Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Meghan Griffith  (Davidson College). Meghan Griffith In “ Narrative Capacity and Moral Responsibility ”, I argue that our ability to understand and tell stories plays a role in moral responsibility. One standard approach to moral responsibility involves “reasons-responsiveness.” If we can recognize and react to reasons for acting, then it seems that we are in control of our behavior, and therefore responsible (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998 for an influential account). I think “narrative capacity” enhances our sensitivity to reasons. Narrative capacity is a way of making sense of the world (Velleman 2003, 1) and involves understanding the “meaning-affecting” relation between events (Rosati 2013, 34). In other words, we come to understand and interpret the events in our lives within the context of a story. Each event is not interpreted on its own. Instead, its meaning is “conditioned by” its relation to other events (Schechtman 2007, 162). For example, an event might b...

This post is written by José Luis Bermúdez , who is Professor of Philosophy and Samuel Rhea Gammon Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University . Prof. Bermúdez has published seven single-author books and six edited volumes. His research interests are at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, focusing particularly on self-consciousness and rationality.  In this post, he presents his new edited collection " Self-Control, Decision Theory, and Rationality " published by Cambridge University Press.  Is it rational to exercise self-control? Is it rational to get out of bed to go for a run, even when staying in bed seems preferable at the time? To resist the temptation to have another drink? Or to forego a second slice of cake? From a commonsense perspective, self-control is a way of avoiding weakness of will, and succumbing to weakness of will seems to be a paradigm of irrationality – something that involves a distinctive type of inconsi...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in sessions 2 and 3, emphasising those themes that have already been discussed in the blog. (If interested in session 1 of the conference, I reported on it last week). Session 2: Genetics, Neuroscience and Mental Disorder Neuroscientist  Pamela Sklar  asked "How may genetics change our understanding of mental illness?" and she focused on schizophrenia as a "mystery", that is a disorder that is both inherited and very common. Thousands of DNA alleles are involved in the risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The difficulty in identifying the genetic bases of such disorders made some people think that research in this area was doomed to failure. But both for bipolar disorder and for schizophrenia some regions that increase risk have been discovered s...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in session 1, emphasising those themes that are close to our blog readers' hearts. Session 1: Genetics and Neuroscience of Mind, Self and Behaviour Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux  (pictured above) kicked off the conference with a presentation entitled: "What neuroscience can tell us about mind and behaviour?" He presented the brain as a very complex physico-chemical system about which we know a lot already but not everything. This is because the brain is the product of the integration of different types of evolution occurred in millions of years (evolution of species in terms of variability of genome, ontogenetic development in terms of variability of connections, evolution of thought in terms of variability of spontaneous activity and synaptic efficacies, and soc...

Natalie Gold This week we publish an interview with Natalie Gold , Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, and Principal Investigator of a five-year project on self-control and the person funded by the European Research Council ( TeamControl ). Project team members include: Jurgis Karpus (PhD student), Marcela Herdova (postdoc), and James Thom (postdoc). Natalie held post-doctoral fellowships in the Probability, Philosophy and Modeling group based at the University of Konstanz, and in the Philosophy Department at Duke University. Before joining King’s College London, she was a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in rationality, decision theory, moral psychology, experimental philosophy and collective intentions. LB : The aim of your project is to explain self-control, defined as the capacity to resist a temptation in order to pursue a long-term goal. How did you become interested in self-control? What problems do you think a ...