This paper argues that open-mindedness is a corrective virtue. It serves as a corrective to the epistemic vice of confirmation bias. Specifically, open-mindedness is the epistemically virtuous disposition to resist the negative effects of confirmation bias on our ability to reason well and to evaluate evidence and arguments. As part of the defense and presentation of our account, we explore four discussions of open-mindedness in the recent literature. All four approaches have strengths and shed light on aspects of the virtue (...) of open-mindedness. Each mentions various symptoms of confirmation bias and some explore aspects of the corrective role of open-mindedness. However, ours is the first to explicitly identify open-mindedness as a corrective virtue to the specific epistemic vice of confirmation bias. We show how the corrective account also permits a response to the concern that open-mindedness might not actually count as a virtue. (shrink)

This book will be a part of Routledge's "New Problems of Philosophy" series.

Pretense is a topic of keen interest to philosophers and psychologists. But what is it, really, to pretend? What features qualify an act as pretense? Surprisingly little has been said on this foundational question. Here I defend an account of what it is to pretend, distinguishing pretense from a variety of related but distinct phenomena, such as (mere) copying and practicing. I show how we can distinguish pretense from sincerity by sole appeal to a person's beliefs, desires, and intentions – (...) and without circular recourse to an ‘intention to pretend’ or to a sui generis mental state of ‘imagining.’. (shrink)

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and (...) desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

Abstract: How it is that one's own thoughts can seem to be someone else's? After noting some common missteps of other approaches to this puzzle, I develop a novel cognitive solution, drawing on and critiquing theories that understand inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia as stemming from mismatches between predicted and actual sensory feedback. Considerable attention is paid to forging links between the first-person phenomenology of thought insertion and the posits (e.g. efference copy, corollary discharge) of current cognitive (...) theories. I show how deficits in the subconscious mechanisms regulating inner speech may lead to a 'fractured phenomenology' responsible for schizophrenic patients' reports of inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations. Supporting work on virtual environments is discussed, and lessons concerning the fixity of delusional belief are drawn. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an imagining (...) aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...) its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 1-13 [Access article in PDF] From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context Ihab Hassan I What Was Postmodernism? What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I (...) did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed.But this is only to confirm Nietzsche's insight, that if an idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological conflict and media hype.All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physical sciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries; haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon and, just to [End Page 1] add to the confusion, myself--locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week. But a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.Let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In the process, we may discover a family of words congenial to postmodernism. Here are some current uses of the term: 1. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt McDougall's Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki's Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples of postmodern architecture. They depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch. 2. In a recent encyclical, titled "Fideset Ratio," Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine. 3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct. 4. In Pop culture, postmodernism--or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly--refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo's David--pink dayglo glasses, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders--advertising KonTiki Travel in New Zealand. What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious readers can consult Hans Bertens' The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest [End Page 2] introduction I know to the topic. But now I must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective. II Postmodernism/Posmodernity. I make this move by... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Postmodernism:A Self-InterviewIhab HassanThe following interview did not take place in Ihab Hassan's study in Milwaukee, with a view of Lake Michigan, rippling turquoise, blue, and mauve under a sky of fluffy paratactical clouds.Interviewer: You are sometimes known as the Father...Hassan: Please! At most, the Godfather of Postmodernism, though I don't know who the Godmother is. Maybe Madam Hype?I: Why hype?H: Because postmodernism began as a genuinely contested (...) idea and is fading as a form of media hype.I: Can you define it, however tentatively?H: I would prefer not to. In fact, I cannot, no more than I can define romanticism or modernism in a sentence or paragraph. Such definitions are best left to some onomastic genius. Once, I offered a table of features contrasting modernism with postmodernism. Once is quite enough.I: Why is that?H: Because it was as widely cited as pounced upon, nearly everyone ignoring my pointed disclaimer: "Yet the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound."I: Well, if we can't define postmodernism, how can we talk about it? [End Page 223]H: The way we talk about everything else: say, freedom, justice, love, spirit, happiness.... We talk about postmodernism by using the word in various verbal contexts—Wittgenstein would have said "language games"—and seeing what happens.I: What happens?H: Some discussions engage postmodernism and clarify it in certain perspectives, without actually defining it: for instance, the works of Hans Bertens, Charles Jencks, Andreas Huyssen, even Fredric Jameson....I: Why even Jameson?H: Because Marxism has a tenuous relation to contemporary reality, as everyone knows except some Western academics.I: Some would say that the entire phenomenon of postmodernism is an exercise of Western academics.H: That's a bit of a non sequitur but true enough, true up to a point. Remember, the phenomenon has overflowed its theoretical origins to become a kind of ironic cultural awareness, a mode of historical reflexivity—if you wish, a perpetually anxious exercise in self-definition.I: But Western, always Western, right?H: Japan has contributed vigorously to postmodernism, especially in art and architecture. So, instead of saying "Western," let's say high-tech, mass-media, omni-consuming societies.I: That, in effect, excludes four fifths of the world, wouldn't you say?H: Yes—and no. You see, cultural postmodernism has mutated into geopolitical postmodernity. By the latter, I mean both globalization with its thousand faces (multinational capitalism, cyber technology, cultural imperialism, "Americanization"), and counter-globalization with as many masks (local knowledge, old cultural traditions, postcolonial ideologies, anti-Western resentments). It's the monster phenomenon of our time.As I have written a good deal about this phenomenon, most recently in Angelika, I won't repeat myself here. The point, however, is that postmodernity is a planetary process, postmodernism is not.I: That suggests a political dimension, which some say you have slighted in your work. How would you respond to that criticism?H: Writing in the late sixties and early seventies about postmodernism, I lacked the benefits of hindsight. For instance, I focused on high culture, Beckett and Borges and Nabokov and Barthelme and Barth. I did not foresee then that postmodernism would become a media phenomenon, involving pop and kitsch. And I recognized the emergent process of globalization only in the Seventies, in Paracriticisms (1975).But I "slighted" the political only in the sense that I did not give it [End Page 224] priority, did not make it an "absolute horizon." In fact, I believe that a primary emphasis on politics flattens, impoverishes our lives. The current paradigm in the humanities ignores the inner cost of "politics."I: Forgive me, but that's another example of what some colleagues in the profession perceive as your contrary or cross-grained character. Can you explain why politics impoverishes our lives?H: Conformists—remember Harold Rosenberg's quip about "the herd of independent minds"?—are quick to discover perversity everywhere. But never mind that. The gravamen is that politics... (shrink)

In Finnegans Wake, the uncouth portmanteau word "Janglish" suggests a jangled kind of English. Joyce, of course, lived and died before that other uncouth word, "globalization," rode the waves of cyberspace. By resorting to a dubious conceit, I use "Janglican" to invoke American letters on the tongue of writers like Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Aleksander Hemon, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, among many others (including this writer, who speaks every language with an accent, a literary feat of sorts.)There's no (...) conceit in my subtitle, which moots the central question of this essay: can we still speak of national literatures—say, of American or Australian literature—in the age of globalization? (Concepts germane to .. (shrink)

One feature of the individuals Nietzsche considers paradigms of greatness is that they are, in some capacity, rare —an exception to the majority.1 It would be difficult to overstate the frequency of this association in the texts. From as early as UM, Nietzsche repeatedly contrasts the “rarest and most valuable exemplars” with the pejorative “herd [Heerde]”, the “common [gemein]”, the “mediocre [mittelmässig]”, and the “rabble [Pöbel]”.2 This contrast becomes more explicit in Nietzsche’s mature period, where, for example, he writes plainly (...) that “what can be common has ever but little... (shrink)

In this descriptive – correlative study we examined the relationship between big five personality traits with cultural intelligence in 113 active soccer coaches in the city of Mashhad in north-eastern of Iran. Anget. al cultural intelligence and Costa & McCrae Revised NEO Personality Inventory and NEO Five-Factor Inventory with Cultural intelligence. A significant reverse relationship was observed between neuroticism and Cultural intelligence. A significant difference was observed between coaches with A and B coaching degree, in comparison with C and D (...) coaching degree in terms of cultural intelligence. No significant difference was observed between these two groups regarding personality traits. Our results show that some of the personality characteristics are crucial and related to a capability to function effectively in diverse settings. (shrink)

The concept of well-being is correlated with social indicators linked in turn with the classical notion of “the good life”. The paper, instead, emphasizes the importance of relational aspects. It develops a reflection on the dialectic of interpersonal and systemic trust and mistrust, and it analyzes different semantic nuances of the notion of trust. A society characterized by well-being evidences strong type agency, a society with low levels of well being evidences weak type agency. Trust is a social resource indispensable (...) for sustaining agency, society’s self-transformation and well-being. While trust is traditionally thought to contribute to social cohesion, mistrusting the rulers can also be considered a positive countervailing force in contemporary democracies. At the same time, the distrust sedimented in time creates, on the one hand, a saving expectation and on the other, paternalisation as a search for a substitute trust. (shrink)

Le mégaprojet de centrale au charbon Thar (Thar Coal Mega Power Project) est l’un des plus ambitieux du Pakistan. Il affectera directement les communautés du désert de Thar sur une superficie d’environ neuf mille kilomètres carrés. Plus de deux cent cinquante villages seront évacués pour assurer son succès économique. Le projet a d’ores et déjà provoqué des migrations, des spéculations sur le sol, l’usurpation de pâturages communs et le rejet des communautés. Les conflits dans la région revêtent deux faces. D’abord, (...) on constate des conflits entre les communautés autochtones, l’État et les fonctionnaires de la Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC). Ensuite, les problèmes intracommunautaires se sont transformés en conflits religieux entre musulmans et hindous, bien que les causes sous-jacentes soient environnementales. Cet article fournit une description critique des conflits, de l’usurpation de la terre, des processus de spéculation et d’accumulation dans la zone du projet. (shrink)

Visual imagination (or visualization) is peculiar in being both free, in that what we imagine is up to us, and useful to a wide variety of practical reasoning tasks. How can we rely upon our visualizations in practical reasoning if what we imagine is subject to our whims? The key to answering this puzzle, I argue, is to provide an account of what constrains the sequence in which the representations featured in visualization unfold—an account that is consistent with its freedom. (...) Three different proposals are outlined, building on theories that link visualization to sensorimotor predictive mechanisms (e.g., efference copies, forward models ). Each sees visualization as a kind of reasoning, where its freedom consists in our ability to choose the topic of the reasoning. Of the three options, I argue that the approach many will find most attractive—that visualization is a kind of off-line perception, and is therefore in some sense misrepresentational—should be rejected. The two remaining proposals both conceive of visualization as a form of sensorimotor reasoning that is constitutive of one’s commitments concerning the way certain kinds of visuomotor scenarios unfold. According to the first, these commitments impinge on one’s web of belief from without, in the manner of normal perceptual experience; according to the second, these commitments just are one’s (occurrent) beliefs about such generalizations. I conclude that, despite being initially counterintuitive, the view of visualization as a kind of occurrent belief is the most promising. (shrink)

Few philosophers that have been studied as much as Ibn Sīnā have been as much misunderstood. His extraordinary ability to reflect upon and write in a variety of styles about seemingly every topic in every domain has steered his thought from philosophy and theology to mysticism and esoterism. Instead of helping us to learn and understand better Ibn Sīnā than he has previously been understood, the recent surge of Avicennan studies only adds more confusion to the already complex social context (...) which he was living in. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn from (...) the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (shrink)

This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend (...) a factive view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary. (shrink)

How do we know when we have imagined something? How do we distinguish our imaginings from other kinds of mental states we might have? These questions present serious, if often overlooked, challenges for theories of introspection and self-knowledge. This paper looks specifically at the difficulties imagination creates for Neo-Expressivist, outward-looking, and inner sense theories of self-knowledge. A path forward is then charted, by considering the connection between the kinds of situations in which we can reliably say that another person is (...) imagining, and those in which we can say the same about ourselves. This view is a variation on the outward-looking approach, and preserves much of the spirit of Neo-Expressivism. (shrink)

Dasein contra Mensch: Heidegger und Cassirer in Davos -- Rosenzweig und Heidegger -- Dass die Philosophie nur abendländisch-europäisch sei-- und was nun? Frage an Heidegger und Husserl -- Das Geschick des Abendlandes -- Sein, Geschichte, Ereignis -- Wahrheit in Heideggers Denken -- Der Erste Weltkrieg oder wie der Tod in die Philosophie Einzug hielt.

The nomination of candidate genes underlying complex traits is often focused on genetic variations that alter mRNA abundance or result in non‐conservative changes in amino acids. Although inconspicuous in complex trait analysis, genetic variants that affect splicing or RNA editing can also generate proteomic diversity and impact genetic traits. Indeed, it is known that splicing and RNA editing modulate several traits in humans and model organisms. Using high‐throughput RNA sequencing (RNA‐seq) analysis, it is now possible to integrate the genetics of (...) transcript abundance, alternative splicing (AS) and editing with the analysis of complex traits. We recently demonstrated that both AS and mRNA editing are modulated by genetic and environmental factors, and potentially engender phenotypic diversity in a genetically segregating mouse population. Therefore, the analysis of splicing and RNA editing can expand not only the regulatory landscape of transcriptome and proteome complexity, but also the repertoire of candidate genes for complex traits. (shrink)

Animal models play a crucial role in fundamental and medical research. Progress in the fields of drug discovery, regenerative medicine and cancer research among others are heavily dependent on in vivo models to validate in vitro observations, and develop new therapeutic approaches. However, conventional rodent and large animal experiments face ethical, practical and technical issues that limit their usage. The chick embryo represents an accessible and economical in vivo model, which has long been used in developmental biology, gene expression analysis (...) and loss/gain of function experiments. It is also an established model for tissue/cell transplantation, and because of its lack of immune system in early development, the chick embryo is increasingly recognised as a model of choice for mammalian biology with new applications for stem cell and cancer research. Here, we review novel applications of the chick embryo model, and discuss future developments of this in vivo model for biomedical research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to elucidate Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy in terms of an ethics of virtue. This paper consists of four sections. In the first section I outline three major objections Schopenhauer raises for Kant’s moral philosophy. In section two I extract from these criticisms a framework for Schopenhauer’s own position, identifying how his moral psychology underpins a unified and hierarchical conception of virtue and vice. I then ascertain some strengths of this view. In section three I (...) focus in upon the issue of fixed character and moral education as at least one major point of divergence between Schopenhauer’s virtue ethics and typical trends within the tradition. In the fourth and final section, I consider and respond to this ethical framework’s possible susceptibility to the charge of egoism, and adjudicate among competing solutions in the secondary literature. I conclude that refined forms of Schopenhauer’s ethical views offer rich and plausible insights into both virtue and vice which have received less attention than they deserve. Hence, Schopenhauer warrants more serious concern in contemporary discussions of virtue ethics alongside the likes of Aristotle, Hume and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Let \=\Sigma _{k\ge 0}a_{k}z^{k}\) be a transcendental entire function with real coefficients. The main purpose of this paper is to show that the restriction of f to \ is not definable in the ordered field of real numbers with restricted analytic functions, \. Furthermore, we show that there is \ such that the function \\) on \ is not definable in \, where \ the expansion of the real field generated by multisummable real series.

Martin and Deutscher’s causal theory of remembering holds that a memory trace serves as a necessary causal link between any genuine episode of remembering and the event it enables one to recall. In recent years, the causal theory has come under fire from researchers across philosophy and cognitive science, who argue that results from the scientific study of memory are incompatible with the kinds of memory traces that Martin and Deutscher hold essential to remembering. Of special note, these critics observe, (...) is that a single memory trace can be shaped by multiple past experiences. This appears to prevent traces from underwriting Martin and Deutscher’s distinction between remembering an event and merely forming an accurate representation of it. This paper accepts such criticisms of the standard causal theory and, through considering the phenomenon forgetting through repetition, raises several others. A substantially revised causal theory is then developed, compatible with the thesis that individual memory traces are shaped by multiple past experiences. The key strategy is to conceive of episodic remembering not as the simple retrieval and projection of a static memory trace, but as a complex quasi-inferential process that makes use of multiple forms of information and cues—“prop-like” memory traces included—in generating the experience known as episodic remembering. When remembering is understood as a multi-componential process, there are a variety of ways in which a representation of the past may be appropriately causally dependent upon a prior experience of the event remembered. (shrink)

Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, internal verbalization, “talking in your head,” the “little voice in the head,” and so on. It is both a familiar element of first-person experience and a psychological phenomenon whose complex cognitive components and distributed neural bases are increasingly well understood. There is evidence that inner speech plays a variety of cognitive roles, from enabling abstract thought, to supporting metacognition, memory, and executive function. One active area of (...) controversy concerns the relation of inner speech to auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia, with a common proposal being that sufferers of AVH misidentify their own inner speech as being generated by someone else. Recently, researchers have used artificial intelligence to translate the neural and neuromuscular signatures of inner speech into corresponding outer speech signals, laying the groundwork for a variety of new applications and interventions. (shrink)

Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that (...) even fiction-directed sui generis imaginings would need to incorporate ‘in the fiction’ operators, the main appeal of the idea that sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires") are at work in fiction-appreciation dissipates. [This is Chapter 10 of Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020)]. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative to controls. (...) More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

The theories of reasoned action and planned behaviour have fundamentally changed the view that attitudes directly translate into behaviour by introducing intentions as a crucial intervening stage. Much research across numerous ethical contexts has drawn on these theories to offer a better understanding of how consumers form intentions to act in an ethical way. Persistently, researchers have suggested and discussed the existence of an intention–behaviour gap in ethical consumption. Yet, the factors that influence the extent of this gap and its (...) magnitude have not been systematically examined. We, therefore, contribute to the debate on the intention–behaviour gap by reviewing the empirical TRA/tpb studies that have assessed both intention and behaviour in ethical contexts. The findings from our review show that few studies assessed the intention–behaviour relationship and as a result, there is limited empirical evidence to date to quantify more accurately the intention–behaviour gap in ethical consumption. Our second contribution aims to provide an empirical case study which assesses the magnitude of the intention–behaviour gap in the context of avoidance of sweatshop clothing and to assess the roles of planning and actual behavioural control in potentially reducing the intention–behaviour gap. The findings of our case study suggest that there is indeed a large gap between intention and behaviour, and we conclude by calling for more empirical longitudinal studies to assess the complex nature of the relationship between intention and behaviour. (shrink)

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing (...) interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

This chapter considers the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to exhibit creativity and imagination, in light of recent advances in generative AI and the use of deep neural networks (DNNs). Reasons for doubting that AI exhibits genuine creativity or imagination are considered, including the claim that the creativity of an algorithm lies in its developer, that generative AI merely reproduces patterns in its training data, and that AI is lacking in a necessary feature for creativity or imagination, such as consciousness, (...) agency, metacognitive awareness, or the use of mental imagery. In each case, a counterargument is provided that AI already has or soon will overcome the apparent barrier. In some instances, this is because the critical features deemed lacking in AI may not be necessary for human creativity and imagination either. In others, it is because important developmental and structural similarities between humans and generative AI have been insufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces—the replay theory and the (...) prop theory—that return conflicting answers to whether remembering is constructive imagining. The prop theory’s vision of traces is suggestive of continuism, while the replay theory’s is a natural fit for discontinuism. Which view of traces is in fact correct remains undetermined by current empirical work. Nevertheless, it may already be possible to reach a compromise in the (dis)continuism debate, through the development of a conciliatory continuist causal theory. This view—only outlined here—accepts the continuism-friendly prop theory of traces, while still requiring that genuine remembering fulfills an appropriate causation condition, as required by the kinds of causal theories of remembering typically favored by discontinuists. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes. The result is that, if inner (...) speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is. The article concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech. (shrink)

Analyzing encounters between Europeans and their eastern others before the European Enlightenment, this book illustrates that adopting an intercultural perspective in western political theory is necessary because the West’s cultural others have played a foundational role in developing a distinct western cultural self-understanding.

It was recently suggested that the cosmological constant problem as viewed in a non-perturbative framework is intimately connected to the choice of time and a physical Hamiltonian. We develop this idea further by calculating the non-perturbative vacuum energy density as a function of the cosmological constant with multiple choices of time. We also include a spatial curvature of the universe and generalize this calculation beyond cosmology at a classical level. We show that vacuum energy density depends on the choice of (...) time, and in almost all time gauges, is a non-linear function of the cosmological constant. This non-linear relation is a calculation for the vacuum energy density given some arbitrary value of the cosmological constant. Hence, in this non-perturbative framework, certain conventional aspects of the cosmological constant problem do not arise. We also discuss why the conventional cosmological constant problem is not well-posed, and formulate and answer the question: “Does vacuum gravitate?”. (shrink)