This article proposes that social identities are best understood as a kind of affordance, a “social identity affordance.” Social identity affordances are possibilities for action and interaction between persons, within a social niche, based on perceived and self-perceived social group identification. First, the view presented captures and articulates the basic structure of social identities. Second, it explains the multifaceted interplay of such an item in the social field, including not only the complexity of the interpersonal dimensions, but also the multiplicity (...) of registers in which social identities vibrate (ethical, political, psychological, geographical, affective, epistemic). Third, by doing good on (i) and (ii), the view makes social identities intelligible, helping preclude reductive misinterpretations of social identities, either subjective-only or public-only. The view has robust descriptive and explanatory power in concrete social contexts and retains the openness of a historically bound type of formation whose specific meanings change over time. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Drawing from empirical literature on ecological psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, this article describes a model of affect-as-motivation in the intentional bond between organism and environment. An epistemological justification for the motivating role of emotions is provided through articulating the perceptual context of emotions as embodied, situated, and functional, and positing perceptual salience as a biasing signal in an affordance competition model. The motivational role of affect is pragmatically integrated into discussions of action selection in the neurosciences.

This monograph discusses the question of what it is to be a reason – mainly in practical ethics – and proposes an original contribution to metaethics.It critically examines theories of metaethical realism, constructivism and error theory and identifies several misunderstandings or unclarities in contemporary debates. Based on this examination, the book suggests a distinction between a conceptual question, that can be answered by pure first-personal thinking, and a material question, that targets responses to reasons as a natural phenomenon in space (...) and time and that can be answered by help of the sciences. While this book defends a sharp distinction between these approaches, it also argues that the insights gained by the distinct approaches can be fruitfully integrated into a comprehensive picture.The comprehensive picture promoted in this book, based on both philosophical analysis and resources from psychology and cognitive science, is a picture of reasons as items in a collective archive of mind – reconfiguring the “domain of reasons” as a collectively established and socially cultivated fund of considerations with normative weight. The developed Collective Archive View combines Reasons Fundamentalism as an answer to the conceptual question, with a social ontological proposal, similar to Haslanger’s critical realism, as an answer to the material question.Thereby, it introduces central ideas from the field of social metaphysics into metaethics. At the same time, it offers a way of settling some controversies within metaethics, going on between proponents of Reasons Fundamentalism and Constitutivism, realism and constructivism, as well as proponents of mind-dependence and mind-independence of normative facts. Finally, the proposal enables us to envision and conceptualize genuine normative change within a metaethical theory. (shrink)

The possibility of autonomous artificially intelligent systems has awaken a well-known worry in the scientific community as well as in popular imaginary: the possibility that beings which have gained autonomous intelligence either turn against their creators or at least make the moral and ethical superiority of creators with respect to the created questionable. The present paper argues that such worries are wrong-headed. Specifically, if AAIs raise a worry about human ways of life or human value it is a worry for (...) a certain human way of thinking about what it is to be human. What is threatened is a way of thinking about what it is to be human, not human ways of life or human value. (shrink)