Published in Philosophical Psychology (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT Cognitive Penetration holds that cognitive states and processes, specifically propositional attitudes (e.g., beliefs), sometimes directly impact features of perceptual experiences (e.g., the coloring of an object). In contrast, more traditional views hold that propositional attitudes do not directly impact perceptual experiences, but rather are only involved in interpreting or judging these

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to explain what it means that bodily expressions are perceivable per se, as Direct Perception (DP) accounts seem to assume. They claim that we have direct access to the mentality of others through the perception of their expressions (§§1-2). And yet, a few issues might render DP’s grounds unsteady (§3). To avoid such risk, a more detailed account of how bodily expressions

ABSTRACT Our aim in this paper is to argue that empathy is an intellectual virtue. Empathy enables agents to gain insight into other people’s emotions and beliefs. The agent who possesses this trait is: (i) driven to engage in acts of empathy by her epistemic desires; (ii) takes pleasure in doing so; (iii) is competent at the activity characteristic of empathy; and, (iv) has good judgment as to when

Published in Philosophical Psychology (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom

ABSTRACT Some collective irrationalities, like epistemically and pragmatically reckless Covid skepticism, are especially dangerous. While we normally have incentives to avoid dangerous beliefs, there are cases in which the danger of a belief is valuable. This is not captured by most accounts of motivated reasoning. I argue that Covid skepticism can function as a costly signal (handicap) so as to more

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that thinking in terms of process metaphysics and seeing the mind and mental disorders as processual in nature allows for a more complete understanding of mental disorders than is allowed by non-processual frameworks, while it also allows us to incorporate what we currently know about them. In addition, it can address problems in psychiatry that arise when we ask the

ABSTRACT Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle

Published in Philosophical Psychology (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT Incorporating one’s preexisting ethical values into targeted messages has the capacity to increase message persuasiveness. The following study explores this idea by appealing to the ethical frameworks of deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics in ethical climate messaging in order to determine which appeal is seen as the most persuasive among the religious demographic. Current literature

ABSTRACT Sethi (2020) attempts to show that even if we keep Price’s intuition: the claim that having an experience as of an F make us aware of an instance of Fness, we can still block the Argument from Hallucination, and so reject the conclusion that we are aware of mind-dependent rather than mind-independent items when we undergo successful perceptions. In an attempt to demonstrate this, she formulates

ABSTRACT This paper offers an explanation for subjects’ lack of confidence in vaccines’ safety, which in turn is widely recognized as one of the main determinants of vaccine hesitancy. I argue that among the psychological roots of this lack of confidence there is a kind of intuitive thinking that can be traced back to a specific superstitious belief: the belief that “it is bad luck to tempt fate”.

ABSTRACT What’s the difference between those psychological posits that are ‘me” and those that are not? Distinguishing between these psychological kinds is important in many domains, but an account of what the distinction consists in is challenging. I argue for Psychological Constructionism: those psychological posits that correspond to the kinds within folk psychology are personal, and those that

ABSTRACT This paper argues that emotions can play an epistemic role as justifiers of evaluative beliefs. It also presents the heuristics theory of emotion as an empirically informed explanation of how emotions can play such a role and why they in practice usefully complement non-affective evaluative judgments. As such, the heuristics theory represents a form of moderate rationalism: it acknowledges

Published in Philosophical Psychology (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT One of the most vigorously debated issues in attention labs concerns the nature of the coupling between the sensory-motor system and covert spatial attention. Proponents of the Premotor Theory of Attention (PToA) claim that attention should be accounted for in terms of motor preparation for goal-directed actions such as eye or hand movements. For others, it is a supramodal psychological entity

Published in Philosophical Psychology (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso argue that humans are never morally responsible for their actions and take that thesis as a starting point for a project whose ultimate goal is the reform of responsibility practices, which include expressions of praise, blame, and the institution of legal punishment. This paper shares the skeptical concern that current responsibility practices can be suboptimal

ABSTRACT The contents of representations in non-human animals, human core cognition, and perception cannot precisely be characterized by sentences of a natural language. However, this fact does not stop us from giving imprecise characterizations of these contents through natural language. In this paper, I develop an account of the precision of content characterizations by appealing to possible-world

ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic is a global health crisis and the biggest challenge of our time. The aim of the study was to compare the perceived threat of COVID-19, self-assessed physical health, and mental resilience among some social categories vulnerable to stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as 67 people diagnosed with mental disorders and healthy people (67 healthcare specialists, 67

ABSTRACT Recent decades are marked by the upswing of the use of the term “normativity“ not only in philosophical discussions, but increasingly also within reports of empirical scientists. This may invoke the question how far these developments overlap and in how far they go past each other. A significant overlap might lead to an interesting coalescence of the two approaches to norms, which may provide

(2022). A social account of the vices of self-assessment. Philosophical Psychology. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Subjectivism about welfare is the claim that something contributes to a person’s welfare if and only if that person has in proper conditions a certain pro attitude toward that thing. Dale Dorsey argues that the pro attitude in question is a judgment that the thing is good for one, a welfare judgment, as opposed to a desire for that thing. Eden Lin and Anthony Kelley provide counterexamples

(2022). The secrets of the madman are also secrets for the madman. Philosophical Psychology. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT On the simulation theory of memory, to remember is to imagine an event from the personal past. McCarroll has recently argued that, because it implies not only that a genuine memory need not be caused by the rememberer’s experience of the remembered event but also that the rememberer need not even have experienced that event, simulationism is unable, first, to explain infantile amnesia (the

(2022). Believing badly ain’t so bad. Philosophical Psychology. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Hybrid and pluralist accounts of concepts agree that the class of concepts includes a multiplicity of heterogeneous representational structures, such as prototypes, sets of exemplars and theories. In this paper I argue that these accounts agree on two additional central claims related to the ways in which they articulate those structures: each type of representational structure can be used

ABSTRACT This paper treats of phenomenal consciousness and its relation to an organism’s capacity to be hedonically perturbed by its environment. This paper offers an empirically informed, phenomenologically descriptive conceptual analysis of subjective character in terms of an organism’s ability to feel with its body. The subjective character of phenomenal consciousness is at least partially constituted

ABSTRACT Most mainstream psychologists consider philosophy irrelevant to their work, but see themselves as realists. Various opposition movements embrace philosophy but reject realism, either completely or partially, despite upholding ideas consistent with a realist philosophy. Many on both sides see the Tower of Babel that constitutes psychology as a sign of healthy diversity, not fragmentation. We

ABSTRACT A recent strand in the philosophical literature on addiction emphasizes problems with diachronic self-control. Hanna Pickard, for example, argues that an important aspect of addiction consists in inability to identify with a non-addicted future self. This literature sits alongside another that treats addiction as the product of neural changes that “hijack” mechanisms of reward prediction,

ABSTRACT I reflect on what may be termed ‘omnipotent passivity and omniscient oblivion’ which are some of the key paradoxes within schizophrenia. I discuss various aspects of insight and self-awareness as components of clinical recovery and argue that the minds affected by schizophrenia can in fact be very insightful, albeit a different kind of insight entirely. I argue that the nature of schizophrenia

ABSTRACT In this article, we postulate that belief understanding unfolds in two steps over ontogenetic time. We propose that belief understanding begins in interactive scenarios in which infants and toddlers respond directly and second-personally to the actions of a misinformed agent. This early understanding of beliefs is practical and grounded in the capacity for perspective-taking. Practical belief

ABSTRACT A phenomenal concept is a concept that one possesses only if one has the relevant experience. In this essay, I argue that phenomenal concept theorists, namely, those who believe that we acquire phenomenal concepts through being acquainted with the relevant experience, can never succeed in determining which species of non-human animals are phenomenally conscious because they prohibit any a

ABSTRACT According to L. A. Paul, the subjective value of an outcome is normally assessed by running a cognitive model of what it would be like if that outcome were to occur. However, cognitive models, along with the expectations in which they result, are unreliable for application to transformative experiences because we cannot know what it would be like for an outcome to occur if we have never experienced

ABSTRACT Marek Pokropski’s “Mechanisms and Consciousness Integrating Phenomenology with Cognitive Science” reopens the question about the possibility of naturalization of phenomenology. The author adopts the position of nonreductive mechanistic integration, which, he claims, has offered new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. In this paper, I outline

ABSTRACT It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight

(2022). Eyeing up life’s social instincts. Philosophical Psychology. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative

ABSTRACT It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of

ABSTRACT Adolescents’ and young adults’ practical moral judgments about two interpersonal moral dilemmas, which differed in their moral complexity, were examined using two philosophical frameworks (deontological and consequentialist principles) as tools for psychological analysis. A sample of 234 participants (ages 14–16, 18–19, and 20–21) reasoned about two moral dilemmas, which had been experienced

ABSTRACT We explain that most of the explanations that traditionally have been used to conceptually and ontologically differentiate aesthetic experience from any other are not compatible with a naturalistic framework, since they are based on transcendental idealistic metaphysics, reductions, and on the assumption that the aesthetic is an a priori special ontology in the object and the mind. However

ABSTRACT Recently, psychologists have developed indirect measurement procedures to predict suicidal behavior. A prominent example is the Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (DS-IAT). In this paper, I argue that there is something special about the DS-IAT which distinguishes it from different IAT measures. I argue that the DS-IAT does not measure weak or strong associations between the implicit

ABSTRACT There is a remarkable gap in the academic literature when it comes to group navigation, and procedural metacognition in group navigation is an important but virtually unexplored topic. The present paper aims to fill this gap by providing an account of how metacognitive feelings evaluate and regulate group navigational processes. The paper reviews animal studies and ethnographic work to elucidate

ABSTRACT This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust – default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust – each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic

ABSTRACT Despite its long period of dominance, the details of associationism as developed by the British Empiricists in the 18th and 19th centuries are often ignored or forgotten today. Perhaps as a result, modern understandings of Empiricist associationism are often oversimplified. In fact, there is no single core view that can be viewed as definitional, or even weaker, as characteristic, of the tradition

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a qualitative study exploring anomalous self and world-experiences in individuals with high levels of depersonalization experiences. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by distressing feelings of being a detached, neutral and disembodied onlooker of one’s mental and bodily processes.Our findings indicate the presence of a wide range of anomalous experiences

ABSTRACT Phronesis or practical wisdom – Aristotle’s intellectual meta-virtue of discernment, deliberation, and arbitration – is undergoing a revival. Yet phronesis enthusiasts have recently been experiencing blowback both from philosophers and psychologists who think that phronesis has been given an inflated role in recent theorizing and that the functions it is meant to perform can more readily and

ABSTRACT The urgent need for solutions to critical environmental challenges is well attested, but often environmental problems are understood as fundamentally collective action problems. However, to solve these problems, there is also a need to change individual behavior. Hence, there is a pressing need to inculcate in individuals the environmental virtues – virtues of character that relate to our

ABSTRACT We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We argue that if these findings are correct

ABSTRACT Knowledge of human uses of animals is an important, but understudied, aspect of how humans treat animals. We developed a measure of one kind of knowledge of human uses of animals – knowledge of factory farming. Studies 1 (N = 270) and 2 (N = 270) tested an initial battery of objective, true or false statements about factory farming using Item Response Theory. Studies 3 (N = 241) and 4 (N = 278)

ABSTRACT Deflationists reduce self-deception to a motivated bias, eliminating the need for doxastic tension, divided minds, intentions, or even effortful action. While deflationism fits many cases, there are others that demand more robust psychological processes and complexity. We turn to the empirical literature on self-handicapping to find commonplace examples of self-deception with high levels of

ABSTRACT Over the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the “atypical” brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the “typical” brain does not generate, either due to a systematic

ABSTRACT Two experiments tested the hypothesis that neurological abnormalities decrease punishment by decreasing perceptions of free will. Experiment 1 found that a brain tumor decreased punishment for criminal behavior by decreasing perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s free will. This effect was stronger for liberal and non-religious participants than for conservative and religious participants

ABSTRACT Despite several criticisms surrounding the DSM classification in psychiatry, a significant bulk of research on mental conditions still operates according to two core assumptions: a) homogeneity, that is the idea that mental conditions are sufficiently homogeneous to justify generalization; b) additive comorbidity, that is the idea that the coexistence of multiple conditions in the same individual

ABSTRACT It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept

ABSTRACT Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly influential neurocognitive-computational framework. PP research has so far focused predominantly on lower level perceptual, motor, and various psychological phenomena. But PP seems to face a “scale-up challenge”: How can it be extended to conceptual thought, language, and other higher cognitive competencies? Compositionality, arguably a central

ABSTRACT What attitude does someone manifesting implicit bias really have? According to the default representationalist picture, implicit bias involves having conflicting attitudes (explicit versus implicit) with respect to the topic at hand. In opposition to this orthodoxy, dispositionalists argue that attitudes should be understood as higher-level dispositional features of the person as a whole.

ABSTRACT According to Milner and Goodale’s dual visual systems (DVS) theory, a division obtains between visual consciousness and motor action, in that the visual system producing conscious vision (the ventral stream) is distinct from the one guiding action (the dorsal stream). That there would be this division is often taken (by Andy Clark and others) to undermine the folk view on how consciousness

(2022). An offloading view of perceptual learning. Philosophical Psychology. Ahead of Print.