Monothematic delusions are delusions whose contents pertain to a single subject matter. Examples include Capgras delusion, the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor, and Cotard delusion, the delusion that one is dead or does not exist. Two-factor accounts of such delusions hold that they are the result of both an experiential deficit, for instance flattened affect, coupled with an aberrant cognitive response to that deficit. In this paper we develop a new expressivist two-factor account of (...) delusion. In contrast to existing endorsement and explanationist accounts, which treat delusions as either explanations or endorsements of the contents of these disordered experiences, we hold that delusional beliefs have an expressive function: they characterize, in impressionistic terms, what the subject’s experience is like for them. We show how our account improves upon existing two-factor views in explaining the central features of monothematic delusions, in particular the way in which delusional subjects fall short of the ideal of rationality. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology: it involves “mentally reliving” a past event. It has been suggested that characterising episodic memory in terms of this phenomenology makes it impossible to test for in animals, because “purely phenomenological features” cannot be detected in animal behaviour. Against this, I argue that episodic memory's phenomenological features are impure, having both subjective and objective aspects, and so can be behaviourally detected. Insisting on a phenomenological characterisation of episodic memory consequently does nothing to damage the (...) prospects for detecting it in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Since ancient times, legal systems have held owners responsible for harm caused by their property. Across 4 experiments, we show that children aged 3–7 also hold owners responsible for such harm. Older children judge that owners should repair harm caused by property, and younger children may do this as well. Younger and older children judge that owners should apologize for harm, even when children do not believe the owners allowed the harm to occur. Children are also as likely to hold (...) owners responsible for harm caused by property as for harm caused by the owners themselves. The present findings contribute to psychological accounts of ownership by showing that ownership not only confers rights to control property, but also responsibility for harm caused by property. The findings also contribute to our understanding of the attribution of responsibility, and challenge accounts claiming that directly causing harm, or allowing it to happen, is a prerequisite for responsibility. The findings provide support for an account claiming that property is an extension of its owner, and likewise reveal that responsibility for harm caused by property is an early developing aspect of the psychology of ownership. 2018 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The brutalities of the past century have taken place in the milieu of Enlightenment values. At present, even the ideals of human rights have been used to (at the very least) tolerate and (and at its worst) justify barbaric acts, such as torture. This article interrogates the diverse ways British, American, and Australian individuals engaged in extremes of violence during three major conflicts of the 20th century. Like servicemen and servicewomen today, these combatants struggled to find a language capable of (...) making sense of their violent deeds. Constraining their excesses of violence proved a formidable task. In particular, I examine the ways in which sexual violence was normalized. Finally, on returning home after the war, these individuals and civilian society more broadly struggled with the problem of ‘remembering’ wartime violence in the post-war world. The act of ‘framing’ extremes of violence was integral to the process of enabling perpetrators of violence to assimilate his or her acts into a peacetime self. (shrink)

Was wir nicht bemerken können, das können wir auch nicht wahrnehmen: Diese im Rahmen der gegenwärtigen analytischen Philosophie des Geistes weitverbreitete Ansicht wurde neulich von M. Tye und A. Noë verteidigt. Wir werden uns hier mit einigen empirischen Beispielen auseinandersetzen, die u.E. mit dieser Idee kaum in Einklang zu bringen sind und stattdessen den Gedanken nahelegen, dass die Grenzen des Wahrnehmbaren über die Grenzen sowohl des primär Bemerkbaren als auch des sekundär Bemerkbaren hinausgehen. Auf diesem Weg gelangen wir dann zur (...) Verwerfung von Arvidsons Hypothese der Identität zwischen Bewusstseinsfeld und Feld der (im erweiterten Sinne gefassten) Aufmerksamkeit gelangen. (shrink)

This is a response to Jerry Fodor’s article, Fodor, J. (1980). "Methodological solipsism as a research strategy in cognitive psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 63-109.

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on (...) the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

With some help from the commentators, a few adjustments to the characterizations of A-consciousness and P-consciousness can avoid some trivial cases of one without the other. But it still seems that the case for the existence of P without A is stronger than that for A without P. If indeed there can be P without A, but not A without P, this would be a remarkable result that would need explanation.

To contribute to the organizational turn in research on participatory democracy, this paper examines the effects of organizational hierarchy on individual thinking. Power corrupts, but neither political scientists nor psychologists can really tell us how. To identify mechanisms by which it does so, the paper introduces recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology, here to suspicious political theorists. The study of cognition shows that we actively make meaning, and that we do so with a discernable neurological apparatus. The paper (...) presents hierarchy as a social construct that 'fits' this apparatus in such a way as to assist the capture of meaning by the interests of power. This process of capture takes place beneath individual awareness. For this reason, the concern here amounts to ideology critique: specifically, using cognitive psychology to reveal the ideological propagation of hierarchy. The fact that hierarchy has hidden cognitive costs has important implications for the prospects of a more participatory democracy. Any democratization of organizational life is seen to turn on the capacity of participants to selectively use and manage hierarchy and to minimize its cognitive costs. This entails, among other things, a recovery of our own thinking from the knowledge processing requirements of power saturated hierarchic organizations. In its examination of the personal effects of power, the paper seeks to reveal psychological mechanisms by which power corrupts, and by which, inadvertently, we come to serve the interests of power in the very way we think. (shrink)

In this third installment of his series on key, underappreciated ideas in Ayn Rand's epistemology, the author discusses the nature of differentiation and integration as the functional essence of consciousness and applies that insight to various cognitive and noncognitive processes of awareness, with a special emphasis on logic and illogic. He offers an extended analysis of the fallacies of “Frozen Abstraction” and “False Alternative,” as well as critiques of a long-standing Objectivist conflation of falsity and contradiction and a relatively more (...) recent Objectivist error, the fallacy of “genuine awareness.”. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to stimulate discussion of the framework by providing a primer on its key claims and a clear statement of its main empirical (...) predictions. (shrink)

Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...) I argue that depersonalized patients indeed have an impaired basic self-awareness, and that their study allows us both to favor one specific theory of basic self-awareness and to understand what is wrong with its rivals. According to the favored theory, which I call Cartesian, we are basically self-aware in virtue of being acquainted with ourselves through introspection. (shrink)

Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...) I argue that depersonalized patients indeed have an impaired basic self-awareness, and that their study allows us both to favor one specific theory of basic self-awareness and to understand what is wrong with its rivals. According to the favored theory, which I call Cartesian, we are basically self-aware in virtue of being acquainted with ourselves through introspection. (shrink)

Visual, somatosensory, and perspectival cues normally provide congruent information about where the self is experienced. Separating those cues by virtual reality techniques, recent studies found that self-location was systematically biased to where a visual–tactile event was seen. Here we developed a novel, repeatable and implicit measure of self-location to compare and extend previous protocols. We investigated illusory self-location and associated phenomenological aspects in a lying body position that facilitates clinically observed abnormal self-location . The results confirm that the self is (...) located to where touch is seen. This leads to either predictable lowering or elevation of self-localization, and the latter was accompanied by sensations of floating, as during out-of-body experiences. Using a novel measurement we show that the unitary and localized character of the self can be experimentally separated from both the origin of the visual perspective and the location of the seen body, which is compatible with clinical data. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show the methodological power and potentiality of the concept paradigm of unity introduced originally in the ceremony on the occasion of honoring Chiara Lubich with the doctor honoris causa title by the Catholic University of Lublin in 1996. Originally this conception was used to suggest the societal activity of Chiara Lubich in building, via the Focolari movement, psychosocial infrastructures for unity in various social domains,, in public media, in ecumenism and inter-religious contacts This (...) conception is a kind of a great inspiration which would motivate the social sciences to build their own research paradigm of a type of mental and methodological power and potentiality which could give a new vision of social world ). Thomas Kuhn regarded the Copernician revolution as the one which, in the history of science, best illustrates the nature of scientific revolution. The essence of paradigm in a Kuhnian sense is a mentality change in its nature. Copernicus had to change the well-established geocentric system which functioned not only in the science of his day but also in culture, tradition, social perception, and even in the mentality of religious and political authorities. And he did it in a well prepared empirical, methodological and psychological way. In a similar way Chiara Lubich created by her social acting a revolutionary inspiration for building paradigm in social science She decided in an extremely difficult and risky situation in 1944 in Trento not only to escape from her own life emergency but she with her friends made a decision to help other people who were in a much more difficult situation to survive. She decided to take a war bombing risk to be with lost children and older people who were in need. It was a practical building of the unity with the real people who were in need. This kind of experience rediscovered the community as a model for the real life and made a concretization and clarification of the charisma of the unity. However, the development of this charisma shows that it is simply a concrete and practical actualization of the new vision of social, economic, political and religious relationships which advises, recommends, suggests, and promotes the unity with others persons. (shrink)

Two hypotheses concerning the relative importance of agentic versus communal traits as predictors of selfesteem were tested. The perspective hypothesis assumed that self-esteem is dominated by agency over communion because self-perceptions are formed from the agent perspective. The culture hypothesis assumed that self-esteem is dominated by communal concerns in collectivistic cultures and by agentic concerns in individualistic cultures. Study 1 involving three samples from collectivistic countries and three from individualistic ones found that self-esteem was better predicted from self-ratings of agentic (...) than communal traits, with the exception of collectivistic women for whom the two predictors were equal. Study 2 primed the interdependent or independent self and found self-ratings of agency to be better predictors of self-esteem than self-ratings of communion, with the exception of interdependence priming,where the two predictors were equal in strength. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

It is difficult to accommodate compulsive drug use that destroys regulation by consequences in a unitary framework of melioration or maximization, especially as both are strategies of behavioral regulation. The “contradiction” of addictive behavior despite aversive consequences is an illusory issue because consequences that do not decrease addictive behavior cannot be considered punishing.

This paper develops a novel interpretation of Kant's argument from incongruent counterparts to the effect that the representations of space and time are intuitions rather than concepts. When properly understood, the argument anticipates the contemporary position whereby the meaning of indexicals cannot be captured by descriptive contents.

This article is concerned with the alleged incompatibility between presentism and specious present theories of temporal experience. According to presentism, the present time is instantaneous (or, near-instantaneous), while according to specious present theories, the specious present is temporally extended—therefore, it seems that there is no room in reality for the whole of a specious present, if presentism is true. It seems then that one of the two claims—presentism or the specious present theory—has to go. I shall argue that this kind (...) of worries is mislead. Once we understand properly how our phenomenal experience as of passage and as of change, such as it is understood by specious present theorists, comes into being, the apparent phenomenologico-metaphysical conflict will disappear. In short, the mistake here is to presuppose that there is a link between phenomenology and metaphysics stronger than it actually is. Presentism is a metaphysical theory about what exists. Specious presentism is a phenomenological theory about how things appear to us in experience. As we will see, the two claims are not in conflict, and are in fact entirely orthogonal. (shrink)

In this article, I defend Lewisian modal realism against objections arising from the possibility of ‘Island Universes’ and other similar cases. The problem comes from Lewis’ claim that possible worlds are spatio-temporally isolated. I suggest a modification of Lewisian modal realism in order to avoid this family of objections. This modification may sound quite radical since it amounts to abandoning the very notion of a possible world, but as radical as it may sound it in fact remains well in the (...) spirit of Lewis’ original view. (shrink)

When I say that I am a lot of things, I mean it literally and metaphysically speaking. The Self, or so I shall argue, is a plurality (notwithstanding the fact that ordinary language takes "the Self" to be a singular term – but, after all, language is only language). It is not a substance or a substratum, and it is not a collection or a bundle. The view I wish to advocate for is a kind of reductionism, in line with (...) some – but not all – broadly Humean ideas. In short, I will defend the view there are the experiences and mental states we have, and that's it: no additional substances, and no bundles. This does not mean, however, that there is no Self – the Self simply is the experiences. I will try to articulate and defend this view by showing that it can accommodate what I take to be the three main desiderata for any theory of the Self to satisfy: first, that the Self is the subject of experience (a subject of mental states, in general); second, that there is a unity to the Self in the sense that our (conscious, phenomenal) experience is at least partly continuous or 'stream-like'; and third, that we do not die when we go to sleep or when we otherwise don't have any (conscious, phenomenal) experiences. (shrink)

Endurantism, as opposed to perdurantism, is supposed to be the intuitive view. But the ‘endurantist intuition’ – roughly, that objects persist through time by being numerically identical and wholly located at all times at which they exist – is behind more than just endurantism. Indeed, it plays an important role in the motivation of some theories about the passage of time, and some theories about the nature of the subject. As we shall see, the endurantist intuition is often taken in (...) these cases to be a reason, or at least a motivation, to endorse one or the other of these metaphysical theories. Sometimes, it is even said to constitute a basis for an argument in their favour. In this article, I show that such an appeal to this ‘endurantist intuition’ is misleading and wrong. I do not deny that there is an intuition of this kind, but I deny that it can play any philosophically significant role as a reason – and even less as a basis for an argument – in defending metaphysical theories such as endurantism, dualism, or the A-theory. (shrink)

In this article, I am interested in dual-aspect monism as a solution to the mind-body problem. This view is not new, but it is somewhat under-represented in the contemporary debate, and I would like to help it make its way. Dual-aspect monism is a parsimonious, elegant and simple view. It avoids problems with “mental causation”. It naturally explains how and why mental states are correlated with physical states while avoiding any mysteries concerning the nature of this relation. It fits well (...) with our ordinary picture of the world, as well as with the scientific picture. It gives its rightful place to the phenomenal, qualitative, subjective character of experience, instead of reducing it or eliminating it. It does not unnecessarily multiply ontological categories. It can come in many versions, and is compatible with other interesting views, such as panpsychism. (shrink)

Drawing on the empirical premise that attention makes objects look more intense, Ned Block has argued for mental paint, a phenomenal residue that cannot be reduced to what is perceived or represented. If sound, Block's argument would undermine direct realism and representationism, two widely held views about the nature of conscious perception. We argue that Block's argument fails because the empirical premise it is based upon is false. Attending to an object alters its salience, but not its perceived intensity. We (...) also argue that salience should be equated with mental primer, a close cousin of mental paint that reintroduces difficulties for direct realism and representationism. The upshot is that direct realism and representationism are still in trouble, but not for the reason that Block thinks. (shrink)

Macphail’s comparative approach to intelligence focused on associative processes, an orientation inconsistent with more multifaceted lay and scientific understandings of the term. His ultimate emphasis on associative processes indicated few differences in intelligence among vertebrates. We explore options more attuned to common definitions by considering intelligence in terms of richness of representations of the world, the interconnectivity of those representations, the ability to flexibly change those connections, knowledge, and individual differences. We focus on marine mammals, represented by the amphibious pinnipeds (...) and the aquatic cetaceans and sirenians, as animals that transitioned from a terrestrial existence to an aquatic one, experiencing major changes in ecological pressures. They adapted with morphological transformations related to streamlining the body, physiological changes in respiration and thermoregulation, and sensory/perceptual changes, including echolocation capabilities and diminished olfaction in many cetaceans, both in-air and underwater visual focus, and enhanced senses of touch in pinnipeds and sirenians. Having a terrestrial foundation on which aquatic capacities were overlaid likely affected their cognitive abilities. Vocal and behavioral observational learning capabilities in the wild and in laboratory experiments suggest versatility in group coordination. Empirical reports on aspects of intelligent behavior like problem-solving, spatial learning, and concept learning by various species of cetaceans and pinnipeds, suggest rich cognitive abilities. The high energy demands of the brain suggest brain-intelligence relationships might be fruitful areas for the study when specific hypotheses are considered, e.g., brain mapping indicates hypertrophy of specific sensory areas in marine mammals. Modern neuroimaging techniques provide ways to study neural connectivity, and the patterns of connections between sensory, motor, and other cortical regions provide a biological framework for exploring how animals represent and flexibly use information in navigating and learning about their environment. At this stage of marine mammal research, it would still be prudent to follow Macphail’s caution that it is premature to make strong comparative statements without more empirical evidence, but an approach that includes learning more about how animals flexibly link information across multiple representations could be a productive way of comparing species by allowing them to use their specific strengths within comparative tasks. (shrink)

To ascribe a telos is to ascribe a norm or standard of performance. That fact underwrites the plausibility of, say, teleological theories of mind. Teleosemantics, for example, relies on the normative character of teleology to solve the problem of “intentional inexistence”: a misrepresentation is just a malfunction. If the teleological ascriptions of such theories to natural systems, e.g., the neurological structures of the brain, are to be literally true, then it must be literally true that norms can exist independent of (...) intentional and psychological agency. Davies, for one, has argued that such norms are impossible within a naturalistic worldview. Consequently, teleological theories of mind, for example, cannot be literally true. I will show, however, that the truth conditions on normative statements do not presuppose intentional and psychological agency and, further, that a selectional regime is one naturalistic mechanism that satisfies those truth conditions. Norms, then, exist in the world independent of intentional and psychological agency. (shrink)