Many philosophers accept an ‘Authority Thesis’ according to which self-ascriptions of one’s current mental states ordinarily are or ought to be met with a distinctive presumption of truth. Recently, however, Wolfgang Barz (2018) has argued that there is no adequately specified Authority Thesis. This, he argues, is because available specifications are either (1) philosophically puzzling but implausible, or (2) plausible but philosophically unpuzzling. I argue that there are several plausible and philosophically puzzling specifications of the Authority Thesis.

Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a novel agency-based account (...) of deference. Drawing on recent work on self-knowledge, I argue that a person normally has a distinctive type of cognitive agency; specifically she is able to constitute her psychological attitudes by making judgments about what they ought to be. I then argue that a speaker expresses this agentive authority when she self-ascribes a psychological attitude and this is what justifies deferentially trusting what she says. Because the notion of expression plays a central role in this account, I contrast it with recent neo-expressivist theories. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I (...) present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses. (shrink)

The uncanny valley—the unnerving nature of humanlike robots—is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience, rather than agency. Experiment 1 examined whether a machine’s humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine capable (...) of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience—but not agency—is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines. (shrink)

Although people own myriad objects, land, and even ideas, it is currently illegal to own other humans. This reluctance to view people as property raises interesting questions about our conceptions of people and about our conceptions of ownership. We suggest that one factor contributing to this reluctance is that humans are normally considered to be autonomous, and autonomy is incompatible with being owned by someone else. To investigate whether autonomy impacts judgments of ownership, participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk read (...) vignettes where a person paid for an entity or created it. Participants were less likely to judge that the entity was owned when it was described as autonomous compared with when it was described as non-autonomous, and this pattern held regardless of whether the entity was a human or an alien, a robot, or a human-like biological creation. The effect of autonomy was specific to judgments of whether entities were owned, and it did not influence judgments of the moral acceptability of paying for and keeping entities. These experiments also found that judgments of ownership were separately impacted by ontological type, with participants less likely to judge that humans are owned compared with other kinds of entities. A fourth experiment tested a further prediction of the autonomy account, and showed that participants are more likely to view a person as owned if he willingly sells himself. Together these findings show that attributions of autonomy constrain judgments of what can be owned. 2017 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Previous research suggests that how people conceive of minds depends on the culture in which they live, both in determining how they interact with other human minds and how they infer the unseen minds of gods. We use exploratory factor analysis to compare how people from different societies with distinct models of human minds and different religious traditions perceive the minds of humans and gods. In two North American samples (American adults, N = 186; Canadian students, N = 202), we (...) replicated a previously found two‐factor agency/experience structure for both human and divine minds, but in Fijian samples (Indigenous iTaukei Fijians, N = 77; Fijians of Indian descent, N = 214; total N = 679) we found a three‐factor structure, with the additional containing items related to social relationships. Further, Fijians’ responses revealed a different three‐factor structure for human minds and gods’ minds. We used these factors as dimensions in the conception of minds to predict (a) expectations about human and divine tendencies towards punishment and reward; and (b) conception of gods as more embodied (an extension of experience) or more able to know people's thoughts (an extension of agency). We found variation in how these factors predict conceptions of agents across groups, indicating further theory is needed to explain how culturally generated concepts of mind lead to other sorts of social inferences. We conclude that mind perception is shaped by culturally defined social expectations and recommend further work in different cultural contexts to examine the interplay between culture and social cognition. (shrink)

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state. The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person, or that person’s continuation as (...) a disembodied being. The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death the existential concept of death, and the concept of social death. (shrink)

Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, genetics, and evolution. The authors propose that modularity, cleanly defined, provides a useful framework for directing (...) research and resolving debates about individual cognitive systems and the nature of human evolved cognition. Modularity is a fundamental property of living things at every level of organization; it might prove indispensable for understanding the structure of the mind as well. (shrink)

We evaluate the role of embodiment in ordinary mental state ascriptions. Presented are five experiments on phenomenal state ascriptions to disembodied entities such as ghosts and spirits. Results suggest that biological embodiment is not a central principle of folk psychology guiding ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness. By contrast, results continue to support the important role of functional considerations in theory of mind judgments.

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub-disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit (...) responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human-like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; a reflection of early testimony; and/or an evolutionary byproduct. (shrink)

We argue that the causal account offered by analytic functionalism provides the best account of the folk psychological theory of mind, and that people ordinarily define mental states relative to the causal roles these states occupy in relation to environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states. We present new empirical evidence, as well as review several key studies on mental state ascription to diverse types of entities such as robots, cyborgs, corporations and God, and explain how this evidence supports (...) a functional account. We also respond to two challenges to this view based on the embodiment hypothesis, or the claim that physical realizers matter over and above functional role, and qualia. In both cases we conclude that research to date best supports a functional account of ordinary mental state concepts. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that adventurous approaches to physical activity can contribute more to well-being than approaches that have been shaped by fitness ideology. To defend this claim, I draw on work in philosophy and psychology concerning internal goods and intrinsic motivation, respectively. This work shows that motivating ourselves intrinsically and cultivating the internal goods of physical activity can contribute significantly to well-being. Unfortunately, the discourse and images associated with fitness culture tend to undermine intrinsic motivation and the cultivation (...) of internal goods. Consequently, approaches to physical activity shaped by fitness ideology often fail to support well-being. In contrast, I argue that an adventurous approach to physical activity better fosters intrinsic motivation and the pursuit of internal goods. To show this, I consider three examples of internal goods strongly associated with adventure – character development, enlivening kinesthetic and psychological e... (shrink)

The principle of respect for autonomy in clinical ethics is frequently linked to bioethics’ neglect of community-level ethical considerations. I argue that the latter is not an inevitable consequence of the former; rather, that neglect results from a common interpretation of respect for autonomy in solely synchronic and individual terms. A relational understanding of autonomy reveals the way in which respect inescapably involves diachronic and social dimensions. When these are acknowledged, the association between respect for autonomy and liberal individualism is (...) weakened. Such respect has more in common with communitarian approaches, and it need not conflict with the incorporation of collective-level values into ethical deliberation. (shrink)

Mind attribution may be divided into the subcategories of attribution of agency, associated with moral agency, and attribution of experience and emotion, associated with moral concern and moral patiency (Gray et al. Science 315(5812):619, 2007; Gray et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108(2):477–479, 2011b; Robbins and Jack Philosophical Studies 127(1):59–85, 2006). In this paper I attend to social context and the different psychological needs influencing the different types of mind attribution. A (...) need for social connection drives the attribution of experiences and emotions. The individual’s capacity to regulate emotional reactions is crucial for empathic concern. I further relate differences of mind attribution, attention, and emotional processing, to two different modes of functioning: In an interactive state of mind (comparable to the “second-person perspective” described by Schilbach et al. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press), social and emotional cues are attended to; In a detached task-oriented state of mind it may be beneficial to predict the behaviors of others but emotional information may not be attended to. The complexity and plasticity of mind attribution, including the possibility to train attentional mechanisms and regulation of emotions, is promising for the field of moral enhancement. (shrink)

How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on organizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organizational groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people are really perceiving minds in organizational groups at all. Our current paper and its data weigh in on these debates and suggest that organizations can indeed be ascribed experiential minds. We present a “member and goals” framework for systematically understanding the mind perception of organization. This framework suggests that people can (...) perceive the organizational mind through its elemental building blocks: members (people who form the organization) and goals (its aims). Four studies reveal that people ascribe agency and experience to organizations based on whether the members of organizations and the goals of the organization are characterized by agency or experience. Study 1 finds that past work on mind perception often examines for‐profit corporations, which consist of agentic members (corporate professionals) and agentic goals (market competition). Studies 2 and 3 reveal that when an organization with members and goals high (vs. low) in experience, people imbue its mind with perceived experience—equal to that of a person—and that even emotions low in warmth (i.e., anger) can imbue an organization with such perceptions. Study 4 shows the moral consequences of emphasizing experience: after organizational wrongdoing, experiential organizations are seen to deliver more sincere apologies and are more forgiven. (shrink)

Theoretical debates around the concept of self-deception revolve around identifying the conditions for a behavior to qualify as self-deception. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that various candidate features—such as intent, belief change, and motive—are treated as sufficient, but non-necessary, conditions according to the lay concept of self-deception. This led us to ask whether there are multiple lay concepts, such that different participants endorse competing theories (the disagreement view), or whether individual participants assign partial weight to various features and consequently waver (...) in cases of middling similarity (the conflict view). In Experiment 3, by-participant regression models uncovered that most participants additively consider multiple characteristics of the prototype of self-deception, while only a minority of participants treat a characteristic (or a combination thereof) as necessary and sufficient. In sum, by disambiguating interpersonal disagreement and intrapersonal conflict in a within-subjects design, the present experiments indicate that the lay concept may primarily exhibit a prototype structure. In closing, we suggest that future research deploying this method may help to explain why experimental research on philosophical concepts often engenders partial support for competing theories. (shrink)

Clark and Fischer's three levels of depiction of social robots can be conceptualized as cognitive schemas. When interacting with social robots, humans shift between schemas similarly to how they shift between identity category schemas when interacting with other humans. Perception of mind, context cues, and individual differences underlie perceptions of which level of depiction is most situationally relevant.

The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the imposition of harm by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest that decision-makers can actually avoid punishment more easily by delegating to machines than by delegating (...) to other people. Our results imply that the availability of artificial agents could provide stronger incentives for decision-makers to delegate sensitive decisions. (shrink)

This study investigated women’s lived experience of becoming less obsessed with their bodily appearance. Written narrative accounts were collected from seven women co-participants and a phenomenological analysis of these descriptive protocols was then performed in order to reveal the prereflective structure of the focal phenomenon, seven essential constituents of which emerged. A major goal of this research was to contribute to the undernourished area of phenomenological research regarding the experience of body image.

Recent criticism of the role of respect for autonomy in bioethics has focused on that principle's status as ‘dogma’ or ‘ideology’. I suggest that lying beneath many applications of respect for autonomy in medical ethics are some influential dogmas — propositions accepted, not as explicit premises or as a consequence of reasoned argument, but simply because moral problems are so frequently framed in such terms. Furthermore, I will argue that rejecting these dogmas is vital to secure and protect an autonomy (...) worthy of respect. The concept of autonomy that is widely applied in clinical ethics emphasises decision-making competence, at the expense of considering the authenticity of those decisions. Respect for such autonomy is interpreted in largely synchronic and individual terms — concerned with the isolated decisions of individual agents — and thus neglects the diachronic and social dimensions of many moral dilemmas arising in the health care context. I will examine how these unwritten rules lead to an impoverished understanding of respect and a systematic neglect in bioethics of certain kinds of ethical consideration, and draw on insights from feminist and communitarian work on autonomy to sketch an alternative approach to understanding respect, modelled on the norms of respectful conversation — a respect that is firstly concerned with engaging with the another as a potential giver and bearer or reasons, and working with them to promote both individual and social flourishing. (shrink)