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This paper discusses the concept of social affordances in relation to social theory. Our point of departure is the growing literature which posits, in one way or another, that affordances may be seen as social, or cultural or similar. Across the literature on social affordances, it is thus emphasized how perception is shaped within human econiches, how it is fundamentally social, historical, and cultural, but limited direct engagement with decades of scholarship within the social sciences on many of these same topics. This paper thus discusses three key themes for theories of social affordances, exploring sociological perspectives on meaning, place and power, arguing that there may be a difficult, yet fruitful, potential for not just an ecological psychology, but an ecological social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some situations appear to make moral demands on us – they call for a certain response. How can we account for such paradigmatic moral experiences? And what normative properties or relations are involved? This paper argues that we can account for such moral experiences in terms of moral affordances, where moral affordances are opportunities for fitting action. The paper demonstrates that the concept of affordances helps to generate new insight in moral inquiry, especially in relation to the moral significance of fittingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society is a composite of interacting people and groups. These groups play a significant role in maintaining social status, establishing group identity and social identity, and enforcing norms. As such, groups are essential for understanding human behavior. Nevertheless, the study of groups in everyday group life yields many diverse and sometimes contradicting theories of group behavior, and researchers tend to agree that we have yet to understand the emergence of groups out of aggregates of individuals. The current paper aims to shed new light on the convoluted interrelation between groups and individuals by focusing on individuals’ social identities and group categorization. It does so by exploring the dynamic nature of the self and its implications on identity and group membership, and introducing a framework recognizing the fluidity of groups and group categorization. Incorporating historical insights with contemporary theories, this paper argues for a flexible understanding of group dynamics that surpasses rigid in-group and out-group classifications, proposing instead that group affiliations exist along a continuum that reflects the ever-changing social landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue for an often-neglected solution to the conceivability argument: the reconciliatory response. Its advocates state that, even if zombies are metaphysically possible, it does not follow that all versions of physicalism are false. To make the reconciliatory response, we must construct a theory that counts as a version of physicalism (because it makes higher-level facts count as physical) but also allows for the metaphysical possibility of zombies. Call any physicalist theory that can make the reconciliatory response type-R physicalism. In this paper, I discuss one version of type-R physicalism: stochastic ground physicalism (SGP). First, I argue that type-R physicalism, construed as SGP, offers physicalists an attractive rationalist package that no other version of physicalism can provide. Second, I address two concerns that have been underexplored in the literature. First, the charge that SGP is incoherent because it fails to provide metaphysical explanations. Second, the charge that type-R physicalism is not a genuine form of physicalism because the supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical is a necessary condition for any formulation of physicalism. I argue that both concerns are ill-founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective intentional actions are intentional actions of more than one individual. These actions come in many forms. Some are pursued spontaneously by strangers in face-to-face situations, others are performed by highly coordinated groups of individuals that know each other very well, others are actions in which the participating individuals, widely spread in space and time, act in organized ways. Current accounts of collective intentional action have privileged one or other kind of case, leaving out the study of other cases. This paper seeks to remedy this situation by offering a methodological framework that allows to study, both conceptually and empirically, all the variety of cases of collective intentional actions. It first presents the standard accounts of collective intentional action and argues that they fail in capturing all the cases that arguably count as cases of this kind. It then puts forward a multidimensional and paradigmatic (MAP) methodology for the study of collective intentional actions. It is shown how this methodology offers a unified, overarching, characterization of collective intentional actions. In conclusion, the paper compares the different methodologies and shows how the MAP methodology can inform the interdisciplinary study of collective intentional action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resurgence of interest in psychedelic substances for psychiatric treatment has sparked both excitement and scepticism within the scientific community. This paper addresses the moralisation and hype surrounding psychedelic therapies. Through a systematic review of the literature and a detailed case study, we illustrate that the therapeutic effect of psychedelics is not solely pharmacological but is instead facilitated by their ability to enhance psychotherapy. The paper explores the historical context of psychedelics in psychiatry, their mechanism of action, and evidence of their efficacy in treating depression. We highlight the necessity of integrating psychedelics with psychotherapeutic interventions and emphasise the importance of methodological rigour and ethical standards in psychedelic research and practice. By presenting an informed understanding of psychedelic treatments, we advocate for their consideration as legitimate alternatives alongside traditional therapies, offering a potential paradigm shift in psychiatric care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to place the general thesis for a species-unique “shared” or “we” intentionality, against the theoretical background of the material engagement approach. We will argue that the human ability to enact and share intentions rests upon a relational and participatory foundation of situated activity where intentional transactions between humans as well as between humans and things (in the broadest sense of material environment) are inseparable from the situational affordances of their engagement. Based on that, the paper advocates for an ecological-enactive account of shared intentionality which understands material engagement as central to the evolution and development of human social cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed that where consciousness is present, it is a single stream. This notion is bolstered by functions attributed to consciousness, particularly providing multi-faceted experience of a perceptual scene and contributing to the production of coherent behavior, which supposedly require consciousness to be unitary. It is believed that were the unitary structure of consciousness to break down, such that multiple streams of consciousness are present, these functions would be compromised. The split-brain syndrome is widely regarded as evidence for this claim. However, the split-brain syndrome is an atypical structure of human consciousness. As such, conclusions based on the split-brain syndrome regarding the structure and functions of consciousness may be limited in generalizability. There may be cases where multiple consciousness is neither maladaptive nor anomalous but is the naturally evolved configuration, and thus may not compromise the capacity of consciousness to subserve multi-faceted experience and coherent behavior. This paper speculates on the different forms multiple consciousness may take, and demonstrates how they may be able to implement the aforementioned functions of consciousness. In doing so, the paper demonstrates that the commitment a unitary model of consciousness may be due more to anatomical constraints than functional ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a remarkable gap in the academic literature when it comes to group navigation, and procedural metacognition in group navigation is an important but virtually unexplored topic. The present paper aims to fill this gap by providing an account of how metacognitive feelings evaluate and regulate group navigational processes. The paper reviews animal studies and ethnographic work to elucidate three exiting processes in human group navigation: many-wrongs, leadership and emergent sensing. This is followed by an analysis of the role of procedural metacognition in the navigational processes involved in each of these three processes. This analysis shows that procedural metacognition serves to regulate and evaluate group navigation in a flexible, process-specific way. When performance issues arise during group navigation, the emergence of negative affective states makes the navigational process conspicuous, prompting a modulation of said process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats of phenomenal consciousness and its relation to an organism's capacity to be hedonically perturbed by its environment. This paper offers an empirically informed, phenomenologically descriptive conceptual analysis of subjective character in terms of an organism's ability to feel with its body. The subjective character of phenomenal consciousness is at least partially constituted by embodied affect, that is, by our ability to feel what is happening on and inside our living bodies. It is in virtue of our being able to feel with our bodies that our experiences disclose the world as seeming a certain way for us. I call this the "affectively embodied perspectival view" of subjective character (AEP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive states of affairs to be located in the future not the past, and for negative states of affairs to be located in the past not the future. Three explanations for future-bias have been posited: the temporal metaphysics explanation, the practical irrelevance explanation, and the three mechanisms explanation. Understanding what explains future-bias is important not only for better understanding the phenomenon itself, but also because many philosophers think that which explanation is the correct one has implications for our evaluation of the normative status of future-bias. In this paper we focus on the connection between future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry. The latter refers to the fact that people tend to assign more value to a state of affairs when it is located in the future, as opposed to being equidistant in the past. All three candidate explanations offered for future-bias proceed by explaining the temporal value asymmetry, and then supposing that future-bias is simply a manifestation of that asymmetry. Recently, however, it has been argued that the conditions under which people display the temporal value asymmetry and future-bias are different, and that this is reason to doubt that the latter is a manifestation of the former. In this paper we empirically test one response to this argument against the manifestation thesis – the simulation response – according to which once we control for the degree to which people can simulate the object of their preference, we find that people display future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry in the same conditions. We find no evidence in favor of the simulation response. Moreover, our results support some previous research that suggests that the temporal value asymmetry is less robust than previously thought, and this in itself casts doubt on the idea that future bias is just a manifestation of this asymmetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the relevance of silence in several psychopathologies, first-person perspectives on silence have been largely neglected in the phenomenological scholarship on those conditions. This paper proposes a phenomenological framework for addressing this neglect and demonstrates its usefulness through a case study of empty silence, an experience which can be found in many first-person accounts of depression. The paper begins by surveying research on silence in depression in mental health research and phenomenological psychopathology. Drawing on the thought of Merleau-Ponty, it then outlines a phenomenological framework for explicating the structure of silence experiences in psychopathology. Finally, it applies this framework to articulate the experiential structure and implications of empty silence, with a particular emphasis on the bodily doubt that can flow from repeated experiences of empty silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of “I”, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (“IEM”); first-personal claims are IEM in the use “as subject”, but not in the other use. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are not strictly speaking IEM; Gareth Evans disputed this. Similar issues have been debated regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts based on first-personal awareness, in the light of claims of “thought insertion” in schizophrenic patients. The paper aims to defend a Shoemaker-like line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. Methodologically, the paper argues that to properly address these issues the all-inclusive term “thought” should be avoided, and specific types of thoughts countenanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso argue that humans are never morally responsible for their actions and take that thesis as a starting point for a project whose ultimate goal is the reform of responsibility practices, which include expressions of praise, blame, and the institution of legal punishment. This paper shares the skeptical concern that current responsibility practices can be suboptimal and in need of change, but argues that a non-skeptical pursuit of those changes is viable and more promising. The main lines of the argument are developed by assessing the prospects of implementing one of the changes favored within the skeptical project (namely, the reduction of punishment severity) in light of how human moral psychology works. An original vignette experiment (N = 180; participants from Facebook groups related to Brazilian universities) asked participants to recommend sentences for a fictitious criminal after considering alternatives to regular punishment that varied in their effectiveness to prevent reoffending. The results suggest that people can become less punitive even if they continue to believe in moral responsibility and free will. The paper further argues that reforming responsibility practices is more likely to occur without the endorsement of skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ethical requirements and features that characterize the professional life of successful contemporary classical orchestras, with particular focus on the leadership style of their conductors. As we will show, the traditional authoritarian approach, marked by the conductor’s commanding charisma and strict demand for obedience from orchestra members, has evolved today into a more ethically-based transformational style of leadership. This new approach is rooted in principles of respect, voluntary compliance, and trust. The present paper delves into the interpersonal dynamics within contemporary orchestras, focusing specifically on the character traits required to establish trust and collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra members, as well as among the orchestra members themselves. In particular, drawing from recent research in psychology, we underscore the significance of deference, empathy, and shared commitment toward the common goal of excellence in performance. We conclude that the ethics-centered style of leadership adopted by most contemporary conductors may extend beyond the realm of music, offering insights applicable to leaders in various other fields. By fostering deep connections, shared purpose, and collaboration, this approach has the potential to enhance organizational performance and outcomes in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a view on bodily IEM by describing, first, the structure that grounds need to have in order to yield IEM judgments, and then arguing that somatosensation has this structure. I make my case by presenting an analysis of the sense of bodily ownership. According to this analysis, there is a substantive explanatory relationship between bodily self-consciousness and psychological self-consciousness. I argue that one central virtue of this approach to bodily self-consciousness is that, not only does it help explain bodily IEM, but it also sheds some light on the fact that both psychological and bodily self-ascriptions are subject to analysis in IEM terms, despite their differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that a coherent strong Phenomenal Intentionality Theory (sPIT) needs to adopt the concept of unconscious phenomenality. sPIT is based on the thesis that phenomenal properties constitute intentional episodes. But if “constitutive” means that without these phenomenal properties, intentional episodes break down, then this poses a serious problem for so-called unconscious intentional occurrent episodes. The dilemma is that sPIT either preserves unconscious intentional states, but then must reject constitutiveness, or conversely, sPIT accepts constitutiveness but must acknowledge unconscious phenomenality. It is argued that the second option – i.e. accepting unconscious phenomenality – offers an interesting way to preserve sPIT. This counterintuitive solution is labeled a “dual model” here. Accepting the dual model not only as a conceptual possibility but as a factual case – supported by conceptual and empirical arguments – could be a plausible proposal for solving the dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to deepen into a theoretical account on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordative space and how this perspective can be used to reconceptualize various human cognitive developmental trajectories and conditions. In the course of this theoretical work, we want to contribute in rethinking developmental trajectories based on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordances from an embodied perspective. Behavioral settings emerge from joint actions in conjunction with the affordances available. These affordances will have multiple levels and kinds of meanings for the organism which is why we need to distinguish between the general affordances for a form of life and the particular affordances for particular agents that are generated through sensorimotor interactions. We propose to apply this theoretical frame in different developmental conditions, taking as a leading example the Autistic Spectrum, extending it to other lived experiences of other groups marginalized by "normative behavioral settings" – and the ensuing ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion of affordance perception focuses almost exclusively on affordances for non-mental actions like climbing, walking and eating. This paper asks whether we might also perceive affordances for a specific class of mental action: acts of imagination. We first explore how the environment can present opportunities for imaginative action. We then combine phenomenological and theoretical considerations to argue that we do indeed perceive affordances for imaginative action. Putting this claim to work, we apply the concept of imaginative affordances to the topics of imaginative skill and imaginative tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From an architectural perspective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamic relations between individuals and the environments using the concept of affordance. In three different cases of architectural research, the concept of affordance is used as an analytical tool – yet demonstrating different scopes and outcomes. A post-occupancy evaluation of an office space in transformation; a lighting assessment and intervention in low vision rehabilitation situated in private home environments; and an urban event at an architecture festival involving the intervention of a sound- and scentscape. The three cases show that the concept of affordance can embrace and operationalize the human perception of the environment, pointing at descriptive, prescriptive, and exploratory possibilities in relation to architectural design and research. The concept of affordance enables rich descriptions and explorations of qualities of architecture, related to multisensorial, emotional, and social interactional aspects of humans and their environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is two-fold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said "mental acts" requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of self-diagnosing, amplified by the spread of psychiatric knowledge through social media, has grown rapidly. Yet, the motivations behind this trend, and, critically, its psychological repercussions remain poorly understood. Self-ascribing a psychiatric label always occurs within a broader narrative context, with narratives serving as essential interpretive tools for understanding oneself and others.In this paper, we identify four principal motivators for people pursuing self-diagnosis, pertaining to 1. waiting time and cost of mental health resources, 2. recognition, 3. identity formation, and 4. destigmatization. We compare these motivators against the backdrops of psychiatric narratives, including DSM-based (operationalism), bio-medical, and Neurodiversity narratives, to evaluate the psychological implications of self-ascriptions. We show that while self-ascription aligns with many motivations, it also carries the risk of essentialism across all analyzed narratives, which can over-simplify and sometimes misrepresent people’s attempts to find meaning through psychiatric labels. Essentialism makes narratives less comprehensive, responsive, and resourceful.We contend that self-ascriptions are not inherently problematic; instead, they show the need for greater focus and understanding in psychiatric practices and the importance of incorporating people’s experiences and perspectives in clinical settings. However, both the narratives and the social climate from which they emerge may need adjustments to make self-ascriptions meaningful, comprehensive, and resourceful tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autistic people often camouflage, i.e. they adopt certain behaviors in order to fit in in neurotypical environments. Autobiographical accounts suggest that autistic trans people experience camouflaging in a unique, more complex and often heightened way than cis autistic people, and this has not been studied. They have autistic traits to mask, as well as gendered traits, in a hostile neuronormative and cisnormative world. This intersection of experience is worthy of exploration, not least because this group of people are typically misunderstood and silenced, as well as being particularly at risk of the mental distress that can come from camouflaging. In this paper I discuss autistic trans people’s accounts of camouflaging and begin a preliminary phenomenological analysis. I draw primarily from Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of “doubling”, whereby (cis) women experience being both oneself and the image of oneself, under patriarchal objectification. One can argue that autistic people are similarly “doubled” when camouflaging, experiencing their neurodivergent selves as well as their more neurotypical presentation. Going beyond de Beauvoir, it can be further argued that many trans people experience “tripling” and therefore that trans autistic people experience being at least “quadrupled” if not “quintupled”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversational agents (CA) are thought to be promising for psychotherapy because they give the impression of being able to engage in conversations with human users. However, given the high risk for therapy patients who are already in a vulnerable situation, there is a need to investigate the extent to which CA are able to contribute to therapy goals and to discuss CA’s limitations, especially in complex cases. In this paper, we understand psychotherapy as a way of dealing with existential situations and position CAs in the context of the therapeutic experience of patients. This experience is determined by the patient’s unique personal context and specific therapy goals. We suggest that psychotherapy is a fundamentally dialogical activity, because it crucially involves work on the self and one’s self-narrative. This brings us to our central question: is it possible for CAs to engage in a productive therapeutic dialogue, given their limitations as epistemic agents? We will discuss several of those limitations, show how these undermine the possibility of engaging in a therapeutic dialogue, and illustrate those limitations through discussions of the cases of grief and abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive scientists and neuroscientists typically understand the brain as a complex communication/information-processing system. A limitation of this framework is that it requires cognitive systems to have prior knowledge about their environment to successfully perform some of their basic functions, such as perceiving. It is unclear how the source of such knowledge can be explained from within this framework. Drawing on Dennett (1981), we refer to this as the loans of intelligence problem. Recent advances in machine learning have resulted in the development of a family of algorithms, including the class known as autoencoders, that seem to provide a way for the information-processing framework to avoid this problem: cognitive systems do not require loans of intelligence, but instead acquire the knowledge necessary for perception through a process of unsupervised learning. This paper argues that although autoencoders do avoid the loans of intelligence problem, how they do so should not be understood from within the information-processing framework. Instead, their success should be interpreted as a proof of concept of how neural networks can attune to Gibsonian information. We thus propose that autoencoders belong to a class of algorithms for modeling the brain that have recently been dubbed direct fit algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many agents commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important focus in discussions of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) is on what explains putative cases of it, and correspondingly, on what significance its presence should be taken to have. This focus is important for the literature: the interest of the phenomenon naturally depends on why it is supposed to be significant when it arises. This paper looks to the claimed IEM of memory-based judgments as a case study to advocate for a pluralist account of explanations of IEM. I argue that Evans was right that Shoemakerian q-memories fail to undermine the supposed IEM of memory-based first personal judgments, but that he was wrong about why. In fact, cases of q-memory reveal a surprising referential underdetermination in first person thought, which subvenes an underdetermination of the explanation of IEM for memory-based judgments. Given this plurality of explanations active in just a single case study, we should be cautious about claims to IEM having just one source of significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English continues to rise as the lingua franca of academic philosophy. Philosophers from all types of linguistic backgrounds use it to communicate with each other across the globe. In this paper, we identify how the rise of English leads to linguistic injustices. We argue that these injustices are similar in an important regard: they are all instances of distributive epistemic injustice. We then present six proposals for addressing unjust linguistic discrimination and evaluate them on how well they can mitigate the specific types of distributive epistemic injustice that we identify. We accept that there is much more to be said. But we hope that what we say will motivate other philosophers to take these types of injustices more seriously and encourage them to make academic philosophy a more inclusive global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex nature of social biases, arguing for a functional framework that recognizes their unity and diversity. The functional approach posits that all biases share a common functional role in overcoming underdetermination. This framework, I argue, provides a comprehensive understanding of how all psychological biases, including social biases, are unified. I then turn to the question of disunity, demonstrating how psychological social biases differ systematically in the mental states and processes that constitute them. These differences indicate that biases at various levels of the cognitive architecture require distinct treatment along at least two dimensions: epistemic evaluation and mitigation strategies. By examining social biases through this dual lens of unity and diversity, we can more effectively identify when and how to intervene on problematic biases. Ultimately, this approach provides a nuanced understanding of the nature of social bias, offering practical guidance for addressing existing biases and proactively managing emerging biases in both human and artificial minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic discrimination is a complex phenomenon. How should it be investigated? Evidential pool is of key importance. In this paper, we present specific conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of linguistic discrimination, with a focus on linguistic discrimination resulting from implicit attitudes and the steadily growing research on biases and structural approaches to social injustice. We conclude by proposing that a productive and comprehensive way to investigate linguistic discrimination rooted in implicit attitudes should seek to incorporate first-person perspectives and testimonies from the linguistically harmed individuals, and discuss some arguments in support of this view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Niche construction theory highlights the active role of organisms in modifying their environment. A subset of these modifications is the developmental niche, which concerns ecological, epistemic, social and symbolic legacies inherited by organisms as resources that scaffold their developmental processes. Since in this theory development is a situated process that takes place in a culturally structured environment, we may reasonably ask if implicit cultural biases may, in some cases, be responsible for maladaptive developmental niches. In this paper we wish to argue for an affirmative answer. In order to do so, we first propose to conceptualize implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits, and then proceed to show that these habits are at least partially responsible for maladaptive developmental niches of children with Down syndrome and autism. With this framework we thus hope to bring together two fields of research that haven't been explicitly connected: implicit bias and niche construction theory. Linking these two theories may bring benefits both to implicit bias researchers, who can extend this concept to characterize other sets of processes as biased, as well as to niche construction theorists, who will have a useful theoretical tool to diagnose maladaptive features of niches brought about by sociocultural biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthology Collective Action, Philosophy and Law brings together two key strands of philosophical inquiry: social ontology and jurisprudence. Most of the papers use collective agency as a starting point to get a better grasp on collective entities and activities in the legal domain, but others reverse the approach and use legal examples to refine theories of collective agency. The introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on collective agency, emphasizing issues in jurisprudence and legal practices where collective agency plays a central role. It also offers a detailed overview of the anthology’s structure and contents. With thirteen papers organized into four parts, the anthology covers a broad spectrum of topics. While each paper deserves in-depth exploration, this review will provide a brief summary of all the papers, followed by concise discussions of the contributions of Sara Rachel Chant and Bill Wringe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Delusions are usually depicted in one of two contrasting ways. They are either characterized as harmful and dysfunctional beliefs or as fostering engagement with the environment and sometimes even psychological wellbeing in the face of psychological or biological difficulties – something which, according to some accounts, would make them biologically adaptive. It is this “adaptive hypothesis” that I focus on in this paper, by empirically investigating the adaptiveness of delusions in a sample of people suffering from OCD. The paper shows that delusions in OCD entertain complex and heterogeneous relationships with psychological wellbeing and engagement with the environment, highlighting some future directions that clinical and philosophical research on the topic should take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that thinking in terms of process metaphysics and seeing the mind and mental disorders as processual in nature allows for a more complete understanding of mental disorders than is allowed by non-processual frameworks, while it also allows us to incorporate what we currently know about them. In addition, it can address problems in psychiatry that arise when we ask the wrong kinds of questions that naturally arise within a non-processual metaphysical framework. In this paper I address the problems of reductionism, essentialism and dualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most discussed puzzle about weakness of will (WoW) is how it is possible: how can a person freely and intentionally perform actions that she judges she ought not perform, or that she has resolved not to perform? In this paper, we are concerned with a much less discussed puzzle about WoW—how is overcoming it possible? We explain some of the ways in which previously weak-willed agents manage to overcome their weakness. Some of these are relatively straightforward—as agents learn of the real costs of weakness, or as those costs mount dramatically, they can become strongly motivated to do what they already judged best. But other cases are more difficult to explain: sometimes, agents with a long history of forming and then weakly abandoning resolutions manage to stick to their guns. We argue that these cases can be explained by combining George Ainslie's model of agents as multiple preference orderings competing in game theoretic interactions along with the insights of evolutionary game theory. This can explain the puzzling cases where agents suddenly adopt successful strategies for avoiding weak-willed behavior, especially where agents gain no new information about themselves or the consequences of their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental scaffolding refers to the ways in which agents make use of features of the environment to augment and enhance their cognitive behavior. Recent discussion on the notion of affective scaffolding extends this perspective to investigate how agents’ affective states are supported by environmental scaffolds. This paper builds on such discussion by exploring how elements of nature, such as forests, oceans, and gardens, function as affective scaffolds. Empirical research demonstrates that the presence of natural elements has a positive impact on health and wellbeing, as well as a modulatory effect on stress response mechanisms. I argue that there are specific characteristics to these types of scaffolds which can be surveyed to shed philosophical light on this research. I suggest that natural environments scaffold our affective lives by enabling, enhancing, and promoting a specific bodily affective profile characterized by restorativeness and immersion attentiveness. An analysis of this scaffolding can aid in understanding the relationship between nature and affect, in turn identifying a new application for the scaffolded mind framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychedelics have shown promise as a treatment for depression. Although there is some debate, a popular view is that psychedelics produce their benefits in an experience-dependent manner. This is the view that a depressed person gets better, inter alia, because of the experience she has had on psychedelics. Among the various questions that treatment for depression with psychedelics raise, one of the most important is: By what mechanism do these drugs reduce symptoms? If the experience-dependent view is correct, the answer, at least on the personal level of explanation, lies in the phenomenology. In this paper, borrowing mainly from Ratcliffe’s account of depression, I offer such an answer. I argue that psychedelic experiences involve a surge of existential feelings, which can revise the depressed person’s diminished sense of possibility and restore their ability to be affected by the world. I explain how this occurs via a change in the sense of reality linked to the subjective effects of psychedelics. This, I suggest, is the personal level mechanism or process behind psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-narration, many philosophers assume, makes important contributions to our mental lives. Two views on self-narration can be distinguished. On the internalistic view, self-narration unfolds in the secluded mind and does not require overt communication. On the situated view, self-narration often depends on the conversational interaction with an interlocutor. The situated view has many advantages over its internalistic rival, including theoretical consistency and empirical plausibility. Yet, research on situated conversational self-narration has been shaped by a harmony bias, which consists in the tacit assumption that interlocutors contribute to self-narration in ways that are beneficial and supportive, rather than malicious and harmful. This paper seeks to mitigate the harmony bias by considering the phenomenon of gaslighting, which is characterized by an interlocutor’s erosion of someone’s sense of epistemic and moral competence. In cases of narrative gaslighting, this erosion proceeds by maliciously interfering with the self-narrator’s mnemonic, interpretational, and conceptual abilities. Bringing together research on situated self-narration and gaslighting for the first time, it will be argued that the emerging account of narrative gaslighting has important implications for both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elizabeth Barnes’ new book, Health Problems, seeks to show that health is philosophically distinctive and that no account of “health” can explain its biological, normative, political and phenomenological significance. Barnes argues that we should engage in the project of understanding this concept, but she is skeptical about its feasibility. Her skepticism is nevertheless ameliorative: it seeks to improve our understanding of this concept while accepting that, depending on the context and our purposes, its meaning will shift. In this paper, I examine and respond to two claims that Barnes defends in her book. The first concerns her skepticism toward the possibility of developing an explanatory and extensionally adequate account of health. To assess whether her skepticism is justified, I examine the objections that she raises against existing theories of health and disease. I argue that, while her objections are compelling, they do not justify her skeptical stance. The second concerns the relationship between health and well-being. Barnes argues against two views: that health is constitutive of well-being and that health contributes to well-being. In response to her concerns, I show that – on a richer understanding of “well-being” – these views can accommodate most of her concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marek Pokropski's "Mechanisms and Consciousness Integrating Phenomenology with Cognitive Science" reopens the question about the possibility of naturalization of phenomenology. The author adopts the position of nonreductive mechanistic integration, which, he claims, has offered new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. In this paper, I outline the context of the discussions on the relationship between phenomenology and cognitive sciences, and (§2) discuss the approach proposed by Pokropski, pointing out the main arguments and the most important research achievements. Then I focus on some difficulties of this position. The first of these I associate with a procedure which I call a dismemberment of phenomenology (§3). The second (§4) concerns the concept of constraint, which is key to Pokropski's analyzes, and some consequences of its application and alternative reading. Finally, in §5 I draw attention to two difficulties. The first is whether it is possible to read phenomenology in terms of functional analysis; the second is related to the doubt whether psychological or phenomenological functional explanations can be treated as mechanistic (which is a strong premise of Pokropski's argument). In Conclusion I make an overall assessment of the presented approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades are marked by the upswing of the use of the term "normativity" not only in philosophical discussions, but increasingly also within reports of empirical scientists. This may invoke the question how far these developments overlap and in how far they go past each other. A significant overlap might lead to an interesting coalescence of the two approaches to norms, which may provide for a "naturalization" of some philosophical speculations about normativity, putting them on a firmer foundation, while offering the empirical scientists some new impulses for directing their research. In this paper I give an overview of some recent empirical results concerning human normativity and I point out a certain philosophical tradition, rooted especially in the works of Wittgenstein, Sellars and Brandom, which treats normativity so that it becomes more or less compatible with these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, psychologists have developed indirect measurement procedures to predict suicidal behavior. A prominent example is the Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (DS-IAT). In this paper, I argue that there is something special about the DS-IAT which distinguishes it from different IAT measures. I argue that the DS-IAT does not measure weak or strong associations between the implicit self-concept and the abstract concept of death. In contrast, assuming a goal-system approach, I suggest that sorting death-related to self-related words takes effort because death-related words trigger avoidance-impulses, which suicide ideation weakens. The DS-IAT taps into weakened automatic responses from the self-preservation system. Additionally, the suggested cognitive structure, illuminated with the selfish-goal theory, explains predictable suicidal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the simulation theory of memory, to remember is to imagine an event from the personal past. McCarroll has recently argued that, because it implies not only that a genuine memory need not be caused by the rememberer's experience of the remembered event but also that the rememberer need not even have experienced that event, simulationism is unable, first, to explain infantile amnesia (the inability to remember events that occurred in one's early childhood) and, second, to rule out certain "impossible" memories (namely, memories of events that occurred before one was born). Responding to McCarroll, this paper argues that simulationism is in fact able to explain infantile amnesia but concedes that it is unable to rule out pre-birth memories. It goes on to argue, however, that, rather than leading us to reject the theory, this should lead us to endorse a radicalized simulationism on which to remember is simply to imagine an event from the past, regardless of whether that event belongs to the personal past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative inferentialism, an utterance has the content that it has in virtue of its normative status, that is, in virtue of the set of commitments and entitlements that the speaker undertakes by producing this utterance. This normative status is determined by the normative attitudes shared by members of the utterer's linguistic community. I propose here an account of such normative attitudes based on the ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. I explain how social normativity can be understood in that framework as the way in which members of a group shape their social niche to make it more predictable. Finally, I apply this account of social normativity to basic communicative practices, thereby explaining how social normative expectations can emerge to regulate these communicative practices, eventually leading to the institution of the sort of normative statuses constitutive of linguistic content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to L. A. Paul, the subjective value of an outcome is normally assessed by running a cognitive model of what it would be like if that outcome were to occur. However, cognitive models, along with the expectations in which they result, are unreliable for application to transformative experiences because we cannot know what it would be like for an outcome to occur if we have never experienced it before. This paper argues that despite their unreliability, expectations are still important in the case of chosen and unchosen transformative experiences because expectations about an outcome can systematically influence the very experience of that outcome. More precisely, empirical research shows that affective experiences tend to assimilate to affective expectations. In turn, more positive affective experiences lead, ceteris paribus, to higher subjective value. Therefore, rational agents confronting transformative outcomes should form or cultivate positive/optimistic affective expectations since, all else being equal, that maximizes subjective value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can a minority agent, Jamal, discriminate against a majority agent, Dave, conceptually speaking? Taking an experimental-philosophical approach, this article addresses the conceptual puzzle by investigating both the ordinary usage of discrimination and whether the academic literature reflects the folk concept. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of discrimination as it is used across the discrimination research field. The analysis produces two novel definitions of discrimination: a symmetric conception, which implies multi-directionality, and an asymmetric conception, which implies uni-directionality. Then, I empirically investigate the US lay concept of discrimination (N = 1,487). The highlight of the paper is an experiment on whether US ordinary usage is symmetric or asymmetric (Study 1), tested across four contexts and three traits (Hiring: Gender, Club: Sexuality, Dating: Race, Parental: Gender). In addition, I study which groups are most often discriminated against, according to respondents, to record potential sensitivity to the frequency of discrimination (Study 2). Overall, the results show that ordinary usage in the US is symmetric across different contexts and traits, and that paradigmatic minority groups are most often discriminated against. So, according to respondents, Jamal can discriminate against Dave, although Jamal is more often discriminated against than Dave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theory of joint attention as based on, and explicable in terms of, the exercise of a minimal kind of perceptual joint know-how. On the action-based view I shall be developing, joint forms of perception are object-involving processes constituted by perceivers’ skillfully co-ordinated motor movements in social space. Joint experience can then be understood as presenting the process to the involved perceivers and joint attention as perceivers’ focus on the object of this process. This theory reconciles at least some primitivist and reductionist intuitions about joint attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionary psychiatry suggests that mental disorders can be explained in evolutionary terms (a) as failures of psychological mechanisms to produce the adaptive effects for which they were naturally selected, (b) as mismatches between naturally selected psychological mechanisms and contemporary environmental pressures, or (c) as naturally selected psychological mechanisms whose effects continue to be adaptive. In this paper, I present a philosophical critique of evolutionary psychiatry that draws on Subrena Smith’s matching problem for evolutionary psychology. For evolutionary psychiatry hypotheses to be empirically supported, proponents of evolutionary psychiatry must demonstrate (1) that the contemporary psychological mechanisms involved in mental disorders resemble the psychological mechanisms of our evolutionary ancestors, (2) that the contemporary psychological mechanisms are phylogenetically descended from the ancestral psychological mechanisms, and (3) that the ancestral psychological mechanisms were naturally selected because their effects had adaptive benefits. However, for many mental disorders, evolutionary psychiatry lacks the methodological resources to demonstrate these conditions. Therefore, many evolutionary psychiatry hypotheses are empirically untestable and remain indefinitely underdetermined by data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluativists hold that psychiatric disorders have a factual and evaluative dimension and recognize that psychiatric patients have an active role in shaping their symptoms, influencing the development of their disorders, and the outcome of psychiatric therapy. This is reflected in person-centered approaches that explicitly consider the role of values in psychiatric conceptualization, classification, and decision-making. In this respect, in light of the recent partnership between Fulford’s value-based practice (VBP), and Stanghellini’s phenomenological-hermeneutic-dynamical (P.H.D) psychotherapy method, this paper presents a comparative analysis of two person-centered approaches to psychiatric care currently discussed within the literature. I claim that while these approaches share some core ideas, they also present important divergences concerning their axiological underpinnings, which could potentially compromise their partnership. In particular, by exploring their theoretical, practical, and ethical dimensions, I show that these models have different conceptions of what values are, which, in turn, affect their understanding of how values relate to the person and how clinicians can identify them. Finally, I argue that although Fulford’s and Stanghellini’s approaches are prima facie compatible and complementary, developing a “combined analytic-plus-phenomenological form of values-based practice” should address fundamental conceptual issues if it is to become a consistent and coherent method for psychiatric care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]