Journal Entries

When does hate speech cross the line into incitement of violence? And how does incitement get prosecuted around the world when it leads to violent atrocities like genocide? Are legal categories like incitement to genocide in international law all that effective at preventing or deterring this kind of speech? In her paper, Shannon Fyfe walks us through these complicated legal and philosophical questions as they played out in the trial of three media executives held by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for incitement during the Rwandan genocide. She also discusses incitement in domestic jurisdictions and the January 6 attacks in Washington DC.

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Special Guest: Shannon Fyfe.

Disgust is often thought of as a negative emotion, and even moreso when it comes to morality. Many have argued that the feeling we have when we are morally disgusted by others has a questionable evolutionary history, is not always reliably produced, and has inspired acts of great evil in our past. In his paper, Victor Kumar argues that it's not all bad though, and that moral disgust can sometimes be a fitting response to moral wrongs. Specifically, he argues that disgust is fitting when it is evoked by moral wrongs that pollute social relationships by eroding shared expectations of trust. In these cases, moral disgust can help right certain wrongs, serve as a useful tool for social signalling, and enourage political organization.

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Many philosophers are skeptical of moral disgust, perhaps because they assume that it is tied exclusively to conservative norms and values. I have shown, to the contrary, that disgust is implicated in important moral norms and values that are shared by liberals and conservatives. Disgust is repurposed in ways that support these norms and values, by motivating an important form of punishment, tracking the spread of moral violations, and expressively coordinating collective action. Disgust accurately reflects the nature of certain wrongs that commonly elicit moral revulsion. Instead of ridding ourselves of disgust, then, we would do better to understand its fittingness and unfittingness, its uses and its hazards, and thus arrive at a richer appreciation of its suitability for moral life.

Special Guest: Victor Kumar.

As we learn more and more about the brain, researchers are developing new neuroscientific methods that can help diagnose patients with traumatic brain injury. For example, some of these methods might even be able to tell us that patients who otherwise appear unresponsive are actually still "alive inside". That's an amazing idea, but the story doesn't stop there. As such technology develops, it raises a number of ethical questions about how it works and how to use. In this paper, Andrew and his coauthors investigate the benefits, harms, and costs of using neuroimaging to detect human consciousness.

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The practice guideline update is a milestone in the history of neurology. Recommendations to use investigational neuroimaging methods are but one aspect of the guideline, and there is a need for further normative analysis of its rich content. We encourage continued debate on these issues. Bringing clarity to the underlying ethics of caring for brain‐injured patients can assist clinicians and health care institutions as they incorporate the guideline in clinical practice.

We think that investigational neuroimaging could facilitate access to opportunity for DoC patients. As the guideline highlights, investigational neuroimaging could function as a gatekeeper for continued rehabilitation, and it might also be used as a neural prosthetic, based on future technical improvements. Neuroimaging assessment could also inform clinical decisions that best reflect a patient’s values, even if pursuing those values are inconsistent with standard notions of quality of life. Opportunity‐based frameworks for healthcare justice still require conceptual refinement, and further work needs to be done to thoroughly apply such a framework to the DoC context. However, we believe that this is a promising avenue of future research to explicate the justice claims that DoC patients (or other disabled populations) have to investigational neuroimaging and other novel therapies.

Special Guest: Andrew Peterson.

An enormous amount of research in philosophy and cognitive science has been devoted to belief representation in theory of mind, or the capacity we have to figure out what other people believe. Because of all this focus on belief, one might be tempted to think that belief is one of the most basic theory of mind capacities we have. But is that really what the evidence shows? Jonathan and his coauthors argue that it doesn’t show that at all. Instead, they argue that it’s actually the capacity to figure out what others know—rather than what they believe—that’s the more basic capacity.

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Since the 1970’s, research has explored belief attribution in a way that brings together numerous areas of cognitive science. Our understanding of belief representation has benefitted from a huge set of interdisciplinary discoveries from developmental studies, cognitive neuroscience, primate cognition, experimental philosophy, and beyond. The result of this empirical ferment has been extraordinary, giving us lots of insight into the nature of belief representation.

We hope this paper serves as a call to arms for cognitive scientists to join researchers who have already begun to do the same for knowledge representation. Our hope is that we can marshal the same set of tools and use them to get a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge. In doing so, we may gain better insight into the kind of representation that may— at an even more fundamental level— allow us to make sense of others’ minds.

Special Guest: Jonathan Phillips.

Can the fact that something is morally wrong to believe affect whether the evidence you have justifies that belief? In her paper, Georgi Gardiner argues that the answer is "no". We should follow the evidence where it leads and align our beliefs with the evidence. And if we do that, she argues, we’ll discover that morally wrong beliefs—such as racist beliefs--simply don’t align with the evidence. On this view, racist beliefs are irrational because they are unsupported by evidence or reflect cognitive errors in statistical reasoning, not because they are immoral.

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"Advocates of moral encroachment aim to describe a person whose beliefs are epistemically impeccable—well supported by the evidence and conscientiously considered—yet morally wrong because racist. My contention is that no such belief can exist. If a belief is morally wrong then there is some corresponding prior epistemic error. The belief is not well supported by the evidence and/or it is not interpreted through a morally appropriate understanding, and that understanding is not epistemically well supported. If a belief is epistemically well supported it cannot be racist since no true fact is genuinely racist. With the right background understanding we see that since everyone is equal, any differences based on gender, race, and so on are morally insignificant."

Special Guest: Georgi Gardiner.

You've heard about "social-distancing" but what about emotional "self-distancing", can that help make you wiser? Are different people wiser than others and why? Is wisdom a stable trait and if so how should we measure it? In recent years there's been an explosion of research in cognitive science into answering these questions. But along with this there's also been many disagreements between researchers about what wisdom is, how best to measure it, how it develops, and how it manifests across different situations or cultures. In this episode, Igor Grossmann discusses the efforts of the Wisdom Task Force, a group of researchers who came together in the summer of 2019 to provide a systematic evaluation of dominant theoretical and methodological positions on wisdom, and to try and reach a common position or consensus on the state of the art in wisdom research in empirical psychology.

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"For laypersons and some scientists, wisdom can mean many things (Grossmann & Kung, 2018; Sternberg & Glück, 2019). Conceptualizations of wisdom often appear idiosyncratic, reflecting culture-bound attitudes toward abilities (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995; Rattan, Savani, Naidu, & Dweck, 2012), favored leadership styles (House et al., 2004), or culturallyrelevant moral characteristics (e.g., Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Miller et al., 1990). These considerations notwithstanding, empirically oriented wisdom scientists around the world converge of a set of morally-grounded aspects of meta-cognition as a common psychological signature of wisdom.

Building on the commonalities across many construct operationalizations in empirical sciences, the Wisdom Task Force has proposed the common wisdom model, defining wisdom’s psychological characteristics as morally-grounded excellence in social-cognitive processing. The task force established that by excellence in social-cognitive processing empirical scientists typically refer to PMC—i.e., features of meta-comprehension and meta-reasoning that apply to problem-solving in domains that have consequences for other people. By moral grounding, empirical wisdom scholars typically refer to a set of inter-related aspirational goals: balance of self- and otheroriented interests, pursuit of truth (vs. dishonesty), and orientation toward shared humanity. Future generations of psychological scientists can build on these insights, establishing a common language for a psychometrically sound construct operationalization across multiple levels of analysis (e.g., state vs. trait), and with an eye toward possible ways to nurture wisdom in challenging times."

Special Guest: Igor Grossmann.

Complaining about our pains is often viewed as weak or soft. Kant and Aristotle went so far as to say that it should never be done. And they say it's something a real man would never do. But could complaining actually be a virtue, even when you can't fix the thing that makes you sad or mad? When done well, complaining can expose our vulnerabilities, invite others to commiserate over share pains, affirm and validate experiences, and just maybe--help us all feel a little less alone.

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Complaining offers important personal and interpersonal benefits, to oneself when one may otherwise feel isolated or wonder if one’s perceptions are correct, and to others when complaining fulfills social expectations to be a certain kind of cooperative and discursive companion. In short, minor complaints can fulfill the functions of affirmation of one’s own presence and perceptions, or affirmation of others’ perceptions, or both. The whinge can communicate one’s insistence on acknowledgement (“I am not alone”) and/or the interest in acknowledging others (“You are not alone”).

Most pressing to me are those occasions when one’s complaint is a plea for validation that one’s pains are not insignificant, and one’s complaint further seeks company to attenuate isolation in suffering, because denial of recognition frustrates basic goods of self-knowledge and autonomy. The recognition of others provides us with options, sources of control, and assistance in integrating our self-narratives; the denial of recognition can leave us trapped within ourselves.

Special Guest: Kathryn Norlock.

There is often resistance to the claim from feminist philosophy that knowledge is somehow "socially constructed", but what does that actually mean and is it really all that radical? Sometimes, our social situations or experiences dictate the kind of evidence we are likely to encounter and put us in a better position than others to know what's going on around us. Other times, these experiences can impact what we consider to be good evidence or what a community considers to be justified in the first place. Or maybe here's a simpler way to frame some of these ideas: when it comes to COVID-19 for example, who do you think knows best about what health care workers really need to do their jobs, CEOs or those on the front lines?

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Our aim is not so much to defend these feminist epistemologies – although we think

So, it’s not accurate to say that feminist epistemologists allow social factors to trump truth. They don’t dogmatically assert that justication lines up with beliefs which complement feminist aims, but instead show that certain of these feminism-complementing beliefs t with the evidence as well as, or better than, other beliefs, and that these have other (epistemic) benets to boot.

Special Guests: Natalie Alana Ashton and Robin Mckenna.

Are games art and if so, why? Are they important or valuable and if so, how? A lot of work tries to answer these questions in aesthetics by comparing games to various properties of traditionally acknowledged works that scholars already agree are art. But does this obscure basic features of what games are all about? Unlike most fictions, game designers don't just create a stable object, like a book or a movie. Insead, they create goals, rules, and abilities that people slip into when playing and that guide their experiences. In other words, to some extent games also recreate us, which both reveals what’s beautiful about them--and kind of like yoga--forces us to try out unfamiliar ways of being.

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In game playing, we take on alternate agencies. The game designer can shape a specific form of agency and then pass it to the player. The clarity of the rules and the crispness of the goals make it easier for us to find our way to a novel form of agency. Thus, games allow for the curious possibility of communicating agencies. Games join, then, the various methods and technologies we have invented for recording aspects of our experience. We record sights in paintings, photographs, and movies. We record stories in novels, movies, and songs. And we record agencies in games. By letting us inscribemodes of agency in stable artifacts, games can help constitute a library of agencies.

It is easier to start trying out an unfamiliar way of being when somebody tells you exactly what to do. This is true with yoga and other physical training. If there is a mode of movement or a postural stance that is unfamiliar to me, the easiest way for me to find my way there is to submit myself to very precise direction about where to stand, where to put my feet, and how to move. A new agential mode is likewise easier to find through precise directions about what goals to pursue and which means to use. In this way, we can find our way to a greater flexibility with our agency, by temporarily submitting ourselves to strictures on that agency. Games are yoga for your agency.

Special Guest: C. Thi Nguyen.

How well do you know your own feelings? Is our ability to know this about ourselves less reliable than what we know about the outside world around us? Is there anything we can do to make ourselves less "naive" and improve the reliability of introspection about conscious experiences?

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Descartes, I think, had it quite backwards when he said the mind—including especially current conscious experience—was better known than the outside world. The teetering stacks of paper around me, I’m quite sure of. My visual experience as I look at those papers, my emotional experience as I contemplate the mess, my cognitive phenomenology as I drift in thought, staring at them—of these, I’m much less certain. My experiences flee and scatter as I reflect. I feel unpracticed, poorly equipped with the tools, categories, and skills that might help me dissect them.

I know better what’s in the burrito I’m eating than I know my gustatory experience as I eat it. I know it has cheese. In describing my experience, I resort to saying, vaguely, that the burrito tastes “cheesy,” without any very clear idea what this involves. Maybe, in fact, I’m just— or partly—inferring: The thing has cheese, so I must be having a taste experience of “cheesiness.” Maybe also, if I know that the object I’m seeing is evenly red, I’ll infer a visual experience of uniform “redness” as I look at it. Or if I know that weeding is unpleasant work, I’ll infer a negative emotion as I do it. Indeed, it can make great sense as a general strategy to start with judgments about plain, easily knowable facts of the outside world, then infer to what is more foreign and elusive, our consciousness as we experience that world. I doubt we can fully disentangle such inferences from more “genuinely introspective”

Special Guest: Eric Schwitzgebel.