The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
Dan Haybron’s recent post on ‘The Folk Concept of Happiness’ brings up an interesting question that I think deserves some further discussion. Is people’s ordinary concept of happiness a purely psychological one, or is it wrapped up in some way with irreducibly normative or moral issues? To address this question, …
Greg Johnson (Drexel University) has completed an almost final draft of an article on
According to a recent paper in Nature Neuroscience, children with autism have virtually no activity in their brain’s mirror neuron system, the apparatus that facilitates imitation and empathy. The researchers believe this malfunction may be the primary cause of autism. Link.
In a recent post and its comments, some questions were raised about Griffiths’s theory of emotions and whether emotions are natural kinds.Griffiths’s (1997) central point was that it is unlikely that all the psychological states and processes that fall under the vernacular category of emotion are similar to one another to …
In his 1997 book, What Emotions Really Are, Paul Griffiths argues that emotions split into three different natural kinds. But in his PSA talk a few weeks ago, Andrea Scarantino (a student of Griffiths) said that Griffiths now thinks that emotions do not split in the way he envisioned in his …
