Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic (University of Copenhagen). Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic A wave of influential voices in philosophy and psychology have argued that negative affective states like stress, discomfort, and anxiety are not necessarily detrimental for mental health, but that they can, under certain conditions, take productive forms that may broaden our epistemic horizons (Kurth 2018; Applebaum 2017; Harbin 2016; Bailey 2017; Medina 2013; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018; Jamieson, Mendes, and Nock 2013) and even contribute to social mobility (Munch-Jurisic 2020a).  In my new article for the Synthese topical collection "Worry and Wellbeing: Understanding Anxiety", I identify one epistemic problem which has not been properly addressed by this new wave of research; to benefit from a surge of negative affect, agents need to be able to conceptualize and make sense of their internal, physiological states (Berntson, Gianaros, and Tsakiris 2018). Whether agents wi...

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic  (Photo ©Dorte_Jelstrup) Today's post is by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic, who is a postdoc at the Section for Philosophy and Science Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. It has become quite trendy to argue that that it is okay (or maybe even required) to make people feel uncomfortable because of their biases or prejudices. In my new paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Right to Feel Comfortable: Implicit Bias and the Moral Potential of Discomfort , I discuss this new trend by arguing that there are good reasons (from affective neuroscience) for why we should curb our enthusiasm when it comes to the moral potential of discomfort. It certainly can be justified to call people out for their biased behavior and we need not comfort every display of what I call “awareness discomfort”. But in such situations we shouldn’t expect to be changing the receiver’s moral mindset.  This is the first out of two papers on the feelings of disc...