Humans see faces as beautiful: The role of superadditive mechanisms in determining visual content. Selina Guter, MIT Our conscious visual experience presents us with various features of objects: among others, their shape, color, and size. But what about aesthetic properties, like beauty? My paper argues that at least one kind …
By Sarah Robins, Purdue University Thanks to the Brains Blog for featuring some of the great work from the latest SSPP meeting this week. There are several ‘phil & psych societies’, so it feels worth kicking off the week with a note about what distinguishes the SSPP. The SSPP is, …
This week we are very happy to co-host a series of posts with the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, featuring work from this year’s annual meeting! Today, Sarah Robins will outline the mission of SSPP, and what makes it such a great venue. Then, the rest of the week …
Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)Peter Carruthers 5. The will Intentions get discussed in a number of places in the book. One is in Chapter 5. Having shown that cognitive science makes use of an irreducible notion of intention (often studied in cognitive neuroscience under the …
Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)Peter Carruthers 4. Belief and knowledge Chapter 7 discusses the other main component in common-sense belief-desire psychology: beliefs. (Chapter 8 – which discusses the question whether attitudes like belief, desire, and intention admit of degrees – takes up the alleged existence …
Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)Peter Carruthers 3. Pleasure and desire Much of the remainder of the book evaluates the standard model of action-explanation itself. Chapter 5 discusses decision making in light of one’s beliefs and desires, resulting in intentions to act. Here there is much …
Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing (CUP, 2025)Peter Carruthers 2. Mental actions Yesterday I emphasized the wide range of actions that fall outside the standard belief-desire model. One payoff from recognizing this variety is that many more mental processes emerge as action-like, too. There are obvious cases that …
