In the late 1720s, Daniel Turner and James Blondel engaged in a pamphlet dispute over the power of the maternal imagination. Turner accepted the long-standing belief that a pregnant woman's imagination could be transferred to her unborn child, imprinting the foetus with various marks and deformities. Blondel sought to refute this view on rational and anatomical grounds. Two issues repeatedly received these authors' attention: the identity of imagination, and its power in pregnant women; and the process of generation and foetal (...) development. In their discussions of these issues, differences between the authors' acceptance of general medical theories and philosophies became apparent. Blondel invoked Newtonian matter theory, experimental philosophy, and iatro-mechanism, while Turner adhered more to the authority of the Ancients and advocated a more direct role for the Creator as an alternative to mechanism in explaining natural phenomena. Additionally, the authors held differing views of what they regarded as experience. The widespread contemporary interest in their dispute suggests that Turner and Blondel raised the phenomenon of the maternal imagination from an issue of folk belief to a concern of eighteenth-century medicine. (shrink)

We examined disgust and fear responses to spiders in spider-distressed and nondistressed individuals. Undergraduate participants (N = 134) completed questionnaires concerning responses to spiders and other potentially aversive stimuli, as well as measures of disgust sensitivity, anxious arousal, worry, and anhedonic depression. In addition, we obtained self-report and facial expressions of disgust and fear while participants were exposed to a live tarantula. Both spider distressed and nondistressed individuals reported disgust and exhibited disgust facial expressions in response to a tarantula. Disgust (...) in response to spiders was not found to be part of a general disgust response to all negative stimuli, nor was it due to a general negative emotional response to spiders. Emotional responses to spiders were differentially associated with scores on personality and psychological functioning measures. The results of this study provide evidence that spiders have a specific disgust-evoking status in both distressed and nondistressed populations. (shrink)

This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ from (...) psychological states we already countenance, in which case there is no robust notion of aliefs; on the other, if aliefs just contain associative content, then they cannot do the explanatory work set out for them, in which case there is no reason to posit aliefs at all. Thus, it appears that we have little reason to posit the novel category of robust aliefs. (shrink)

Forthcoming, Journal of Philosophy [pdf manuscript].

In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emotional selection in cultural transmission of urban legends, which has previously been shown to operate in (...) the choose-to-transmit phase. In a series of experiments we studied serial transmission of stories based on urban legends manipulated to be either high or low on disgusting content. Results supported emotional selection operating in all three phases of cultural transmission. Thus, the prevalence of disgusting urban legends in North America may be explained by emotional selection through a multitude of pathways. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

In this paper I review some leading developments in the empirical theory of affect. I argue that (1) affect is a distinct perceptual representation governed system, and (2) that there are significant modular factors in affect. The paper concludes with the observation thatfeeler (affective perceptual system) may be a natural kind within cognitive science. The main purpose of the paper is to explore some hitherto unappreciated connections between the theory of affect and the computational theory of mind.

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...