularism holds that there are representations of properties that fix reference but are not attributed to the object of reference. These properties are either object-parts or properties of object-parts. For referentialist like Pylyshyn, the visual system singles out objects in a purely causal manner, where properties play a causal albeit non-representational role in visual reference. By contrast, representational singularism holds that visual reference is best explained if one posits pre-attributive contents that represent properties before any attribution of a property to an object. These contents have an iconic structure because they represent pre-objective properties as spatiotemporally arranged. Echeverri thinks that this approach makes better sense of the central role of the mechanisms of grouping and figure-ground organization. In Echeverri [115; 116], he claims that this view enables one to characterize perceptual errors that concern object individuation and do not seem to fall on one or another side of philosophers’ dichotomy between illusions and hallucinations. He also argues that the proposed analysis puts pressure on what are taken to be the main theoretical options in the debate between austere naïve realists and representationalists about perception. Since austere naïve realists take it that non-representational relations to mind-independent objects are primitive, they cannot explain how illusions concerning object individuation are possible. Since representationalists have posited representational structures that only make room for illusions or hallucinations, they lack the tools to explain illusions concerning object individuation.

Echeverri has been interested in the reference and functional role of the I-concept. In Echeverri [117], he suggests that the I-concept is a device of information integration: it enables the thinker of a token of I to make explicit self-concerning information that is implicit in other mental states and events (such as visual experiences and proprioception) and anchor self-concerning information stemming from testimony and imagistic representations.

Andrea Onofri is full time professor at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí. She works mainly in the philosophy of mind and language. In [118], she challenged the Fregean explanation of inference in Recanati’s theory of mental files. In [119], she argued that there are two constraints on the theory of concepts which are, in fact, incompatible. Then, in [120] she defended the publicity of thought by proposing a relational theory, where thoughts are individuated by their mutual relations. In [121], she criticized the similarity-based accounts of so-called “Loar cases” and proposed instead that such cases are instances of epistemic luck, where the hearer correctly identifies the referent without knowing it. In 2021, she published in Oxford University Press a collection of essays exploring how mental fragmentation affects memory, thought, language, and implicit attitudes, constituting the first interdisciplinary collection dedicated to this topic [122]. Onofri and Dirk Kindermann wrote the Introduction to the volume. In [123], she critiqued Cumming’s interpretation of Lewisian coordination as content identity and suggested a simpler approach to communicative success. Finally, in [124] she presented, with Matheus Valente, a puzzle inspired by Kripke’s “Paderewski” story, arguing that understanding and successful communication do not require thought identity.

Conclusion

I’m perfectly aware that some philosophers of mind and their works do not appear in the portrait I tried to draw of the philosophy of mind in Latin America. Nonetheless, I believe it is fair enough and covers the most important works in that research field as it is today. I wrote to many Latin-American philosophers of mind to obtain information on their works, but some did not answer my request. For that reason, the treatment of the researchers in this paper may sometimes seem to be unequal. I want to thank, especially, Diana Perez and Santiago Echeverri for their help. They gave me many addresses and references. I am also indebted to the following works I used as a starting point: Perez & Echeverri [106], Perez & Moreno [107], Nuccetelli [84] and Ezcurdia [45]. Some works would have deserved more extensive comments, like Chateaubriand [7; 8], Gomes & D’Ottaviano [9], Perez & Gomila [16]; others were not even commented, like those of Marcelo Dascal [125; 126], or da Costa & French [127]. But this will have to be done somewhere else, on another occasion.

I want to thank all those who sent me, as I asked, a brief description of their work and some references. Once more, I apologize for all those philosophers that are not, but could have been, mentioned in this paper. But a mere list of names would be boring and uninformative, and a description of all the works done by all the philosophers of mind in Latin America would exceed the limits of a reasonable paper on the subject. I tried to compensate by elaborating a bibliography as rich as possible. I hope this will be useful to any reader interested in the philosophy of mind in Latin America.

 

_{¹ Carrió and Rabossi were professors at the University of Buenos Aires and were fired by the dictature. After dictatorship, they occupied important positions: Carrió went to the Supreme Court, and Rabossi was responsible for the National Commission on the Disappeared. Rabossi earned an international prize for his work on human rights. They both translated Austin’s How to Do things with Words em 1962 and founded SADAF with Gregorio Klimovsky (a philosopher of science) and Carlos Alchourrón (a philosopher of law). See [1. P. 62].}

_{² The following books are representative of the innovative character of logico-linguistic works by Brazilian researchers: Newton da Costa [5]; Walter Carnielli & Epstein, R.L. [6]; Chateaubriand Filho O. Logical Forms. Part I: Truth and Description and Logical Forms. Part II: Logic, Language, and Knowledge. [7; 8]; Gomes, E.L., D’Ottaviano, I.M.L. [9].}

_{³ On the same theme, see also A. Leclerc and F. Boccaccini [17] in which Perez and Gomila have each one a contribution.}

_{⁴ Here are just a few of her works: Gonzalez M.E.Q. [24–31].}

_{⁵ See, for instance, Broens M.C. [32–35].}

_{⁶ See here a few of Mendonça’s contributions in the philosophy of mind and semantics: Mendonça W. & Telles de Menezes [36–41].}

_{⁷ Here are some of her works: Dias M.C. [42–48].}

_{⁸ Here is a sample of his production: Teixeira J.F. [49–54].}

_{⁹ Here goes a small sample: Leclerc A. [17; 68–76].}

_{¹⁰ The following are some of her works: Sorrentino B.M. [77–79].}

_{¹¹ Here are some of his works: Pereira F. [80–82].}

_{¹² Personal correspondence with the author. See, for more details, Burdman F.A. [83].}

_{¹³ Here are some of his relevant works: Arango-Muñoz S. [92–96].}

_{¹⁴ For this important work on control, see Juan Pablo Bermúdez [97].}

_{¹⁵ Here a few works: Hansberg O. [110–112].}

About the authors

André Leclerc

University of Brasília; National Scientific and Technical Research Council

Author for correspondence.
Email: andre.leclerc55@gmail.com
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4823-5883

PhD, Full-Time Professor

Darcy Ribeiro University Campus, Brasilia, 70910-900, Brazil; SAUS Qd 1, lt. 1 e 6, Bl. H, SAUS Edifício Telemundi II 8º andar, Brasília, 70297-400, Brazil; Бразилия, 70297-400, Бразилиа, SAUS Qd 1, lt. 1 и 6, Bl. H, SAUS Edifício Telemundi II 8º andar

References

Supplementary files