Philosophers and psychologists have often maintained that in order to attribute mental states to other people one must have a ‘theory of mind’. This theory facilitates our grasp of other people’s mental states. Debate has then focussed on the form this theory should take. Recently a new approach has been suggested, which I call the ‘Direct Perception approach to social cognition’. This approach maintains that we can directly perceive other people’s mental states. It opposes traditional views on two counts: by (...) claiming that mental states are observable and by claiming that we can attribute them to others without the need for a theory of mind. This paper argues that there are two readings of the direct perception claims: a strong and a weak one. The Theory-theory is compatible with the weak version but not the strong one. The paper argues that the strong version of direct perception is untenable, drawing on evidence from the mirror neuron literature and arguments from the philosophy of science and perception to support this claim. It suggests that one traditional ‘theory of mind’ view, the ‘Theory-theory’ view, is compatible with the claim that mental states are observable, and concludes that direct perception views do not offer a viable alternative to theory of mind approaches to social cognition. (shrink)

The role of culture in shaping folk psychology and mindreading has been neglected in the philosophical literature. This paper shows that there are significant cultural differences in how psychological states are understood and used by drawing on Spaulding’s recent distinction between the ‘goals’ and ‘methods’ of mindreading to argue that the relations between these methods vary across cultures; and arguing that differences in folk psychology cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the cognitive architecture that facilitates our understanding of psychological states. (...) The paper concludes that any good account of social cognition must have the conceptual resources to explain how culture affects our understanding of psychological states, and that this explanandum should not be an after-thought but instead a guiding feature for those accounts. (shrink)

We spend a lot of time thinking about other people: their motivations, what they are thinking, why they want particular things. Sometimes we are aware of it, but it often occurs without conscious thought, and we can respond appropriately to other people's thoughts in a diverse range of situations. The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction examines the cognitive capacities that facilitate this amazing ability. It explains and critiques key philosophical theories about how we think about other people's minds, measuring them (...) against empirical findings from neuroscience, anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive ethology. Some of the fascinating questions addressed include: How do we think about other people's minds? Do we put ourselves in another's shoes to work out what they think? When do we need to think about another person's thoughts? What kinds of thoughts do we attribute to others? Are they propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires as analytic philosophers have often assumed, or could they be something else? What sorts of neural mechanisms underlie our ability to think about other people's thoughts? How is the ability to think about other minds different for individuals on the autism Spectrum? Is a preoccupation with other people's thoughts a Western phenomenon or is it found in all cultures? How do children learn to think about other minds? Can non-human animals think about other minds? These questions are applied to case studies throughout the book, including mirror neurons, recent research on infant social cognition, false belief tasks, and cross-cultural studies. Covering complex interdisciplinary debates in an accessible and clear way, with chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal entry point into this fast-moving and exciting field. It is essential reading for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, and anthropology. (shrink)

The cognitive ability to think about other people's psychological states is known as `mindreading'. This Element critiques assumptions that have been formative in shaping philosophical theories of mindreading: that mindreading is ubiquitous, underpinning the vast majority of our social interactions; and that its primary goal is to provide predictions and explanations of other people's behaviour. It begins with an overview of key positions and empirical literature in the debate. It then introduces and motivates the pluralist turn in this literature, which (...) challenges the core assumptions of the traditional views. The second part of the Element uses case studies to further motivate the pluralist framework, and to advocate the pluralist approach as the best way to progress our understanding of social cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

While it is widely acknowledged that psychology is in the throes of a replication ‘crisis’, relatively little attention has been paid to the role theory plays in our evaluation of replications as ‘failed’ or ‘successful’. This paper applies well-known arguments in philosophy of science about the interplay between theory and experiment to a contemporary case study of infants’ understanding of false belief (Onishi and Baillargeon [2005]), and attempts to replicate it. It argues that the lack of consensus about over-arching theories (...) informing both the concepts under study and the methodologies used to track them means that researchers disagree over which experiments constitute replications of the original. The second part of the paper places this specific debate within a broader discussion of the replication crisis as a crisis of ‘theory’, developing work by Muthukrishna and Henrich ([2018]) and Bird ([2018]). Bird argues that the lack of agreed over-arching theories in psychology means that a high rate of replication failure is to be expected; this paper agrees with his diagnosis but challenges his proposal that more replication will resolve the problem. (shrink)

We often explain by citing an absence or an omission. Apart from the problem of assigning a causal role to such apparently negative factors as absences and omissions, there is a puzzle as to why only some absences and omissions, out of indefinitely many, should figure in explanations. In this paper we solve this ’many absences problem’ by using the contrastive model of explanation. The contrastive model of explanation is developed by adapting Peter Lipton’s account. What initially appears to be (...) only a trivial amendment to Lipton’s Difference Condition enables us both to offer a much more satisfactory solution to the ’many absences problem’ than David Lewis did, and also to explain why explanation in terms of absences and omissions should be so common. (shrink)

Daniel Hutto’s Enactive account of social cognition maintains that pre- and non-linguistic interactions do not require that the participants represent the psychological states of the other. This goes against traditional ‘cognitivist’ accounts of these social phenomena. This essay examines Hutto’s Enactive account, and proposes two challenges. The account maintains that organisms respond to the behaviours of others, and in doing so respond to the ‘intentional attitude’ which the other has. The first challenge argues that there is no adequate account of (...) how the organisms respond to the correct aspect of the behaviour in each situation. The second challenge argues that the Enactive account cannot account for the flexibility of pre- and non-linguistic responses to others. The essay concludes that these challenges provide more than sufficient reason to doubt the viability of Hutto’s account as an alternative to cogntivist approaches to social cognition. (shrink)

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject.Key topics and their areas of focus include:Epistemology - what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it;Philosophy of Science - foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice;Philosophy of Mind - what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained;Moral Philosophy - the (...) nature of our moral judgements and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and;Metaphysics - fundamental conceptual questions about the nature of reality.Designed to be used on the corresponding Introduction to Philosophy online course offered by The University of Edinburgh, this book is also highly recommended to anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline. (shrink)

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include: Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior; Political philosophy – fundamental questions about the (...) nature of states and their relationship to the citizens within those states Epistemology – what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; and whether we should form beliefs by trusting what other people tell us; Philosophy of mind – what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Philosophy of science – foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice, such as whether scientific theories are true; and Metaphysics - fundamental questions about the nature of reality, such as whether we have free will, or whether time travel is possible. This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ MOOC created by the University of Edinburgh’s _Eidyn_ research centre, and hosted by the Coursera platform.This book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline. (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

Firms and industries increasingly subscribe to voluntary codes of conduct. These self-regulatory governance systems can be effective in establishing a more sustainable and inclusive global economy. However, these codes can also be largely symbolic, reactive measures to quell public criticism. Cross-sector alliances (between for-profit and nonprofit actors) present a learning platform for infusing participants with greater incentives to be socially responsible. They can provide multinationals new capabilities that allow them to more closely ally social responsibility with economic performance. This paper (...) examines learning facilitators in cross-sector alliances that enrich corporate understanding of stakeholder concerns. It suggests that these organizational learning experiments can translate into globally responsible practices and processes that improve the content and effectiveness of voluntary corporate codes. (shrink)

"It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements. (...) To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. This book is a study of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct."--. (shrink)

The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns ...

This is part of a complete set of Jane Austen's novels collating the editions published during the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts. The books are illustrated with 19th century plates and incorporate revisions by experts in the light of subsequent research.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about (...) the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world. (shrink)

When discussing the problem of evil, philosophers often distinguish between physical evil (harm caused within the natural world such as natural disasters, disease, and the like), and moral evil (harm caused by human agency). Mapping this traditional distinction is mapped onto the third section of Fichte’s The Vocation of Man would at first seem fairly straightforward: for Fichte, evil arising from nature occurs through “blind mechanism” and is unfree; in contrast, evil done by human beings arises out of free agency. (...) The answer may be more complicated, however, in two different ways. First, Fichte holds that nature is to be cultivated and controlled by human beings so that it is no longer a source of harm; this may imply that the continuing harm done by nature is the result of humans’ failure to have sufficiently tamed nature. In that case, some of the harm caused by nature may be attributable to free human causality and thus no longer be a clearcut instance of natural evil. Second, Fichte repeatedly states that those who fail to act morally and who fail to conform their wills to the moral law are still be in the power of the mechanisms of nature. Even though we must think of them as free, Fichte compares their actions to the operation of nature and its mechanism of necessity. By presenting a careful and nuanced Fichtean account of the traditional distinction between physical and moral evil, we can better appreciate how Fichte understood the meaning and scope of human responsibility. (shrink)

Overviews -- Hildegard of Bingen -- Anne Conway -- Mary Astell -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- Harriet Taylor Mill -- Edith Stein -- Simone Weil -- Simone de Beauvoir -- Conclusions.

In _influx & efflux_ Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book _Vibrant Matter_: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx _& _efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of “I” and “we” (...) can live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we “write up” influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us. (shrink)

Clicks, comments, transactions, and physical movements are being increasingly recorded and analyzed by Big Data processors who use this information to trace the sentiment and activities of markets and voters. While the benefits of Big Data have received considerable attention, it is the potential social costs of practices associated with Big Data that are of interest to us in this paper. Prior research has investigated the impact of Big Data on individual privacy rights, however, there is also growing recognition of (...) its capacity to be mobilized for surveillance purposes. Our paper delineates the underlying issues of privacy and surveillance and presents them as in tension with one another. We postulate that efforts at controlling Big Data may create a trade-off of risks rather than an overall improvement in data protection. We explore this idea in relation to the principles of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as it arguably embodies the new ‘gold standard’ of cyber-laws. We posit that safeguards advocated by the law, anonymization and pseudonymization, while representing effective counter measures to privacy concerns, also incentivize the use, collection, and trade of behavioral and other forms of de-identified data. We consider the legal status of these ownerless forms of data, arguing that data protection techniques such as anonymization and pseudonymization raise significant concerns over the ownership of behavioral data and its potential use in the large-scale modification of activities and choices made both on and offline. (shrink)

Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. (...) However complex the truth conditions of generics appear to be, though, young children grasp generics more quickly and readily than seemingly simpler quantifiers such as `all' and `some'. I present an account of generics that not only illuminates the strange truth conditions of generics, but also explains how young children find them so comparatively easy to acquire. I then argue that generics give voice to our most cognitively primitive generalizations and that this hypothesis accounts for a variety of facts ranging from acquisition patterns to cross-linguistic data concerning the phonological articulation of operators. I go on to develop an account of the nature of these cognitively fundamental generalizations and argue that this account explains the strange truth-conditional behavior of generics. (shrink)

"It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements. (...) To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. This book is a study of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct."--. (shrink)

Effective corporate social responsibility policies are a requirement for today's companies. Policies have not only to be formulated, they also have to be delivered by corporate employees. This paper uses existing research findings to identify two types of factors that may impact on employee motivation and commitment to CSR ‘buy-in’. The first of these is contextual: employee attitudes and behaviours will be affected by organizational culture and climate, by whether CSR policies are couched in terms of compliance or in terms (...) of values, and by whether such policies are integrated into business processes or simply an ‘add-on’ that serves as window-dressing. The second set of factors is perceptual. Motivation and commitment will be affected by the extent to which they can align personal identity and image with that of the organization, by their perceptions of justice and fairness both in general and in terms of how CSR performance is rewarded, and by their impressions concerning the attitude of top management to CSR issues and performance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number of anthologies have (...) been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

This paper sets out to launch a challenge to the usual ‘modernist’ view of the relationship between ecology and ethics. Two ‘post-modern’ interpretations of this relationship are considered. The first ‘deep’ interpretation holds that ecology reveals that nature has intrinsic value. The second interpretation derives from the work of Michel Foucault. The aim of his critique is to reveal how certain values are taken for granted by the acceptance of certain scientific models, and how the acceptance of those models as (...) true makes it impossible to articulate alternative values. I end by suggesting, contra Foucault, that phenomenological enquiry could serve to articulate alternative and perhaps more eco-friendly values. (shrink)

A paradigm for peace discovered in the cosmopolitan neighborhoods of poor urban immigrants.

This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of "thing-power." Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the (...) nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power. (shrink)