Developing an actor’s intuition:minds beyond muses

This PhD demonstrates that the actor’s intuition is developable as an embodied cognition. This research proposes that the actor’s intuition is a necessary cognitive process insofar as it can facilitate an immersion into a performance and encourage affective engagement. This research has three aims: first, the production of a conceptualisation of intuition as an embodied cognition; second, the production of an original somatic acting training method to develop the actor’s intuition as it is conceptualised; and finally, an analysis of the method’s efficacy. This research is situated within a Euro-American, English-speaking paradigm of knowledge.In this PhD intuition is defined as an energetic sensitivity, meaning the ability to be sensitive to the affective states of oneself, another, and an environment. This definition distinguishes intuition from existing conceptions which synonymise it with tacit, expert, self-evident (i.e., a priori) knowledge, and instinct. Defined as an energetic sensitivity, intuition is conceptualised as an embodied cognitive process and state which is responsive to the dynamics of an environment, rather than as a wealth of established skills or knowledges that are often deemed to be ‘subconscious’ or part of the unconscious faculty of the mind.This study offers a developed conceptualisation of intuition for actors, which was previously absent in acting scholarship. This research challenges the belief that the actor’s intuition is an undevelopable, subconscious phenomenon by offering a somatic acting training method to develop it. By offering actors a way to develop their intuition, this research addresses particular tensions that have arisen between the mainstream acting industry and actor training processes. These tensions are the effect that limited rehearsal and training time has on the actor’s creative state of mind, as well as the trend towards inclusivity and globalisation in professional practice.This project employs a Practice as Research (PaR) methodology that is shaped with an integrationist model of interdisciplinarity. The study integrates the disciplines of acting training, cognitive science, and somatics. This research methodology was shaped with an integrationist model of interdisciplinarity in order to argue for and explore the possibility of the development of an actor’s intuition as an embodied cognition, which is the central objective of the research. This research uses a combination of qualitative, quantitative, and arts-based methods to generate and collect data. To conduct this study, data from secondary research, semi-structured interviews, workshops, group discussions, journals, psychological scales, and behavioural tasks are used. This PhD consists of this written thesis and a somatic acting training method that was examined on the 17th of May 2022 at Coventry University. A link to a recording of one of the workshops where the method was explored can be found in Chapter Four on page 5

Philosophical Intuitions

What exactly is a philosophical intuition? And what makes such an intuition reliable, when it is reliable? This paper provides a terminological framework that is able answer to the first question, and then puts the framework to work developing an answer to the second question. More specifically, the paper argues that we can distinguish between two different "evidential roles" which intuitions can occupy: under certain conditions they can provide information about the representational structure of an intuitor's concept, and under different conditions, they can provide information about whether or not a property is instantiated. The paper describes two principles intended to capture the difference between the two sets of conditions---that is, the paper offers a principle that explains when an intuition will be a reliable source of evidence about the representation structure of an intuitor's concept, and another principle that explains when an intuition will be a reliable source of evidence about whether or not a property is instantiated. The paper concludes by briefly arguing that, insofar as philosophers are interested using intuitions to determine whether or not some philosophically interesting property is instantiated by some scenario (for instance, whether knowledge is instantiated in a Gettier-case), the reliability of the intuition in question does not depend on whether or not the intuition is widely shared

The argument against neutrality about the size of population

How should we as a society value changes in population size? The question may be crucial when evaluating global warming scenarios. I defend the intuition of neutrality, which answers a part of the question. It states that – other things being equal – it is ethically irrelevant whether or not additional people are added to a population. The argument against neutrality criticizes the intuition of neutrality as inconsistent. The contribution of this thesis is twofold: First, the framework of welfare economics, the intuition of neutrality, and the argument against neutrality will be presented with formal rigour. Second, the formalizations will be used for a critical analysis of the argument against neutrality. Three ethical frameworks will be assumed – the difference principle, average utilitarianism, and contractarianism –, and their relation to the explicit and hidden premises of the argument against neutrality will be investigated. The result will be that all three frameworks are compatible with the intuition of neutrality (or slightly modified versions); so the argument against neutrality does not hold within them

Respecting Preferences

Theorists of justice have to steer between two rocks. On the one hand, there is the intuition that an individual’s morally permitted preferences should be respected: it is not justifiable to intervene with them. On the other hand, such preferences are the result of formation processes, which are notoriously vulnerable to manipulation. Does justice demand respect for preferences that produce or perpetuate injustices, suffered either by the individual herself or by others? In this paper, I will investigate this problem in the context of the ambiguous tenet of neutrality. The field of gender justice has extended Rawlsian theories of justice in order to account for structural factors, such as socialisation. Some theorists have argued that the justice-inhibiting character of some preferences implies that the first intuition should be rejected in favour of the second in some cases, which leads to the conclusion that some preferences are like obstacles standing in the way of justice and should thus be reformed. I will call this the ‘Normative Hierarchy View’ and argue that it is problematic. It presupposes a certain attitude with respect to those who hold the preferences, which forecloses a politically salient kind of respect. Furthermore, at th

The epistemic analysis of luck

Duncan Pritchard has argued that luck is fundamentally a modal notion: an event is lucky when it occurs in the actual world, but does not occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. Jennifer Lackey has provided counterexamples to accounts which, like Pritchard’s, only allow for the existence of improbable lucky events. Neil Levy has responded to Lackey by offering a modal account of luck which attempts to respect the intuition that some lucky events occur in more than half of the relevant nearby possible worlds. But his account rejects that events which are as likely as those in Lackey’s examples are lucky. Instead, they are merely fortunate. I argue that Levy’s argument to this effect fails. I then offer a substitute account of the improbability condition which respects this intuition. This condition says that the relevant notion of probability for luck is epistemic

Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, ‘introspectively inaccessible’ attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals’ moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals’ partial awareness of their implicit biases makes them (partially) morally responsible for them. I argue by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods

Presenting and predicating lower events

The effects of different forms of predication have been insightfully (and almost exclusively) studied for 'simple' cases of predication, of which the 'presentational sentence' is maybe the paradigm instantiation. It is the aim of this paper to show that thc same kind of effects as well as in fact the same kind of structures are present at embedded levels in thematically and otherwise more complex structures. Beyond presentational sentences, 'unaccusative' experiencing constructions involving a dative subject, 'double object constructions' and - to a lesser extent - spraylload constructions are discussed. For all of these, it is argued that they comprise a predication encoding the ascription of a transient temporal property to a location. On this basis, a proposal is made as to how the scope asymmetry between the two arguments involved in the colistructions can be explained. Furthermore, a proposal is made as to how what has been called 'argument shift' is motivated

Implementation in Advised Strategies: Welfare Guarantees from Posted-Price Mechanisms When Demand Queries Are NP-Hard

State-of-the-art posted-price mechanisms for submodular bidders with $m$ items achieve approximation guarantees of $O((\log \log m)^3)$ [Assadi and Singla, 2019]. Their truthfulness, however, requires bidders to compute an NP-hard demand-query. Some computational complexity of this form is unavoidable, as it is NP-hard for truthful mechanisms to guarantee even an $m^{1/2-\varepsilon}$-approximation for any $\varepsilon > 0$ [Dobzinski and Vondr\'ak, 2016]. Together, these establish a stark distinction between computationally-efficient and communication-efficient truthful mechanisms. We show that this distinction disappears with a mild relaxation of truthfulness, which we term implementation in advised strategies, and that has been previously studied in relation to "Implementation in Undominated Strategies" [Babaioff et al, 2009]. Specifically, advice maps a tentative strategy either to that same strategy itself, or one that dominates it. We say that a player follows advice as long as they never play actions which are dominated by advice. A poly-time mechanism guarantees an $\alpha$-approximation in implementation in advised strategies if there exists poly-time advice for each player such that an $\alpha$-approximation is achieved whenever all players follow advice. Using an appropriate bicriterion notion of approximate demand queries (which can be computed in poly-time), we establish that (a slight modification of) the [Assadi and Singla, 2019] mechanism achieves the same $O((\log \log m)^3)$-approximation in implementation in advised strategies