Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Phil Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett . It is a reply to the post we published on Tuesday on Metaethics and Mental Time Travel . In Metaethics and Mental Time Travel , Fileva and Tresan (F&T) fairly and accurately reconstructed (improved?) and intricately dissected our paper. We cannot follow every twist and turn in a short blog post so concentrate on the key issue. They partially agree with us that semantic knowledge detached from diachronic self-awareness is insufficient for moral agency but disagree (i) whether that awareness needs to be "richly experiential" and (ii) the nature of diachronic deficits in the cases we discuss (see their discussion of these cases which is deeper than ours). As they say, Representations with past- or future-oriented, autobiographical content, crucially, awareness of one’s past actions or future options as consistent or inconsistent with one’s principles do seem necessary : but MTT involves experiential repres...

We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid fi...

Luca Malatesti and Filip Čeč collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law ( CEASCRO ), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (Grant HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia). Luca is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry. Filip is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter " Psychopathy, Identification and Mental Time Travel ", that is contained in the collection edited by Filip Grgić and Davor Pećnjak,  Free Will & Action . Psychopaths are characterised by a callous, manipulative a...

In this post Kourken Michaelian and Chloe Wall report from the workshop New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory. Funded by a generous grant from the University of Otago 's Division of Humanities, researchers from Australasia and Europe gathered in Dunedin, New Zealand on 25-26 October 2016 for a workshop on New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory . The workshop, organized by Kourken Michaelian, was the second of two events linked to a planned book—edited by Michaelian, Dorothea Debus , and Denis Perrin —featuring papers describing new lines of research in this burgeoning field; the first was held at the University of Grenoble earlier in 2016 as part of a broader interdisciplinary event. The two days of the workshop included eight talks. On the first day, Kourken Michaelian’s “Confabulating, misremembering, relearning: The simulation theory of memory and unsuccessful remembering” argued against taxonomies of memory errors that are based on the causal theory of m...

In this blog post, Kourken Michelian introduces his new book Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past . I'm a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Otago. Before moving to New Zealand last year, I worked for several years at Bilkent University in Turkey and at the Institut Jean-Nicod in France. My work is mostly on memory. Everyone -- including philosophers -- knows that memory doesn't work like a tape recorder, but philosophers have a way of forgetting this fact. When working on other topics, they often assume that it's an acceptable idealization to treat memory as if it did work that way. If they then happen to read research by psychologists or others that reminds them that remembering really doesn't work like a tape recorder -- that it's a thoroughly reconstructive process, rather than simple reproductive one -- they react with surprise. If remembering isn't a reproductive process, then what'...

This post is by  Dorothea Debus  (pictured below), who is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. Her  research is on topics in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology.  At present, I am thinking about our ability to 'engage in future-directed mental time travel', that is, our ability to imagine future events. More specifically, I am interested in cases in which we imagine future events in a vivid, experiential way. For example, try to imagine what you are going to do this coming Sunday. Chances are that when you really try to do this, you will have some vivid imaginary experiences of the things you might hope to do, and the situations you might hope to encounter.  Clearly, such experiential, or 'sensory', imaginations of future events have a characteristic temporal orientation - that is, they are directed towards the future , rather than the past or the present. In an attempt to account for this feature, I show that the context in which r...

We are posting this on behalf of Dorothea Debus , Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York.   Dorothea Debus Hello! My name is Dorothea Debus, and my research is on topics in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology. I've recently written a paper on a new paradigm in experimental psychology, the paradigm of 'mental time travel', and Lisa has asked me to write a piece for this blog on my work on that topic. 'Mental Time Travel' is a comparatively new research paradigm in experimental psychology and the neurosciences. Relevant empirical work starts from the observation that there might be important similarities between, and maybe even a shared neuro­physiologial basis for, our engaging with the past in memory, and our engaging with the future in foresight. Both ways of relating to times other than the present are then, in an attempt to emphasize relevant similarities, referred to as cases of 'mental time travel'.