Part 1 of The Implicit Mind makes the case that “implicit attitudes” are mental states that cause us to act in relatively spontaneous ways, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I offer an unorthodox description of implicit attitudes, distinguish implicit attitudes from other folk psychological kinds, and show how …
To avoid becoming a victim of violent assault, people are often coached to trust their gut feelings. “Trust your INSTINCTS,” the University of Oklahoma Police Department says, “believe your inner feelings when you get uncomfortable about a person or situation. Respond as soon as you feel uncomfortable!”[1] Gavin De Becker, …
The Brains blog is excited for the first webinar of the year over at Neural Mechanisms this Friday. The event is free. Find information about how and when to join the webinar in this post.
Weakness of will is a traditional puzzle in the philosophy of action. The puzzle goes something like this:
FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY: If, at time t, an agent judges that it is better to do A than B, and she believes she is free to do A, then, provided she tries to do either at that time, she will try to do A and not B.
WEAKNESS OF WILL: An agent judges that it is better to do A than B, believes that she is free to do A, but tries to do B.
But taken together, these statements are inconsistent. FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY precludes the possibility of weakness of will (as characterized in WEAKNESS OF WILL), but WEAKNESS OF WILL asserts that it occurs. So can WEAKNESS OF WILL be possible, and if so, how?
In my final post I consider whether all our visual cues to scale function at the level of cognition rather than vision, and the kind of theory that ‘vision without scale’ would imply. 1. Physiological Cues There are two aspects to 3D vision: shape and scale. So far we have …
My account of 3D vision attempts to preserve many of the traditional commitments of naïve realism, whilst rejecting its central tenet of mind-independence. In this fourth post I explain why this provides a more satisfactory solution to variations in scene geometry with viewing conditions than recent ‘four-dimensional’ accounts. 1. Naïve …
In my second post I questioned whether the integration of pictorial cues and binocular disparity occurs at the level of perception. In this third post, I push the argument further by questioning whether pictorial cues contribute to 3D vision at all. 1. ‘Monocular Stereopsis’ (Seeing Depth with One Eye) It …
