In this paper, I discuss what I call the oversized experiences that anorexic patients suffer from. It has been known for some time that anorexic patients mentally picture their bodies as larger than reality. While this constitutes one kind of oversized experience, I claim there is another, less explored kind. This is an experience of the body as oversized in relation to the affordances of its environment. I discuss recent evidence suggesting anorexic patients exhibit distorted affordance perception. I then discuss (...) how this distorted affordance perception also constitutes an oversized experience of the body. Along with sociocultural influences, I claim oversized experiences ground negative propositional attitudes regarding body size. (shrink)

In their article, Pitron and de Vignemont (2017) provide an insightful and well overdue discussion of the relationship between long-term body representation models and Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Here, I supplement their discussion with a number of observations. First, I present a cautionary note regarding the interpretation of experiential changes in body size as reflective of changes in the content of body representations. Second, I show how their evidence contradicts an alternative model of body representation arising from research into anorexia (...) nervosa—the “LTB” hypothesis. Finally, I highlight a significant issue with their proposed co-construction model. -/- . (shrink)

Sufferers of eating disorders often hold false beliefs about their own body size. Such beliefs appear to violate norms of rationality, being neither grounded by nor responsive to appropriate forms of evidence. I defend the rationality of these beliefs. I argue that they are in fact supported by appropriate evidence, emanating from proprioceptive misperception of bodily boundaries. This argument has far‐reaching implications for the explanation and treatment of eating disorders, as well as debates over the relationship between rationality and human (...) psychology. (shrink)

Levy (2021 Levy, N. (2021). Bad beliefs: Why they happen to good people. Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) argues that bad beliefs predominately stem from automatic (albeit rational) updating in response to testimonial evidence. To counteract such beliefs, then, we should focus on ridding our epistemic environments of misleading testimony. This paper responds as follows. First, I argue that the suite of automatic processes related to bad beliefs extends well beyond the deference-based processes that Levy identifies. Second, I push back (...) against Levy’s claim that bad beliefs stem from wholly rational processes, suggesting that, in many cases, such processes are better characterized as arational. Finally, I note that Levy is too quick to dismiss the role that individuals can play in cleaning up their own epistemic environments, and I suggest one route through which this is possible. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss empirical evidence regarding anorexic patients’ distorted body representations. I fit this evidence into a broader framework for understanding how the spatial content of the body is tracked and represented. This framework is motivated by O’Shaughnessy’s (1980) long-term body image hypothesis. This hypothesis posits a representation that tracks changes in the spatial content of the body and supplies this content to other body representations. I argue that a similar kind of body representation might exist and, in (...) the case of anorexia, be distorted. Finally, I suggest that this body representation might become distorted through influence by affect. -/- . (shrink)

Many intelligent, capable, and successful individuals believe that their success is due to luck and fear that they will someday be exposed as imposters. A puzzling feature of this phenomenon, commonly referred to as imposter syndrome, is that these same individuals treat evidence in ways that maintain their false beliefs and debilitating fears: they ignore and misattribute evidence of their own abilities, while readily accepting evidence in favour of their inadequacy. I propose a novel account of imposter syndrome as an (...) instance of self-deception, whereby biased evidence treatment is driven by the motivational benefit of negative self-appraisal. This account illuminates a number of interconnected philosophical and scientific puzzles related to the explanation, definition, and value of imposter syndrome. (shrink)

Many who suffer from eating disorders claim that they see themselves as “fat”. Despite decades of research into the phenomenon, behavioural evidence has failed to confirm that eating disorders involve visual misperception of own-body size. I illustrate the importance of this phenomenon for our understanding of perceptual processing, outline the challenges involved in experimentally confirming it, and provide solutions to those challenges.

Body dissatisfaction has long been considered an integral component of and driving force behind anorexia nervosa. In this paper, I characterise body dissatisfaction in terms of problematic beliefs about body size and the value of thinness. I suggest two methods for understanding these beliefs. Regarding body size beliefs, I suggest focusing on certain forms of misleading phenomenal evidence that sufferers of anorexia nervosa are exposed to. Regarding beliefs about the value of thinness, I suggest focusing on the benefits of such (...) beliefs. (shrink)

Empiricist models explain delusional beliefs by identifying the abnormal experiences which ground them. Recently, this strategy has been adopted to explain the false body size beliefs of anorexia nervosa patients. As such, a number of abnormal experiences of body size which patients suffer from have been identified. These oversized experiences convey false information regarding the patients’ own bodies, indicating that they are larger than reality. However, in addition to these oversized experiences, patients are also exposed to significant evidence suggesting their (...) bodies are in fact thin. This situation poses a conundrum: why do patients appear strongly influenced by the former kinds of evidence while the latter has little effect? To solve this conundrum, I suggest a two-factor account. First, I discuss research on the biases patients exhibit in how they gather, attend to and interpret evidence related to their own body size. Such biases in evidence treatment, I suggest, cause oversized experiences to be sought out, attended to and accepted, while veridical body size experiences are ignored or explained away. These biases constitute the second factor for this empiricist model, accounting for the unwarranted conviction with which these beliefs are held. Finally, in line with recent research into self-deception, I propose that, paradoxically, these biases in evidence treatment arise from patients’ own desires. (shrink)

The distinction between body image and body schema has been incredibly influential in cognitive neuroscience. Recently, researchers have begun to speculate about the relationship between these representations (Gadsby, 2017, 2018; Pitron & de Vignemont, 2017; Pitron et al., 2018). Within this emerging literature, Pitron et al. (2018) proposed that the long-term body image and long-term body schema co-construct one another, through a process of reciprocal interaction. In proposing this model, they make two assumptions: that the long-term body image incorporates (...) the spatial characteristics of tools, and that it is distorted in the case of Alice in wonderland syndrome. Here, I challenge these assumptions, with a closer examination of what the term “long-term body image” refers to. In doing so, I draw out some important taxonomic principles for research into body representation. -/- . (shrink)

We evaluate a growing trend towards anti-representationalism in cognitive science in the context of recent research into the development and maintenance of anorexia nervosa in cognitive neuropsychiatry. We argue two things: first, that this research relies on an explanatorily robust concept of representation—the concept of a long-term body schema; second, that this body representation underlies our most basic environmental interactions and affordance perception—the psychological phenomena supposed to be most hospitable to a non-representationalist treatment.

We introduce the predictive processing account of body representation, according to which body representation emerges via a domain-general scheme of (long-term) prediction error minimisation. We contrast this account against one where body representation is underpinned by domain-specific systems, whose exclusive function is to track the body. We illustrate how the predictive processing account offers considerable advantages in explaining various empirical findings, and we draw out some implications for body representation research.

I introduce and discuss an underappreciated form of motivated cognition: motivational pessimism, which involves the biasing of beliefs for the sake of self-motivation. I illustrate how motivational pessimism avoids explanatory issues that plague other (putative) forms of motivated cognition and discuss distinctions within the category, related to awareness, aetiology, and proximal goals.

Anorexia nervosa involves seemingly irrational beliefs about body size and the value of thinness. Historically, researchers and clinicians have avoided referring to such beliefs as delusions, instead opting for the label ‘overvalued ideas’. I discuss the relationship between the beliefs associated with anorexia nervosa and the distinction between delusions and overvalued ideas, as it is conceived in both European and American psychiatric traditions. In doing so, I question the benefit of applying the concepts of delusion and overvalued idea to anorexia (...) nervosa and raise some issues with contemporary use of the Brown Assessment of Beliefs scale for assessing the level of delusionality associated with the disorder. (shrink)

A recent critique of hierarchical Bayesian models of delusion argues that, contrary to a key assumption of these models, belief formation in the healthy (i.e., neurotypical) mind is manifestly non-Bayesian. Here we provide a deeper examination of the empirical evidence underlying this critique. We argue that this evidence does not convincingly refute the assumption that belief formation in the neurotypical mind approximates Bayesian inference. Our argument rests on two key points. First, evidence that purports to reveal the most damning violation (...) of Bayesian updating in human belief formation is counterweighted by substantial evidence that indicates such violations are the rare exception—not a common occurrence. Second, the remaining evidence does not demonstrate convincing violations of Bayesian inference in human belief updating; primarily because this evidence derives from study designs that produce results that are not obviously inconsistent with Bayesian principles. (shrink)

Anorexia nervosa patients exhibit distorted body-representations. Specifically, they represent their bodies as larger than reality. Given that this distortion likely exacerbates the condition, there is an obligation to further understand and, if possible, rectify it. In pursuit of this, experimental paradigms are needed which manipulate the spatial content of these representations. In this essay, I discuss how virtual reality technology that implements full-body variants of the rubber-hand illusion may prove useful in this regard, and I discuss some issues related to (...) the clinical application of this method. -/- . (shrink)

There are two ways in which we are aware of our bodies: reflectively, when we attend to them, and pre-reflectively, a kind of marginal awareness that pervades regular experience. However, there is an inherent issue with studying bodily awareness of the pre-reflective kind: given that it is, by definition, non-observational, how can we observe it? Kuhle claims to have found a way around this problem—we can study it indirectly by investigating an aspect of reflective bodily awareness: the sense of bodily (...) ownership. Unfortunately, I argue, there is little reason to believe a relationship between pre-reflective bodily awareness and the sense of bodily ownership exists. Until more work is done, pre-reflective bodily awareness remains beyond our empirical grasp. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that delusions be conceived of as symptoms on the harmful dysfunction account of disorder: delusions sometimes arise from dysfunction, but can also arise through normal cognition. Much attention has thus been payed to the question of how we can determine whether a delusion arises from dysfunction as opposed to normal cognition. In this paper, we consider another question, one that remains under-explored: which delusions warrant treatment? On the harmful dysfunction account, this question dissociates from the (...) question about dysfunction—there are a broad range of “treatable conditions” beyond mere harmful dysfunctions. As such, many conditions that arise from normal cognition are also eligible for medical intervention. We argue that some delusions that arise from normal cognition may well fall under the banner of treatable conditions. We examine the practical and ethical questions surrounding such treatment, including the issue of coercive and deceptive treatment options. (shrink)

I address an apparent conflict between Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causation and acting/doing [agere]. Spinoza apparently holds that an immanent cause undergoes [patitur] whatever it does. Yet according to his stated definition of acting and undergoing in the Ethics, this is impossible; to act is to be an adequate cause, while to undergo is to be merely a partial cause. Spinoza also seems committed to God’s being the adequate cause of all things, and, in a well-known passage, appears to deny (...) categorically that God is capable of undergoing. How then can God also be the immanent cause of all things, as Spinoza claims? On the basis of a close reading of the passage in question, I argue that Spinoza actually distinguishes between two senses of undergoing. An immanent cause undergoes not by being a partial cause but rather by being the metaphysical subject of its effect. While this sense of undergoing has its roots in scholasticism, Spinoza’s willingness to attribute such a capacity to undergo to God is idiosyncratic and reveals important ways in which his understanding of essence, perfection, and causation differs from the scholastic model. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relevance of the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze to the works of Allan Kaprow and Adrian Piper. It argues that Kaprow had made a shift akin to Deleuze's move from expressionism to constructivism and addresses the politics of Kaprow's practice in relation to Deleuze's concept of counter-actualisation. It describes the alternative of Piper's practice as one that creates performance events capable of catalysing new social territories in and as life.

According to a natural view of instrumental normativity, if you ought to do φ, and doing ψ is a necessary means for you to do φ, then you ought to do ψ. In “Instrumental Normativity: In Defense of the Transmission Principle,” Benjamin Kiesewetter defends this principle against certain actualist-inspired counterexamples. In this article I argue that Kiesewetter’s defense of the transmission principle fails. His arguments rely on certain principles—Joint Satisfiability and Reason Transmission—which we should not accept in the unqualified forms (...) needed to establish his conclusion. (shrink)

This paper outlines and defends a notion of ‘tragic-remorse’. This moral emotion properly accompanies those actions that involve unavoidable moral wrongdoing in general and dirty hands scenarios in particular. Tragic-remorse differs both phenomenologically and conceptually from regret, agent-regret and remorse. By recognising the existence of tragic-remorse, we are better able to account for our complex moral reality which at times makes it necessary for good persons to act in ways that although justified leave the agent with a moral stain and (...) a particular emotional response. (shrink)

Science and the End of Ethics examines some of the most important positive and negative implications that science has for ethics. Addressing the negative implications first, author Stephen Morris discusses how contemporary science provides significant challenges to moral realism. One threat against moral realism comes from evolutionary theory, which suggests that our moral beliefs are unconnected to any facts that would make them true. Ironically, many of the same areas of science (e.g. evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology) that present difficulties (...) for moral realism point to a new ethical approach that focuses on achieving some of the key practical goals shared by ethicists. Chief among these is how to increase amicable behavior among people. (shrink)

This book represents a major new statement on the issue of property rights. It argues for the justification of some rights of private property while showing why unequal distributions of private property are indefensible. Three features of the book are especially salient: it offers a challenging new pluralist theory of justification; the argument integrates perceptive analyses of the great classical theorists Aristotle, Locke, Hegel and Marx with a discussion of contemporary philosophers such as Nozick and Rawls; and the author moves (...) with assurance among philosophy, law and economics to present a very broad, interdisciplinary study. (shrink)

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains, which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables (...) under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our understanding of it. Then it addresses moral and legal responsibility generally, and specific doctrines. Executive function is seldom found to be the most perspicuous approach to any of the general or specific moral and legal questions. (shrink)

Often the first issue addressed by a theory of justified belief is the aim, goal, purpose, or objective of epistemic justification. What, in short, is the point of epistemic justification? Or, to put it a bit differently, why value justification: why is it worth having or pursuing? Prominent epistemologists, including both externalists and internalists, have proposed the following answer: the ultimate aim of epistemic justification is to maximize true belief and minimize false belief. This answer specifies what I’ll call the (...) “nominal aim,” an aim that gets endorsed by a number of well-known accounts of justification. William Alston, an externalist with certain internalist scruples, is among the most explicit champions of the nominal aim. (shrink)

How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder (...) and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them. (shrink)

This chapter provide an introductory portrait of global media ethics as an evolving discipline in broad strokes—its motivating questions, its distinct concerns and methods, how the discipline is related to other forms of ethics, and why we need a global media ethics. Since our global world is linked by many forms of media, the chapter argues that we need an accompanying global media ethics that challenges the use of media to promote racism, xenophobia, extreme nationalism, and the denial of human (...) rights. The chapter explores the types of research and writing that comprise global media ethics and concludes with an outline of how a global media ethics can be realized in practice. (shrink)

I challenge the appropriateness of the discourse of managerial control of employees in four ways. First, I question arguments which suggest that employees are always subject to organizational control. Second, I contrast workplace conditions which support employee self-determination and autonomy with conditions which permit control of employees. Third, I provide an ethical assessment of the normative use of control talk and fourth, I suggest an alternative discourse, a discourse of accountability which appropriately highlights the reciprocity necessary to build ethical organizations.

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of (...) influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)

Actor Paul Giamatti and philosopher Stephen Asma collaborate to describe the imagination (phantasia) as a form of embodied cognition. They explore the actor's ability to replicate embodied affective states and communicate those to audiences that are capable of catching (via emotional contagion) those affective states. The role of social affordances in imaginative work is explored. Finally, the role of imagination in political conspiracy thinking is considered.

After summarizing the content of Philip Rossi’s book, The Ethical Commonwealth in History: Peace-Making as the Moral Vocation of Humanity, I pose two main questions. First, does politics or religion play a more important role in Kant’s philosophy when it comes to the task of ushering humanity to the realization of its ultimate vocation, the establishment of a lasting peace for human society? I argue that Kant portrays politics as a means to a religious end, whereas Rossi tends to reverse (...) their Kantian order of priority. Second, what concrete details does Kant give in defense of his theory that establishing an ethical community is a universal duty of humankind? As Rossi tends to overlook Kant’s details, I provide an overview. Kant argues that the ethical community can only be established in the form of a church and that the rational content constituting the core of the true church consists of four requirements: universality, integrity, freedom, and unchangeableness. After challenging Rossi’s claim that Kantian hope is necessarily social, I conclude with two minor questions: Is Kant’s theory of human nature dualist or monist? and Must the church create a political form of peace that applies to all human beings? (shrink)

We commonly face circumstances in which the cumulative negative effects of repeatedly acting in a certain way over time will be significant, although the negative effects of any one such act, taken on its own, are insubstantial. Warren Quinn's puzzle of the self-torturer presents an especially clear example of this type of predicament. This paper considers three different approaches to understanding the rational response to such situations. The first focuses on the conditions under which it is rational to revise one's (...) prior intentions. The second raises the possibility of a fundamental disconnect between the rational assessment of an extended pattern of choices and the assessment of the individual choices that make up that pattern. I show that neither adequately addresses the underlying issues. I propose a third approach, according to which the rational assessment of the “self-torturer's” choices is guided, not by any plan or intention the he has actually adopted, but by the plan or plans it would have been reasonable for him to adopt from the outset. The larger significance of this conclusion is brought out through the identification of conditions under which one's past choices can non-derivatively constrain the rational response to one's present circumstances. (shrink)

Commentators who lament that Kant offers no concrete guidelines for how to set up an ethical community typically neglect Kant’s claim in Religion that the ethical state of nature can transform into an ethical community only by becoming a people of God—i.e., a religious community, or “church.” Kant’s argument culminates by positing four categorial precepts for church organization. The book’s next four sections can be read as elaborating further on each precept, respectively. Kant repeatedly warns against using religious norms to (...) control people. Accordingly, he explicitly forbids the true church from adopting any standard form of political governance; it must aim to be radically non-political. Nevertheless, churches organized according to Kant’s non-coercive theocratic model contribute something essential to the ultimate political goal of achieving perpetual peace and an end to war: by approaching the ultimate ethical goal, the true church offers an antidote to normative fragmentation. (shrink)

This essay explores various ways in which bibliographies have exhibited “sociality.” Bibliographies are both products of the social contexts that have created them and engines of social interaction in scholarly communities. By tracing the history of the Isis Bibliography, the longest-running and most comprehensive bibliography in its field, this essay explains how different Isis classification systems have been tied to major twentieth-century cataloging efforts. By looking at classification, the essay also attends to the ways in which aspects of the Isis (...) Bibliography in different decades have reflected social mores of their period. Finally, it demonstrates how critical the Isis Bibliography was in the formation of the discipline of history of science and goes on to discuss how that disciplinary connection is evolving in the twenty-first century. By thinking of the bibliography as a network of scholars, not just scholarly works, the essay asks us to reflect on the nature and purpose of bibliography in the digital age. (shrink)