If racism is a matter of possessing racist beliefs, then it would seem that its cure involves purging one’s mind of all racist beliefs. But the truth is more complicated, and does not permit such a straightforward strategy. Racist beliefs are resistant to subjective repudiation, and even those that are so repudiated are resistant to lasting expulsion from one’s belief system. Moreover, those that remain available for use in cognition can shape thought and behavior even in the event that one (...) has recognized their falsehood. Yet if one is intent upon combating the racism within one’s mind, one is not without effective cognitive countermeasures that can render one’s racist beliefs ineffectual. (shrink)

Given that charges of anti-Semitism, racism, and the like continue to be potent weapons of moral and intellectual critique in our culture, it is important that we work toward a clear understanding about just what sorts of conduct and circumstances constitute these moral offenses. In particular, can criticism of a state (such as Israel), or other social or political institution or organization (such as the NAACP), ever amount to anti-Semitism, racism, or other bigotry against the people represented by or associated (...) with it, even if no explicit denigration of them occurs? That a renowned scholar of rhetoric and philosophy takes up the challenge of answering such a question would seem to be cause for optimism, but the recent attempt by Judith Butler turns out to be subverted by faulty logic and blatant misreading. As a result, it obfuscates the issue, and wrongly suggests that expressive acts cannot be blameworthy on grounds of bigotry if they are not intentionally designed to serve such purposes. (shrink)

It is unfortunate that so much turns on the practices of argument construction and critique in intelligence analysis, for example, because these practices are fraught with difficulty. However, the recently developed technique of argument mapping helps reasoners conduct these practices more thoroughly and insightfully, as can be shown in an extended illustration concerning Iraqi nuclear activities circa 2002. Argument mapping offers other benefits, as well. Its ultimate value, though, will depend on how its advantages compare to those of competitor reasoning (...) methodologies. (shrink)

Those who suggest that only a sexist (or racist, or anti-semite) can experience amusement at a sexist (or racist, or anti-semitic) joke have failed to grasp two underappreciated features of the psychology of humor: (1) that amusement is sensitive to what is conveyed to the audience by the contexts within which a joke is taken to be situated, and hence to pragmatic, and not merely semantic, factors; and (2) that, given the non-integrated nature of the ordinary human cognitive system, the (...) frame of mind that gets employed in enjoying a joke need not represent accurately its possessor’s overall mind or personality. (shrink)

What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie selfless conduct, both ‘thinking’ and unthinking? We first consider deliberate selflessness, a manner of selecting acts in which, in evaluating options, one expressly chooses not to weigh the potential consequences for oneself (though this formulation is seen as needing some qualification). We then turn to unthinking behavior in general, and whether we are responsible for it, as the foundation for analyzing the unthinking variety of selflessness. Using illustrative cases (Grenade Gallantry, The Well-Meaning Miner, (...) Ignorant Ilya, Self-Disregarding Sally) we explore just what is involved in setting aside one's self-interests unthinkingly. Eventually, this account links up with work on mental compartmentalization, as it becomes apparent that unthinking selflessness encompasses both unthinking behavior (calling upon inexplicit cognitive utilization of stored images) that is selfless, and thinking behavior (calling upon reasoning with sentences) that is unthinkingly selfless (by virtue of an unreasoned, automatic shift of cognitive standpoint to a ‘compartment’ that omits information about one's self-interests). The analysis points toward a practical program for generating increased selflessness in ourselves and others. (shrink)

The grounds for recognizing that artists possess a personal “moral right of integrity” that would entitle them to prevent others from modifying their works are weak. There is, however, an important public interest in protecting highly-valued entities, including at least some works of art, from permanently destructive transformations.

Scientists and their supporters often portray as exasperatingly irrational all those laypersons who refuse to accede to practical recommendations issued by expert scientists and 'science appliers'. After first considering the latter groups’ standard explanations for such non-deference, which focus upon irrationalities besetting the laity, I will propose that a better explanation for at least some of the non-deference is that many laypersons are rationally electing to substitute their own judgments for those urged upon them by the scientific community. Science-based recommendations, (...) as I treat them, have the general form In light of the science on X, if you seek outcome O, you ought to V. Non-deferring laypersons deny the soundness or cogency of the V-supporting argumentation—though they are supposedly not competent to do so, given their gross epistemic inferiority to the scientific authorities who create and endorse the arguments. On account of thus being epistemically irrational, they end up being instrumentally irrational, pursuing courses of action that are poor choices for serving their own interests. The non-deferring laypersons are thought to violate two mandates of rationality: for internal deference to the underlying science as true enough to constitute an unproblematic background for decisionmaking, and for external deference to the practical application of that science to the concrete extra-scientific circumstances in question. I claim that rationality does not require categorical adherence to these mandates. In any given case, non-deference by some laypersons might be warranted by one or more of four distinct rationales. 1. Value-ladenness: The science-based recommendation discernibly includes non-scientific value-choice or value-weighting assumptions. It embodies a certain prioritizing of the plurality of specific values packed within its O parameter, and some laypersons may permissibly substitute their own. 2. Non-scientific-reasoning-ladenness: The science-based recommendation discernibly relies upon reasoning moves that are not distinctive to science, moves whose critical assessment demands no scientific expertise. Error-free reasoning is difficult to attain, and the laypersons may justifiably take themselves to have found weaknesses in the V-supporting argumentation that undermine the case for conformity to the recommendation. 3. Overgeneralization: The science-based recommendation discernibly is not adequately tailored to the specific situation of the laypersons in question. 4. Untrustworthy science: The science-based recommendation discernibly is based upon scientific research that is of doubtful quality. The first three rationales cast doubt upon the External Deference Mandate, questioning not the existence of sound underlying research but the recommendation’s judgments about how this research ought to be applied. The fourth is a challenge to the Internal Deference Mandate. (shrink)

The standard philosophical and folk-psychological accounts of cognition and action credit us with too much spontaneity in our activities and projects. We are taken to be fundamentally active rather than reactive, to project our needs and aims and deploy our full supporting arsenal of cognitive instruments upon an essentially passive environment. The corrected point of view presented here balances this image of active agency with an appreciation of how we are also continually responding to the world, that is, to the (...) pragmatic situations that effectively select subsets of our cognitive resources to be at our disposal in generating responses. The result is a superseding of the standard Cognitive Integrationist picture by a model of a structurally divided mind, comprising a multiplicity of diverse and sometimes-conflicting standpoints, personas, and wills whose elicitation is a complex function of agent intentions and plans, the encountered environment, past experience, and temporal sequence. According to this model, the manifold stored representations constituting a person’s cognitive endowment do not form a single integrated network all equally ready for use. Cognition at any given moment is limited to drawing upon only a subset of one’s perspective, the perspect that is activated in accordance with the specific mental task or situation (the pragmatic context) that one perceives oneself to be facing. The system enlists the environmental context as trigger for practical and theoretical activity, based upon the agent’s prior experience. Though susceptible to certain kinds of error, and not inherently inclined toward innovative thinking, it enables the generally efficient use of our enormous cognitive endowments in conducting our lives in real time. (shrink)

The grounds for recognizing that artists possess a personal “moral right of integrity” that would entitle them to prevent others from modifying their works are weak. There is, however, an important (and legislation-worthy) public interest in protecting highly-valued entities, including at least some works of art, from permanently destructive transformations.