Calendar

Our final session of 2017 will be on Friday 15th of December, 10.30-12.30, in 7113 (The Philosophy Thesis Room) at the CUNY Graduate Center.

We will be discussing the attached paper by Louise Daoust (Penn/Eckerd) on Perspectival Geometry and Spatial Perception.
Hope to see you there.

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members, but Spring 2018 we will be meeting less frequently. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members, but Spring 2018 we will be meeting less frequently. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

The metaphysics of implicit bias has been an area of heated debates involving philosophers and psychologists. Most theorists of implicit bias posit that associations underwrite implicit bias. Recent dissenters have argued that propositional attitudes undergird this pernicious attitude. However, the propositional attitude view of implicit bias does not satisfyingly explain its various manifestations that are underwritten by its diverse contents. In this paper my criticism targets: (1) legitimacy of ascriptions of unconscious mental content, and (2) the phenomenology of implicit bias. The first criticism focuses on a common assumption in philosophy of mind—the equivalence of content in the conscious and unconscious domain—and raises problems regarding the propositional attitude theorist’s strategy to ascribe propositional attitudes to explain implicit biases which they locate in the unconscious mind of the subject. Second, I argue that the similarities between a more familiar mental phenomenon—the phenomenon of moods—and the conscious manifestations of implicit bias have been ignored. I identify several parallels between moods and implicit bias: their context-dependence, the subject’s lack of awareness of their source, their effects on the salience and valence of their targets, and their simultaneous responsiveness and recalcitrance to reasons. I argue that an explanatorily robust view of implicit bias must be commensurate with this analogy. I end with a proposal that I dub the indeterminate content view, which avoids these problems and promises explanatory power.

We will also be giving an award to 2nd-place essay prize winner Elis Miller (Harvard) for her paper “Whether to Suspend Judgment”.

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members, but Spring 2018 we will be meeting less frequently. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Gottlob Frege famously argued that we should always ‘always separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective’. While analytic philosophers have generally followed this advice when discussing logic and mathematics (in their rejection of ‘psychologism’ about these things), they have not followed it when discussing the psychological itself. It might be thought that if psychologism was true of anything, it is true of the psychological. But much 20th and 21st century analytic philosophy of mind has thought otherwise, approaching the study of the mind using ideas from logic, semantics and the theory of meaning (e.g. the proposition, truth, reference etc.). In this lecture I make two claims: (i) that its rejection of psychologism is one of the things that has made it difficult for philosophy of mind to gain a proper understanding of consciousness, and (ii) that despite the widespread rejection of behaviourism in philosophy and psychology, contemporary philosophy of mind still works with a conception of consciousness that derives from mid-20th century behaviourism. The relationship between psychologism and behaviourism explored here is different, though complementary to, Ned Block’s discussion In his classic 1981 paper, ‘Psychologism and Behaviourism’.

“Reasoning often involves searching for information relevant to answering some question or determining the truth value of some proposition. Starting from a set of propositions, akin to a patch of resources in the environment, reasoners draw inferences, akin to harvesting resources from that patch. Reasoners forage through the space of propositions to find potentially informative patches, each of which promises multiple paths of inferences. Once reasoning from a premise patch begins, reasoners follow a path of inferences relevant to the reasoner’s goal. While foraging along these inferential paths, information relevant to the question or proposition is gathered from the premises. By interpreting reasoning in terms of information intake, a novel model of reasoning can be built.”

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members, but Spring 2018 we will be meeting less frequently. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

SWIP-Analytic Fall 2018 Events

Thursday, September 20, 4:00pm-6:00pm
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 9205
Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame), “Temporal Discounting in Psychology and Philosophy: Four Proposals for Mutual Research Aid”

Thursday, October 18, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Location TBA
Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth), Title TBA

Thursday, November 8, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Location TBA
Jessica Wilson (Toronto), Title TBA

More details will be added as they become available. Click here to download the flyer as a PDF.