In this series, I summarized major arguments in A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology. My exploration of the uses of psychology has emphasized the explanatory roles it fulfills within broader cultural projects. Briefly, empirical psychology seeks mechanistic explanations which then filter into popular uses of psychology, and discursive clinical …
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 …
Welcome to the Brains Blog’s Symposium series on the Cognitive Science of Philosophy. The aim of the series is to examine the use of diverse methods to generate philosophical insight. Each symposium is comprised of two parts. In the target post, a practitioner describes their use of the method under …
When I was in graduate school at Pitt around the late 1990s, I hung out with some faculty and students in the Psych Department. One day I asked one of the more ambitious Psych grad students, “what’s the future of psychology?” He answered without hesitation: “cognitive neuroscience”. Since then, psychology …
The distinction between innate and acquired traits is relevant to the long-standing debate between nativists and empiricists about whether knowledge (of concepts, of language, etc.) is primarily innate or acquired. The debate can’t get off the ground if the distinction is baseless or confused. In recent years, some philosophers have …
You have surely heard about cultural differences in reasoning, how people can fabricate reasons when asked to explain one of their decisions, and how many people seem systematically susceptible to reasoning errors. Much of this research was contributed by Richard Nisbett and their colleagues. Dr. Nisbett was kind enough to …
As explained in the previous post, one very rich area of inquiry concerns the extent to which normative theories of causal reasoning, from both philosophy and elsewhere, successfully characterize how, as an empirical matter, various sorts of subjects (adults, children, non-human animals) reason. This has been explored by psychologists and other researchers …
