Welcome to our fifth Ergo symposium. This week we are showcasing Joshua Shepherd’s paper “Halfhearted Action and Control”, with commentaries by Andreas Elpidorou (Louisville), Nora Heinzelmann (Munich), and Zachary Irving (Virginia). Let me begin by thanking all the participants for their great work! Shepherd introduces his topic with a possibly familiar …
I’m very glad to announce our latest Mind & Language symposium on Guillermo Del Pinal and Shannon Spaulding’s “Conceptual Centrality and Implicit Bias” from the journal’s February 2018 issue. Commentators on the target article include Bryce Huebner (Georgetown), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh), Eric Mandelbaum (CUNY), Steven Sloman (Brown), and Ema Sullivan-Bissett (Birmingham). *** The term “implicit bias” is typically used refer …
I’ll be posting summaries each month of high-quality, general-interest papers from the systems neuroscience literature (usually there are one to five such papers a month). I plan to post them in the middle of the following month (depending on what else is going on here at Brains). Efference copy: from …
I am delighted to announce the next symposium in our series on articles from Neuroscience of Consciousness. We have two types of symposia. For primarily theoretical articles, we will have several commentators from a variety of theoretical perspectives. For novel empirical research, we will have single commentators whose goal is …
Today—in my (alas!) last posting—I suggest some ways the account of the evolution of representational decision making laid out in my book (and sketched in outline last time on the blog) can be applied to a number of open questions in philosophy, psychology, and economics. I will focus on three …
Why did some organisms switch from relying just on reflexive—i.e. purely perceptually-driven—interactions with the world to also employing the tools of representational decision making? What adaptive and other benefits does the reliance on representational decision making yield? Today, I sketch aspects of the answers to these questions; for more details, …
Before it is possible to begin the investigation of the evolution of representational decision making it is necessary to address three foundational issues: (1) The nature of representational decision making—what is it that we are investigating? (2) The reality of representational decision making—why think that representational decision making is a …
