Philosophy of Psychology

Starting from Jaspers’ analysis of attitudes in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen and analyzing their causes, we find an essential description of the human being. The human condition of being in the world (Heidegger, Jaspers) can be troubled (Freud, Jung). However, this is characteristic for human life (Jaspers, Schellenbaum). Among all attitudes, the enthusiastic one is the more consistent with human being’s dynamic nature (Bergson, Jaspers, Schellenbaum). The human being feels himself deeply touched (Scheler, Jaspers) and becomes stunned. The aim of the (...) paper is to show that the enthusiastic view is well exposed by the act of singing. Traditionally analysed in connection with art (Cassirer, Solger, Wackenroder), the enthusiastic view gives us a “sound image” of the human being since his childhood (Gehlen, Leydi). In everyday life and by all its difficulties (Freud, Jung, Schellenbaum, Jaspers), the human being discloses his nature in acoustic manifestations (Keil, Kafka, Wackenroder) by expressing the enthusiastic mode. (shrink)

A necessary first step in collaboration between hypnosis research and meditation research is clarification of key concepts. The authors propose that such clarification is best advanced by neurophenomenological investigations that integrate neuroscience methods with phenomenological models based on first-person reports of hypnotic versus meditative experiences. Focusing on absorption, the authors argue that previous treatments of hypnosis and meditation as equivalent are incorrect, but that they can be fruitfully compared when characteristic features of the states described by these concepts are examined. (...) To this end, the authors use the “phenomenological and neurocognitive matrix of mindfulness” (PNM), a multidimensional model recently proposed by Lutz and colleagues. The authors compare focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation with hypnosis across the dimensions of the PNM, using it to interpret empirical research on hypnosis, and to shed light on debates about the role of meta-awareness in hypnosis and the role of suggestion in meditation. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that all concepts cannot have the same representational structure, because no single kind of representation has been successful in accounting for the phenomena related to the formation and application of concepts. Here, I argue against this “appeal to cognitive science” by demonstrating that different theories of the kind concept cohere with different interpretations of the argument. To circumvent the threat of relativism, I argue that theories of concept should be understood as working hypotheses, which are provisionally accepted (...) to facilitate the investigation and explanation of the mind/brain. From this perspective, theories of concept are to be evaluated as part of a comparative analysis of the different kinds of cognitive science they inspire. (shrink)

A recurring claim made by evolutionary psychologists is that their opponents neglect biological explanations as such for ideological reasons. I argue in this paper that this is a self-immunizing strategy that avoids serious engagement with existing critique by exploiting the long history of essentialist fallacies and anti-essentialist debunking arguments. To argue for this claim, I reconstruct the general form of the essentialist fallacy as well as the history of anti-essentialist debunking arguments and suggest that they play a central role in (...) the persistence of the ideological dimension of the nature-nurture debate. Discussing recent work from evolutionary psychology on how hormones influence female behavior, I show how self-immunizing strategies are used to avoid engagement with existing critique, while reproducing sexist stereotypes at the same time. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will present an empirical conjecture to the effect that some bodily actions are categorically perceived. These are bodily actions such as grasping or reaching for something, which I am going to call motor actions. My conjecture builds on one recently put forward about how the categorical perception of facial expressions of some emotions works. I shall motivate my own conjecture on the basis of both theoretical and empirical considerations, describe how it could be operationalised and what (...) explanatory gain could be obtained from it. (shrink)

The social intuitionist approach to moral judgments advanced by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presupposes that it is possible to provide an explanation of the human moral sense without normative implications. By contrast, Iris Murdoch’s philosophical work on moral psychology suggests that every description of morality necessarily involves evaluative features that reveal the thinker’s own moral attitudes and implicit philosophical pictures. In the light of this, we contend that Haidt’s treatment of the story about Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide (...) to have casual, protected, and in his view harmless sex, provides a too simplistic picture of what is involved in understanding human morality. Despite his aim to explain the roots of moral judgments, he fails to provide a deeper understanding of morality in two different respects. First, he does so by suggesting that his story contains all the relevant information needed to take a moral stand on it, and by rejecting as irrelevant the wider human context in which questions about sexual and family relations arise. Second, he simplifies the responses of the people who are subject to his experiment by disregarding their various reasons for disapproving and by equating understanding human morality with explaining an impersonal psychological process. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that to tackle social injustice, implicit biases and unjust social structures should be targeted equally because they sustain and ontologically overlap with each other. Here I develop this thought further by relating it to the hypothesis of extended cognition. I argue that if we accept common conditions for extended cognition then people’s implicit biases are often partly realized by and so extended into unjust social structures. This supports the view that we should counteract psychological and (...) social contributors to injustice equally. But it also has a significant downside. If unjust social structures are part of people’s minds then dismantling these structures becomes more difficult than it currently is, as this will then require us to overcome widely accepted ethical and legal barriers protecting people’s bodily and personal integrity. Thus, while there are good grounds to believe that people’s biases and unjust social structures ontologically overlap, there are also strong ethical reasons to reject this view. Metaphysical and ethical intuitions about implicit bias hence collide in an important way. (shrink)

The topic of my paper is the virtual controversy between Leibniz and Lockeover concepts and ideas. At the end of the 17th century John Locke made a crucial contribution to semantics and philosophy: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The work represents a decisive turning point for the discussion about ideas and innatism. Indeed, Locke’s aim was to dismantle the Cartesian theory according to which ideas are innate in our soul. Against this onto-epistemological thesis, Locke maintains that all our knowledge starts (...) off with experience: ideas are mental representations depending on subjects’ sensual experiences and reflection skills. Some years later, in his notes on Locke’s Essay, Leibniz writes that Locke dealt with a fundamental topic: human understanding and the limits of human knowledge (NE p. 4). All we can find out about the world is determined by answering the question about what we can know; nonetheless, Leibniz argues in favor of innate ideas. My thesis is that in his opinion Locke’s empiricism can be conciliated with the assumption that there are innate ideas. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck assume that approximate number system representations should be assigned referents from our scientific ontology. However, many representations, both in perception and cognition, do not straightforwardly refer to such entities. If we reject Clarke and Beck's assumption, many possible contents for ANS representations besides number are compatible with the evidence Clarke and Beck cite.

On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals possess a “number sense,” or approximate number system, that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques that question whether the ANS genuinely represents number. We distinguish three lines of critique – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and imprecision – and show that none succeed. We then provide positive reasons to think that the ANS genuinely represents numbers, and not just non-numerical confounds or exotic substitutes for (...) number, such as “numerosities” or “quanticals,” as critics propose. In so doing, we raise a neglected question: numbers of what kind? Proponents of the orthodox view have been remarkably coy on this issue. But this is unsatisfactory since the predictions of the orthodox view, including the situations in which the ANS is expected to succeed or fail, turn on the kind of number being represented. In response, we propose that the ANS represents not only natural numbers, but also non-natural rational numbers. It does not represent irrational numbers, however, and thereby fails to represent the real numbers more generally. This distances our proposal from existing conjectures, refines our understanding of the ANS, and paves the way for future research. (shrink)

A relatively common approach in game studies understands gameworlds as constituting an existential situation for the player. Taking that stance, which is rooted in the European philosophical tradition of Existentialism, in this chapter we investigate the relationships and similarities between our existence within and without gameworlds. To do so, we first provide a review of existing literature in ‘existential ludology’ - work in game studies which considers our engagement with gameworlds from an existential perspective. In the second part of the (...) chapter, we then engage with some of the most notable ideas of the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. Zapffe understood human life as inherently meaningless and identified four ways in which human beings typically protect themselves from the existential panic that accompanies the awareness of that meaninglessness: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. These four categories are used as the foundation for an examination of gameworlds as technologies for repressing existential panic. (shrink)

Self-control is that which is enacted to align our behaviour with intentions, motives, or better judgment in the face of conflicting impulses of motives. In this paper, I ask, what explains interpersonal differences in self-control? After defending a functionalist conception of self-control, I argue that differences in self-control are analogous to differences in mobility: they are modulated by inherent traits and environmental supports and constraints in interaction. This joint effect of individual biology and environmental factors is best understood in terms (...) of access to self-control behaviours. I sketch an account of access as including the three criteria of means, awareness, and non-excessive effort. I further demonstrate that people with disorders such as ADHD have limited access to self-control behaviours and stand therefore at a disadvantage with regard to self-control. (shrink)

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate over how to understand attention. It spells out and defends a novel account according to which attending is the most general type of mental act, that which one performs on some object if one performs any mental act on it at all. On this view, all mental acts are (to a first, rough approximation) species of attending. The view is novel in going against the grain of virtually all extant accounts, which work by (...) identifying the purported unique functional role of attention. It is inspired by Timothy Williamson’s account of knowledge as the most general factive mental state (Williamson, 2001: ch. 1). -/- Beyond the Williamsonian thin explanation of knowledge, the account of attention as the most general mental act is animated by two striking pre-theoretical features of attention, dubbed ubiquity and heterogeneity. The hope of accommodating these twin features seems to drive at least two other extant accounts of attention, very different from the one proposed here, offered by Mole and Wu, respectively. However, as the chapter explains, both Mole’s and Wu’s accounts fall short, leaving room for the novel account defended here, which does adequately capture both features. (shrink)

There is ample evidence that violations of injunctive norms impact ordinary causal attributions. This has struck some as deeply surprising, taking the ordinary concept of causation to be purely descriptive. Our explanation of the findings—the responsibility view—rejects this: we contend that the concept is in fact partly normative, being akin to concepts like responsibility and accountability. Based on this account, we predicted a very different pattern of results for causal attributions when an agent violates a statistical norm. And this pattern (...) has been borne out by the data. These predictions were based on the responsibility attributions that we would make. In this paper, I extend these previous findings, testing responsibility attributions. The results confirm the basis of our predictions, showing the same pattern of effects previously found for causal attributions for both injunctive norms and statistical norms. In fact, the results for responsibility attributions are not statistically significantly different from those previously found for causal attributions. I argue that this close correspondence lends further credence to the responsibility view over competing explanations of the impact of norms on causal attributions. (shrink)

Theorizing about children’s early development is beset with interpretational complexities. I argue that there is a general tendency to over-interpret the experimental findings, and that one of the main causes of this is the difficulty of disengaging from our adult frame of reference when theorizing about the young child’s mind. One domain where this holds is children’s ability to differentiate themselves from others. In relation to this I first critically analyze some cases of interpretational complexities, and then apply my methodological (...) and conceptual concerns to children’s perspective-taking abilities. This has a specific bearing on the classical false-belief task, which is a perspective-taking task. Part II proposes a new, what I call, a ‘Piagetian reading’ of the false-belief test. My new interpretation of the test suggests two different ways of perspective-taking of which one is egocentric in Piaget’s sense. Concluding Part III elaborates on some implications of the proposed reading of the test for a number of findings in the Theory-of-Mind field. (shrink)

The functional theory of boredom maintains that boredom ought to be defined in terms of its role in our mental and behavioral economy. Although the functional theory has recently received considerable attention, presentations of this theory have not specified with sufficient precision either its commitments or its consequences for the ontology of boredom. This essay offers an in-depth examination of the functional theory. It explains what boredom is according to the functional view; it shows how the functional theory can account (...) for the known characteristics of boredom; and it articulates the theory’s basic commitments, virtues, and limitations. Ultimately, by furthering our understanding of the functional theory of boredom, the essay contributes to a better theoretical grounding of boredom. (shrink)

Culture or Biology? The question can seem deep and important. Yet, I argue in this chapter, if you are enthralled by questions about our biological differences, then you are probably confused. My goal is to diagnose the confusion. In debates about the role of biology in the social world it is easy to ask the wrong questions, and it is easy to misinterpret the scientific research. We are intuitively attracted to what is called psychological essentialism, and therefore interpret what is (...) biological as what can be traced to “essences”. On this interpretation, it would be deep and important to know what about, say, the differences between the genders is biological: it would correspond to what is essential to being a man or being a woman, and be opposed to what is a mere accidental feature that some women or some men have. Yet, the psychological essentialist understanding of ‘biological differences’ is deeply mistaken about biology. It has the wrong conception of biological kinds, of biological heritability, and of how genes and hormones work. Those who argue for an important role of ‘biology’ in the explanation of human differences often see ‘the science’ on their side. But this is false – on the interpretation of ‘biological differences’ that is most intuitive and that makes the question appear to be most interesting. Defenders of ‘biology’ often have the science against them. What is often called ‘biology’ is a myth: a myth created by an intuitive tendency that grotesquely distorts real biological research. (shrink)

Based on a review of several “anomalies” in research using implicit measures, Machery (2021) dismisses the modal interpretation of participant responses on implicit measures and, by extension, the value of implicit measures. We argue that the reviewed findings are anomalies only for specific—influential but long-contested—accounts that treat responses on implicit measures as uncontaminated indicators of trait-like unconscious representations that coexist with functionally independent conscious representations. However, the reviewed findings are to-be-expected “normalities” when viewed from the perspective of long-standing alternative frameworks (...) that treat responses on implicit measures as the product of dynamic processes that operate on momentarily activated, consciously accessible information. Thus, although we agree with Machery that the modal view is empirically unsupported, we argue that implicit measures can make a valuable contribution to understanding the complexities of human behavior if they are used wisely in a way that acknowledges what they can and cannot do. (shrink)

On the basis of Descartes’s account of the passions of the soul, we argue that current interoception-based theories of emotions cannot account for the hallmark of a passion of the soul, i.e., that its effects are felt as being in the soul itself. We also pay attention to the epistemic functions of the passions and to Descartes’s category of emotions that are caused and occur in the soul alone. Certain passions of the soul and certain internal (or intellectual) emotions are (...) similar to what are today called ‘epistemic (or noetic) feelings’ and ‘epistemic emotions.’ Descartes’s work reflects another challenge for contemporary embodied cognition: how might epistemic affect be embodied? Since the signature of embodiment is increasingly understood as interoceptive, the challenge to interoceptive research is demonstrating the degree to which (epistemic) affect results from interoception. This challenge also implies that the locus of emotional experience is taken into account. (shrink)

This paper maintains, relying on empirical evidence from semantic dementia, that the descriptive information associate with concepts plays an important role in the performance of a variety of cognitive tasks, as it is suggested by Descriptivist Theories of Concepts (DTC). However, it also argues that it does not follow from this that such information determines the extension of concepts, as it is also suggested by DTC. The evidence from semantic dementia provides support to the thesis that the descript information is (...) part of the cognitive content of concepts and it is involved in different cognitive tasks. But, against DTC, that evidence does not provide support to the thesis that intentional content is derived from the cognitive content. If so, the argument of ignorance would take place. (shrink)

Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs to account for our understanding of others: the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual failure, but also engages us morally; the moral question of understanding is not limited to the extent to which we understand (...) a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in understanding people; and “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same, or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are never at peace in the exploration of morality. (shrink)

Some emotional representations seem to be unreliable. For instance, we are often afraid when there is no danger present. If emotions such as fear are so unreliable, what function do they have in our representational system? This is a problem for representationalist theories of emotion. I will argue that seemingly unreliable emotional representations are reliable after all. While many mental states strike an optimal balance between minimizing inaccurate representations and maximizing accurate representations, some emotional representations only aim at maximizing accuracy. (...) They detect important phenomena such as danger based on little evidence, which will lead to a lot of false alarms. When it matters, however, these emotional representations will detect danger and other important phenomena. Often, one is better scared than sorry. (shrink)

A brief critical notice of Dan J Stein's new book _Problems of Living: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Cognitive-Affective Science_.

Kurth wants us to understand and appreciate our anxiety more than we typically do. His concise and crisply written monograph makes a good case that we should. It deepens our understanding of what anxiety is, and of how it animates different facets of our mental and moral lives. The case he builds that, roughly, anxiety is one of the brain’s ways of affectively signaling and responding to uncertainty is clearly argued and meticulously organized. Kurth hits the targets he sets for (...) himself, and advances his agenda in a way that I found largely convincing. The result is a book that is a must-read for anyone working on anxiety and other moral emotions, and that will reward anyone who is curious about the nature and value of this increasingly, and perhaps alarmingly, prominent component of our minds. (shrink)

Building from the works of Jacques Derrida, this article explores health anxiety’s aporetic relationship with medicine through a deconstructive approach. I argue that attention to Derrida’s writings (and in particular, his readings of pharmakon and autoimmunity) may prove useful in explaining the cyclical character of health anxiety and its ambivalent response to medical reassurance. What’s more, I demonstrate how structuralist interpretations of health anxiety as a signifier without referent prove insufficient within a Derridean account. Such a reading emphasizes the need (...) for interdisciplinary medical humanities as well as critical reflections on the possible limitations of Western medical semiotics. (shrink)

When we look around the world, some things are inert and others are ‘alive’. What is it to ‘look alive’? An account of animacy perception is crucial, both for a proper understanding of visual experience, and for downstream questions about the epistemology of social cognition. I argue that empirical work on animacy supports the view that animacy is genuinely perceptual. We should construe perception of animacy as perception of agents and perception of behavior. My proposal explains how static and dynamic (...) animacy cues relate, and offers a plausible account of how animacy perception relates to social cognition more broadly. Animacy perception draws perceptual attention to objects that are apt to be well-understood folk psychologically, and in doing so enables us to marshal our folk psychological resources efficiently. (shrink)

Traditional models of skill learning posit that skilled action unfolds in an automatic manner and that control will prove deleterious to movement and performance proficiency. These perspectives assume that automated processes are characterised by low levels of control and vice versa. By contrast, a number of authors have recently put forward hybrid theories of skilled action which have sought to capture the close integration between fine-grained automatic motor routines and intentional states. Drawing heavily on the work of Bebko et al. (...) and Christensen et al., we argue that controlled and automated processes must operate in parallel if skilled performers are to address the wide range of challenges that they are faced with in training and competition. More specifically, we show how skilled performers use controlled processes to update and improve motor execution in training contexts and to stabilise performance under pressurised conditions. (shrink)

Skilled sportsmen or musicians—more generally, skilled agents—often fill us with awe with the way they perform their actions. One question we may ask ourselves is whether they intended to perform some awe-inspiring aspects of their actions. This question becomes all the more pressing as it often turns out that these agents were not conscious of some of those aspects at the time of performance. As I shall argue, there are reasons for suspecting lack of conscious access to an aspect of (...) one’s action to be incompatible with intending to perform that aspect of one’s action. Subsequently, though, I will also argue that, in some cases, the incompatibility is only prima facie, and can be dispelled by drawing the following distinction: that between aspects of one’s action that are merely temporarily not consciously accessed, versus aspects of one’s action that are permanently inaccessible to consciousness. I will thus remove an obstacle towards saying that skilled agents intended to perform certain aspects of their actions, despite lack of conscious access to those aspects at the time of performance. (shrink)

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of emotion and (...) show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires – they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists claim to have discovered a large number of cognitive biases, which have a tendency to mislead reasoners. Might cognitive scientists themselves be subject to the very biases they purport to discover? And how should this alter the way they evaluate their research as evidence for the existence of these biases? In this paper, we posit a new paradox, which bears a striking resemblance to some classical logical paradoxes. Suppose that research R appears to be good evidence for the (...) existence of bias B, but if B exists, then R would have been subject to B. Thus, it seems sensible for the researcher to reject R as good evidence for the existence of B. However, rejecting R for this reason admits the existence of B. We examine four putative cognitive biases and criticisms of them, each of which seem to be subject to self-reflexivity. In two cases, we argue, paradox is avoidable. In the remaining two, we cannot find a way to avoid the paradox, which poses a practical obstacle to scientific inquiry and results in an intriguing theoretical quandary. (shrink)

We endorse Cesario’s call for more research into the complexities of “real-world” decisions and the comparative power of different causes of group disparities. Unfortunately, these reasonable suggestions are overshadowed by a barrage of non sequiturs, misdirected criticisms of methodology, and unsubstantiated claims about the assumptions and inferences of social psychologists.

When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences, and at the same time, these psychometric instruments were considered a means to create a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics - due to its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research - has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop (...) a contrasting characterization of contemporary psychometrics as a value-laden discipline. We expose four such values: that individual differences are quantitative (rather than qualitative), that measurement should be objective in a specific sense, that test items should be fair, and that utility of a model is more important than its truth. Our goal is not to criticize psychometrics for employing these values, but rather to bring them into the open and to show that these values are not inevitable and are in need of systematic evaluation. (shrink)

Phillips argues that blindsight is due to response criterion artefacts under degraded conscious vision. His view provides alternative explanations for some studies, but may not work well when one considers several key findings in conjunction. Empirically, not all criterion effects are decidedly non-perceptual. Awareness is not completely abolished for some stimuli, in some patients. But in other cases, it was clearly impaired relative to the corresponding visual sensitivity. This relative dissociation is what makes blindsight so important and interesting.

In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. In this paper, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence, and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.

When subject to the choice-blindness effect, an agent gives reasons for making choice B, moments after making the alternative choice A. Choice blindness has been studied in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes. The pervasiveness and robustness of the effect is regarded as powerful evidence of self-ignorance. Here we compare two interpretations of choice blindness. On the choice error interpretation, when the agent gives reasons she is in fact wrong about what (...) her choice is. On the choice change interpretation, when the agent gives reasons she is right about what her choice is, but she does not realise that her choice has changed. In this paper, we spell out the implications of the two interpretations of the choice-blindness effect for self-ignorance claims and offer some reasons to prefer choice change to choice error. (shrink)

What is it like to perceive a feared object? According to a popular neo-Gibsonian theory in psychology, fear biases our perceptions of objects so as to encourage particular kinds of actions: when we are afraid, spiders may be perceived as physically closer than they are in order to promote fleeing. Firestone mounted severe criticisms against this view, arguing that these cases are better explained by non-perceptual biases that operate on accurate perceptions of the external environment. In this paper I will (...) argue that fear might indeed distort our perceptions of the world, but not in the way neo-Gibsonians suppose. In the view I favor, perceptual distortions occur as by-products of fearful attention, a special mode of attention that is part of an orchestrated defensive response that prepares the organism to deal effectively with a threat. To argue for this view I will rely on empirical evidence that fearful attention narrows down the focus of attention and favors processing of local rather than global features of stimuli, which may jointly explain why perceptual distortions might occur in fearful object seeing. This view has consequences not only for empirical investigations in fearful perceptual distortions, but also for an explanation of the intentionality of fear and the phenomenal integration of bodily and intentional elements in fear episodes. (shrink)

This special issue on what some regard as a crisis of replicability in cognitive science (i.e. the observation that a worryingly large proportion of experimental results across a number of areas cannot be reliably replicated) is informed by three recent developments. -/- First, philosophers of mind and cognitive science rely increasingly on empirical research, mainly in the psychological sciences, to back up their claims. This trend has been noticeable since the 1960s (see Knobe, 2015). This development has allowed philosophers to (...) draw on a wider range of relevant resources, but it also makes them vulnerable to relying on claims that may not survive further scrutiny. If we have reasons to believe that a large proportion of findings in the psychological sciences cannot be reliably replicated, this would be a problem for philosophers who use such findings in their work. Second, philosophers are increasingly designing and carrying out their own experiments to back up claims, or to test claims earlier made from the armchair, for example, on the perceived permissibility of diverting trolleys or on the nature of free will. This growing field of experimental philosophy has diversified the intellectual field in philosophy, but may also be vulnerable to issues of replicability that philosophers did not face before. -/- Third, the recent evidence of apparently widespread non-replicability in the social sciences (and other fields) has forced philosophers of science to grapple with long standing questions from their field from a new perspective. To what extent does replicability matter for theory construction? How do the notions of replicability and scientific progress interact? How can normative insights from philosophy of science be used in order to improve scientific practice? -/- It is with these three developments in mind—the increasing importance of empirically-informed philosophy, of experimental philosophy, and of philosophy of science around replicability—that this special issue has been conceived. (shrink)

Epistemic feelings like tip-of-the-tongue experiences, feelings of knowing, and feelings of confidence tell us when a memory can be recalled and when a judgment was correct. Thus, they appear to be a form of metacognition, but a curious one: they tell us about content we cannot access, and the information is supplied by a feeling. Evaluativism is the claim that epistemic feelings are components of a distinct, primitive metacognitive mechanism that operates on its own set of inputs. These inputs are (...) heuristics that correlate with the presence of mental content that can’t be accessed directly. I will argue that evaluativism is unmotivated, unsupported, and ill-conceived. I will critique the philosophical and empirical arguments for evaluativism and conclude that there is no reason to posit a distinct mechanism to explain epistemic feelings. I will conclude, however, that epistemic feelings may constitute a nonconceptual form of metacognition, which if true is a significant claim. (shrink)

Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links these depictions to (...) adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned, Children of the Damned, The Damned, and Lord of the Flies, will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’. (shrink)

Embodiment matters to perception and action. Beyond the triviality that, under normal circumstances, we need a body in order to perceive the world and act in it, our particular embodiment, right here, right now, both enables and constrains our perception of possibilities for action. In this chapter, we provide empirical support for the idea that the structural and morphological features of the body can narrow the set of our possible interactions with the environment by shaping the way we perceive the (...) possibilities for action provided. We argue that this narrowing holds true in the perception of what we call strongly embodied affordances, that is, relevant micro-affordances that have a genuinely demanding characteristic, as well as in the perception of actions performed by others. In particular, we show that perceptual contents are shaped by fine-grained morphological features of the body, such as specific hand-shapes, and that they change according to our possibility to act upon them with this body, in this situation, at this moment. We argue that these considerations provide insight into distinguishing a variety of experienced affordance relations that can aid us in better understanding the relevance of embodiment for perception and experience. (shrink)

Aging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the phenomenological method: time, embodiment, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and even the social norms that grow into the very notion of aging as such. In my article, I delineate a phenomenological analysis of aging and show how such an analysis connects with the debate concerning personal identity: I claim that aging is not merely a physical process, (...) but is far more significantly also a spiritual one as the process of aging consists in our awareness of and conscious relation to our aging. This spiritual process takes place on an individual and on a social level, whereas the latter is the more primordial layer of this experience. This complicates the question of personal identity since it will raise the question in two ways, namely who I am for myself and who I am for the others, and in a further step how the latter experience shapes the former. However, we can state that aging is neither only physical nor only spiritual. It concerns my bodily processes as it concerns the complex reflexive structure that relates my former self with my present and even future self. (shrink)