Workplace ethics perceptions drive ethical behaviors, but our understanding of how context shapes the nature of this relationship is limited. Consequently, this article uses contingency theory to explore how perceptions of ethical priorities in the workplace—ethical work climate (EWC)—are differentially associated with ethical behavior based on the broader context. Specifically, we meta-analytically test theoretically relevant cultural values (i.e., collectivism, power distance) and work context factors (i.e., consequence of errors, job autonomy) as moderators of the connection between EWC perceptions and ethical (...) behavior. Our findings reveal that while higher power-distance societal contexts strengthen the connection between EWC perceptions and ethical behavior, work contexts with higher autonomy _weaken_ the connection. We found mixed support for collectivism as a contextual moderator, with results supporting theoretical expectations with one cultural conceptualization but not another. Contrary to expectations, the consequences of errors in work contexts did not moderate the association between EWC perceptions and ethical behavior. Taken together, this meta-analytic investigation highlights the meaningful role of the broader organizational context as a potential boundary condition for the influence of EWC perceptions on ethical behavior. (shrink)

Workplace ethics perceptions drive ethical behaviors, but our understanding of how context shapes the nature of this relationship is limited. Consequently, this article uses contingency theory to explore how perceptions of ethical priorities in the workplace—ethical work climate (EWC)—are differentially associated with ethical behavior based on the broader context. Specifically, we meta-analytically test theoretically relevant cultural values (i.e., collectivism, power distance) and work context factors (i.e., consequence of errors, job autonomy) as moderators of the connection between EWC perceptions and ethical (...) behavior. Our findings reveal that while higher power-distance societal contexts strengthen the connection between EWC perceptions and ethical behavior, work contexts with higher autonomy weaken the connection. We found mixed support for collectivism as a contextual moderator, with results supporting theoretical expectations with one cultural conceptualization but not another. Contrary to expectations, the consequences of errors in work contexts did not moderate the association between EWC perceptions and ethical behavior. Taken together, this meta-analytic investigation highlights the meaningful role of the broader organizational context as a potential boundary condition for the influence of EWC perceptions on ethical behavior. (shrink)

Questions about the nature of self and self-consciousness are closely aligned with questions about the nature of autonomy. These concepts have deep roots in traditional philosophical discussions that concern metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. They also have direct relevance to practical considerations about informed consent in medical contexts. In this paper, with reference to understanding specific side effects of deep brain stimulation treatment in cases of, for example, Parkinson’s Disease, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder, I’ll argue that it (...) is best to frame discussions of informed consent in terms of relational autonomy and a pattern theory of self. (shrink)

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions (...) in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way? (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher presents a ground-breaking interdisciplinary account of action. He shows that in order to understand human agency and the aspects of mind that are associated with it, we need to grasp the crucial role of context or circumstance in action, and the normative constraints of social and cultural practices.

Shaun Gallagher's The Inordinance of Time develops an account of the experience of time at the intersection of three approaches: phenomenology, cognitive ...

Philosophical hermeneutics, understood as the theory of nterpretation, investigates some questions that are also asked in the cognitive sciences. The nature of human understanding, the way that we gain and organize knowledge, the role played by language and memory in these considerations, the relations between conscious and unconscious knowledge, and how we understand other persons, are all good examples of issues that form the intersection of hermeneutics and the cognitive sciences. Although hermeneutics is most often contrasted with the natural sciences, (...) there are some clear ways in which hermeneutics can contribute to the cognitive sciences and vice versa. (shrink)

Researchers working on children's moral understanding maintain that the child's capacity to distinguish morality from convention shows that children regard moral violations as objectively wrong. Education in the moral domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, one traditional way to cast the issue of objectivism is to focus not on conventionality, but on whether moral properties depend on our responses, as with properties like icky and fun. This paper argues that the moral/conventional task is inadequate for assessing whether children regard moral (...) properties as response-dependent. Unfortunately, children's understanding of response-dependent properties has been neglected in recent research. Two experiments are reported showing that children are more likely to treat properties like fun and icky as response-dependent than moral properties like good and bad. Hence, this helps support the claim that children are moral objectivists. (shrink)

Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including perception, affect, and action. Gallagher argues that the brain is not secluded from the world or isolated in its own processes, but rather is dynamically connected with body and environment.

Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how ‘intentional’ is interpreted. That is, in Knobe’s cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of ‘intentional’ opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe’s results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the (...) use of intuitions in philosophy is complicated by fact that there are robust individual differences in intuitions about matters of philosophical concern. (shrink)

Rational Rules argues that moral learning can be understood in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. Nichols provides statistical learning accounts of some fundamental aspects of moral development, combining aspects of traditional empiricist and rationalist approaches.

The medicalization of mental health remains a point of contention for bioethicists, especially as it concerns the epistemic capabilities of those diagnosed with an illness or disorder. Gosselin (2019) argues that biomedicalization commits epistemic injustices against these persons and consequently entraps them in a “cycle of vulnerability”; in response, she proposes principles of justice to defend them from such affronts. This paper builds off of her work and responds particularly to the demand for a “sociocentric view of the self as (...) essentially relational.” I present a theory of interdependent agency and affiliation that I contend conceptually bolsters her normative principles. I explain how an expanded use of relational epistemologies, united with a non-ideal theory of mental health, can enrich our hermeneutical resources with respect to those with mental illnesses/disorders. My account introduces normative considerations premised on interdependency, most notably from care theory. Concepts such as vulnerability, relational autonomy, attentiveness, and responsiveness ground a relationally-situated approach that (1) improves the epistemic positionalities of patients, (2) informs more suitable dynamics of care/treatment, and (3) unites groups of mutually interested actors against harm and injustice. I thus use a framework of care to promote affiliations of similarly disadvantaged persons under shared causes and initiatives. I refer to these assemblages as “caring affinity networks.”. (shrink)

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural (...) evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

_The Phenomenological Mind_ is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: • what is phenomenology? • naturalizing phenomenology and the cognitive sciences • phenomenology and consciousness • consciousness and self-consciousness • time and consciousness • intentionality • the embodied mind • action • knowledge of other minds • situated and extended minds • phenomenology and personal identity. This second edition includes a new preface, and revised (...) and improved chapters. Also included are helpful features such as chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and a glossary, making _The Phenomenological Mind_ an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I present arguments against both explicit and implicit versions of the simulation theory for intersubjective understanding. Logical, developmental, and phenomenological evidence counts against the concept of explicit simulation if this is to be understood as the pervasive or default way that we understand others. The concept of implicit (subpersonal) simulation, identified with neural resonance systems (mirror systems or shared representations), fails to be the kind of simulation required by simulation theory, because it fails to explain how neuronal processes meet constraints (...) that involve instrumentality and pretense. Implicit simulation theory also fails to explain how I can attribute a mental or emotion state that is different from my own to another person. I also provide a brief indication of an alternative interpretation of neural resonance systems. (shrink)

Beyond Rawls engages one of the most provocative and influential developments in contemporary political philosophy. Focusing on the idea- as opposed to a single conception- of purely 'political' liberalism, Shaun Young examines the work of a number of prominent political liberals, and concludes that as it presently manifests itself, the concept of political liberalism cannot achieve its stated goals.

Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.

According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of (...) obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. (shrink)

This volume presents new essays on the propositional imagination by leading researchers. The propositional imagination---the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator---plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. Yet only recently has there been a systematic attempt to give a cognitive account of the propositional imagination. These thirteen essays, specially written for the volume, capitalize on this recent work, extending the theoretical picture (...) of the imagination and exploring the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The essays in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of 'imaginative resistance', the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility. The Architecture of the Imagination will be an essential resource for the growing number of philosophers and psychologists studying the nature of the imagination and on its role in philosophy, aesthetics, and everyday life. (shrink)

The Phenomenological Mind is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: What is phenomenology? naturalizing phenomenology and the empirical cognitive sciences phenomenology and consciousness consciousness and self-consciousness, including perception and action time and consciousness, including William James intentionality the embodied mind action knowledge of other minds situated and extended minds phenomenology and personal identity Interesting and important examples are used throughout, including phantom limb syndrome, blindsight (...) and self-disorders in schizophrenia, making The Phenomenological Mind an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Marc Jeannerod is director of the Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon. His work in neuropsychology focuses on motor action. The idea that there is an essential relationship between bodily movement, consciousness, and cognition is not a new one, but recent advances in the technologies of brain imaging have provided new and detailed support for understanding this relationship. Experimental studies conducted by Jeannerod and his colleagues at Lyon have explored the details of brain activity, not only as we are actively (...) moving, but as we plan to move, as we imagine moving, and as we observe others move. His work also captures important distinctions between pathological and non-pathological experience. In The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action , Jeannerod focussed on object-oriented actions. What happens in the brain and what do we experience when we reach to grasp an object? How do we plan an action of that sort? To what extent does explicit motor imagery contribute to such action? What role does a motor representation or motor schema play in the accomplishment of action? At the very end of that book he raises questions that seem quite different. How is it possible to understand the intentions of others? Precisely what mechanisms allow us to imitate other people's actions? In more recent years much of Jeannerod's work has been in pursuit of these questions about interaction with others, and he has helped to show that there are intimate connections between moving ourselves and understanding others. Jeannerod's work does not lack important implications for a philosophical understanding of human activity. Although in contemporary philosophical debates on consciousness one can still find arguments that simply ignore bodily movement as an important factor in cognition, several recent works have returned to serious consideration of movement and action . In the following interview Jeannerod discusses many issues relevant to the philosophy of mind and action, including concepts of intentionality, movement and consciousness of movement, the role of simulation in understanding others, and the best way to conceptualize brain processes in all of these regards. Importantly, he makes constant reference to the empirical evidence, much of it developed in his own experimental studies. (shrink)

A comprehensive reader on the problem of the self as seen from the viewpoints of philosophy, developmental psychology, robotics, cognitive neuroscience,...

The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, selfawareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been (...) concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

Senior lecturers/lecturers in mental health nursing (11 in round one, nine in round two, and eight in the final round) participated in a three-round Delphi study into the teaching of health care ethics (HCE) to students of nursing. The participants were drawn from six (round one) and four (round three) UK universities. Information was gathered on the organization, methods used and content of HCE modules. Questionnaire responses were transcribed and the content analysed for patterns of interest and areas of convergence (...) or divergence. Findings include: the majority (72.8%) of the sample believed that insufficient time was allocated to the teaching of HCE; case studies were considered a popular, although problematic, teaching method; the ‘four principles’ approach was less than dominant in the teaching of HCE; and virtue ethics was taught by only 36.4% of the participants. The Delphi technique proved adequate and worth while for the purposes of this study. Further empirical research could aim to replicate or contradict these findings, using a larger sample and recruiting more university departments. Reflection is required on several issues, including the depth and breadth to which ethics theory and, more controversially, meta-ethics, are taught to nursing students. (shrink)

People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and (...) equivocal evidence to interpret candidate rules as applying more narrowly than utilitarian rules. (shrink)

In this essay, two different forms of debunking arguments are distinguished. On the type of debunking argument that I will promote, one attempts to undercut the justificatory status of a belief by showing that the belief was formed by an epistemically defective psychological process. I argue that there is a promising application of such a process debunking argument in metaethics. In normative ethics, however, process debunking arguments face greater obstacles.

This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, ultimately depends (...) on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem. (shrink)

Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism (...) is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. (shrink)

This paper argues that self-consciousness and moral agency depend crucially on both embodied and social aspects of human existence, and that the capacity for practical wisdom, phronesis, is central to moral personhood. The nature of practical wisdom is elucidated by drawing on rival analyses of expertise. Although ethical expertise and practical wisdom differ importantly, they are alike in that we can acquire them only in interaction with other persons and through habituation. The analysis of moral agency and practical wisdom is (...) framed by Dennett's proposal that moral personhood requires satisfaction of six conditions, including self-consciousness. (shrink)

In Political Theology the "Modern Way": The Case of Jacques Almain (d. 1515), Shaun Retallick provides the first monograph on this late medieval philosopher-theologian and conciliarist, and his thought. He demonstrates that Almain's political theology, of which ecclesiology is a sub-discipline, is strongly impacted by the Via moderna. At the heart of his political theology is the individual and his or her will. Yet, the individual is rarely viewed in isolation from others; there is a strong emphasis on community (...) and on the religious and secular bodies through which it is realized. But these bodies, including the Church, are understood in collectivist rather than corporatist terms, which tends to a quite radical form of conciliarism. (shrink)

The case of Xiang as described by Jane Carroll is indeed disconcerting well beyond the immediately apparent factors contained within the article. While Xiang’s direct medical expenses are excessive and his inability to pay for those expenses and further support his noncustodial family seem to be the main issues up for debate, Xiang, however, is likely going to need much more psychosocial support if he is to regain his previous independent functionality or retain any aspect of a quality of life (...) whilst continuing his indefinitely isolated treatment. In this response, I briefly outline the probable effects of Xiang’s current situation on his social identity and mental health as well as a potential way that we can minimize these adverse effects. (shrink)

This new introduction by Shaun Gallagher gives students and philosophers not only an excellent concise overview of the state of the field and contemporary debates, but a novel way of addressing the subject by looking at the ways in which phenomenology is useful to the disciplines it applies to. Gallagher retrieves the central insights made by the classic phenomenological philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and others), updates some of these insights in innovative ways, and shows how they directly relate (...) to ongoing debates in philosophy and psychology. Accounts of phenomenological methods, and the concepts of intentionality, temporality, embodiment, action, self, and our ability to understand other people are integrated into a coherent contemporary statement that shows why phenomenology is still an active and vital philosophical approach. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the classic analyses and then goes on to show their relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy about embodied, enactive and extended approaches to our understanding of human experience. Along the way Gallagher introduces some novel interpretations that suggest how phenomenology can both inform and be informed by the terms of these debates. (shrink)

Clark and Chalmers [1998] introduced the concept of the extended mind, in part to move beyond the standard Cartesian idea that cognition is something that happens in a private mental space, "in the head." In this paper I want to pursue a liberal interpretation of this idea, extending the mind to include processes that occur within social and cultural institutions. At the same time I want to address some concerns that have been raised about whether such..

I propose a distinction between two closely related problems: the problem of social cognition and the problem of participatory sense-making. One problem focuses on how we understand others; the other problem focuses on how, with others, we make sense out of the world. Both understanding others and making sense out of the world involve social interaction. The importance of participatory sense-making is highlighted by reviewing some recent accounts of perception that are philosophically autistic -- i.e., accounts that ignore the involvement (...) of others in our perception of the world. (shrink)

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, fancifully dubbed 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our lives. In the latter half of the 20th century mindreading became the object of sustained scientific and theoretical research, capturing the attention of a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, anthropology, and cognitive psychopathology. What has been missing is a detailed and integrated account of the mental components that underlie this remarkable capacity. Nichols and Stich develop and defend a new (...) account of the psychological mechanisms underlying mindreading. They maintain that it is, as common sense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others' minds and reading one's own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretence and imagination which proposes that pretence representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, the 'Possible World Box', which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The mechanisms underlying pretence get recruited when people attempt to understand others and predict their behaviour. In some cases, we use our own mental mechanisms to simulate the mental processes of another, as suggested by the 'simulation theory' of mindreading. However, mindreading also implicates very different kinds of mechanisms that rely on rich bodies of information, as suggested by information-based accounts of mindreading. In addition, the authors argue, reading other minds involves important processes that don't fit into either category. None of these mechanisms, though, explain how we read our own minds, which, according to the authors, requires invoking an entirely independent set of mechanisms.What we find, then, is an intricate web of mental components to explain our fascinating and multifarious knack of understanding minds. This account provides a valuable framework for future work on mindreading and has broad implications for philosophical debates that have surrounded the issue for the last quarter century. (shrink)

The present volume provides an introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy, bringing together some of the most influential articles in ...

An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995) 1; Ethics 103 (1993) 337). Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction. (...) However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This paper argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (a Normative Theory) and an affective mechanism. This account leads to the prediction that other normative prohibitions that are connected to an affective mechanism might be treated as non-conventional. An experiment is presented that indicates that “disgust” violations (e.g. spitting at the table), are distinguished from conventional violations along the same dimensions as moral violations. (shrink)

Educational pressures such as challenging workload, demanding deadlines and competitiveness among undergraduate dental students erode academic integrity in clinical training. The implementation of honour codes have been associated with the reduction in academic dishonesty.An action research was undertaken to investigate and foster academic integrity through creative pedagogical strategies and the implementation of an honour code within the undergraduate dental programme.Students reported the honour code as relevant and it encouraged the five investigated fundamental values of academic integrity. The students also favoured (...) the annual implementation of the honour code. The creative pedagogical strategy facilitated a change in perception on academic integrity in the clinical scenarios sessions. Most students showed changes in perception of academic integrity. The majority of students’ narratives/responses were positive and the emerging subthemes also espoused the five out of the six ICAI fundamental values of academic integrity. Students indicated the need for inclusion of academic integrity education within the curriculum. They felt that staff also should be guided by an academic integrity policy.Implementation of an honour code coupled with creative pedagogical strategies helped to foster understanding and appreciation for academic integrity. Conversely the honour code implementation was more effective due to the use of supportive creative pedagogical strategies on academic integrity. It is still undetermined whether these change in perception impacted on clinical practice during training and post-graduation. (shrink)

Theory theorists conceive of social cognition as a theoretical and observational enterprise rather than a practical and interactive one. According to them, we do our best to explain other people's actions and mental experience by appealing to folk psychology as a kind of rule book that serves to guide our observations through our puzzling encounters with others. Seemingly, for them, most of our encounters count as puzzling, and other people are always in need of explanation. By contrast, simulation theorists do (...) their best to avoid the theoretical stance by using their own experience as the measure of everyone else's. When it comes to explaining how we understand other people some of the very best contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists are simulationists. For example, Vittorio Gallese, Alvin Goldman, Robert Gordon, Jane Heal, Susan Hurley, and Marc Jeannerod. This short list of simulationists, however, already involves some problems. Not everyone on this list understands simulation in the same way. In effect, there are different simulation theories, and although it is important to distinguish them, and I will do so before I go much further, I will in the end argue against all of them. For several reasons I don't think that the concept of simulation explains our primary and pervasive way of understanding others, any more than theory theory does. (shrink)

We argue that theory-of-mind (ToM) approaches, such as “theory theory” and “simulation theory”, are both problematic and not needed. They account for neither our primary and pervasive way of engaging with others nor the true basis of our folk psychological understanding, even when narrowly construed. Developmental evidence shows that young infants are capable of grasping the purposeful intentions of others through the perception of bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions etc. Trevarthen’s notion of primary intersubjectivity can provide a theoretical framework for (...) understanding these capabilities and his notion of secondary intersubjectivity shows the importance of pragmatic contexts for infants starting around one year of age. The recent neuroscience of resonance systems (i.e., mirror neurons, shared representations) also supports this view. These ideas are worked out in the context of an embodied “Interaction Theory” of social cognition. Still, for more sophisticated intersubjective interactions in older children and adults, one might argue that some form of ToM is required. This thought is defused by appeal to narrative competency and the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (or NPH). We propose that repeated encounters with narratives of a distinctive kind is the normal route through which children acquire an understanding of the forms and norms that enable them to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. A potential objection to this hypothesis is that it presupposes ToM abilities. Interaction Theory is deployed once again to answer this by providing an alternative approach to understanding basic narrative competency and its development. (shrink)

By examining Dainton's account of the temporality of consciousness in the context of long-running debates about the specious present and time consciousness in both the Jamesian and the phenomenological traditions, I raise critical objections to his overlap model. Dainton's interpretations of Broad and Husserl are both insightful and problematic. In addition, there are unresolved problems in Dainton's own analysis of conscious experience. These problems involve ongoing content, lingering content, and a lack of phenomenological clarity concerning the central concept of overlapping (...) experiences. (shrink)