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  1. Balancing the evidential scales for the mental unconscious Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind, Ben R. Newell & David R. Shanks, MIT Press, 2023, 234 pp., $45.00, ISBN 9780262546195. [REVIEW]Aliya R. Dewey - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    In Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind, Ben R. Newell & David R. Shanks (henceforth, N&S) challenge the popular claim that much of human judgment and decision-making is explained by unconscious processes...
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  • Imaginative Beliefs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...)
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  • Disfluency attenuates the reception of pseudoprofound and postmodernist bullshit.Ryan E. Tracy, Nicolas Porot, Eric Mandelbaum & Steven G. Young - 2023 - Thinking and Reasoning 1.
    Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by cognitive thinking style. In all studies, we measured participants’ cognitive reflection, need for cognition, faith in intuition, and (...)
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  • (1 other version)The language-of-thought hypothesis as a working hypothesis in cognitive science.Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e292.
    The target article attempted to draw connections between broad swaths of evidence by noticing a common thread: Abstract, symbolic, compositional codes, that is, language-of-thoughts (LoTs). Commentators raised concerns about the evidence and offered fascinating extensions to areas we overlooked. Here we respond and highlight the many specific empirical questions to be answered in the next decade and beyond.
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  • Descartes’ God is a deceiver, and that’s OK.Joseph Gottlieb & Saja Parvizian - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-29.
    That Descartes’ God is not a deceiver is amongst the canonical claims of early modern philosophy. The significance of this (purported) fact to the coherence of Descartes’ system is likewise canonical, infused in how we teach and think about the _Meditations_. Though prevalent, both ends of this narrative are suspect. We argue that Descartes’ color eliminativism, when coupled with his analysis of the cognitive structure of our sensory systems, entails that God is a deceiver. It’s doubtful that Descartes recognized this, (...)
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  • Unconscious Perception and Unconscious Bias: Parallel Debates about Unconscious Content.Gabbrielle Johnson - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 87-130.
    The possibilities of unconscious perception and unconscious bias prompt parallel debates about unconscious mental content. This chapter argues that claims within these debates alleging the existence of unconscious content are made fraught by ambiguity and confusion with respect to the two central concepts they involve: consciousness and content. Borrowing conceptual resources from the debate about unconscious perception, the chapter distills the two conceptual puzzles concerning each of these notions and establishes philosophical strategies for their resolution. It then argues that empirical (...)
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  • Implicit Bias and Qualiefs.Martina Fürst - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-34.
    In analyzing implicit bias, one key issue is to clarify its metaphysical nature. In this paper, I develop a novel account of implicit bias by highlighting a particular kind of belief-like state that is partly constituted by phenomenal experiences. I call these states ‘qualiefs’ for three reasons: qualiefs draw upon qualitative experiences of what an object seems like to attribute a property to this very object, they share some of the distinctive features of proper beliefs, and they also share some (...)
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  • Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?David Thorstad - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):396-413.
    Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context‐sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language (Carr, 2022; Pasnau, 2013). In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My (...)
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  • Public reason and private bias: Accommodating political disagreement.Athmeya Jayaram - forthcoming - Journal of Social Philosophy.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • How to Express Implicit Attitudes.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):251-272.
    I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this (...)
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  • Bias, norms, introspection, and the bias blind spot1.Thomas Kelly - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):81-105.
    In this paper, I sketch a general framework for theorizing about bias and bias attributions. According to the account, paradigmatic cases of bias involve systematic departures from genuine norms. I attempt to show that the account illuminates a number of important psychological phenomena, including: the fact that accusations of bias frequently inspire not only denials but also countercharges of bias (“you only think that I'm biased because you're biased!”); the fact that we tend to see ourselves as less biased than (...)
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  • (1 other version)Foundations of a we-perspective.Katja Crone - 2021 - Synthese 198 (12):11815-11832.
    What enables everyday collective attitudes such as the intention of two persons to go for a walk together? Most current approaches are concerned with full-fledged collective attitudes and focus on the content, the mode or the subject of such attitudes. It will be argued that these approaches miss out an important explanatory enabling feature of collective attitudes: an experiential state, called a “sense of us”, in which a we-perspective is grounded. As will be shown, the sense of us pre-structures collective (...)
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  • Problems and mysteries of the many languages of thought.Eric Mandelbaum, Yarrow Dunham, Roman Feiman, Chaz Firestone, E. J. Green, Daniel Harris, Melissa M. Kibbe, Benedek Kurdi, Myrto Mylopoulos, Joshua Shepherd, Alexis Wellwood, Nicolas Porot & Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (12): e13225.
    “What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...)
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  • Feeling is believing: recalcitrant emotion & Spinozan belief formation.Kris Goffin - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1–14.
    In this paper, I defend the judgementalist theory of emotion against the argument from recalcitrant emotions. Judgementalism holds that a necessary condition for being in an emotional state is that an evaluative belief is formed. Recalcitrant emotions are emotions that contradict endorsed beliefs and judgements. The argument from recalcitrant emotions states that a judgementalist explanation of recalcitrant emotions results in the absurd conclusion that one would hold two contradictory beliefs. I argue that emotion involves a so-called Spinozan belief-forming process: a (...)
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  • (1 other version)The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences.Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e261.
    Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...)
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  • Prejudice as the misattribution of salience.Jessie Munton - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (1):1-19.
    What does it take to be prejudiced against a particular group? And is prejudice always epistemically problematic, or are there epistemically innocent forms of prejudice? In this paper, I argue that certain important forms of prejudice can be wholly constituted by the differential accessibility of certain pieces of information. These accessibility relations constitute a salience structure. A subject is prejudiced against a particular group when their salience structure is unduly organised around that category. This is significant because it reveals that (...)
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  • The importance of self‐knowledge for free action.Joseph Gurrola - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (4):996-1013.
    Much has been made about the ways that implicit biases and other apparently unreflective attitudes can affect our actions and judgments in ways that negatively affect our ability to do right. What has been discussed less is that these attitudes negatively affect our freedom. In this paper, I argue that implicit biases pose a problem for free will. My analysis focuses on the compatibilist notion of free will according to which acting freely consists in acting in accordance with our reflectively (...)
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  • Responsibility for implicitly biased behavior: A habit‐based approach.Josefa Toribio - 2021 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (2):239-254.
    This paper has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action—as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for their implicit biased (...)
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  • Intentional and Unintentional Discrimination: What Are They and What Makes Them Morally Different.Rona Dinur - 2021 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (2):111-138.
    The distinction between intentional and unintentional discrimination is a prominent one in the literature and public discourse; intentional discriminatory actions are commonly considered particularly morally objectionable relative to unintentional discriminatory actions. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what the two types amount to, and what generates the moral difference between them. The paper develops philosophically-informed conceptualizations of the two types based on which the moral difference between them may be accounted for. On the suggested account, intentional discrimination is characterized by the agent (...)
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  • ‘I love women’: an explicit explanation of implicit bias test results.Reis-Dennis Samuel & Vida Yao - 2021 - Synthese (5-6):13861-13882.
    Recent years have seen a surge of interest in implicit bias. Driving this concern is the thesis, apparently established by tests such as the IAT, that people who hold egalitarian explicit attitudes and beliefs, are often influenced by implicit mental processes that operate independently from, and are largely insensitive to, their explicit attitudes. We argue that implicit bias testing in social and empirical psychology does not, and without a fundamental shift in focus could not, establish this startling thesis. We suggest (...)
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  • Conceptual Centrality and Implicit Bias.Del Pinal Guillermo & Spaulding Shannon - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (1):95-111.
    How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus on salient or statistical associations between target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in the dependency networks that are part of our representations of social categories. (...)
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  • Moral Rationalism on the Brain.Joshua May - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (1):237-255.
    I draw on neurobiological evidence to defend the rationalist thesis that moral judgments are essentially dependent on reasoning, not emotions (conceived as distinct from inference). The neuroscience reveals that moral cognition arises from domain-general capacities in the brain for inferring, in particular, the consequences of an agent’s action, the agent’s intent, and the rules or norms relevant to the context. Although these capacities entangle inference and affect, blurring the reason/emotion dichotomy doesn’t preferentially support sentimentalism. The argument requires careful consideration of (...)
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  • Émotions et sensibilité aux valeurs : quatre conceptions philosophiques contemporaines.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 110 (2):209-229.
    RÉSUMÉ. Cet article examine plusieurs façons de comprendre les émotions comme des réactions évaluatives. Il existe un consensus dans les sciences affectives qui veut que les émotions paradigmatiques soient faites de quatre composants : catégorisation du stimulus, tendances à l’action, changements corporels et aspect phénoménal. L’article expose les quatre principales théories dans la philosophie contemporaine des émotions et montre qu’elles ont tendance à se focaliser sur l’un ou l’autre des quatre composants des émotions pour expliquer leur nature évaluative. La conclusion (...)
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  • Smooth Coping: An Embodied, Heideggerian Approach to Dual-Process Theory.Zachariah A. Neemeh - 2021 - Adaptive Behavior 1:1-16.
    Dual-process theories divide cognition into two kinds of processes: Type 1 processes that are autonomous and do not use working memory, and Type 2 processes that are decoupled from the immediate situation and use working memory. Often, Type 1 processes are also fast, high capacity, parallel, nonconscious, biased, contextualized, and associative, while Type 2 processes are typically slow, low capacity, serial, conscious, normative, abstract, and rule-based. This article argues for an embodied dual-process theory based on the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. (...)
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  • Moral encroachment and the epistemic impermissibility of (some) microaggressions.Javiera Perez Gomez - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9237-9256.
    A recent flurry of philosophical research on microaggression suggests that there are various practical and moral reasons why microaggression may be objectionable, including that it can be offensive, cause epistemic harms, express demeaning messages about certain members of our society, and help to reproduce an oppressive social order. Yet little attention has been given to the question of whether microaggression is also epistemically objectionable. This paper aims to further our understanding of microaggression by appealing to recent work on moral encroachment—the (...)
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  • Beliefs and biases.Shannon Spaulding - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7575-7594.
    Philosophers are divided over whether implicit biases are beliefs. Critics of the belief model of implicit bias argue that empirical data show that implicit biases are habitual but unstable and not sensitive to evidence. They are not rational or consistently action-guiding like beliefs are supposed to be. In contrast, proponents of the belief model of implicit bias argue that they are stable enough, sensitive to some evidence, and do guide our actions, albeit haphazardly sometimes. With the help of revisionary notions (...)
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  • Default Hypotheses in the Study of Perception: A Reply to Phillips.Jacob Berger & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4):206-219.
    Some theorists have recently raised doubts about much of the experimental evidence purporting to demonstrate the existence of unconscious perception. In our (2019) in this journal, we argued some of these considerations are not decisive. Phillips (forthcoming a) replies thoughtfully to our paper, concluding that he is unconvinced by our arguments. Phillips maintains that the view that perception is invariably conscious remains, as he puts it, the “default” hypothesis both within the folk understanding and experimental study of perception. There is (...)
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  • Imaginative immersion, regulation, and doxastic mediation.Alon Chasid - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4): 1-43.
    This paper puts forward an account of imaginative immersion. Elaborating on Kendall Walton’s thesis that imagining aims at the fictional truth, it first argues that imaginings are inherently rule- or norm-governed: they are ‘regulated’ by that which is presented as fictionally true. It then shows that an imaginer can follow the rule or norm mandating her to imagine the propositions presented as fictional truths either by acquiring explicit beliefs about how the rule (norm) is to be followed, or directly, without (...)
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  • Cognitive penetration and informational encapsulation: Have we been failing the module?Sam Clarke - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (8):2599-2620.
    Jerry Fodor deemed informational encapsulation ‘the essence’ of a system’s modularity and argued that human perceptual processing comprises modular systems, thus construed. Nowadays, his conclusion is widely challenged. Often, this is because experimental work is seen to somehow demonstrate the cognitive penetrability of perceptual processing, where this is assumed to conflict with the informational encapsulation of perceptual systems. Here, I deny the conflict, proposing that cognitive penetration need not have any straightforward bearing on the conjecture that perceptual processing is composed (...)
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  • Perceptual consciousness plays no epistemic role.Jacob Berger - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):7-23.
    It is often assumed that perceptual experience provides evidence about the external world. But much perception can occur unconsciously, as in cases of masked priming or blindsight. Does unconscious perception provide evidence as well? Many theorists maintain that it cannot, holding that perceptual experience provides evidence in virtue of its conscious character. Against such views, I challenge here both the necessity and, perhaps more controversially, the sufficiency of consciousness for perception to provide evidence about the external world. In addition to (...)
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  • Implicit Bias as Mental Imagery.Bence Nanay - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3):329-347.
    What is the mental representation that is responsible for implicit bias? What is this representation that mediates between the trigger and the biased behavior? My claim is that this representation is neither a propositional attitude nor a mere association. Rather, it is mental imagery: perceptual processing that is not directly triggered by sensory input. I argue that this view captures the advantages of the two standard accounts without inheriting their disadvantages. Further, this view also explains why manipulating mental imagery is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Cognitive Dissonance and the Logic of Racism.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia - 2020 - In Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds. New York: Routledge. pp. 219-243.
    Cognitive dissonance is a kind of ambivalence in which your apprehension of the fact that you performed or want to perform an action of which you disapprove gives rise to psychological distress. This, in turn, causes you to solicit unconscious processes that can help you reduce the distress. Here we look at the role that cognitive dissonance plays in explaining the inner workings of racism. We distinguish between three types of racist acts: inadvertent bigotry, habitual racism, and explicit racism. Unlike (...)
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  • (1 other version)The science of belief: A progress report.Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science 1.
    The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...)
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  • Rational Agency and the Struggle to Believe What Your Reasons Dictate.Brie Gertler - 2021 - In Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    According to an influential view that I call agentialism, our capacity to believe and intend directly on the basis of reasons—our rational agency—has a normative significance that distinguishes it from other kinds of agency (Bilgrami 2006, Boyle 2011, Burge 1996, Korsgaard 1996, Moran 2001). Agentialists maintain that insofar as we exercise rational agency, we bear a special kind of responsibility for our beliefs and intentions; and it is only those attitudes that represent the exercise of rational agency that are truly (...)
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  • The Structure of Bias.Gabbrielle M. Johnson - 2020 - Mind 129 (516):1193-1236.
    What is a bias? Standard philosophical views of both implicit and explicit bias focus this question on the representations one harbours, for example, stereotypes or implicit attitudes, rather than the ways in which those representations are manipulated. I call this approach representationalism. In this paper, I argue that representationalism taken as a general theory of psychological social bias is a mistake, because it conceptualizes bias in ways that do not fully capture the phenomenon. Crucially, this view fails to capture a (...)
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  • Implicit biases in visually guided action.Berit Brogaard - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 17):S3943–S3967.
    For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in the primary visual cortex: a ventral, perception-related ‘conscious’ stream and a dorsal, action-related ‘unconscious’ stream. They furthermore maintain that the perceptual and memory systems in the ventral stream are relatively shielded from the action system in the dorsal stream. In recent years, this view has come under scrutiny. Evidence points to two overlapping action pathways: a (...)
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  • Mental Structures.Kevin J. Lande - 2020 - Noûs (3):649-677.
    An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle (...)
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  • Literal Perceptual Inference.Alex Kiefer - 2017 - In Metzinger Thomas & Wiese Wanja (eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing. MIND Group.
    In this paper, I argue that theories of perception that appeal to Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference (“Helmholtzian” theories) should be taken literally, i.e. that the inferences appealed to in such theories are inferences in the full sense of the term, as employed elsewhere in philosophy and in ordinary discourse. -/- In the course of the argument, I consider constraints on inference based on the idea that inference is a deliberate acton, and on the idea that inferences depend on the (...)
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  • Construct validity in psychological tests – the case of implicit social cognition.Uljana Feest - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (1):1-24.
    This paper looks at the question of what it means for a psychological test to have construct validity. I approach this topic by way of an analysis of recent debates about the measurement of implicit social cognition. After showing that there is little theoretical agreement about implicit social cognition, and that the predictive validity of implicit tests appears to be low, I turn to a debate about their construct validity. I show that there are two questions at stake: First, what (...)
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  • Assimilation and control: belief at the lowest levels.Eric Mandelbaum - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):441-447.
    The core of Zimmerman’s picture posits an inverse correlation between an action’s automaticity and belief’s role in the action’s execution. This proposal faces serious problems. First, high-attention, high-control actions don’t seem to heighten awareness of one’s beliefs. Second, low-attention, low-control actions are caused by the same states at play when executing high-attention, high-control actions, in which case there is no ontological difference in the states involved in these behaviors. Third, on Zimmerman’s view it is unclear what it is for a (...)
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  • Belief’s minimal rationality.Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3263-3282.
    Many of our beliefs behave irrationally: this is hardly news to anyone. Although beliefs’ irrational tendencies need to be taken into account, this paper argues that beliefs necessarily preserve at least a minimal level of rationality. This view offers a plausible picture of what makes belief unique and will help us to set beliefs apart from other cognitive attitudes.
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  • Attention and encapsulation.Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (3):335-349.
    The question of whether perception is encapsulated from cognition has been a major topic in the study of perception in the past decade. One locus of debate concerns the role of attention. Some theorists argue that attention is a vehicle for widespread violations of encapsulation; others argue that certain forms of cognitively driven attention are compatible with encapsulation, especially if attention only modulates inputs. This paper argues for an extreme thesis: no effect of attention, whether on the inputs to perception (...)
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  • Rational Inference: The Lowest Bounds.Cameron Buckner - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):697-724.
    A surge of empirical research demonstrating flexible cognition in animals and young infants has raised interest in the possibility of rational decision‐making in the absence of language. A venerable position, which I here call “Classical Inferentialism”, holds that nonlinguistic agents are incapable of rational inferences. Against this position, I defend a model of nonlinguistic inferences that shows how they could be practically rational. This model vindicates the Lockean idea that we can intuitively grasp rational connections between thoughts by developing the (...)
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  • Longer, smaller, faster, stronger: On skills and intelligence.Ellen Fridland - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (5):759-783.
    ABSTRACTHow does practice change our behaviors such that they go from being awkward, unskilled actions to elegant, skilled performances? This is the question that I wish to explore in this paper. In the first section of the paper, I will defend the tight connection between practice and skill and then go on to make precise how we ought to construe the concept of practice. In the second section, I will suggest that practice contributes to skill by structuring and automatizing the (...)
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  • The imagination model of implicit bias.Anna Welpinghus - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1611-1633.
    We can understand implicit bias as a person’s disposition to evaluate members of a social group in a less favorable light than members of another social group, without intending to do so. If we understand it this way, we should not presuppose a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how implicit cognitive states lead to skewed evaluations of other people. The focus of this paper is on implicit bias in considered decisions. It is argued that we have good reasons to (...)
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  • What we can (and can’t) infer about implicit bias from debiasing experiments.Nick Byrd - 2019 - Synthese (2):1-29.
    The received view of implicit bias holds that it is associative and unreflective. Recently, the received view has been challenged. Some argue that implicit bias is not predicated on “any” associative process, but it is unreflective. These arguments rely, in part, on debiasing experiments. They proceed as follows. If implicit bias is associative and unreflective, then certain experimental manipulations cannot change implicitly biased behavior. However, these manipulations can change such behavior. So, implicit bias is not associative and unreflective. This paper (...)
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  • Interpretivism and norms.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):905-930.
    This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...)
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  • Implicit attitudes and the ability argument.Wesley Buckwalter - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2961-2990.
    According to one picture of the mind, decisions and actions are largely the result of automatic cognitive processing beyond our ability to control. This picture is in tension with a foundational principle in ethics that moral responsibility for behavior requires the ability to control it. The discovery of implicit attitudes contributes to this tension. According to the ability argument against moral responsibility, if we cannot control implicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes cause behavior, then we cannot be morally responsible for that (...)
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  • Free Will, Self-Governance and Neuroscience: An Overview.Alisa Carse, Hilary Bok & Debra J. H. Mathews - 2018 - Neuroethics 11 (3):237-244.
    Given dramatic increases in recent decades in the pace of scientific discovery and understanding of the functional organization of the brain, it is increasingly clear that engagement with the neuroscientific literature and research is central to making progress on philosophical questions regarding the nature and scope of human freedom and responsibility. While patterns of brain activity cannot provide the whole story, developing a deeper and more precise understanding of how brain activity is related to human choice and conduct is crucial (...)
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  • Silencing without Convention.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2):573-598.
    Silencing is usually explained in terms of conventionalism about the nature of speech acts. More recently, theorists have tried to develop intentionalist theories of the phenomenon. I argue, however, that if intentionalists are to accommodate the conventionalists' main insight, namely that silencing can be so extreme as to render certain types of speech act completely unavailable to victims, they must take two assumptions on board. First, it must be possible that speakers' communicative intentions are opaque to the speakers themselves. Secondly, (...)
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