Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.

Memories are mental states with a number of interesting features. One of those features seems to be their having an intentional object. After all, we commonly say that memories are about things, and that a subject represents the world in a certain way by virtue of remembering something. It is unclear, however, what sorts of entities constitute the intentional objects of memory. In particular, it is not clear whether those are mind-independent entities in the world or whether they are mental (...) entities of some kind. The purpose of this chapter is to map the different positions on this issue, and to highlight the virtues and difficulties for each of the options. In Section 2, I will specify the question of what the intentional objects of memory are by clarifying the relevant notions of memory and intentional object. In Section 3, I will motivate the significance of identifying the intentional objects of memory by exploring the relations between, on the one hand, the intentionality of memory and, on the other hand, the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory. In Section 4, I will consider two natural candidates for being the intentional objects of memory, namely, worldly entities and mental entities, and I will raise some concerns for each of the two candidates. A promising alternative will emerge, in Section 5, as preserving the virtues of the two original candidates while avoiding their difficulties. The alternative will concern a certain combination of worldly and mental entities; a combination that involves both causal and truth-making relations. I will conclude by sketching how the alternative candidate can shed some light on the phenomenological and epistemological issues raised in the third section. (shrink)

Whenever psychologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers draw conclusions about moral judgments in general from a small selected sample, they assume that moral judgments are unified by some common and peculiar feature that enables generalizations and makes morality worthy of study as a unified field. We assess this assumption by considering the six main candidates for a unifying feature: content, phenomenology, force, form, function, and brain mechanisms. We conclude that moral judgment is not unified on any of these levels and that moral (...) science should adopt a more fine-grained taxonomic approach that studies carefully defined groups of moral judgments. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of critical approaches to questions in qualitative research. Written using examples from actual research and course work, this volume helps students and researchers learn to interrogate and inquire against the grain. For use by anyone doing qualitative research in Education, _Critical Approaches to Questions in Qualitative Research_ teaches that questions are tools for decision making in the research process. With exercises, sample questions, and outlines for planning research, this volume teaches readers to ask questions (...) that confront prevailing assumptions leading to an analysis, dismantling and uncovering of omissions and invisiblities. (shrink)

This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain “truths” about First Nations lives that often render them as “bare life,” to use the term of Giorgio Agamben. First Nations peoples’ existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a “state of exception” to the legal order and its standards of care. Zones of exception place First Nations people (...) in a separate and diminished legal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial “biopower,” both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay—treating them as “bare life.”. (shrink)

Our memories elicit, in us, both beliefs about what the external world was like in the past, and beliefs about what our own past experience of it was like in the past. What explains the power of memories to do that? I tackle this question by offering an account of the content of our memories. According to this account, our memories are ‘token-reflexives’, in that they represent their own causal origin. My main contention will be that our memories are able (...) to provide us with evidence for the two types of beliefs due to the self-referential nature of their content. First, I will put forward a series of thought-experiments intended to raise several intuitions about the veridicality of memories. Next, I will introduce the view that memories are token-reflexives, and I will motivate it by pointing out that the view accommodates the relevant intuitions. And, then, I will return to the two types of beliefs prompted by our memories, and argue that conceiving memories as token-reflexives allows us to explain why memory has the power to elicit the two types of beliefs in us. (shrink)

Every day, students from marginalized communities disproportionately face adversity and trauma. It is well documented that exposure to adverse childhood experiences can impact children's ability to focus, learn, and even regulate their emotions. Many schools, rather than providing multi-tiered systems of support to address the root causes of behavior, place these students at greater risk of experiencing health disparities through the use of exclusionary school discipline practices. ESDs not only deny students important educational opportunities, but also can compound existing social, (...) economic, and health inequities. Thus, ESD practices must be understood as more than simply impacting what happens in the classroom. Instead, they should be conceptualized as public health policies with far-reaching impacts on a child's lifelong health and well-being. Even though school discipline has largely been overlooked by the public health community, current reform efforts are one aspect of a holistic health justice framework.This article seeks to begin to bridge current gaps in the literature and public discourse by identifying key linkages between ESD practices and health. It then presents evidence-based design principles to ensure education policy is aligned with a health justice framework. And finally, it explores a specific school-based intervention, restorative justice. (shrink)

Over the last 80 years, a major goal of medical educators has been to improve the quality of applicants to medical school and, hence, the resulting doctors. To do this, academic standards have been progressively strengthened. The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) in the United States and the undergraduate science grade point average (GPA) have long been correlated with success in medical school, and graduation rates have been close to 100 percent for many years. Recent studies have noted that some (...) doctors having difficulties in practice were found to have had similar problems while in school. In this essay, we present a brief historical account of attitudes and approaches to admissions requirements, then discuss basic broad areas of accomplishment in clinical practice: academic mastery, clinical acumen, and professionalism. We then review data that suggest that lack of competency can often be detected very early in a student’s career and may or may not be immune to remediation efforts. We end with a recommendation for a course of action that upholds and fulfills the profession’s social responsibility. This will be a moral argument, defending an aggressive but equitable approach to maintaining both public accountability and trust. (shrink)

A physician's lack of humanity is a general complaint in public surveys. The physician-patient relationship is viewed by the public as being reduced to a business relationship where the patient feels that she is merely a 'client' and the physician a healthcare 'practitioner' instead of a 'care giver'. This public perception is not a phenomenon that is peculiar to Lebanon. Yet, the problem has been increasing over the years to the extent that patients feel that physicians are becoming inhumane and (...) business oriented. While this might not characterize all physicians of the 21 st century, this might be true of at least some. Responses were collected from a study that was undertaken based on a questionnaire distributed to a pool of 650 participants from different geographical areas and different social and educational backgrounds in Lebanon. Participants were all older than18 years and mentally competent. None were physicians. The questionnaire was open-ended and initially piloted among a random sample. The physician traits most desired by the public were found to be: moral traits (41%), interpersonal traits (36%), scientific traits (19%) and other (4%). The most unwanted traits/behaviours were a lack of interpersonal traits (57%), a lack of moral traits (40%) and a lack of scientific skills (3%). The physician-patient relationship was perceived, in general, as being a flawed one. What can be done to remedy the image of the Lebanese physician that has been projected in the minds of the patients and the public at large? Nine major recommendations are presented. (shrink)

Negative self-referential processing has fruitfully been studied in unipolar depressed patients, but remarkably less in patients with bipolar disorder (BD). This exploratory study examines the relation between task-based self-referential processing and depressive symptoms in BD and their possible importance to the working mechanism of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for BD. The study population consisted of a subsample of patients with BD (n = 49) participating in an RCT of MBCT for BD, who were assigned to MBCT + TAU (n = (...) 23) or treatment as usual (TAU) (n = 26). Patients performed the self-referential encoding task (SRET), which measures (1) positive and (2) negative attributions to oneself as well as (3) negative self-referential memory bias, before and after MBCT + TAU or TAU. At baseline, all three SRET measures were significantly related to depressive symptoms in patients with BD. Moreover, repeated measures analyses of variance revealed that negative self-referential memory bias diminished over time in the MBCT + TAU group, compared with the TAU group. Given the preliminary nature of our findings, future research should explore the possibly mediating role of reducing negative self-referential memory bias in preventing and treating depressive symptoms in BD through MBCT. (shrink)

Termination of pregnancy (TOP) is offered in many countries, for foetuses prenatally diagnosed with congenital malformations that are deemed incompatible with life or that are associated with a high morbidity. In Lebanon, a middle income country where religion plays a focal role, the law prohibits any form of TOP unless it is the only means to save the mother's life. It is the contention of the authors of this article that even if the foetus is a person, if it were (...) medically revealed that there is a substantial risk that the newborn will suffer severe physical abnormalities that will cause it to be seriously handicapped; it is morally acceptable to terminate the pregnancy. Hence, TOP carried out for these indications is justified in the interest of the foetus and the child. Whatever the status of the foetus is, once born, it will become a full-fledged sentient being with all that this entails. When given the option of starting an existence, this person-to-be has the right to a minimum that allows him/her to enjoy a relatively good quality of life. Today, Lebanese obstetricians are confronted with the burden placed on them under the law to refuse TOP, or, when performing them, to forge records or deny having done them. This is why we strongly believe that the Lebanese policy on abortion should be amended. (shrink)

Acting classes and theatre education have long been framed as activities during which children can learn skills that transfer outside the acting classroom. A growing empirical literature provides evidence for acting classes’ efficacy in teaching vocabulary, narrative, empathy, theory of mind, and emotional control. Yet these studies have not been based in what is actually happening in the acting classroom, nor on what acting teachers report as their pedagogical strategies. Instead, previous work has been unsystematic and fragmented in its measured (...) transfer outcomes, and absent mechanistic explanation. Expanding research on this topic requires more grounding in teachers’ beliefs about the acting classes they teach, as well as observation of the classes themselves. As a first step, we surveyed 173 acting teachers online, asking them about the activities within acting classes they believed caused change in their students, as well as which outcomes they believed were changed as a result of acting classes. Teachers taught across educational levels (elementary to professional) and had a variety of training in teaching acting. Overall, teachers rated almost every activity within classes as important for and causing impact on students, and almost every outcome as being positively influenced as a result of acting class. When forced to rank order outcomes, teachers focused on collaboration, communication, creativity, confidence, and empathy as most likely to change. Teachers rated importance of class activities and outcomes differently depending on what level they taught. This study shows the difficulty of surveying highly motivated teachers, given the globally high rankings, but also proposes candidate psychological skills likely to change as a result of acting classes, and the mechanistic behaviors that may cause change. (shrink)

Distancing and then embracing constitutes a useful way of thinking about the paradox of aesthetic pleasure. However, the model does not account for live theatre. When live actors perform behaviors perceptually close to real life and possibly really experienced by the actors, audiences may experience autonomic reactions, with less distance, or may have to distance post-experiencing/embracing their emotions.

With growing public health and health equity challenges brought to the forefront — following racialized health inequities resulting from COVID-19 and a national reckoning around the deaths of unarmed Black victims at the hands of police — an antiracist health equity agenda has emerged naming racism a public health crisis.

An overview of the latest interdisciplinary research on human morality, capturing moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms. Over the past decade, an explosion of empirical research in a variety of fields has allowed us to understand human moral sensibility as a sophisticated integration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms shaped through evolution, development, and culture. Evolutionary biologists have shown that moral cognition evolved to aid cooperation; developmental psychologists have demonstrated that the elements that underpin (...) morality are in place much earlier than we thought; and social neuroscientists have begun to map brain circuits implicated in moral decision making. This volume offers an overview of current research on the moral brain, examining the topic from disciplinary perspectives that range from anthropology and neurophilosophy to justice and law. The contributors address the evolution of morality, considering precursors of human morality in other species as well as uniquely human adaptations. They examine motivations for morality, exploring the roles of passion, extreme sacrifice, and cooperation. They go on to consider the development of morality, from infancy to adolescence; findings on neurobiological mechanisms of moral cognition; psychopathic immorality; and the implications for justice and law of a more biological understanding of morality. These new findings may challenge our intuitions about society and justice, but they may also lead to more a humane and flexible legal system. Contributors Scott Atran, Abigail A. Baird, Nicolas Baumard, Sarah Brosnan, Jason M. Cowell, Molly J. Crockett, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Andrew W. Delton, Mark R. Dadds, Jean Decety, Jeremy Ginges, Andrea L. Glenn, Joshua D. Greene, J. Kiley Hamlin, David J. Hawes, Jillian Jordan, Max M. Krasnow, Ayelet Lahat, Jorge Moll, Caroline Moul, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Alexander Peysakhovich, Laurent Prétôt, Jesse Prinz, David G. Rand, Rheanna J. Remmel, Emma Roellke, Regina A. Rini, Joshua Rottman, Mark Sheskin, Thalia Wheatley, Liane Young, Roland Zahn. (shrink)

Bioethics is a relatively new addition to bedside medical care in Arab world which is characterized by a special culture that often makes blind adaptation of western ethics codes and principles; a challenge that has to be faced. To date, the American University of Beirut Medical Center is the only hospital that offers bedside ethics consultations in the Arab Region aiming towards better patient-centered care. This article tackles the role of the bedside clinical ethics consultant as an active member of (...) the medical team and the impact of such consultations on decision-making and patient-centered care. Using the case of a child with multiple medical problems and a futile medical condition, we describe how the collaboration of the medical team and the clinical ethics consultant took a comprehensive approach to accompany and lead the parents and the medical team in their decision-making process and how the consultations allowed several salient issues to be addressed. This approach proved to be effective in the Arab cultural setting and indeed did lead to better patientcentered care. (shrink)

En este trabajo se analiza la tesis foucaultiana de la reducción de la filosofía a forma de conocimiento en Descartes y el consecuente abandono de la espiritualidad clásica, es decir, de la filosofía concebida como forma de vida basada en el cuidado de sí. A partir de aquí, además de observar que el propio Foucault matizará esta tesis, se demostrará que en Descartes la filosofía sigue esencialmente unida a la espiritualidad.

Philosophy can enhance communication among new forms of knowledge, existing ones, and those that will arise in light of the heuristic possibilities of the revolutions in science, technology, and thought; it can turn to a reevaluation of all of the culture that humanity has produced for its own welfare and can prevent the loss of the differentiating essences of diverse social groups. In the conjugation of the forms of knowledge, I am interested in the relationship that has emerged between specialized (...) scientific knowledge and ordinary knowledge, between the tradition, religion, art, and the evaluation of all that has previously been treated by philosophy. But if there is one discipline that I regard as privileged because of its effect on human actions, it is political science: public policy can provide a basis for planetary consciousness, a concern for mankind and for its potential destruction. The role of political philosophy is to serve as an ideological guide for a political science that would comprehend political behavior in relation to its consequences for individual human beings and would thus support actions favorable to humanity. (shrink)

Se analizará una aporía inherente al giro subjetivo del último Foucault causada por el sostenimiento simultáneo de dos sentidos incompatibles de la irreductibilidad del sujeto y, por lo tanto, de su posible emancipación: en unos casos es posible hacer referencia a procesos de subjetivación externos a las formas de subjetividad generadas por el poder ; pero, en otros, los procesos de emancipación no pueden ser pensados más allá de la resistencia al poder. La hipótesis del trabajo es que la aporía (...) está producida por la gradual marginación del problema del autoconocimiento en la temática del cuidado de sí, que, como resultado, pasa a ser comprendida exclusivamente desde las prácticas cínicas. Pero reducido el autoconocimiento, también es eliminada la problemática del cuidado de sí, que sostenía la noción fuerte de la subjetividad. Se mostrará que en el Barroco literario y neoestoico español se pueden encontrar elementos para recuperarla. (shrink)

Self-injury is a perilous and increasingly common behavior that is particularly prevalent among youth. Nonetheless, there is a deep-rooted public stigma towards people who self-injure. Consequently, people who engage in self-injury are reluctant to seek professional help or disclose their experiences to others. This article aims to combat stigma and promote help-seeking behavior by debunking the common myths surrounding self-injury in the Malaysian context. Specifically, this article aims to serve as an eye-opener for Malaysian counselors and other mental health professionals (...) to improve their multicultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes when working with those who self-injure. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...) which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them. (shrink)

BackgroundMany discretionary foods contribute both to individual health risks and to global issues, in particular through high carbon footprints and water scarcity. Snacking is influenced by the presence of snacking cues such as food availability, observing others eating, and negative affect. However, less is known about the mechanisms underlying the effects of negative affect. This study examines whether the individual odds of consuming high-calorie snacks as a consequence to being exposed to known snacking cues were moderated by experiencing higher or (...) lower total negative affect per day or higher or lower negative affect variability per day.MethodsSecondary analysis of an ecological momentary assessment study of 60 participants over 14 days with food logs and randomly timed assessments of known snacking cues. High total daily negative affect levels and negative affect variability were examined as moderators to predict high-calorie snacking in three-level hierarchical random effects logistic regressions.ResultsConsistent with previous studies, the odds of snacking increased when food was available, when others were eating, and when participants experienced more negative affect. Associations for food availability and others eating were significantly moderated by negative affect variability such that associations between cues and high-calorie snacking were weaker on days with higher negative affect variability, but not negative affect levels.ConclusionThe relationship between cues to high-calorie snacking and snacking behavior varies with variability in negative affect, suggesting a complex relationship between affect and high-calorie snacking. Clearer conceptualizations on the relation between affect and eating are needed. (shrink)

Recently, several scholars have argued in support of the idea that folk psychology involves a primary capacity for regulating our mental states and patterns of behavior in accordance with a bunch of shared social norms and routines :259–281, 2015; Zawidzki, Philosophical Explorations 11:193–210, 2008; Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A new framework for understanding human social cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013). This regulative view shares with the classical Dennettian intentional stance its emphasis on the normative character of human socio-cognitive capacities. Given those similarities, (...) it makes sense to assess the regulative view by considering some of the classical arguments against the normative nature of the intentional stance :76–100, 1985; Stich, Philosophical Topics 12:39–62, 1981; Stich, The fragmentation of reason: Preface to a pragmatic theory of cognitive evaluation, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990). The aim of this paper is to argue that the priority that the regulative view lays on the pluralistic and regulative character of folk psychology leaves the theory well-placed to resist these arguments. In this sense, the regulative view possesses better theoretical options to defend the normative character of human social cognition. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that in order for the study of arts education to continue to advance, we must delineate the effects of particular forms of arts education, offered in certain contexts, on specific domains of children’s socioemotional development. We explain why formulating precise hypotheses about the effects of arts education on children’s socioemotional development requires a differentiated definition of each arts education program or activity in question, as well as a consideration of both the immediate and broader contexts (...) in which that program or activity occurs. We then offer the New Victory Theater’s Schools with Performing Arts Reach Kids program as an illustrative example of how these considerations allow for the refinement of hypotheses about the impact of arts education on children’s socioemotional development. (shrink)

Análisis estético, sociológico y político de la obra de Goethe Las desventuras del joven Werther, partiendo de las tesis estético-literarias de Georg Lukács, claramente influenciadas por Friedrich Schiller, y de las consideraciones que el mismo Goethe realizó posteriormente acerca de su vida y obra en su inconclusa autobiografía Poesía y verdad . El objetivo es realizar un pequeño estudio de la obra pero, en especial, del tipo de sujeto que ejemplifica su personaje principal: el sujeto del humanismo burgués revolucionario , (...) un sujeto que podemos caracterizar en palabras de Lukács como demoníaco y que, por su estructura constitutiva, está condenado al fracaso de sus expectativas vitales. (shrink)

The dichotomy between the qualitative and the quantitative has been a classic throughout the history of science. As will be seen, this dichotomy permeates all ontological levels of reality. In this work, phenomenological examples potentially related to semiosis are presented at the different levels established by Mario Bunge and Josep Ferrater Mora, contrasting the qualitative categorizations with the quantifiable physical reality. Likewise, the need to continue in the quantification of the biosemiotic and linguistic studies will be presented, while, in contrast, (...) the need to establish a qualitative framework in the little-addressed study of technosemiotics will be raised, of potential interest given the notable advances that are expected in communication systems for inert artifacts in the next years. In short, in the thesis defended here the qualitative precedes the quantitative in the defining path of science. (shrink)