Imperfect Cognitions

On June 7th, Ken Richman (MCPHS University, Boston) and Julian Savulescu (Oxford) hosted a small workshop on autism and moral responsibility at the University of Oxford. Some philosophers have argued that impaired cognitive empathy prevents autistic individuals from being fully morally responsible. Neuropsychologists working on autism, philosophers working on moral responsibility and psychiatric illness, autistic adults, and students and postdocs at the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics came together to discuss autism and responsibility. Throughout the discussion, we focused on autistic individuals with average or higher intelligence, rather than those who also experience intellectual disability. One of the first issues addressed was that questioning the moral responsibility of a certain group is extremely sensitive, as exempting individuals from responsibility entails doubting their moral agency, either in a specific situation or more generally. Such considerations...

My name is Peter Pantelis . I study “theory of mind”—our ability to reason about other people’s mental states. Years ago, I became interested in an economic game called the Beauty Contest, because I think it taps into theory of mind very elegantly: You are going to play a game (against 250 undergraduate psychology students). Each player will submit a whole number from 0 to 100. The winner will be the player whose number is closest to 2/3 of the mean number selected by all the players. What number do you submit? (I’ll wait for you to think about it for a moment) What number should you submit, and why? Game theory says the rational strategy is for you to say 0—and so should everyone else. That’s what economists call the Nash equilibrium. [1] But in practice, virtually nobody submits the “rational” choice of 0. The average number selection is usually something like 25-35. People also give a wide variety of responses, and interpreting this (non-normative) pattern is where th...

Uwe Peters In honour of World Autism Awareness Day, we publish a post by Uwe Peters on his recent paper ' Self-Knowledge and Consciousness of Attitudes '.   Uwe is currently writing up his  dissertation   on the accessibility and self-knowledge of beliefs at King's College London. He develops an account of self-knowledge on which our privileged, non-inferential self-knowledge of beliefs is grounded in and dependent on our inferential knowledge of other people’s mental states. In my research, I often appeal to cases of atypical cognition. In a recent paper , I argue that findings on autism pose a challenge to the following view of conscious thinking. On the basis of empirical studies and theoretical considerations, it has been argued that conscious thinking, i.e., thinking that involves the deployment of the components of working memory, involves only sensory-imagistic events such as episodes of inner speech or visual image...

Logo of The Human Mind Project I'm Mattia Gallotti , Project Coordinator of The Human Mind Project . In this post, I report on a recent symposium entitled "Theory of Mind and the Social Mind". This was the third public event of The Human Mind Project and it took place on September 16th in the broader context of the 2014 annual meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) held in Noto, Sicily. Led by Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, The Human Mind Project highlights the contribution of the arts and humanities to the study of human nature, and the importance of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mind, integrating science and the humanities. In this spirit, the event - a symposium on “Theory of Mind and the Social Mind” - had presentations in social anthropology and neuroscience, by Rita Astuti (LSE) and Mina Cikara (Harvard) , about how recent advances in the research on shared cognition and group behaviour can ...