By Alon Chasid Peter Langland-Hassan’s Explaining Imagination (hereafter: EI) presents a reductive thesis: imagining is not a sui generis mental state or attitude, but one of the basic folk- psychological attitudes such as beliefs, judgments (i.e., occurrent beliefs), desires, intentions, etc., or combinations thereof. At first sight, this novel thesis …
By Margherita Arcangelia Imagination is clearly “a dense and tangled piece of country” (Furlong 1961: 15). The last decade, however, saw considerable philosophical work aimed at mapping this terrain of the mind. Peter Langland-Hassan’s book is a sophisticated and thought provoking atlas, whose purpose is to show that where other …
Greetings Brains Blog readers! I am very pleased to begin a weeklong Brains Blog symposium on my book, Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020). The entire book is available as an open access download HERE, for those interested in following along at home. I begin today with a précis articulating the book’s …
We are thrilled that Peter Langland-Hassan will be sharing and responding to comments about their new book Explaining Imagination (2020, Oxford University Press). You can find everything in one place here (as it becomes available).
One of the major shifts in scientists’ thinking about cognitive control in recent years has been the recognition that control is motivated. In other words, we engage cognitive control to plan and guide a task because, at some level, we are motivated to do that task. This simple recognition has …
Inhibition is arguably the function most colloquially associated with cognitive control. When we think of self-control or willpower, it is often our ability to stop ourselves from doing unwanted, distracting, or maladaptive tasks that we are thinking about. And it follows that the construct of inhibition has played a significant …
In my last post, I introduced the role of working memory in cognitive control as a source of contextual support. I then discussed the metaphor of a working memory gate that controls input and output from working memory. In today’s post, I will drill down a bit more into one …
