Life can be awful. For this to be the stuff of tragedy and not farce, we require a capacity to be more than we presently are. Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, poses a challenge to this commitment of ethics in his commentary on the instability of memory. But Barnes leads us past this difficulty by showing us that Tony’s real problem is his inability to make sense of himself—a failure of self-knowledge. Tony’s past (...) is tangled up with others he can scarcely see as people. Let us hope we can do better. (shrink)

Every episodic memory entails a sense of identity, which allows us to mentally travel through time. There is a special way by which the subject who is remembering comes into contact with the self that is embedded in the episodic simulation of memory: we can directly and robustly experience the protagonist in memory as ourselves. This paper explores what constitutes such experience in memory. On the face of it, the issue may seem trivial: of course, we are able to entertain (...) a sense of identity—the experience of our recollection structurally resembles our perception of the original event. However, given the phenomenon of observer memory, in which our visual perspective is decoupled from our embodied dimension, it is unclear whether it is the observing or the embodied one that is identified. This phenomenon is important not only in illustrating the complexity of identification but also in assessing how best to address it. In this paper, the issue is analyzed through concepts introduced from the literature on bodily self-consciousness. The potential approaches to addressing the issue of identification are examined, including the inheritance view, according to which the identification relies on the inheritance of mnemonic content from the original experience. I propose and argue for the self-simulation view, which suggests that what results in the experience of “I am this” in memory is the observing and the embodied dimensions as well as the relation between them, which enable different ways of projecting oneself into an episodic simulation. (shrink)

What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and (...) monitoring of one's own internal states). This view is compatible with the hypothesis that the self is a dynamic representation emerging out of a higher level control system, - valuation control - whose articulation with control of plans and perceptual/motor control is discussed in the context of normal and pertrubed agency. (shrink)

The sense of agency is a central aspect of human self-consciousness and refers to the experience of oneself as the agent of one’s own actions. Several different cognitive theories on the sense of agency have been proposed implying divergent empirical approaches and results, especially with respect to neural correlates. A multifactorial and multilevel model of the sense of agency may provide the most constructive framework for integrating divergent theories and findings, meeting the complex nature of this intriguing phenomenon.

People talk not only to others but also to themselves. The self talk we engage in may be overt or covert, and is associated with a variety of higher mental functions, including reasoning, problem solving, planning and plan execution, attention, and motivation. When talking to herself, a speaker takes devices from her mother tongue, originally designed for interpersonal communication, and employs them to communicate with herself. But what could it even mean to communicate with oneself? To answer that question, (...) we need a theory of communication that explains how the same linguistic devices may be used to communicate with others and oneself. On the received view, which defines communication as information exchange, self talk appears to be an anomaly, for it is hard to see the point of exchanging information with oneself. However, if communication is analysed as a way of negotiating commitments between speaker and hearer, then communication may be useful even when speaker and hearer coincide. Thus a commitment-based approach allows us to make sense of self talk as well as social talk. (shrink)

The sensorimotor approach to perception addresses various aspects of perceptual experience, but not the subjectivity of intentional action. Conversely, the problem that current accounts of the sense of agency deal with is primarily one of subjectivity. But the proposed models, based on internal signal comparisons, arguably fail to make the transition from subpersonal computations to personal experience. In this paper we suggest an alternative direction towards explaining the sense of agency by braiding three theoretical strands: a world-involving, dynamical interpretation of (...) the sensorimotor approach, an enactive description of sensorimotor agency as contrasted with organic agency in general, and a dynamical theory of equilibration within and between sensorimotor schemes. On this new account, the sense of oneself as the author of one’s own actions corresponds to what we experience during the ongoing adventure of establishing, losing, and re-establishing meaningful interactions with the world. The meaningful relation between agent and world is given by the precarious constitution of sensorimotor agency as a self-asserting network of schemes and dispositions. Acts are owned as they adaptively assert the constitution of the agent. Thus, awareness for different aspects of agency experience, such as the initiation of action, the effort exerted in controlling it, or the achievement of the desired effect, can be accounted for by processes involved in maintaining the sensorimotor organization that enables these interactions with the world. We discuss these processes in detail from a non-representational, dynamical perspective and show how they cohere with the personal experience of agency. (shrink)

Offers an outline for a new ethical practice - one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. The author demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human.

Offers an outline for a new ethical practice - one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. The author demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human.

The goal of this paper is to make sense of relativism about truth. There are two key ideas. (1) To be a relativist about truth is to allow that a sentence or proposition might be assessment-sensitive: that is, its truth value might vary with the context of assessment as well as the context of use. (2) Making sense of relativism is a matter of understanding what it would be to commit oneself to the truth of an assessment-sensitive sentence or (...) proposition. (shrink)

"Making Sense of Nonsense: Trivial Remarks on the Nature of Language" is an inquiry into the nature and significance of nonsense for philosophers and other human beings. Philosophers have been accused of indulging in nonsense. Wittgenstein complains that philosophers take language on holiday. If an utterance is nonsense in virtue of being on holiday, we might expect meaningful utterances to be meaningful in virtue of their being at work, at home. When we look at language at home, we find that, (...) despite the tribute philosophers of language ordinarily pay to the a priori, meaning is a most contingent and subjective family of phenomena. On the rough ground of everyday discourse, we find language stamped with the desires and agendas of certain groups of mammals. Language shows us its rough edges when we clear away the unarticulated presuppositions smuggled in by dominant philosophical methodology. There are a number of strategies for attaining an unclouded vantage point on language. One is to imagine oneself into the position of someone to whom our language and way of life is unfamiliar. Another is to actually occupy a point of view from which the language and way of life we take for granted begins to seem strange. ;The theory of meaning that emerges from the kind of attention to language here described can be stated thus: meaning is grounded in concernful engagement with the world. Or, to put it another way: we talk about what we care about. As a result, language can serve as a deep reserve of human history. What it tells us about ourselves is not always pleasant. As the language reveals the concerns and agendas of speakers, it reveals the imbalances and abuses of power among those speakers. Insofar as language constructs the worlds we inhabit, the injustices and prejudices we find in language are mirror images of reality as we know it. The good news is the liberatory potential of our realization of the extent to which meaning, and hence reality, are "man-made." This potential is realized in the work of many radical lesbian feminist philosophers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40 [Access article in PDF] Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with (...) the theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that [End Page 22] the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least... (shrink)

This article discusses whether a sense of humor is a political virtue. It argues that a sense of humor is conducive to the central political virtues. We must first, however, delineate different types of humor (benevolent or malicious) and the different political virtues (sociability, prudence, and justice) to which they correspond. Generally speaking, a sense of humor is politically virtuous when it encourages good will toward fellow citizens, an awareness of the limits of power, and a tendency not to take (...) oneself too seriously or when it condemns moral or intellectual vice. An analysis of President Donald Trumps deeply flawed sense of humor is used to ground this account. (shrink)

Beginning from an earlier claim of mine that there was really no such area of study as the philosophy of sport, Part One of the paper reconsiders the place previously given to David Best’s distinction between purposive sports and aesthetic sports. In light of a famous cricketing event in the 1977 contest between England and Australia (‘The Ashes’), in which Derek Randall turned a cartwheel after taking the winning catch, the paper clarifies that not all aesthetically-pleasing events taking place in (...) sporting competitions can be understood as the aesthetic in sport. Then, in Part Two, the force of the claim that philosophy is one subject is explored. The conclusion is that a focus just on the philosophy of sport is necessarily inappropriate, since it will present the student with only cases from sport to then apply to sport. Rather, one’s understanding must be informed by (much of) the breadth of philosophy. Charles Travis’s view of occasion-sensitivity provides a clear example of appropriately contextual appeal. Part Three of the paper returns to the need for an institutional account of sport, one recognizing that there is no one occasion on which a particular sport is played; and hence no single set of conditions which can uniquely identify that sport. Thus, soccer played with one’s children typically differs from elite soccer: but both are (genuinely) soccer. When one turns to the appreciation of sport (in the light of Stephen Mumford’s excellent Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion [2012a]), one recognizes that, in order to genuinely appreciate sport, one cannot detach oneself from the outcome as completely as Mumford’s extreme purist seems to. But reflection on that case may also return us to contextualism by moving us away from attachments to the complete or the exceptionless in our accounts of spectating as of sport: maybe there is no one thing that occurs in all the relevant cases. (shrink)

We can think about ourselves in a variety of ways, but only some of the thoughts that we entertain about ourselves will be thoughts which we know concern ourselves. I call these first-person thoughts, and the component of such thoughts that picks out the object about which one is thinking—oneself—the self-concept. In this thesis I am concerned with providing an account of the content of the self-concept. The challenge is to provide an account that meets two conditions on first-person (...) thought. The account must show how we are aware of ourselves when we entertain first-person thoughts, so that we have an account that establishes the cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. But, in addition, this awareness must be as robust as the thinker’s ability to entertain first-person thoughts if our account is to respect the guaranteed referential success of the self-concept. I introduce both the subject matter of the thesis, and the constraints on a satisfactory account of that subject matter in the first chapter. In the second chapter I then set up a further problem: much of our self-knowledge is knowledge of our current mental states and it is often argued that we know about and can ascribe those mental states on the basis of introspection alone. The first constraint on an account of first-person thought described in the preceding paragraph requires that we be aware of ourselves in some way if our thoughts are to have the special cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. Yet, I argue, we neither do nor can introspectively observe a subject of thought and experience when we come to know about our mental states and experiences. The failure of introspection to supply us with perceptual information about a subject of thought presents us with the further potential problem. According to Fregean semantics sense determines reference: we count on the content of the elements of thought to determine the reference of terms that are used to express those elements. If we do not introspectively observe a subject of thought then we seem to be at a loss to account for the concept and we are at risk of having to accept that neither the self-concept nor the first-person pronoun are referential. In the remainder of my thesis I consider various responses that we can offer to this problem. First, I examine whether we can avoid the problem with an alternative account of first-person reference according to which reference is fixed by a reflexive rule, and whether we can also base an account of first-person thought on this account of first-person reference. Secondly, I look at the descriptivist view of first-person thought which could potentially provide both an account of first-person thought and first-person reference. These two suggestions must be rejected on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the special cognitive significance of first-person thought. A third approach to first-person thought argues that we employ an objective self-concept when we think about ourselves, a concept that is informed by bodily experience, rather than by introspective observation of a subject. Yet such an account cannot make sense of first-person thoughts in which we question our own embodiment. Lastly I consider whether it is possible to explain the cognitive significance of first-person thought in terms of non-conceptual first-person contents. (shrink)

Two problems seem to plague Adam Smith’s account of sympathy and approbation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). First, Smith’s account of sympathy at the beginning of TMS appears to be inconsistent with the account of sympathy at the end of TMS. In particular, it seems that Smith did not appreciate the distinction between ‘self-oriented sympathy’ and ‘other-oriented sympathy’, that is, between imagining being oneself in the actor’s situation and imagining being the actor in the actor’s situation. Second, (...) Smith’s account of approbation, according to which a sentiment of approval arises when there is recognition of concordance between the spectator’s sympathetic passion and the actor’s original passion, seems to face the following problem: since the spectator attains both his own sympathetic passion and the actor’s original passion by sympathizing with the actor, the sympathetic passion of the spectator and the original passion of the actor will necessarily be identical. Therefore, Smith’s account of approbation requires that the spectator utilize both self-oriented and other-oriented sympathy (‘the double-sympathy model of approbation’). I offer a novel developmental account of sympathy in TMS that renders Smith’s account of sympathy consistent and allows for the utilization of the double-sympathy model of approbation. (shrink)

This essay explores the concept of a sense of humor in an effort to determine how this might be a peculiarly Christian virtue. Not every sense of humor is a virtue, much less a Christian one. A Christian sense of humor, being a capacity to be struck by incongruities of character and behavior (in oneself and others) that the Christian stories and concepts bring to light, is a kind of "vision," and thus a form of Christian discernment. When turned (...) upon oneself, it is a form of humility. Also, Christian humor can be a bridge for non-Christians and half-hearted Christians to the things of the Spirit. (shrink)

This article discusses whether a sense of humor is a political virtue. It argues that a sense of humor is conducive to the central political virtues. We must first, however, delineate different types of humor (benevolent or malicious) and the different political virtues (sociability, prudence, and justice) to which they correspond. Generally speaking, a sense of humor is politically virtuous when it encourages good will toward fellow citizens, an awareness of the limits of power, and a tendency not to take (...) oneself too seriously or when it condemns moral or intellectual vice. An analysis of President Donald Trump's deeply flawed sense of humor is used to ground this account. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to be concerned with the capacity of human beings to act jointly. In particular, I will focus on the phenomenal aspect of collective action. I shall suggest that the experience of being jointly engaged with another is complex: it comprises both a practical grasp of oneself and of the other person as single agents participating in the joint pursuit, and an experience of collective immersion in the activity, which includes a sense of joint (...) control. This suggestion gives rise to a number of puzzles: firstly, what is the relation between jointly engaged agents' awareness of self and other and their sense of a joint engagement? Secondly, how are we to substantiate the idea of a sense of joint control if it is also obviously true that I don't, however close our psychological and bodily attunements, have control over your doings? I shall argue that a satisfactory solution to these puzzles is possible only if we take seriously the notion of a perceptually constituted “intersubjective perspective” that is shared by the participants in joint activities and gives rise to an attitude of mutual trust. (shrink)

What grounds my experience of my body as my own? The body that one experiences is always one’s own, but it does not follow that one always experiences it as one’s own. One might even feel that a body part does not belong to oneself despite feeling sensations in it, like in asomatognosia. The article aims at understanding the link between bodily sensations and the sense of ownership by investigating the role played by the body schema.

Herbert, Dilinie How should health professionals respond if a patient nearing the end of life expresses a wish to hasten their death? To answer this question, this article draws upon peer‐reviewed literature, the practices of palliative care, and the experiences of two palliative care physicians, Associate Professor Natasha Michael and Associate Professor Mark Boughey. The expression of a wish to hasten death does not necessarily imply a genuine desire to hasten death or to be helped to die. To the contrary, (...) almost always this means that the patient has been overwhelmed by one or more serious concerns. While inadequate pain relief may be one such factor, more typically these concerns are social and spiritual, such as loneliness, social isolation, feeling oneself to be a burden on others, hopelessness, and fears about the process of dying. If a patient expresses a wish to hasten death, health professionals should therefore discuss with them the reasons for this request, and then devise and effectively communicate an individualised care plan which begins to address these concerns. (shrink)

What does an understanding of the first person pronoun “I” contribute to the understanding of a sentence involving “I”? This paper emphasizes that the first person pronoun is typically used as a tool of communication. We need to think not just about what it is to use the first person pronoun with understanding, but also what it is to understand someone else’s use of the first person pronoun. A plausible principle governing linguistic understanding via the conditions of adequacy upon reporting (...) speech entails what I call the symmetry constraint, which is that an account of the sense of “I” must leave open the possibility of sentences involving “I” saying the same thing as sentences involving “you”. One immediate consequence of the symmetry constraint is that we need to make a distinction between token-sense and type-sense, discussed in sections 1 and 2. A number of authors, most prominently Gareth Evans in his influential book The Varieties of Reference, have proposed that the sense of “I” needs to be elucidated, at least in part, in terms of the speaker’s sensitivity to forms of self-specifying information that have the property of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun. As emerges in section 3, however, this way of thinking about the sense of “I” is not compatible with the symmetry constraint, since it makes the sense of “I” private and unshareable. This leads in section 4 to an alternative proposal for doing justice to the insight that the sense of “I” reflects a distinctive way of being presented to oneself. On this proposal, the distinctive way in which I am presented to myself can be systematically related to the distinctive way in which I am presented to you. What matters is not that I am in receipt of distinctive types of information about myself, but rather that I have a distinctive ability to locate myself in objective space. On a plausible way of thinking about the individuation of cognitive abilities, this is an ability that you also can have and that underwrites both your understanding of “you” when you address me, and your understanding of “I” as uttered by me. (shrink)

Introduction. The sense of agency over thoughts is the experience of oneself qua agent of mental action. Those suffering certain psychotic symptoms are thought to have a deficient sense of agency. Here I seek to explain this sense of agency in terms of metacognition. Method. I start with the proposal that the sense of agency is elicited by metacognitive monitoring representations that are used in the intentional inhibition of thoughts. I apply this model to verbal hallucinations and the like (...) and examine the plausibility of this model explaining deficits associated with these symptoms. Results. By tying the sense of agency to metacognitive inhibition I propose that the loss of a sense of agency in certain psychotic symptoms is accompanied by a particular deficit in the patient’s ability to control their own thinking. This is consistent with the experiences of those at high risk of developing hallucinations, who report more intrusive thoughts than controls. The model I present is able to explain why those at risk of developing verbal hallucinations and those suffering from verbal hallucinations have deficits in the intentional inhibition of thought. I defend this account from a possible objection by distinguishing the form of the intentional inhibition deficit displayed by those suffering verbal hallucination from that displayed by those suffering from orbital-frontal cortex lesions and posttraumatic stress disorder. Conclusion. A plausible hypothesis is that the sense of agency over thoughts is elicited by the metacognitive monitoring representation used to intentionally inhibit. (shrink)

How should we construe the unity, in affective experience, of felt bodily changes on the one hand and intentionality on the other, without forcing affective phenomena into a one-sided theoretical framework such as cognitivism? To answer this question, I will consider the specific kind of self-awareness implicit in affectivity. In particular, I will explore the idea that a bodily sense of ability is crucial for affective self-awareness. Describing the affective ways of “grasping oneself” manifest in a person’s felt sense (...) of ability will help us understand the intimate connection between bodily feelings and intentionality in affective processes. In order to illustrate these experiential structures in a concrete case, I will discuss experiential changes often reported by sufferers of depression. (shrink)

I distill three somewhat interrelated approaches to the ethical criticism of humor: (1) attitude-based theories, (2) merited-response theories, and (3) emotional responsibility theories. I direct the brunt of my effort at showing the limitations of the attitudinal endorsement theory by presenting new criticisms of Ronald de Sousa’s position. Then, I turn to assess the strengths of the other two approaches, showing that that their major formulations implicitly require the problematic attitudinal endorsement theory. I argue for an effects-mediated responsibility theory , (...) holding that the strongest ethical criticism that can be made of our sense of humor is that it might indicate some omission on our part. This omission could only be culpable in so far as a particular joke could do harm to oneself or others. In response to Ted Cohen’s doubts that such a mechanism of harm is forthcoming, I argue that the primary vehicle of the harmful effects of humor is laughter. (shrink)

How does a subject who is competent to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, form her belief against weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary? The phenomenon of self-deception threatens a widely shared view of beliefs according to which they do not regularly correspond to emotions and evaluative attitudes. Accordingly, the most popular answer to this question is that the belief formed in self-deception is caused by an intention to form that belief. On this view, the state (...) of self-deception is taken to be a calculated outcome involving a person's intentional manipulation of her own thoughts. I argue that this answer is false and forms an impediment towards making sense of self-deception. I show that, contrary to philosophical prejudice, emotions and desires exert vast and systematic effects on the formation of beliefs. In this, and other, sections of the article, the results of experimental work are brought forward. Self-deception is portrayed here as resembling numerous instances of belief formation which are regularly affected by motivational factors. I argue that self-deceptive beliefs are direct expressions of the subject's wishes, fears and hopes. Qua beliefs which mostly correspond to such factors (rather than to evidence), self-deceptive states are a kind of fantasy. (shrink)

Here, I put forward a new account of how experience gives rise to the belief that time passes. While there is considerable disagreement amongst metaphysicians as to whether time really does pass, it has struck many as a default, ‘common sense’ way of thinking about the world. A popular way of explaining how such a belief arises is to say that it seems perceptually as though time passes. Here I outline some difficulties for this approach, and propose instead that the (...) belief in time passing is elicited by a particular feature of agentive experience. When we deliberately move our bodies, bring something to mind, or focus our attention, we experience ourselves as the sources of these actions. Sensing oneself as a source, I argue, is a unique type of change experience, one which leads us to a belief that time is passing. (shrink)

One of the goals of computerized tutoring systems is to optimize the learning of facts. Over a hundred years of declarative memory research have identified two robust effects that can improve such systems: the spacing and the testing effect. By making optimal use of both and adjusting the system to the individual learner using cognitive models based on declarative memory theories, such systems consistently outperform traditional methods. This adjustment process is driven by a continuously updated estimate of the rate of (...) forgetting for each item and learner on the basis of the learner's accuracy and response time. In this study, we investigated to what extent these estimates of individual rates of forgetting are stable over time and across different materials. We demonstrate that they are stable over time but not across materials. Even though most theories of human declarative memory assume a single underlying rate of forgetting, we show that, in practice, it makes sense to assume different materials are forgotten at different rates. If a computerized, adaptive fact-learning system allowed different rates of forgetting for different materials, it could adapt to individual learners more readily. (shrink)

Assuming live music can foster belonging in the workplace, this study linked companies in the secondary and tertiary sectors with the world of music performance. Specifically, students from a Swiss music university offered live mini-concerts on the premises of three companies over a period of 3 months. To analyze the impact of these brief musical interventions on the sense of belonging of staff in these companies, a mixed methods approach was adopted using a standardized questionnaire. The short concerts were much (...) appreciated. On the individual level, they led to a greater sense of pleasure and were perceived as a break, a possibility to connect to one’s emotions and above all, as a “moment for oneself.” On the group level, the short concerts allowed the members of teams to meet, prompted conversations and new ways of sharing, created links, and offered opportunities to get to know work colleagues differently and to discover them on a more personal level. (shrink)

One of the goals of computerized tutoring systems is to optimize the learning of facts. Over a hundred years of declarative memory research have identified two robust effects that can improve such systems: the spacing and the testing effect. By making optimal use of both and adjusting the system to the individual learner using cognitive models based on declarative memory theories, such systems consistently outperform traditional methods (Van Rijn, Van Maanen, & Van Woudenberg, 2009). This adjustment process is driven by (...) a continuously updated estimate of the rate of forgetting for each item and learner on the basis of the learner's accuracy and response time. In this study, we investigated to what extent these estimates of individual rates of forgetting are stable over time and across different materials. We demonstrate that they are stable over time but not across materials. Even though most theories of human declarative memory assume a single underlying rate of forgetting, we show that, in practice, it makes sense to assume different materials are forgotten at different rates. If a computerized, adaptive fact‐learning system allowed different rates of forgetting for different materials, it could adapt to individual learners more readily. (shrink)

Surprisingly often Kant asserts that it is possible to behave in such a degrading way that one ‘throws oneself away’ and turns oneself ‘into a thing’, as a result of which others may treat one ‘as they please’. Rather than dismiss these claims out of hand, I argue that they force us to reconsider what is meant and required by ‘respect for humanity’. I argue that to ‘throw away’ humanity is not to lose or extinguish it, but rather (...) to refuse or otherwise fail to claim the respect that it authorizes one to claim. If I refuse or fail to make this claim, there is a sense in which I become a thing, and I leave others no choice but to treat me as such. This is compatible with their respect for humanity in my person. (shrink)

It is well established by psychopathological research that disorders of self-experience are among the main features of schizophrenic prodromes in a pathogenetic sense. Disorders of the phenomenal self, as "lack of ipseity" (the vanishing of the feeling of being embedded in oneself and of distinctiveness between the self and the outer world) and "hyper-reflexivity" (the monitoring of one's own life entailing the tendency to objectify parts of one's own self in an outer space) are considered key phenomena of schizophrenic (...) vulnerability. In this paper, I argue that the analyses of the disorders of phenomenal self catch only some dimensions of schizophrenic vulnerability, since they mainly focus on the pathological changes in subjective experience of an isolated self and disregard the fact that the self is not purely personal. Because our existence is fundamentally tied to a social existence, the feeling of one's own self and the sense of "reality" of an experience are products of intersubjectivity and not only a private process based on introspection or reflexivity in which one is engaged in an idiosyncratic way. Building on, and extending, contributions of the phenomenological tradition, I attempt to demonstrate that intuitive attunement is the basic prerequisite for establishing one's sense of "reality" (feeling familiarly related to one's environment) and for establishing one's sense of "ipseity" (the sense of existing as a subject of awareness). In the last part of the paper, I show the importance of the concepts "lack of attunement" and "antagonomia" (the rejection of conventional knowledge and intuitive attunement, experienced as dangerous sources of loss of individuality) to establish a comprehensive theory of schizophrenic vulnerability. I finally discuss the implications of this view for empirical research and clinical management of schizophrenic vulnerability. (shrink)

People narrating the experience of dysregulated anger after a brain injury call upon metaphor in patterned ways to help them make sense of their situation. Here, I analyze the use of the metaphor of the doubled self in a personal narrative of brain injury, and I situate this metaphor in its cultural history by analyzing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Incredible Hulk as landmark moments in its development. A pattern of thought reflecting Seneca’s philosophy on the incompatibility of (...) anger with rational selfhood emerges. I discuss implications for the way we care for people struggling with post-brain-injury anger. (shrink)

The fields of machine learning (ML) and cognitive science have developed complementary approaches to computationally modeling human behavior. ML's primary concern is maximizing prediction accuracy; cognitive science's primary concern is explaining the underlying mechanisms. Cross-talk between these disciplines is limited, likely because the tasks and goals usually differ. The domain of e-learning and knowledge acquisition constitutes a fruitful intersection for the two fields’ methodologies to be integrated because accurately tracking learning and forgetting over time and predicting future performance based on (...) learning histories are central to developing effective, personalized learning tools. Here, we show how a state-of-the-art ML model can be enhanced by incorporating insights from a cognitive model of human memory. This was done by exploiting the predictive performance equation's (PPE) narrow but highly specialized domain knowledge with regard to the temporal dynamics of learning and forgetting. Specifically, the PPE was used to engineer timing-related input features for a gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) model. The resulting PPE-enhanced GBDT outperformed the default GBDT, especially under conditions in which limited data were available for training. Results suggest that integrating cognitive and ML models could be particularly productive if the available data are too high-dimensional to be explained by a cognitive model but not sufficiently large to effectively train a modern ML algorithm. Here, the cognitive model's insights pertaining to only one aspect of the data were enough to jump-start the ML model's ability to make predictions—a finding that holds promise for future explorations. (shrink)

The fields of machine learning (ML) and cognitive science have developed complementary approaches to computationally modeling human behavior. ML's primary concern is maximizing prediction accuracy; cognitive science's primary concern is explaining the underlying mechanisms. Cross-talk between these disciplines is limited, likely because the tasks and goals usually differ. The domain of e-learning and knowledge acquisition constitutes a fruitful intersection for the two fields’ methodologies to be integrated because accurately tracking learning and forgetting over time and predicting future performance based on (...) learning histories are central to developing effective, personalized learning tools. Here, we show how a state-of-the-art ML model can be enhanced by incorporating insights from a cognitive model of human memory. This was done by exploiting the predictive performance equation's (PPE) narrow but highly specialized domain knowledge with regard to the temporal dynamics of learning and forgetting. Specifically, the PPE was used to engineer timing-related input features for a gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) model. The resulting PPE-enhanced GBDT outperformed the default GBDT, especially under conditions in which limited data were available for training. Results suggest that integrating cognitive and ML models could be particularly productive if the available data are too high-dimensional to be explained by a cognitive model but not sufficiently large to effectively train a modern ML algorithm. Here, the cognitive model's insights pertaining to only one aspect of the data were enough to jump-start the ML model's ability to make predictions—a finding that holds promise for future explorations. (shrink)

Certain expositors of the Tractatus have tried to make sense of Wittegnstein’s curious revocation of its propositions by suggesting that although they lack content, they nonetheless express (“show,” but do not say) some ineffable truths about reality. Such a view Cora Dimaond labels “chickening out.” I attempt to diagnose the lingering attraction of the ‘chicken’ (in this case an attraction to an illusion of sense) by condsidering a (false) parallel with the case of perceptual illusion. To this end, I make (...) a brief excursion into the work of Gareth Evans in order to draw out what the parallel would look like and more specifically how the chicken might be tempted to think that there is indeed such a parallel. In this way, I hope to better ‘understand’ the chicken and her seduction, and in the process make a plea for not “chickening out.” I then turn to a positive consideration of how we should in fact read this work. In particular, I consider Diamond’s idea that the Tractatus requires an “imaginative understanding” of its reader, an ability to ‘think’ oneself into certain philosophical illusions of sense in order to dismantle them from within. I explore exactly what such an imagination involves. In particular, I suggest that it presupposes a kind of ‘metaphysical’ thesis of its own about the nature of human beings and their innermost tendencies, a position, I argue, that Wittegnstein held. (shrink)

The “impossibility” in our title is similar to what Emmanuel Falque designates by the notion of “outside phenomenon”, namely a region as excepting itself from the dialectic of logos and chaos. “Out of phenomenon” in the sense here of a principial impossibility of “saying oneself”, affecting in turn the “self” (saying oneself) and its expression (saying oneself). Phenomenology has taught us that there is no ego as below the cogito. No self‑foundation guarantees the reference that is marked (...) in the (lexical) expression: “self”. From this correlation between egoism and narrativity, we will retain in this article only the essential affirmation, namely that the self is above all a saying: an act of speech, not about itself, nor from itself, but as adhering to itself in such a way that no gap remains between the word (self) and the referent (self). The self becomes from then on like a performance (of language). Almost a reduction. But what happens when the self is affected by a radical aphasia? (shrink)

Subtle bodily sensations such as itching or fluttering that occur in the absence of any external trigger may serve to locate the spatial boundaries of the body. They may constitute the normal counterpart of extreme conditions in which body-related hallucinations and perceptual aberrations are experienced. Previous investigations have suggested that situations in which the body is spontaneously experienced as being deformed are related to the ability to perform own-body transformations, i.e., mental rotations of the body requiring disembodiment. We therefore decided (...) to consider whether the perception of SPS might relate to embodiment as assessed through the ability to perform own-body transformations and schizotypal traits, since high degrees of schizotypy in the general population have been associated with more vivid perceptions and aberrant perceptual experiences. Then participants completed a standard SPS task. Our analysis revealed that the slower the response time in the OBT task, the more frequent the perception of SPS. This suggests that difficulties in disembodying and mentally transforming one’s own body facilitate feeling oneself. Furthermore, a greater number of correct responses in the OBT task was associated with less frequent perception of SPS. This suggests that finding it easier to disembody and perform mental own-body transformations interferes with the ability to sense oneself. The results also show that higher schizotypal traits, as assessed through the SPQ, are associated with more frequent perception of SPS. Taken together, these results provide a coherent picture and suggest that embodiment is required in order to correctly feel oneself, as expressed through the perception of SPS. The ability to easily experience disembodiment reduces the sense of feeling oneself, and proneness to schizotypal traits produces body misperceptions that enhance and amplify this feeling. The results are discussed in the light of current knowledge and theories about body representations, taking into account attention and interoception as factors that influence body awareness. We offer explanations for perceptual aberrations, body-related delusions, and hallucinations based on misperceived or misinterpreted SPS, and we discuss possible mechanisms that may contribute to feeling and misperceiving oneself. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to a certain way of thinking of the action of another. The posture of mind is characteristically expressed by a specific use of what G. E. M. Anscombe calls stopping modals. On this use, the sentence, “You can’t do that; it is mine,” registers the necessity of justice. My question is: what is the relation between the status of a person, a bearer of rights, the recognition of others as persons, and the practice of addressing the (...) demands of justice to one another? According to a certain strand in the tradition, the answer is: in the sphere of justice, a special union arises among language, mind, and world such that there is a sense in which addressing, recognizing, and being a person are one reality. The paper articulates the relevant sense of ‘one reality’ and offers an argument in support of the formula. In the course of the argument I suggest that this issue is central to understanding the philosophical significance of the second person and appreciating that it marks an irreducible and fundamental form of thought. (shrink)

Introduction -- The principles of self-defense -- The leading theories of self-defense -- The doctrine of double effect -- Double effect and common sense morality -- Can double effect justify self-defense? -- Conclusion: Justifying self-defense.

The aim of this study was to assess attitudes of intensive care nurses to selected ethical issues related to end-of-life decisions in paediatric intensive care units. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed in 2005 to intensive care nurses at two different scientific occasions in Turkey. Of the 155 intensive care nurse participants, 98% were women. Fifty-three percent of these had intensive care experience of more than four years. Most of the nurses failed to agree about withholding (65%) or withdrawing (60%) futile (...) treatment. In addition, 68% agreed that intravenous nutrition must continue at all costs. In futile treatment cases, the nurses tended to leave the decision to parents or act maternalistically. The results showed that intensive care nurses could ignore essential ethical duties in end-of-life care. We suggest that it is necessary to educate Turkish intensive care nurses about ethical issues at the end of life. (shrink)

The parameters governing our behavior are in constant flux, and capturing these dynamics in cognitive models remains a challenge. We demonstrate how a mapping between ACT‐R's model of declarative memory and the linear ballistic accumulator enables efficient estimation of memory parameters from data. The resulting estimates provide a cognitively meaningful explanation for observed differences in behavior over time and between individuals.

The parameters governing our behavior are in constant flux. Accurately capturing these dynamics in cognitive models poses a challenge to modelers. Here, we demonstrate a mapping of ACT-R's declarative memory onto the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA), a mathematical model describing a competition between evidence accumulation processes. We show that this mapping provides a method for inferring individual ACT-R parameters without requiring the modeler to build and fit an entire ACT-R model. Existing parameter estimation methods for the LBA can be used, (...) instead of the computationally expensive parameter sweeps that are traditionally done. We conduct a parameter recovery study to confirm that the LBA can recover ACT-R parameters from simulated data. Then, as a proof of concept, we use the LBA to estimate ACT-R parameters from an empirical dataset. The resulting parameter estimates provide a cognitively meaningful explanation for observed differences in behavior over time and between individuals. In addition, we find that the mapping between ACT-R and LBA lends a more concrete interpretation to ACT-R's latency factor parameter, namely as a measure of response caution. This work contributes to a growing movement towards integrating formal modeling approaches in cognitive science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 135-141 [Access article in PDF] On Delusions of Sense:A Response to Coetzee and Sass Rupert Read Keywords schizophrenia, Wittgenstein, Schreber, Faulkner, Benjy, grammar, madness, Cogito The great writings on and of severe mental affliction—those for instance of Schreber, 'Renee', Donna Williams, Artaud, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, Kafka's "Description of a struggle," and even (I (...) would add) key parts of The Lord of the Rings—present us with something deeply enigmatic. They have, we might say, a strong grammar, a grammar—a mode of hanging together, and (in this case) of linguistically seeming to make a sense that is not our sense and that we cannot make sense of—... they have a grammar all of their own, and all of its own, a grammar that resists and rejects interpretation even as it sometimes seems to offer interpretations. 1It was Wittgenstein's view that to make mental illness unpuzzling was a mistake, or (better, perhaps) a mythologically problematic move. Wittgenstein's aim in his philosophizing was to understand what was enigmatic when it could be understood without unwisely turning it into something altogether unpuzzling... and then to acknowledge that there are some things that may remain forever puzzling, without committing oneself to the metaphysically disastrous claim that the reason they are endlessly puzzling is that they lie outside the boundaries of human life, language, or reason, as though we could peek outside those alleged boundaries to see what was there, but never truly say anything about it.There simply may be places where our understanding—phenomenological understanding, understanding of what it is like—gives out, and not because it is (or we are) merely human. For instance, perhaps one cannot capture some mental illness by intellection alone, or even perhaps at all. Perhaps the best understanding one can have of mental illness is purely negative (in a sense at least as strong as that involved in negative theology, wherein God is only defined by what it is not).Louis Sass (2003) writes I am not sure whether or not Read would accept that a philosophical position can be understandable despite its containing deep, internal logical tensions (perhaps he would not). If such understanding is possible, however, it does seem to open the way for a similar understanding of conditions like that of Schreber. (p. 127) Unfortunately, however, it is indeed not possible—that is, this notion is merely a fantasy—by my lights. Philosophical positions, all of which turn out to contain such inexorable tensions, cannot be understood: they are mirages. Solipsism, as a position, is not any better (or worse) off [End Page 135] than (say) (Metaphysical) Realism. They are both mirages, just different aspects of the same nothing. 2 Considered as positions, they are in the end literally—when one understands their logic—one and the same nothing. Wittgenstein already made this quite clear in his Tractatus. Perhaps in contrast to Sass, there is then nothing special about solipsism: it is just one mode of presentation rather than another of the illusion that there can be philosophical positions.Sass claims that in saying this kind of thing I am committed to ruling out that some mental illness can be understood or can even exist, on abstract intellectual grounds. I am not. I am simply wishing to leave open the possibility that there may be things that some people utter or seem to experience which intellection gives us little or no assistance with. If Sass wishes to deny this, then I suggest that it is he and not I who is the absolutist intellectualist here, in insisting that rewriting something deeply strange in a weaker grammar is furthering our grasp of it.My suggestion concerning Faulkner's presentation of Benjy, in my original paper, was that it is a mythological mistake to think that Faulkner provides us with the tools for giving an unpuzzling rendition of what had perhaps appeared to be "another country," inaccessible to us. Rather, Faulkner's representation... (shrink)

In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience. There are, I think, three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from the world and, after stripping the mind of concepts and images, experiences union with something which can be described as an undifferentiated unity. Introvertive (...) mysticism is a more important phenomenon than extrovertive mysticism. Numinous experiences are complex experiences involving dread, awe, wonder, and fascination. One finds oneself confronted with something which is radically unlike ordinary objects. Before its overwhelming majesty and power, one is nothing but dust and ashes. In contrasting oneself with its uncanny beauty and goodness, one experiences one's own uncleanness and ugliness. The experiences bound up with the devotional life of the ordinary believer are also religious in character. Nevertheless these more ordinary experiences should, I think, be distinguished both from numinous experiences and from mystical experiences, for they do not appear to involve the sense of immediate presence which characterises the latter. (shrink)