Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Marta Jorba and Pablo Lopez Silva, who have recently guest edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology entitled Mind in Action: Expanding the concept of affordance. Marta Jorba Organisms relate to their environment through action. Human behavior is guided by the perception of certain opportunities for action that specific objects invite. For example, when playing football, one does not only perceive the ball as round, moving, having certain shades of color, etc. One also perceives the ball as kickable . The perception of the ball as kickable is constitutive of our visual experience of the ball. J.J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, captures this phenomenon with the notion of affordances.  Perceiving a ball as kickable is, then, the perception of an opportunity for a certain action, namely, to kick the ball. For Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), perceptual affordances directly relate organisms to their environments through oppor...

Today's post is by Luke Brunning (University of Birmingham). He presents his new book, Does Monogamy Work? (Thames & Hudson 2020). Luke Brunning Monogamy, where someone has one romantic partner at a time, is the dominant form of romantic life in our society, and most others. But why is this the case? Has monogamy always been dominant? Are there realistic alternatives to monogamy? What will the future of romantic life be different? I explore some of the questions in Does Monogamy Work?  a short book for a general audience. People often suppose monogamy is the ‘natural’ result of our biological constitution. Human babies require extensive care, so we might think we are hardwired to form monogamous ‘pair bonds.’ But the evidence for this is not conclusive. Different strategies can aid the survival of our genes, and two may favour nonmonogamous social dynamics: group care and kin support, or the prioritisation of offspring quantity over quality.   Monogamy is better tho...

Today's post is by Carrie Jenkins , Canada Research Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where she is heading up a multi-year interdisciplinary research project on the Metaphysics of Romantic Love . She lives in Vancouver, and she is @carriejenkins on Twitter. Her new book is What Love Is And What It Could Be (2017, Basic Books). The book takes off from a dilemma facing anyone who wants to know what romantic love is. One promising approach treats love as a biological phenomenon: a bundle, perhaps, of evolved neurochemical responses (chapter 1). Another promising approach locates it as a social construct: a creature of norms, institutions, and practices (chapter 2). These approaches appear inconsistent—evolved neurochemistry is not a social construct—yet choosing one to the exclusion of the other feels like discarding half our hard-won wisdom. After a brief detour through some “canonical” (and often deeply problematic) philosophers ...