Drugs and Agency

The ethical quandary at the core of how we represent the mind in practical uses of psychology is the technology of agency. The biomedical and psychodynamic (i.e., discursive) approaches are “two different ways to identify, understand, and respond to mental anguish.”[i] In the latter, there are mechanistic accounts for how …

A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology

In A Suspicious Science, I analyze the epistemic context of the uses of psychology in contemporary society so as to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-level human science. I distinguish three uses of psychology: positivist-pragmatic empirical study, discursive therapeutic approaches which promote expressive individualism, and reflexive creative practices employed in the arts …

Nina Poth and Krys Dolega will livestream “Believing Conspiracy Theories: A Bayesian Approach to Belief Protection” on March 25

The next Neural Mechanisms Online webinar— “Believing Conspiracy Theories: A Bayesian Approach to Belief Protection”—will be delivered by Nina Poth & Krys Dolega on Friday the 25th. See below for details about the free talk and how to join. Embodied simulation and its role in cognition Nina Poth & Krys …

The representational, propositional and conceptual dimension of infant belief attribution capacity

There are good reasons to suppose that the infant’s innate disposition for informational sensitivity is grounded on a representational mind. As Kim Sterelny (1991, p. 21) writes: «there can be no informational sensitivity without representation. To learn about the world and to use what we learn to act in new …

Beliefs and Subdoxastic States

This week, I’m blogging about my new book, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (Oxford University Press, September 2019). Today, I’ll discuss the epistemic role of consciousness in cognition. Could there be a cognitive zombie – that is, an unconscious creature with the capacity for cognition? As I use the term, …

Applications of the Account of the Evolution of Representational Decision Making

Today—in my (alas!) last posting—I suggest some ways the account of the evolution of representational decision making laid out in my book (and sketched in outline last time on the blog) can be applied to a number of open questions in philosophy, psychology, and economics. I will focus on three …

The Evolution of Representational Decision Making

Why did some organisms switch from relying just on reflexive—i.e. purely perceptually-driven—interactions with the world to also employing the tools of representational decision making? What adaptive and other benefits does the reliance on representational decision making yield? Today, I sketch aspects of the answers to these questions; for more details, …

Back to Top