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This talk describes and criticizes traditional approaches to moral psychology, which try to understand moral judgments through questionnaires. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that it is more accurate and illuminating to use tests of implicit attitudes modeled on tests of implicit racial attitudes. Sinnott-Armstrong explains one such test that we have used with great success in predicting not only personality variables but also behavior (charity donations and voting). Finally, he draws out potential lessons for traditional issues in moral philosophy and legal responsibility.

Walter Sinnott–Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics at Duke University in the Philosophy Department, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Law School. He publishes widely in ethics, moral psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of law, epistemology, informal logic, and philosophy of religion.

Speakers:
Yann LeCun (Data Science, NYU; Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research)
Gary Marcus (Psychology, NYU; Founder, Geometric Intelligence)

Thursday, October 5, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Tishman Auditorium
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South

No registration required. Seating is first-come first-served.

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”.

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’.

In split-brain patients, the cerebral hemispheres have been separated by severing the corpus collosum. These patients sometimes behave as if they have one mind and sometimes as if they have two. Do these patients have a single consciousness that is in some respects fragmented? Or does each hemisphere support a distinct experiencing subject with a separate mind?

Joseph LeDoux (Center for Neural Science, NYU)
Yaïr Pinto (Psychology, University of Amsterdam)
Elizabeth Schechter (Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis)

Elizabeth Schechter, author of the recent book Self-consciousness and ‘Split-brains’: The Mind’s I, will argue for the two-minds view. Yair Pinto, author of the recent article “The Split Brain Phenomenon Revisited: A Single Conscious Agent with Split Perception”, will argue for the one-mind view. Joseph Ledoux, author of the 1977 article “A Divided Mind: Observations on the Conscious Properties of the Separated Hemispheres”, will argue for an intermediate position.