Compiled by David Chalmers (Editor) and David Bourget (Assistant Editor), Australian National University.
Part of PhilPapers: online research in philosophy. To suggest an entry, visit PhilPapers.

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5.1. Mental States (Mental States on PhilPapers)

• Attention [16]
• Attention and Consciousness [13]
• Attention, Misc [1]
• The Nature of Attention [2]
• Belief [48]
• Belief, Misc [4]
• Collective Belief [2]
• De Re Belief [0]
• The Nature of Belief [21]
• Tacit and Dispositional Belief [0]
• Bodily Experience [16]
• Bodily Awareness [12]
• Bodily Experience, Misc [2]
• Bodily Sensations [2]
• Desire [16]
• Desire as Belief [4]
• Desire-Satisfaction Theories of Well-Being [1]
• Pleasure and Desire [0]
• Theories of Desire, Misc [1]
• Desire, Misc [1]
• Dreams [23]
• Dreams, Misc [1]
• The Nature of Dreaming [2]
• Emotions [141]
• Theories of Emotion [33]
• Somatic and Feeling Theories of Emotion [7]
• Perceptual Theories of Emotion [5]
• Cognitive Theories of Emotions [6]
• Theories of Emotion, Misc [10]
• Varieties of Emotion [24]
• Varieties of Emotion, Misc [0]
• Classifying Emotions [8]
• Emotions and Appraisals [3]
• Emotions and Feelings [9]
• Moods [1]
• Aspects of Emotion [37]
• Knowledge of Emotion [5]
• Emotional Expression [1]
• Aspects of Emotion, Misc [0]
• Emotion and Reason [13]
• Objects and Contents of Emotions [18]
• Emotions, Misc [2]
• Mental Imagery [37]
• Imagination [73]
• Imaginative Resistance [2]
• Imagination and Imagery [9]
• Imagination and Pretense [12]
• Imagination, Misc [15]
• Intuition [45]
• Epistemology of Intuition [27]
• Intuition, Misc [2]
• The Nature of Intuition [7]
• Memory [98]
• Epistemology of Memory [0]
• Memory and Cognitive Science [20]
• Memory, Misc [0]
• The Nature of Memory [3]
• Mental Actions [4]
• Moral Psychology [229]
• Moral Emotion [18]
• Responsibility and Emotion [1]
• Moral Emotion, Misc [5]
• [0]
• Moral Education [1]
• Altruism and Psychological Egoism [17]
• Ethics and Cognitive Science [18]
• Evolution of Morality [6]
• Neuroscience of Ethics [6]
• Psychology of Ethics [4]
• Ethics and Cognitive Science, Misc [2]
• Moral Character [32]
• Authenticity [2]
• Personality [0]
• Integrity [15]
• Moral Sainthood [0]
• Skepticism about Character [9]
• Virtues and Vices [3]
• Moral Character, Misc [1]
• Moral States and Processes [110]
• Moral Imagination [0]
• Moral States and Processes, Misc [0]
• Courage [2]
• Hypocrisy [4]
• Cruelty [0]
• Hope [13]
• Envy [5]
• Gratitude [0]
• Guilt and Shame [0]
• Happiness [23]
• Tolerance [0]
• Moral Perception [1]
• Alienation [0]
• Moral Phenomenology [4]
• Jealousy [0]
• Kindness [0]
• Moral Deliberation [3]
• Moral Intuition [2]
• Resentment [0]
• Forgiveness [0]
• Schadenfreude [0]
• Self-Deception [14]
• Anger [2]
• Sympathy [7]
• Trust [30]
• Moral Psychology, Misc [10]
• Pain [54]
• The Concept of Pain [0]
• Location of Pain [1]
• Pain and Pain Experience [3]
• Pain and Perception [0]
• Pain, Misc [1]
• Pain and Mental Objects [0]
• Pleasure [13]
• Pleasure and Pain [0]
• Pleasure, Misc [0]
• The Value of Pleasure [0]
• Thought and Thinking [3]
• Mental States, Misc [2]

• David Barnett (2008). The simplicity intuition and its hidden influence on philosophy of mind.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2008.00682.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/119394834/PDFSTART
  
• Manuel Bremer (2005). Lessons from Sartre for the Analytic Philosophy of Mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There are positive and negative lessons from Sartre: - Taking up some of his ideas one may arrive at a better model of consciousness in the analytic philosophy of mind; representing some of his ideas within the language and the models of a functionalist theory of mind makes them more accessible and inte¬grates them into the wider picture. - Sartre, as any philosopher, errs at some points, I believe; but these errors may be instruc¬tive, especially in as much as they mirror some errors in some current theories of consciousness. This paper, therefore, is not a piece of Sartre scholarship, but an attempt of a “friendly take¬over” of some ideas I ascribe to Sartre into current models in the philosophy of mind.

Attention

Attention and Consciousness

• Austen Clark (online). Preattentive precursors to phenomenal properties.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What are the relations between preattentive feature-placing and states of perceptual awareness? For the purposes of this paper, states of "perceptual awareness" are confined to the simplest possible exemplars: states in which one is aware of some aspect of the appearance of something one perceives. Subjective contours are used as an example. Early visual processing seems to employ independent, high-bandwidth, preattentive feature "channels", followed by a selective process that directs selective attention. The mechanisms that yield subjective contours are found very early in this processing. An experiment by Greg Davis and Jon Driver is described; it seems to show that multiple subjective figures can be coded in these preattentive, parallel stages of visual processing. I propose that some of these preattentive states might register the very same differences that, were one aware of them, would be phenomenal differences. Some arguments pro and con on this possibility are assessed
• Paul Coates (2004). Wilfrid Sellars, perceptual consciousness, and theory of attention.   (More)
• Massimo Grassia (2004). Consciousness and perceptual attention: A methodological argument.   (More)
• S. Grossberg (1999). The link between brain learning, attention, and consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The processes whereby our brains continue to learn about a changing world in a stable fashion throughout life are proposed to lead to conscious experiences. These processes include the learning of top-down expectations, the matching of these expectations against bottom-up data, the focusing of attention upon the expected clusters of information, and the development of resonant states between bottom-up and top-down processes as they reach an attentive consensus between what is expected and what is there in the outside world. It is suggested that all conscious states in the brain are resonant states and that these resonant states trigger learning of sensory and cognitive representations. The models which summarize these concepts are therefore called Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, models. Psychophysical and neurobiological data in support of ART are presented from early vision, visual object recognition, auditory streaming, variable-rate speech perception, somatosensory perception, and cognitive-emotional interactions, among others. It is noted that ART mechanisms seem to be operative at all levels of the visual system, and it is proposed how these mechanisms are realized by known laminar circuits of visual cortex. It is predicted that the same circuit realization of ART mechanisms will be found in the laminar circuits of all sensory and cognitive neocortex. Concepts and data are summarized concerning how some visual percepts may be visibly, or modally, perceived, whereas amodal percepts may be consciously recognized even though they are perceptually invisible. It is also suggested that sensory and cognitive processing in the What processing stream of the brain obey top-down matching and learning laws that are often complementary to those used for spatial and motor processing in the brain's Where processing stream. This enables our sensory and cognitive representations to maintain their stability as we learn more about the world, while allowing spatial and motor representations to forget learned maps and gains that are no longer appropriate as our bodies develop and grow from infanthood to adulthood. Procedural memories are proposed to be unconscious because the inhibitory matching process that supports these spatial and motor processes cannot lead to resonance
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.cns.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/Gro.concog98.pdf
  http://www.cns.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/Gro1999ConCog.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10072692&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/10538100/1999/00000008/00000001/art90372
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ap/cc/1999/00000008/00000001/art00372
  
• Valerie Gray Hardcastle (2003). Attention versus consciousness: A distinction with a difference.   (More)
• Benj Hellie (2006). Beyond phenomenal naivete.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The naive realist takes a veridical visual experience to be an immediate relation to external entities. Is this how such an experience is phenomenally, by its phenomenal character? Only if there can be phenomenal error, since a hallucinatory experience phenomenally matching such a veridical experience would then be phenomenally but not in fact such a relation. Fortunately, such phenomenal error can be avoided: the phenomenal character of a visual experience involves immediate awareness of a sort of picture of external entities, as on a representative theory of perception. The attraction of naive realism results from an erroneous projection of the immediacy of the subject's awareness of this picture onto the external entities pictured.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://quot.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0006.002
  
• Benj Hellie (ms). Visual form, attention, and binocularity.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This somewhat odd paper argues against a representational view of visual experience using an intricate "inversion" type thought experiment involving double vision: two subjects could represent external space in the same way while differing phenomenally due to different "spread" in their double images. The spatial structure of the visual field is explained not by representation of external space but functionally, in terms of the possible locations of an attentional spotlight. I'm fond of the ideas in this paper but doubt I'll be returning to it soon.
• Christopher Mole (2005). Attention is Cognitive Unison.   (More)
• Christopher Mole (2008). Attention in the absence of consciousness?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A response to Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya's 'Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes'
• J. F. Morrison & AS David (2005). Now you see it, now you don't: More data at the cognitive level needed before the PAD model can be accepted.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Before a general cognitive model for recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) is accepted, there must be more research into the neuropsychological and cognitive characteristics of the various disorders in which they occur. Currently available data are insufficient to distinguish whether the similar phenomenology of RCVH across different disorders is in fact produced by a single or by multiple cognitive mechanisms
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=364680&jid=BBS&volumeId=28&issueId=06&aid=362377
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16372945&dopt=Citation
  http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0140525X05350138
  
• Christopher Peacocke (1998). Conscious attitudes, attention, and self-knowledge.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/17388/2000/00000001/00000001/art00004
  
• Johannes Roessler (2000). Attention and the self: An appreciation of C.o. Evans' The Subject of Consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: _The Sub ject of Con scious ness_ is a rich, strik ingly orig i nal and ambi tious work. It makes an impor tant and timely con tri bu tion to cur rent debates on a num ber of issues which over the last few years have been tak ing cen tre stage in the phi los o phy of mind: for exam ple, self-consciousness, selec tive atten tion and the nature of bodily aware ness. What makes this achieve ment some what unusual, and all the more remark able, is that _The Sub ject of Con scious ness_ was pub lished thirty years ago (Evans, 1970). The reviews it received at the time ranged from the hos tile to the deri sory
• Wayne Wu (forthcoming). What is Conscious Attention?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Perceptual attention is essential to both thought and agency, for there is arguably no demonstrative thought or bodily action without it. Psychologists and philosophers since William James have taken attention to be a ubiquitous and distinctive form of consciousness, one that leaves a characteristic mark on perceptual experience. As a process of selecting specific perceptual inputs, attention influences the way things perceptually appear. It may then seem that it is a specific feature of perceptual representation that constitutes what it is like to consciously attend to an object. In fact conscious attention is more complicated. In what follows, I argue that the phenomenology of conscious attention to what is perceived involves not just a way of perceptually locking on to a specific object. It necessarily involves a way of cognitively locking on to it as well.

Attention, Misc

• Christopher Mole (2005). Review of Naomi Eilan, christop hoerlh, Teresa McCormack, Johannes Roessler (eds), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds -- Issues in Philosophy and Psychology.   (More)

The Nature of Attention

• Christopher Mole (2005). Attention is Cognitive Unison.   (More)
• Wayne Wu (forthcoming). Confronting Many-Many Problems: Attention and Agentive Control.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I argue that when perception, indeed perceptual attention, plays a guiding role in intentional bodily action, it is a necessary part or constituent of that action. The argument begins with a challenge that necessarily arises for embodied agents, what I call the Many-Many Problem: in the context of action, agents face too many perceptual inputs and too many possible behavioral outputs. Action requires that the Many-Many Problem be solved by reducing the many-many set of options to a specific mapping between target and response. Throughout the execution of action, the agent must continue to perceptually select, and hence attend to, relevant information so as to guide the execution of specific movements. Since perceptual attention is a necessary part of solving the Many-Many Problem, it is a necessary part of action. Indeed, the whole of the process of implementing a solution to the Many-Many Problem, as constrained by the agent’s motivational state, just is the agent’s acting in a bodily way.

Belief

• A. Beckerman (2001). The real reason for the standard view.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to Lynne Baker, there are three main arguments for the
• Curtis Brown (1992). Direct and indirect belief.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(199206)52:2<289:DAIB>2.0.CO;2-5
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(199206)52:2<289:DAIB>2.0.CO;2-5
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2107937.pdf
  
• Martin Davies (2001). Explicit and implicit knowledge: Philosophical aspects.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: from the fact that the subject reacts faster to those words than to words that were not on the list. The subject
• Pascal Engel (1998). Believing, accepting, and holding true.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000220/en/
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/02/20/ijn_00000220_00/ijn_00000220_00.htm
  
• Keith Frankish (1998). A matter of opinion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper sets out the case for a two-level theory of human psychology. It takes its start from Daniel Dennett
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/philos/Matter_of_opinion_eprint.pdf
  http://libeprints.open.ac.uk/archive/00000116/01/Matter_of_opinion_eprint.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a793920860~fulltext=713240930
  
• M. Gilbert (2002). Belief and acceptance as features of groups.   (More)
• P. M. S. Hacker (2004). On the ontology of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. _The project_ Over the last two and a half centuries three main strands of opinion can be discerned in philosophers
• Christopher S. Hill & Joshua Schechter (2007). Hawthorne's lottery puzzle and the nature of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the first chapter of his Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne argues that thinkers do not ordinarily know lottery propositions. His arguments depend on claims about the intimate connections between knowledge and assertion, epistemic possibility, practical reasoning, and theoretical reasoning. In this paper, we cast doubt on the proposed connections. We also put forward an alternative picture of belief and reasoning. In particular, we argue that assertion is governed by a Gricean constraint that makes no reference to knowledge, and that practical reasoning has more to do with rational degrees of belief than with states of knowledge.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120710750/abstract
  
• Michael McKinsey (1998). The grammar of belief.   (More)
• Carlo Penco (2005). Keeping track of individuals: Brandom's analysis of Kripke's puzzle and the content of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper gives attention to a special point in Brandom
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=1331948
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/pc/2005/00000013/00000001/art00012
  
• John Perry (1996). Rip Van winkle and other characters.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this essay I first review Kaplan’s theory of linguistic character, and then explain and motivate a concept of doxastic character. I then develop some concepts for dealing with the topic of belief retention and then, finally, discuss Rip Van Winkle. I come down on Kaplan’s side with respect to the Frege-inspired strategy, narrowly construed. But I advocate something like the Frege-inspired strategy, if it is construed more broadly. On my view it is remarkably easy to retain a belief, and I think Evans is quite wrong about Rip and Kaplan. The central concept I develop, however, that of an information game, is in the spirit of much of Evans’ work. I also borrow some of his terminology.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry//PHILPAPERS/rip.pdf
  http://www-csli.stanford.edu/users/john/PHILPAPERS/rip.pdf
  
• F. Recanati (1997). Can we believe what we do not understand?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/02/92/ijn_00000292_00/ijn_00000292_00.rtf
  http://firstsearch.oclc.org/fsip?sici=0268-1064(19970301)12:1<84:CWBWWD>2.0.TX;2-R&format=PDF&gsid=03aef2acc24645555b960c6667c5aa36c989677b9c7266beb1f26f54ccea23411494880763d29ddd1c0992469160e7422b69cdfa1e85649550db25e27935baa5e254e1b9ffed308c
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00037
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00037
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1997/00000012/00000001/art00037
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1997/00000012/00000001/art00005
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (ms). Acting contrary to our (professed) beliefs.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/ActBel050524.pdf
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/ActBel050518.pdf
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (online). Belief.   (More)
• Paul G. Skokowski (2004). Structural content: A naturalistic approach to implicit belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Various systems that learn are examined to show how content is carried in connections installed by a learning history. Agents do not explicitly use the content of such states in practical reasoning, yet the content plays an important role in explaining behavior, and the physical state carrying that content plays a role in causing behavior, given other occurrent beliefs and desires. This leads to an understanding of the environmental reasons which are the determinate content of these states, and leads to a better grasp of how representational content can be carried by systems without an explicit representation
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/421538
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?PHOS710305PDF
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/421538
  
• Jeff Speaks (2010). Explaining the disquotational principle.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Questions about the relationship between thought and language, while central to an understanding of the nature of intentionality, are often obscure. I suggest that such questions be framed by asking whether necessary truths which connect mental and linguistic properties are to be explained in terms of the essence of the mental, or of the linguistic, properties. I argue, first, that the disquotational principle, which connects the contents of the beliefs of agents with the meanings of sentences of their language, is such a necessary truth; second, that its necessity requires explanation; third, that it cannot be explained in terms of the `interdependence' of meaning and belief; and fourth, that it cannot be explained in terms of a theory of meaning which takes the meanings of sentences to be inherited from the beliefs with which they are correlated. I conclude by arguing that the view that social facts about public language meaning are part of the story about what it is to have a belief with a given content is more plausible than is usually thought.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_journal_of_philosophy/v040/40.2.speaks.pdf
  
• Dan Sperber (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a most fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold "reflective beliefs" are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide explicit arguments in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000402/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000402/00/beliefs.htm
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:402
  http://firstsearch.oclc.org/fsip?sici=0268-1064(19970301)12:1<67:IARB>2.0.TX;2-N&format=PDF&gsid=03aef2acc24645555b960c6667c5aa36c989677b9c7266beb1f26f54ccea23411494880763d29ddd1c0992469160e7422b69cdfa1e8564958f0d049cba30a6bbe254e1b9ffed308c
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00036/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00036
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1997/00000012/00000001/art00004
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1997/00000012/00000001/art00036
  http://cogprints.org/402/1/beliefs.htm
  http://cogprints.org/402/0/beliefs.htm
  
• Roger W. Sperry (1985). The cognitive role of belief: Implications of the new mentalism.   (More)
• Wolfgang Spohn (1996). On the objects of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: When I talk about the objects of belief I do not mean, e.g., the sun to which my thought that the sun will rise tomorrow refers; I do not mean the objects we think about. I take objects rather in a general philosophical sense; they simply are the bearers of properties and the relata of relations. I am thus concerned with the objects that are related by the belief relation „_a_ believes that _p_“. In this scheme „ _a _“ represents a person or an epistemic subject; but I am not going to discuss what a person is. „ _p _“ or „that _p _“ represents an object, namely the object of belief; and I am going to discuss what this is. In other words, I am interested in belief contents – to use a less neutral, narrower and equally unclear term
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/Mitarbeiter/spohn_files/wspohn25.pdf
  http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/Mitarbeiter_ALT/spohn_files/wspohn25.pdf
  
• Josefa Toribio (2003). Free belief.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/x361557178k30vj5/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/X361557178K30VJ5.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phen/2003/00000002/00000004/05151930
  
• David Velleman (2000). On the aim of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper explores the sense in which belief "aims at the truth". In this course of this exploration, it discusses the difference between belief and make-believe, the nature of psychoanalytic explanation, the supposed "normativity of meaning", and related topics
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1006990
  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1006990_code851409.pdf?abstractid=1006990&mirid=1
  

Belief, Misc

• Lisa Bortolotti (2009). The Epistemic Benefits of Reason Giving.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There is an apparent tension in current accounts of the relationship between reason giving and self knowledge. On the one hand, philosophers like Richard Moran (2001) claim that deliberation and justification can give rise to first-person authority over the attitudes that subjects form or defend on the basis of what they take to be their best reasons. On the other hand, the psychological evidence on the introspection effects and the literature on elusive reasons suggest that engaging in explicit deliberation or justification leads subjects to report attitudes that are not consistent with their previous attitudes or with their future behavior. On the basis of these findings, Tim Wilson (2002) argues that analyzing reasons compromises self knowledge. I shall defend a realistic account of the effects of reason giving which is compatible with the empirical findings on introspection and also with the claim that deliberation and justification have epistemic benefits.
• Lisa Bortolotti & Rochelle Cox (2009). 'Faultless' ignorance: strengths and limitations of epistemic definitions of confabulation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There is no satisfactory account for the general phenomenon of confabulation, for the following reasons: (1) confabulation occurs in a number of pathological and non-pathological conditions; (2) impairments giving rise to confabulation are likely to have different neural bases; and (3) there is no unique theory explaining the aetiology of confabulations. An epistemic approach to defining confabulation could solve all of these issues, by focusing on the surface features of the phenomenon. However, existing epistemic accounts are unable to offer sufficient conditions for confabulation and tend to emphasise only its epistemic disadvantages. In this paper, we argue that a satisfactory epistemic account of confabulation should also acknowledge those features which are (potentially) epistemically advantageous. For example, confabulation may allow subjects to exercise some control over their own cognitive life which is instrumental to the construction or preservation of their sense of self.
• Lisa Bortolotti (2005). Intentionality without rationality.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is often taken for granted in standard theories of interpretation that there cannot be intentionality without rationality. According to the background argument, a system can be interpreted as having irrational beliefs only against a general background of rationality. Starting from the widespread assumption that delusions can be reasonably described as irrational beliefs, I argue here that the background argument fails to account for their intentional description
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.philosophy.bham.ac.uk/staff/Bortolotti_PAS-Bortolotti.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2005.00181.x
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2005.00181.x
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0066-7373.2004.00119.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/paso/2005/00000105/00000003/art00006
  
• Andrei A. Buckareff, Acceptance does not entail belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: D.S. Clarke has defended the claim that accepting that p entails believing that p. He refers to this thesis as “the entailment thesis.” In this paper I argue that we ought to reject the entailment thesis. Many philosophers have defended the claim that acceptance and belief are different types of mental states, or, at the very least, that there are ways of accepting propositions that are distinct from doxastic acceptance.1 Many would claim that belief and non-doxastic acceptance differ in some or all of the following six ways. First, belief aims at truth, while acceptance aims at utility or success. Second, belief is shaped by evidence; acceptance need not be shaped by evidence. Third, belief is contextindependent insofar as it is not shaped by an agent’s purposes, but acceptance is often context-dependent and shaped by an agent’s purposes. Fourth, belief is subject to an ideal of agglomeration, and acceptance is not regulated by any such ideal. Fifth, belief comes in degrees while acceptance is all or nothing. Finally, belief is not subject to direct voluntary control, while acceptance can be under our direct voluntary control (some holding that acceptance is also a mental action type). Not all of those who claim that there is a real difference between (non-doxastic) acceptance and belief take it that all of six of these are real distinctions between the two types of attitudes. And some take ‘acceptance’ to be a rather broad type that includes attitudes such as assuming, having faith, hypothesizing, imagining, trusting, and believing as ways of accepting propositions
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://sites.google.com/site/andreibuckareff/AcceptanceDoesNotEntailBelief.pdf
  

Collective Belief

• Margaret Gilbert (1987). Modelling collective belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue that group beliefs according to the joint acceptance model are important phenomena whose aetiology and development require investigation. There is an analogous phenomenon of social or group preference, which social choice theory tends to ignore
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/q467w67132614123/fulltext.pdf
  
• Margaret P. Gilbert (1994). Remarks on collective belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      The author develops and elaborates on her account of collective belief, something standardly referred to, in her view, when we speak of what we believe. This paper focuses on a special response hearers may experience in the context of expressions of belief, a response that may issue in offended rebukes to the speaker. It is argued that this response would be appropriate if both speakers and hearers were parties to what the authors calls a joint commitment to believe a certain proposition as a body. This joint commitment puts speakers under an obligation to refrain from speaking in certain ways, and gives hearers a correlative right to such refraining, and hence a basis for offended rebukes

De Re Belief

• Desheng Zong (forthcoming). Retention of Indexical Belief and the Notion of Psychological Continuity.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A widely accepted view in the discussion of personal identity is that the notion of psychological continuity expresses a one-many or many-one relation. I argue that the belief is unfounded. Briefly: a notion of psychological continuity expresses a one-many or many-one relation only if it includes as a constituent psychological properties whose relation with their bearer is one-many or many-one; but the relation between an indexical psychological state (a psychological state with indexical content) and its bearer in which it is first tokened is not a one-many or many-one relation. It follows that not all types of psychological continuity may take a one-many or many-one form. Since the Lockean account of personal identity relies on the availability of a notion of psychological continuity featuring indexical psychological states, the conclusion of this paper cast strong doubt on the plausibility of the Lockean theory.

The Nature of Belief

• Curtis Brown (1986). What is a belief state?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What we believe depends on more than the purely intrinsic facts about us: facts about our environment or context also help determine the contents of our beliefs. 1 This observation has led several writers to hope that beliefs can be divided, as it were, into two components: a "core" that depends only on the individual?s intrinsic properties; and a periphery that depends on the individual?s context, including his or her history, environment, and linguistic community. Thus Jaegwon Kim suggests that "within each noninternal psychological state that enters into the explanation of some action or behavior we can locate an ?internal core state? which can assume the causal-explanatory role of the noninternal state."2 In the same vein, Stephen Stich writes that "nonautonomous" states, like belief, are best viewed as "conceptually complex hybrids" made up of an autonomous component together with historical and contextual features.3 John Perry, whose term I have adopted, distinguishes between belief states, which are determined by an individual?s intrinsic properties, and objects of belief, which are not.4 And Daniel Dennett makes use of the same notion when he asks:5
• Robert E. Cummins (1991). Methodological reflections on belief.   (More)
• Keith Frankish (1998). Natural language and virtual belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This chapter outlines a new argument for the view that language has a cognitive role. I suggest that humans exhibit two distinct kinds of belief state, one passively formed, the other actively formed. I argue that actively formed beliefs (_virtual beliefs_, as I call them) can be identified with _premising policies_, and that forming them typically involves certain linguistic operations. I conclude that natural language has at least a limited cognitive role in the formation and manipulation of virtual beliefs
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/philos/Virtual_belief_eprint.pdf
  http://libeprints.open.ac.uk/archive/00000118/01/Virtual_belief_eprint.pdf
  
• Christopher Gauker (2005). The belief-desire law.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the _belief-desire law_, which states, roughly, that _ceteris paribus_ people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://peterlang.metapress.com/index/NU24X048863H865P.pdf
  
• Tamar Szabó Gendler (2008). Alief and belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Forthcoming, Journal of Philosophy [pdf manuscript]
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/alief belief gendler to send.pdf
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/alief%20belief%20gendler%20to%20send.pdf
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/issues/105/10/4.pdf
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/../issues/105/10/4.pdf
  
• Tamar Gendler (2009). Alief in action (and reaction).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation and deliberate control
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/alief2 mind and language.pdf
  
• Tamar Szabó Gendler (2003). On the relation between pretense and belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that pretense-episode (e.g. the child does not expect that ‘spilling’ ( pretend) ‘tea’1 will result in the table really being wet), or more generally, to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the pretended state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world. Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues (e.g. the child does expect that if she up-ends the teapot above the table, then the table will become wet in the pretense), or, more generally to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YI5T-5sOm1EC&oi=fnd&pg=PA125&dq=On+the+relation+between+pretense+and+belief+Gendler&ots=rc-yF5fAMh&sig=_Hpv9w2F4VoLnlOkWneVUv8-hw8
  
• James Hawthorne (2009). The Lockean Thesis and the Logic of Belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In a penetrating investigation of the relationship between belief and quantitative degrees of confidence (or degrees of belief) Richard Foley (1992) suggests the following thesis: ... it is epistemically rational for us to believe a proposition just in case it is epistemically rational for us to have a sufficiently high degree of confidence in it, sufficiently high to make our attitude towards it one of belief. Foley goes on to suggest that rational belief may be just rational degree of confidence above some threshold level that the agent deems sufficient for belief. He finds hints of this view in Locke’s discussion of probability and degrees of assent, so he calls it the Lockean Thesis.1 The Lockean Thesis has important implications for the logic of belief. Most prominently, it implies that even a logically ideal agent whose degrees of confidence satisfy the axioms of probability theory may quite rationally believe each of a large body of propositions that are jointly inconsistent. For example, an agent may legitimately believe that on each given occasion her well-maintained car will start, but nevertheless believe that she will eventually encounter a..
• Scott Hendricks (2006). The frame problem and theories of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The frame problem is the problem of how we selectively apply relevant knowledge to particular situations in order to generate practical solutions. Some philosophers have thought that the frame problem can be used to rule out, or argue in favor of, a particular theory of belief states. But this is a mistake. Sentential theories of belief are no better or worse off with respect to the frame problem than are alternative theories of belief, most notably, the “map” theory of belief
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/p846610503j81603/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/P846610503J81603.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2006/00000129/00000002/00001644
  
• Richard Holton (2008). Partial belief, partial intention.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Is a belief that one will succeed necessary for an intention? It is argued that the question has traditionally been badly posed, framed as it is in terms of all-out belief. We need instead to ask about the relation between intention and partial belief. An account of partial belief that is more psychologically realistic than the standard credence account is developed. A notion of partial intention is then developed, standing to all-out intention much as partial belief stands to all-out belief. Various coherence constraints on the notion are explored. It is concluded that the primary relations between intention and belief should be understood as normative and not essential. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/117/465/27
  
• David J. Owens (2003). Does belief have an aim?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The hypothesis that belief aims at the truth has been used to explain three features of belief: (1) the fact that correct beliefs are true beliefs, (2) the fact that rational beliefs are supported by the evidence and (3) the fact that we cannot form beliefs
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/archive/00001212/
  http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/03/49/17/AIM2.pdf
  http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/03/49/17/fulltext.pdf
  http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/archive/00001212/01/owensdj4.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/q017u7l8l1672338/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5140388&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/Q017U7L8L1672338.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2003/00000115/00000003/05140388
  
• Christopher Peacocke (1998). Conscious attitudes, attention, and self-knowledge.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/17388/2000/00000001/00000001/art00004
  
• John Perry (1979). The problem of the essential indexical.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QOiStM9IBkYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=yGP_M9DfXx&sig=kAZLumVvLPjOIvxWTCedwM9nc_4
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QOiStM9IBkYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=yGP-N7DkWw&sig=lmtE-PvpT0rurhp7TrOnau11Nzs
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QOiStM9IBkYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=yGO1ScyfWx&sig=DqDQIPwfB8rAemES7BVY9eKBCiA
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QOiStM9IBkYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=yGO1UazlRA&sig=fFVm8ShKr7-x8ilTe8mQ2zLlEyM
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624(197903)13:1<3:TPOTEI>2.0.CO;2-F
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624(197903)13:1<3:TPOTEI>2.0.CO;2-F
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2214792.pdf
  
• Darrell P. Rowbottom (2007). 'In Between Believing' and Degrees of Belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Schwitzgebel (2001) — henceforth 'S' — offers three examples in order to convince us that there are situations in which individuals are neither accurately describable as believing that p or failing to so believe, but are rather in 'in-between states of belief'. He then argues that there are no 'Bayesian' or representational strategies for explicating these, and proposes a dispositional account. I do not have any fundamental objection to the idea that there might be 'in-between states of belief'. What I shall argue, rather, is that: (I) S does not provide a convincing argument that there really are such states; (II) S does not show, as he claims, that 'in-between states of belief' could not be accounted for in terms of degrees of belief; (III) S’s dispositional account of 'in-between states of belief' is more problematic than the 'degree of belief' alternative.
• Eric Schwitzgebel (2002). A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper describes and defends in detail a novel account of belief, an account inspired by Ryle's dispositional characterization of belief, but emphasizing irreducibly phenomenal and cognitive dispositions as well as behavioral dispositions. Potential externalist and functionalist objections are considered, as well as concerns motivated by the inevitably ceteris paribus nature of the relevant dispositional attributions. It is argued that a dispositional account of belief is particularly well-suited to handle what might be called "in-between" cases of believing - cases in which it is neither quite right to describe a person as having a particular belief nor quite right to describe her as lacking it
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AcctBel.pdf
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/AccountBel.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001493/00/AccountBel001204.pdf
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1493
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0068.00370
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0068.00370
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/2002/00000036/00000002/art00370
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/2002/00000036/00000002/art00004
  http://cogprints.org/1493/3/AccountBel001204.pdf
  http://cogprints.org/1493/0/AccountBel001204.pdf
  
• Nishi Shah & J. David Velleman (2005). Doxastic deliberation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Believing that p, assuming that p, and imagining that p involve regarding p as true—or, as we shall call it, accepting p. What distinguishes belief from the other modes of acceptance? We claim that conceiving of an attitude as a belief, rather than an assumption or an instance of imagining, entails conceiving of it as an acceptance that is regulated for truth, while also applying to it the standard of being correct if and only if it is true. We argue that the second half of this claim, according to which the concept of belief includes a standard of correctness, is required to explain the fact that the deliberative question whether to believe that p is transparent to the question whether p. This argument raises various questions. Is there such a thing as deliberating whether to believe? Is the transparency of the deliberative question whether to believe that p the same as the transparency of the factual question whether I do believe that p? We will begin by answering these questions and then turn to a series of possible objections to our argument
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philreview.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/114/4/497
  
• Nishi Shah (2003). How truth governs belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Why, when asking oneself whether to believe that p, must one immediately recognize that this question is settled by, and only by, answering the question whether p is true? Truth is not an optional end for first-personal doxastic deliberation, providing an instrumental or extrinsic reason that an agent may take or leave at will. Otherwise there would be an inferential step between discovering the truth with respect to p and determining whether to believe that p, involving a bridge premise that it is good (in whichever sense of good one likes, moral, prudential, aesthetic, allthings-considered, etc.) to believe the truth with respect to p. But there is no such gap between the two questions within the first-personal deliberative perspective; the question whether to believe that p seems to collapse into the question whether p is true
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(200310)112:4<447:HTGB>2.0.CO;2-A
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3595547.pdf
  
• Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (forthcoming). The truth norm and guidance: a reply to Glüer and Wikforss.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss (2009) argue that any truth norm for belief, linking the correctness of believing p with the truth of p, is bound to be uninformative since applying the norm to determine the correctness of a belief as to whether p, would itself require forming such a belief. I argue that this objection conflates the condition under which the norm deems beliefs correct, with the psychological state an agent must be in to apply the norm. I also show that since the truth norm conflicts with other possible norms that clearly are informative, the truth norm must itself be informative.
• Terrance Tomkow (ms). Now, Me.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://tomkow.typepad.com/against_representation/files/NowMe.pdf
  
• Ralph Wedgwood (2002). The aim of belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is often said, metaphorically, that belief "aims" at the truth. This paper proposes a normative interpretation of this metaphor. First, the notion of "epistemic norms" is clarified, and reasons are given for the view that epistemic norms articulate essential features of the beliefs that are subject to them. Then it is argued that all epistemic norms--including those that specify when beliefs count as rational, and when they count as knowledge--are explained by a fundamental norm of correct belief, which requires that, if one considers a proposition at all, one should believe it if and only if it is true
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://phonline.org/paper.php?keynum=174
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0068.36.s16.10/pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0068.36.s16.10
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/2002/00000036/A0160s16/art00393
  
• Daniel Whiting (2010). Should I believe the truth?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi's criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections parallel to those Bykvist and Hattiangadi advance, although it might initially appear to be. In closing, I consider what bearing the preceding discussion has on important questions concerning the natures of believing and of truth
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123547613/PDFSTART
  

Tacit and Dispositional Belief

Bodily Experience

Bodily Awareness

• Berm (2001). Bodily self-awareness and the will: Reply to power.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/content/m3121227u015r735/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/m3121227u015r735/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/M3121227U015R735.pdf
  
• Berm (2005). The phenomenology of bodily awareness.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QJ9PXantDdQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA295&ots=GI2DwXbtV4&sig=hm-eJPtBvTqG_6jPSg4kE2o4LYA
  
• Bill Brewer (1995). Bodily awareness and the self.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In The Varieties of Reference (1982), Gareth Evans claims that considerations having to do with certain basic ways we have of gaining knowledge of our own physical states and properties provide "the most powerful antidote to a Cartesian conception of the self" (220). In this chapter, I start with a discussion and evaluation of Evans' own argument, which is, I think, in the end unconvincing. Then I raise the possibility of a more direct application of similar considerations in defence of common sense anti-Cartesianism. Progress in this direction depends upon a far more psychologically informed understanding of normal and abnormal bodily awareness than is generally found in philosophical discussions of these issues. In the context of my attempt at some such understanding, I go on to assess the potential of this more direct line of argument
• Jonathan Cole, Natalie Depraz & Shaun Gallagher (online). Unity and disunity in bodily awareness: Phenomenology and neuroscience.   (More)
• Frederique de Vignemont (2007). Habeas corpus: The sense of ownership of one's own body.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What grounds my experience of my body as my own? The body that one experiences is always one’s own, but it does not follow that one always experiences it as one’s own. One might even feel that a body part does not belong to oneself despite feeling sensations in it, like in asomatognosia. The article aims at understanding the link between bodily sensations and the sense of ownership by investigating the role played by the body schema
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/16/98/60/PDF/Habeas_Corpus..pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00315.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2007/00000022/00000004/art00005
  
• Shaun Gallagher (2003). Bodily self-awareness and object perception.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Gallagher, S. 2003. Bodily self-awareness and object perception. _Theoria et Historia Scientiarum: International Journal for Interdisciplinary_ _Studies_, 7 (1) - in press
• Glenn Carruthers (2009). Is the body schema sufficient for the sense of embodiment? An alternative to de Vignmont's model.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: De Vignemont argues that the sense of ownership comes from the localization of bodily sensation on a map of the body that is part of the body schema. This model should be taken as a model of the sense of embodiment. I argue that the body schema lacks the theoretical resources needed to explain this phenomenology. Furthermore, there is some reason to think that a deficient sense of embodiment is not associated with a deficient body schema. The data de Vignemont uses to argue that the body image does not underlie the sense of embodiment does not rule out the possibility that part of the body image I call 'offline representations' underlies the sense of embodiment. An alternative model of the sense of embodiment in terms of offline representations of the body is presented.
• Doroth Legrand (2006). The bodily self: The sensori-motor roots of pre-reflective self-consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A bodily self is characterized by pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness that is
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://dorothee.legrand.neuf.fr/LEGRAND 2005 Bodily Self PCS.pdf
  http://dorothee.legrand.neuf.fr/LEGRAND_2006_Bodily_Self_PCS.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/x73424p776816016/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/X73424P776816016.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phen/2006/00000005/00000001/00009015
  
• Bigna Lenggenhager, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger & Olaf Blanke (2007). Video ergo sum: Manipulating bodily self-consciousness.   (More)
• Craig D. Murray & Michael S. Gordon (2001). Changes in bodily awareness induced by immersive virtual reality.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/109493101300210268
  http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109493101300210268
  http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/109493101300210268
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11710261&dopt=Citation
  
• Brian O'Shaughnessy (1998). Proprioception and the body image.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/211235/2003/00000001/00000001/art00028
  
• Joel Smith (2006). Bodily awareness, imagination, and the self.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Common wisdom tells us that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These senses provide us with a means of gaining information concerning objects in the world around us, including our own bodies. But in addition to these five senses, each of us is aware of our own body in way in which we are aware of no other thing. These ways include our awareness of the position, orientation, movement, and size of our limbs (proprioception and kinaesthesia), our sense of balance, and our awareness of bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, and sensations of pressure or temperature. We can group these together under the title
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.joelsmith.net/documents/Bodily Awareness Imagination and the Self.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/ejop/2006/00000014/00000001/art00003
  

Bodily Experience, Misc

• Frederique de Vignemont (2005). Body Mereology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/16/98/37/PDF/Body_mereology.pdf
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/16/98/37/DOC/Body_mereology.doc
  
• John Protevi (ms). Continuum companion to continental philosophy philosophy of consciousness and the body.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical..

Bodily Sensations

• Ned Block (2005). Bodily sensations as an obstacle for representationism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Representationism¹, as I use the term, says that the phenomenal character of an experience just is its representational content, where that representational content can itself be understood and characterized without appeal to phenomenal character. Representationists seem to have a harder time handling pain than visual experience. (I say 'seem' because in my view, representationists cannot actually handle either type of experience successfully, but I will put that claim to one side here.) I will argue that Michael Tye's (2004) heroic attempt at a representationist theory of pain, although ingenious and enlightening, does not adequately come to terms with the root of this difference
• Frederique de Vignemont (2007). Habeas corpus: The sense of ownership of one's own body.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What grounds my experience of my body as my own? The body that one experiences is always one’s own, but it does not follow that one always experiences it as one’s own. One might even feel that a body part does not belong to oneself despite feeling sensations in it, like in asomatognosia. The article aims at understanding the link between bodily sensations and the sense of ownership by investigating the role played by the body schema
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/16/98/60/PDF/Habeas_Corpus..pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00315.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/2007/00000022/00000004/art00005
  

Desire

• Wayne A. Davis (1986). Two senses of desire.   (More)
• Ronald De Sousa (2006). Dust, ashes, and vice: On Tim Schroeder's theory of desire.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://beta.philosophyonline.org/xtf/data/dlg/45-1/dlg_0045_0001_0139_0150.pdf
  
• Delia Graff (2003). Desires, scope, and tense.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I want to discuss a certain argument for the claim that de?nite descriptions are ambiguous between a Russellian quanti?cational interpretation and a predicational interpretation.1 The argument is found in James McCawley
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.princeton.edu/~graff/papers/desires.pdf
  http://www.princeton.edu/~graff/papers/desires.ps.gz
  http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/papers/desires.ps
  http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/papers/desires.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2003.00006.x/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2003.00006.x
  
• Christopher S. Hill (ms). Comments on Timothy Schroeder's Three Faces of Desire.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Department of Philosophy Brown University Providence, RI 02912
• Kris McDaniel & Ben Bradley (2008). Desires.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is not at all obvious how best to draw the distinction between conditional and unconditional desires. In this paper we examine extant attempts to analyse conditional desire. From the failures of those attempts, we draw a moral that leads us to the correct account of conditional desires. We then extend the account of conditional desires to an account of all desires. It emerges that desires do not have the structure that they have been thought to have. We attempt to explain the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic desire in light of our account of desire. We show how to use our account to solve Wollheim's paradox of democracy and to save modus ponens. Finally, we extend the account of desire to related phenomena, such as conditional promises, intentions, and commands. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fzn044?ijkey=rUqgnamfzm9OhVE&keytype=ref
  
• Daniel Nolan (2006). Selfless desires.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: final version in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2006 73.3: 665-679
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00553.x
  http://sites.google.com/site/danielnolanphil/NolanSD.pdf
  
• Geoffrey Sayre-McCord & Michael A. Smith (ms). Desires and beliefs of one's own.   (More)
• Eric Schwitzgebel (1999). Representation and desire: A philosophical error with consequences for theory-of-mind research.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper distinguishes two conceptions of representation at work in the philosophical literature. On the first, "contentive" conception (found, for example, in Searle and Fodor), something is a representation, roughly, if it has "propositional content". On the second, "indicative" conception (found, for example, in Dretske), representations must not only have content but also have the function of indicating something about the world. Desire is representational on the first view but not on the second. This paper argues that philosophers and psychologists have sometimes conflated these two conceptions, and it examines the consequences of this conflation for the developmental literature on the child's understanding of mind. Specifically, recent research by Gopnik and Perner on the child's understanding of desire is motivated by an argument that equivocates between the two conceptions of representation. Finally, the paper suggests that an examination of when the child understands the possibility of misrepresentation in art would be helpful in charting the child's understanding of indicative representation
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a713690374~fulltext=713240930
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/T6LBAKJ0KHLBCAKN.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/T6LBAKJ0KHLBCAKN.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cphp/1999/00000012/00000002/art00003
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a713690374~fulltext=713240930
  
• Dennis W. Stampe (1986). Defining desire.   (More)
• Harry Frankfurt (1992). The Faintest Passion.   (More)
• Paul R. Thagard (2006). Desires are not propositional attitudes.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~pthagard/Articles/desires.pdf
  http://beta.philosophyonline.org/xtf/data/dlg/45-1/dlg_0045_0001_0151_0156.pdf
  

Desire as Belief

• Curtis Brown (1986). What is a belief state?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What we believe depends on more than the purely intrinsic facts about us: facts about our environment or context also help determine the contents of our beliefs. 1 This observation has led several writers to hope that beliefs can be divided, as it were, into two components: a "core" that depends only on the individual?s intrinsic properties; and a periphery that depends on the individual?s context, including his or her history, environment, and linguistic community. Thus Jaegwon Kim suggests that "within each noninternal psychological state that enters into the explanation of some action or behavior we can locate an ?internal core state? which can assume the causal-explanatory role of the noninternal state."2 In the same vein, Stephen Stich writes that "nonautonomous" states, like belief, are best viewed as "conceptually complex hybrids" made up of an autonomous component together with historical and contextual features.3 John Perry, whose term I have adopted, distinguishes between belief states, which are determined by an individual?s intrinsic properties, and objects of belief, which are not.4 And Daniel Dennett makes use of the same notion when he asks:5
• John Collins, Desire-as-belief implies opinionation or indifference.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Rationalizations of deliberation often make reference to two kinds of mental state, which we call belief and desire. It is worth asking whether these kinds are necessarily distinct, or whether it might be possible to construe desire as belief of a certain sort — belief, say, about what would be good. An expected value theory formalizes our notions of belief and desire, treating each as a matter of degree. In this context the thesis that desire is belief might amount to the claim that the degree to which an agent desires any proposition A equals the degree to which the agent believes the proposition that A would be good. We shall write this latter proposition ‘A◦’ (pronounced ‘A halo’). The Desire-as-Belief Thesis states, then, that to each proposition A there corresponds another proposition A◦, where the probability of A◦ equals the expected value of A
• Alan Hajek (ms). Desire beyond belief Alan hájek and Philip Pettit.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: David Lewis [1988, 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the ‘Desire-as-Belief Thesis’. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis’. We explore ways of being anti- Humean that evade all these negative results. We begin by providing background on evidential decision theory, and on Lewis’ negative results. We then introduce what we call the indexicality loophole: if the goodness of a proposition is indexical, partly a function of an agent’s mental state, then the negative results have no purchase. Thus we propose a variant of Desire-as-Belief that exploits this loophole. We argue that a number of meta-ethical positions are committed to just such indexicality. Indeed, we show that with one central sort of evaluative belief — the belief that an option is right — the indexicality loophole can be exploited in various interesting ways. Moreover, on some accounts, ‘good’ is indexical in the same way. Thus, it seems that the anti- Humean can dodge the negative results
• Philip Pettit (ms). Desire beyond belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: David Lewis [1988; 1996] canvases an anti-Humean thesis about mental states: that the rational agent desires something to the extent that he or she believes it to be good. Lewis offers and refutes a decision-theoretic formulation of it, the `Desire-as- Belief Thesis'. Other authors have since added further negative results in the spirit of Lewis's. We explore ways of being anti-Humean that evade all these negative results. We begin by providing background on evidential decision theory and on Lewis's negative results. We then introduce what we call the indexicality loophole: if the goodness of a proposition is indexical, partly a function of an agent's mental state, then the negative results have no purchase. Thus we propose a variant of Desire-as- Belief that exploits this loophole. We argue that a number of meta-ethical positions are committed to just such indexicality. Indeed, we show that with one central sort of evaluative beliefÐthe belief that an option is rightÐthe indexicality loophole can be exploited in various interesting ways. Moreover, on some accounts, `good' is indexical in the same way. Thus, it seems that the anti-Humean can dodge the negative results

Desire-Satisfaction Theories of Well-Being

• Chris Heathwood (2006). Desire satisfactionism and hedonism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Hedonism and the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare (
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~cheathwo/DSH.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/d87q5136225rj6j8/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/D87Q5136225RJ6J8.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2006/00000128/00000003/00007817
  

Pleasure and Desire

Theories of Desire, Misc

• Timothy Schroeder (2009). Desire.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: To desire is to be in a particular state of mind. It is a state of mind familiar to everyone who has ever wanted to drink water or desired to know what has happened to an old friend, but its familiarity does not make it easy to give a theory of desire. Controversy immediately breaks out when asking whether wanting water and desiring knowledge are, at bottom, the same state of mind as others that seem somewhat similar: wishing never to have been born, preferring mangoes to peaches, craving gin, having world conquest as one's goal, having a purpose in sneaking out to the shed, or being inclined to provoke just for the sake of provocation. These varied states of mind have all been grouped together under the heading of ‘pro attitudes’, but whether the pro attitudes are fundamentally one mental state or many is disputed.

Desire, Misc

• Joshua May (forthcoming). Relational Desires and Empirical Evidence against Psychological Egoism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Roughly, psychological egoism is the thesis that all of a person's intentional actions are ultimately self-interested in some sense; psychological altruism is the thesis that some of a person's intentional actions are not ultimately self-interested, since some are ultimately other-regarding in some sense. C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists have argued that experiments provide support for a theory called the "empathy-altruism hypothesis" that entails the falsity of psychological egoism. However, several critics claim that there are egoistic explanations of the data that are still not ruled out. One of the most potent criticisms of Batson comes from Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. I argue for two main theses in this paper: (1) we can improve on Sober and Wilson’s conception of psychological egoism and altruism, and (2) this improvement shows that one of the strongest of Sober and Wilson's purportedly egoistic explanations is not tenable. A defense of these two theses goes some way toward defending Batson‘s claim that the evidence from social psychology provides sufficient reason to reject psychological egoism.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.joshdmay.com/wp-content/media/psych-egoism.pdf
  

Dreams

• Aristotle, Dreams.   (More)
• Aristotle, On dreams.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/dreams/
  http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/noncontradiction/2007/09/on-dreams-trans.html
  
• Lawrence A. Boland (2006). On reviewing machine dreams : Zoomed-in versus zoomed-out.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: continues to receive many reviews. Judging by recent reviews, this is a very controversial book. The question considered here is, how can one fairly review a controversial book—particularly when the book is widely popular and, for a history of economic thought book, a best seller? This essay uses Mirowski’s book as a case study to propose one answer for this question. In the process, it will examine how others seem to have answered this question. Key Words: methodology • reviews • Mirowski • Machine Dreams
• Terry Carney, Fleur Aileen Beaupert, Julia Perry & David Tait, Advocacy and participation in mental health cases: Realisable rights or pipe-dreams?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      This article discusses Australian experiences of mental health clients, legal advocates and other stakeholders in the mental health review system. We review forms of advocacy, the reactions to these, and the contribution lawyers make to protecting rights within this field. Based on our fieldwork we suggest a mixed model of advocacy, one that includes legal representation that goes beyond simple 'following instructions', but also self-advocacy, systemic advocacy and mobilisation of support networks. We suggest that Jan Brakel was right to recently call for a re-conceptualisation of mental health advocacy, and indicate ways this might be achieved
• Andy Clark (2005). The twisted matrix: Dream, simulation, or hybrid?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/1336?mode=simple
  http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/staff/clark/pubs/Matrixbody6.pdf
  
• Edward Davenport (1990). Review essays : Dreams and nightmares technology in 3-d.   (More)
• J. Goguen (2004). Musical qualia, context, time and emotion.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/mq.ps
  http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/mq.ps
  http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/pps/mq.ps
  http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/pps/mq.ps
  http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/pps/mq.ps
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2004/00000011/F0020003/art00007
  
• Christopher Grau (2005). Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy and The Matrix.   (More)
• Robin Hanson, Dreams of autarky.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Genie nanotech, space colonies, Turing-test A.I., a local singularity, crypto credentials, and private law are all dreams of a future where some parts of the world economy and society have an unusually low level of dependence on the rest of the world. But it is the worldwide division of labor that has made us humans rich, and I suspect we won't let it go for a long time to come
• Mauricio Infante & Lloyd A. Wells (2004). Children's dreaming and the development of consciousness.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jaacap.com/pt/re/jaacap/abstract.00004583-200412000-00013.htm
  
• Adrienne M. Martin, Hopes and dreams.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is a commonplace in both the popular imagination and the philosophical literature that hope has a special kind of motivational force. This commonplace underwrites the conviction that hope alone is capable of bolstering us in despairinducing circumstances, as well as the strategy of appealing to hope in the political realm. In section 1, I argue that, to the contrary, hope’s motivational essence is not special or unique—it is simply that of an endorsed desire. The commonplace is not entirely mistaken, however, because standard ways of expressing hope do have motivational influence that is different in kind from that of desire. In sections 2 through 4, I examine one of these ways of expressing hope, fantasizing, and argue that fantasies can present us with reasons to modify our goals and projects in multiple ways
• Leslie Marsh (2005). Review essay: Dennett's sweet dreams philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Review Essay: Dennett’s Sweet Dreams Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/5896/1/Sweet%20Dreams.pdf
  
• Thomas Metzinger & Jennifer Michelle Windt (2007). Dreams.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: differences between dreaming and waking consciousness as well. In this chapter, we will argue that these differences mainly concern the subjective quality of the dreaming experience. The interesting question, from a philosophical point of view, is not so much whether or not dreams are conscious experiences at all. Rather, one must ask in what sense dreams can be considered as conscious experiences, and what happens to the experiential subject during the dream state. Finally, in order to arrive at a more differentiated understanding of dream consciousness, we will contrast our analysis of ordinary dreams with lucid dreams, as well as with the varying degrees of lucidity and cognitive clarity seen in semi-lucid and prelucid dreams
• Tyrus Miller (1996). From city-dreams to the dreaming collective: Walter Benjamin's political dream interpretation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This essay discusses Walter Benjamin's development of 'dream' as a model for understanding 19th- and 20th-century urban culture. Following Bergson and surrealist poetics, Benjamin used 'dream' in the 1920s as an heuristic analogy for investigating child hood memories, kitsch art and literature; during the early 1930s, he also developed it into an historiographic concept for studying 19th- century Parisian culture. Benjamin's interpretative use of the dream cuts across Ricoeur's distinction between the hermeneutics of 'recol lection' and the hermeneutics of 'suspicion'. The political dream analyst seeks to discharge the 'fatal powers' of the ideological dream, while at the same time fostering the experience of waking in which dream elements may recollectively be grasped. Benjamin extends this dialectic of dreaming, interpreting and waking to the relation between historical epochs and the tasks of the materialist historian. Puzzling out the recent past's dreamlike rebuses may serve in the task of a present historical awakening. Key Words: Walter Benjamin • city • dream • hermeneutics • surrealism
• Duncan Pritchard (2001). Scepticism and dreaming.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In a recent, and influential, article, Crispin Wright maintains that a familiar form of scepticismwhich finds its core expression in Descartes’ dreaming argumentcan be defused (or, to use Wright’s own parlance, “imploded”), by showing how it employs self-defeating reasoning. I offer two fundamental reasons for rejecting Wright’s ‘implosion’ of scepticism. On the one hand, I argue that, even by Wright’s own lights, it is unclear whether there is a sceptical argument to implode in the first place. On the other, I claim that even on the supposition that Wright has indeed succeeded in setting-up such an argument, he nevertheless fails to follow-through with an adequate response. A diagnosis of the failure of Wright’s approach is then given in the context of the wider sceptical debate
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/xj61h2505n31h456/fulltext.pdf
  
• Antti Revonsuo & Katja Valli (2000). Dreaming and consciousness: Testing the threat simulation theory of the function of dreaming.   (More)
• John Sutton (ms). Childrens’ dreams and the nature of dreaming.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: (2004) On the philosophical implications of David Foulkes’ experimental results [presented at ESPP/ SPP, Barcelona 2004 but currently stalled]
• John Sutton (ms). Review of Michel jouvet, the paradox of sleep: The story of dreaming; and Patricia Cox Miller, dreams in late antiquity.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This review describes central difficulties in the interdisciplinary study of dreaming, summarizes Jouvet's account of his role in the history of modern dream science, queries his positive speculations on the semantics of dreaming, and suggests work for historians of neuroscience
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1361/0/JHNdreams.htm
  
• Bruce Wilshire (2006). On Ernest Sosa's "on dreaming".   (More)
• John Yates (ms). A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy.   (More)

Dreams, Misc

• Aristotle, On prophesying by dreams.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.4literature.net/Aristotle/Prophesying_by_Dreams
  http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/prophesy/
  http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/noncontradiction/2007/09/on-prophesying-.html
  

The Nature of Dreaming

• Jonathan Ichikawa (2009). Dreaming and imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Penultimate draft; please refer to published version. I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that contrary to an orthodox view, dreams do not typically involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has argued that we do not have misleading sensory experience while dreaming, and partially in agreement with Ernest Sosa, who has argued that we do not form false beliefs while dreaming. Rather, on my view, dreams involve mental imagery and propositional imagination. I defend the imagination model of dreaming from some objections
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philosophy.jollyutter.net/papers/dai.pdf
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121647698/PDFSTART
  

Emotions

• E. M. Adams (1998). Emotional intelligence and wisdom.   (More)
• David B. Annis (1988). Emotion, love and friendship.   (More)
• Murat Aydede (2000). Emotions or emotional feelings?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I criticize Rolls's account of what makes emotional states conscious
• Dirk Baltzly (2007). The stoic life: Emotions, duty, fate.   (More)
• Cristiano Castelfranchi & Maria Miceli (1996). Commentary on towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes.   (More)
• Giovanna Colombetti (web). Enaction, Sense-Making and Emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The theory of autopoiesis is central to the enactive approach. Recent works emphasize that the theory of autopoiesis is a theory of sense-making in living systems, i.e. of how living systems produce and consume meaning. In this chapter I first illustrate (some aspects of) these recent works, and interpret their notion of sense-making as a bodily cognitive- emotional form of understanding. Then I turn to modern emotion science, and I illustrate its tendency to over-intellectualize our capacity to evaluate and understand. I show that this overintellectualization goes hand in hand with the rejection of the idea that the body is a vehicle of meaning. I explain why I think that this over-intellectualization is problematic, and try to reconceptualize the notion of evaluation in emotion theory in a way that is consistent and continuous with the autopoietic notion of sense-making
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://polorovereto.unitn.it/~colombetti/docs/GC_SenseMaking.pdf
  
• Craig DeLancey (2009). Review of Georg Brun, ulvi doguoglu, Dominique kuenzle (eds.), Epistemology and Emotions.   (More)
• Julien A. Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (2009). Taking Affective Explanations to Heart.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this article, the authors examine and debate the categories of emotions, moods, temperaments, character traits and sentiments. They define them and offer an account of the relations that exist among the phenomena they cover. They argue that, whereas ascribing character traits and sentiments (dispositions) is to ascribe a specific coherence and stability to the emotions (episodes) the subject is likely to feel, ascribing temperaments (dispositions) is to ascribe a certain stability to the subject’s moods (episodes). The rationale for this distinction, the authors claim, lies in the fact that, whereas appeal to character traits or sentiments in explanation is tantamount to making sense of a given behaviour in terms of an individual’s specific evaluative perspective — as embodied in this individual’s emotional profile — appeal to temperaments makes sense of it independently of any such evaluative perspective.
• Ronald B. de Sousa (2004). Emotions: What I know, what I'd like to think I know, and what I'd like to think.   (More)
• Mark Devon (ms). The Origin of Emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The Origin of Emotions identifies the purpose, trigger and effect of each emotion
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1379606
  
• Travis Dumsday (2007). Emotional experience and religious understanding: Integrating perception, conception and feeling.   (More)
• Blake Dutton (2006). Emotions in ancient and medieval philosophy.   (More)
• Sharin N. Elkholy (2002). Upheavels of thought: The intelligence of emotions.   (More)
• Guido Gainotti (2005). Emotions, unconscious processes, and the right hemisphere.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://karnacbooks.metapress.com/index/Q272JKU830360683.pdf
  
• Carlos Gershenson, Modelling emotions with multidimensional logic.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: One of the objectives of Artificial Intelligence has been the modelling of "human" characteristics, such as emotions, behaviour, conscience, etc. But in such characteristics we might find certain degree of contradiction. Previous work on modelling emotions and its problems are reviewed. A model for emotions is proposed using multidimensional logic, which handles the degree of contradiction that emotions might have. The model is oriented to simulate emotions in artificial societies. The proposed solution is also generalized for actions which might overcome contradiction (conflictive goals in agents, for example.)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1479/1/mdlemotions.html
  
• Bernd Goebel & Vittorio Hösle (2005). Reasons, emotions, and God's presence in Anselm of canterbury's cur deus homo.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The paper deals with the peculiar nature of Anselm’s rationalism, focussing on the dialogue Cur deus homo. On the one hand, the argument in Cur deus homois based on reason alone. On the other hand, the dialogic nature of the work allows Anselm to unfold emotional states in a way that almost anticipates Kierkegaard. Anselm’s rationalism does not exclude the experience of anxiety and despair, and this is where faith comes to the rescue. Finally, God’s presence in the search is shown to be logically compatible with the rationalist nature of the search
• George Graham (2002). Review of Craig DeLancey, Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal About Mind and Artificial Intelligence.   (More)
• Patricia Greenspan, Craving the right: Emotions and moral reasons.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I first began working on emotions as a project in philosophy of action, without particular reference to moral philosophy. My thought was that emotions have a distinctive role to play in rationality that tends to be underappreciated by philosophers. Bringing this out was meant to counter a widespread tendency to treat emotions as “blind” causes of action (for the general picture, see Greenspan 2009.) Instead, I thought that emotions could be seen as providing reasons. I took their significance as moral motivators to be hard to miss. Of course, philosophers and others sometimes rightly insist that we need to put emotions aside in order to formulate satisfying moral principles, but I would have been surprised to hear anyone deny that moral motivation typically rests on emotion and that we need that basis in early life in order to get to the stage of acting on moral principles. However, I have since come to think that none of the main philosophical approaches to ethics fully appreciates the significance of emotion, in part because of a misconception of practical reasons. Reasons for action are commonly taken as prima facie requirements, so that moral reasons would yield requirements just insofar as they outweigh competing reasons such as reasons of simple self-interest. Someone who recognizes a moral reason as holding “all things considered” would be irrational not to act on it. But I argue in recent work (starting with Greenspan 2005) that even all-things-considered reasons may in one sense be optional: a rational agent can legitimately “discount” them, cancelling their deliberative weight and their force for motivation. What keeps us from setting aside reasons of the sort that underlie moral..
• John D. Greenwood (1987). Emotion and error.   (More)
• Patricia Greenspan (ms). Emotions, innateness, and ethics.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: My discussion below is an highly abbreviated version of a paper in preparation for a conference on innateness . I allow for both types of influence but suggest that more attention should be paid to mechanisms of social transfer of emotions, as a possible innate source of plasticity in moral learning via emotions - and hence of cultural variation in moral codes
• Patricia Greenspan (ms). Learning emotions and ethics.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Innate emotional bases of ethics have been proposed by authors in evolutionary psychology, following Darwin and his sources in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Philosophers often tend to view such theories as irrelevant to, or even as tending to undermine, the project of moral philosophy. But the importance of emotions to early moral learning gives them a role to play in determining the content of morality. I argue, first, that research on neural circuits indicates that the basic elements or components of emotions need not be limited to what psychologists think of as basic emotions. But in that case, innate mechanisms of social transfer of emotion, such as infants’ tendency to facial imitation, gaze-following, and emotional contagion or empathy, provide a source of plasticity in developing the basic elements that lets emotions incorporate cultural influence from early on. This leaves room later for cognitive components of adult human emotions and hence for the further role of language in conveying cultural influence. We can thus see how moral judgment might depend on innate emotional capacities that are both modifiable by culture and capable of registering objective values. I use Rawls’s treatment of the development of moral sentiments to illustrate the kind of supportive role that emotions can play in a principle-based account – though my own account involves modifications I go on to indicate
• Paul E. Griffiths & Andrea Scarantino (2005). Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Paul E Griffiths Biohumanities Project University of Queensland St Lucia 4072 Australia paul.griffiths@uq.edu.au
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002448/
  http://www.uq.edu.au/biohumanities/webpdfs/EmotionsintheWild.PDF
  http://www.uq.edu.au/biohumanities/webpdfs/EmotionsintheWild.PDF
  http://paul.representinggenes.org/webpdfs/Griff.Scara.IP.EmotionsWild.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002448/01/Emotions_in_the_Wild.PDF
  
• Andrew Harrison (1993). Music and the emotions: The philosophical theories.   (More)
• A. Howard, Ritual, memory, and emotion: Comparing two cognitive hypotheses.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Without systems of public, external symbols for recording information, nonliterate communities have to rely on human memory for the retention and transmission of cultural knowledge. Religious expressions either evolved in directions that rendered them memorable or they were--quite literally--forgotten. Most religious systems, including all of the great world religions, emerged among populations that were mostly illiterate (even if there was a literate elite). Thus, it should come as no surprise that religious systems and ritual systems, in particular, have evolved so as to exploit variables that facilitate memory. No doubt, the invention of literacy ameliorates these variables' influence, however, the availability of such cultural tools neither eliminates that influence nor even surmounts it. Experimental psychologists have clarified variables that contribute to extraordinary recall for events that arise in the normal course of life. Probably, the most obvious is frequency. Experiencing events of the same type frequently aids memory for that type of event, though not necessarily for the details of any of the particular instances of that type. When Jains carry out the Puja ritual day after day, they become adept at its performance. Although they are fluent with the ritual's details, it is possible that they do not remember even one of their previous performances distinctively
• Elisa A. Hurley (2007). Working passions: Emotions and creative engagement with value.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglectcentral intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts’ attempts to reduce them to other mental states andtoward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions’ distinctive function is to engage us with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions’ work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives
• Karen Jones (2008). How to Change the Past.   (More)
• Konstantinos Kafetsios & Eric LaRock (2005). Cognition and emotion: Aristotelian affinities with contemporary emotion research.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/5/639
  http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/15/5/639
  
• Robert A. Kaster (2006). Review of David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature.   (More)
• George A. Kennedy (1994). Tragic pleasures: Aristotle on plot and emotion.   (More)
• Peter King, Emotions in medieval thought.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: No single theory of the emotions dominates the whole of the Middle Ages. Instead, there are several competing accounts, and differences of opinion — sometimes quite dramatic — within each account. Yet there is consensus on the scope and nature of a theory of the emotions, as well as on its place in affective psychology generally. For most medieval thinkers, emotions are at once cognitively penetrable and somatic, which is to say that emotions are influenced by and vary with changes in thought and belief, and that they are also bound up, perhaps essentially, with their physiological manifestations. This ‘mixed’ conception of emotions was broad enough to anchor medieval disagreements over details, yet rich enough to distinguish it from other parts of psychology and medicine. In particular, two kinds of phenomena, thought to be purely physiological, were not considered emotions even on this broad conception. First, what we now classify as drives or urges, for instance hunger and sexual arousal, were thought in the Middle Ages to be at best ‘pre-emotions’ fpropayyioney): mere biological motivations for action, not having any intrinsic cognitive object. Second, moods were likewise thought to be non-objectual somatic states, completely explicable as an imbalance of the bodily humours. Depression fmelancholia), for example, is the pathological condition of having an excess of black bile. Medieval theories of emotions, therefore, concentrate on paradigm cases that fall under the broad conception: delight, anger, distress, fear, and the like. The enterprise of constructing an adequate philosophical theory of the emotions in the Middle Ages had its counterpart in a large body of practical know-how. The medical literature on the emotions, for instance, was extensive, covering such subjects as the causal role of emotions in disease and recovery, the nerves as connecting the brain to the organs involved in the physiological manifestations of the emotions, and the effect of diet and nutrition on emotional responses..
• Michael Klebanov, Utilitarian judgments and an intuitive moral system: Can John Mikhail's model accommodate autism and social emotion?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the attempt to understand moral knowledge, a framework of “universal moral grammar” (“UMG”) has gained traction. Instead of relying on justifications provided after moral judgments, or claiming that our moral judgments are determined by reason, emotion, or some combination of the two, UMG seeks to explain moral cognition by modeling our intuitive judgments in moral scenarios. John Mikhail proposes a model of how our mind computes structural descriptions. In this paper, I will outline the justifications for his system, and then review how his system would work in practice. I will then focus on how Mikhail’s model can account for the discrepancy between autistic and non-autistic individuals’ performance in the same types of experiments. Finally, after considering the similarity between the moral judgments of autistics and the judgments of people with damage to their prefrontal cortex, I will investigate possible deficiencies in Mikhail’s model, and briefly conclude with suggestions for further research
• Olga Korpalo (1999). Rationality and emotions: (The perspectives of logical-cognitive analysis).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article is an extension of the author’s previous work on this subject. Primarily it outlines the main directions of this mode of analysis and possible fields to which it could be applied. The first chapter demonstrates a specific method of understanding emotions. The second chapter examines the concept of emotions as a source of the specific modes of “internal” rationality of an agent. The third chapter isdevoted to a comparison between various emotions and the two basic intentional states - belief and desire. The fourth chapter will present the instrumental typology of certain emotional concepts. The final chapter represents preliminary logical schema of the meanings of emotional concepts
• Kristján Kristjánsson (2008). Expendable emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Are there any morally expendable emotions? That is, are there any emotions that could ideally, from a moral point of view, be eradicated from human life? Aristotle may have subscribed to the view that there are no such emotions, and for that reason—though not only for that reason—it merits investigation. I first suggest certain revisions of the specifics of Aristotle’s non-expendability claim that render it less counter-intuitive. I then show that the plausibility of Aristotle’s claim turns largely on the question of how emotions are to be individuated. After probing that question in relation to contemporary theories of emotion, I explore how our emotions and moral virtues relate to distinct spheres of human experience, and how emotion concepts can best carve up the emotional landscape. I argue finally that there exist certain normative reasons for specifying emotion concepts such that Aristotle’s view holds good
• Monique Lanoix (2004). Émotions et valeurs.   (More)
• Mark R. Leary (ms). Motivational and emotional aspects of the self.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      Recent theory and research are reviewed regarding self-related motives (self-enhancement, self-verification, and self-expansion) and self-conscious emotions (guilt, shame, pride, social anxiety, and embarrassment), with an emphasis on how these motivational and emotional aspects of the self might be related. Specifically, these motives and emotions appear to function to protect people's social well-being. The motives to self-enhance, self-verify, and self-expand are partly rooted in people's concerns with social approval and acceptance, and self-conscious emotions arise in response to events that have real or imagined implications for others' judgments of the individual. Thus, these motives and emotions do not operate to maintain certain states of the self, as some have suggested, but rather to facilitate people's social interactions and relationships
• Stefan Linquist (2007). Review of Paul Thagard, Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition.   (More)
• Glen A. Mazis (1983). A New Approach to Sartre's Theory of Emotions: Towards a Phenomenology of Emotions.   (More)
• Glen Mazis (2001). Emotion and Embodiment within the Medical World.   (More)
• Glen A. Mazis (1989). Merleau Ponty, Inhabitation and the Emotions.   (More)
• Jason L. Megill & Jon Cogburn (2005). Easy's gettin' harder all the time: The computational theory and affective states.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2005.00292.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118648358/PDFSTART
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/rati/2005/00000018/00000003/art00005
  
• Alfred R. Mele (2003). Emotion and desire in self-deception.   (More)
• M. Mendl & E. S. Paul (2004). Consciousness, emotion and animal welfare: Insights from cognitive science.   (More)
• Ed Mooney (2005). Review of Rick Anthony Furtak, Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity.   (More)
• Jerome Neu (2005). Not passion's slave: Emotions and choice.   (More)
• Shaun Nichols (2002). On the genealogy of norms: A case for the role of emotion in cultural evolution.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3080977.pdf
  
• Nathan Nobis (online). Rational engagement, emotional response and the prospects for progress in animal use ‘debates’.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper is designed to help people rationally engage moral issues regarding the treatment of animals, specifically uses of animals in medical and psychological experimentation, basic research, drug development, education and training, consumer product testing and other areas
• Martha C. Nussbaum (2006). Radical evil in the Lockean state: The neglect of the political emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: All modern liberal democracies have strong reasons to support an idea of toleration, understood as involving respect, not only grudging acceptance, and to extend it to all religious and secular doctrines, limiting only conduct that violates the rights of other citizens. There is no modern democracy, however, in which toleration of this sort is a stable achievement. Why is toleration, attractive in principle, so difficult to achieve? The normative case for toleration was well articulated by John Locke in his influential A Letter Concerning Toleration , although his attractive proposal thus rests on a fragile foundation. Kant did much more, combining a Lockean account of the state with a profound diagnosis of ‘radical evil’, the tendencies in all human beings to militate against stable toleration and respect. But Kant proposed no mechanism through which the state might mitigate the harmful influence of ‘radical evil’, thus rendering toleration stable. One solution to this problem was proposed by Rousseau, but it has deep problems. How, then, can a respectful pluralistic society shore up the fragile human basis of toleration, especially in a world in which we need to cultivate toleration not only within each state, but also among peoples and states, in this interlocking world? Key Words: toleration • emotion • evil • liberal democracy • Locke • Mill • Kant • Rousseau
• Dilek Onkal, Cognitive and emotional representations of terror attacks: A cross-cultural exploration.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      A questionnaire measuring cognitive and affective representations of terror risk was developed and tested in Turkey and Israel. Participants in the study were university students from the two countries (n = 351). Four equivalent factors explained terror risk cognitions in each sample: costs, vulnerability, trust, and control.Asingle negative emotionality factor explained the affective component of terror risk representations in both samples. All factors except control could be measured reliably. Results supported the validity of the questionnaire by showing expected associations between cognitions and emotions, as well as indicating gender differences and cultural variations. Current findings are discussed in relation to previous results, theoretical approaches, and practical implications
• Joseph T. Palencik (2007). Amusement and the philosophy of emotion: A neuroanatomical approach.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Philosophers who discuss the emotions have usually treated amusement as a non-emotional mental state. Two prominent philosophers making this claim are Henri Bergson and John Morreall, who maintain that amusement is too abstract and intellectual to qualify as an emotion. Here, the merit of this claim is assessed. Through recent work in neuroanatomy there is reason to doubt the legitimacy of dichotomies that separate emotion and the intellect. Findings suggest that the neuroanatomical structure of amusement is similar to other commonly recognized emotion states. On the basis of these it is argued that amusement should be considered an emotion. Les philosophes qui adressent la question des émotions traitent généralement l’état d’amusement comme un êtat mental excluant l’émotion. Parmi les philosophes importants à défendre cette thèse, Henri Bergson et John Morreall soutiennent que l’amusement est trop abstrait et intellectuel pour être tenu pour une émotion. Nous réévaluons cette thèse. De récents travaux en neuroanatomie fournissent des raisons de douter de la légitimité de la dichotomie entre émotion et intellect. Certaines autres découvertes suggèrent que la structure neuroanatomique de l’amusement est très similaire à d’autres états émotifs. Sur la base de ces travaux, nous argumentons que l’amusement doit être considéré comme une émotion
• Stephen Petersen (2004). Functions, creatures, learning, emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I propose a conceptual framework for emotions according to which they are best understood as the feedback mechanism a creature possesses in virtue of its function to learn. More specifically, emotions can be neatly modeled as a measure of harmony in a certain kind of constraint satisfaction problem. This measure can be used as error for weight adjustment (learning) in an unsupervised connectionist network.
• Matthew Ratcliffe (2003). Review of Robert Solomon, Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice.   (More)
• Gretchen Reydams-Schils (2006). Review of Tad Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate.   (More)
• Robert Roberts (online). Emotions in the Christian tradition.   (More)
• Stephanie Ross (2005). Landscape perception: Theory-Laden, emotionally resonant, politically correct.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Our primal ability to see one thing in terms of another shapes our landscape perception. Although modes of appreciation are tied to personal interests and situations, there are many lines of conflict and incompatibility between these modes. A religious point of view is unacceptable to those without religious beliefs. Background knowledge is similarly required for taking an arts or science-based view of landscape, although this knowledge can be acquired. How to cultivate responses grounded in imagination, emotion, and instinct is less clear, but advocates are eager to spell out notions of virtuous exercise and effective schooling. Carlson’s science-based theory often gets the most attention because he has refined and defended it over many years, but there is a place in aesthetic nature appreciation for the formal or design elements he dismisses as well as for religious, imaginative, emotional, and ambient responses. To date, the normative aspects of these theories have been presented sketchily at best. Working out these details will chart a way for landscape appreciation to become politically correct
• Dennis E. Skocz (2007). Aristotle and Heidegger on the “worldliness” of emotion: A hermeneutical auseinandersetzung.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The reflection undertaken here aspires to understand human emotion by joining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s descriptions of emotion in a thoughtful confrontation(Auseinandersetzung). In his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger carries out a phenomenology of being-in-the world which illuminates the “structures” of emotion.Aristotle’s descriptions of emotions in the Rhetoric serve to enrich the structures delineated by Heidegger. Although millennia separate the two thinkers and their civilizations, what they say together about emotion is meaningful today. Their philosophical projects may seem to subordinate consideration of emotion to rhetorical or ontological purposes, but they actually serve to enrich our understanding by recognizing the intertwining of speech, world, and emotion
• Aaron Sloman (ms). Questions about emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In December 2005 I was invited by a well known researcher, Carrol Izard, on emotions to contribute to a discussion by answering a few questions as briefly as possible. He asked for 'one-liners', but I was not able to comply with that condition. However, the answers were short for me!
• C. S. Sripada & Stephen P. Stich (2004). Evolution, culture, and the irrationality of the emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: For about 2500 years, from Plato’s time until the closing decades of the 20^th century, the dominant view was that the emotions are quite distinct from the processes of rational thinking and decision making, and are often a major impediment to those processes. But in recent years this orthodoxy has been challenged in a number of ways. Damasio (1994) has made a forceful case that the traditional view, which he has dubbed _Descartes’ Error_, is quite wrong, because emotions play a fundamental role in rational decision making. When the systems underlying the emotions don’t function properly, Damasio maintains, rational decision-making breaks down. Other theorists, most notably Robert Frank (1988), have argued that if we view the emotions through the longer lens of evolutionary theory, we can see that much of what looked to be irrational in the emotions is actually part of an effective strategy for achieving agents’ goals and maximizing their reproductive success. In the wake of this and other recent work, the pendulum of received opinion has swung in the other direction. The emotions are now increasingly regarded as inherently rational, as Frank maintains, and as important components of other rational processes
• Susan Stark (2004). A change of heart: Moral emotions, transformation, and moral virtue.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Inspired in part by a renewed attention to Aristotle's moral philosophy, philosophers have acknowledged the important role of the emotions in morality. Nonetheless, precisely how emotions matter to morality has remained contentious. Aristotelians claim that moral virtue is constituted by correct action and correct emotion. But Kantians seem to require solely that agents do morally correct actions out of respect for the moral law. There is a crucial philosophical disagreement between the Aristotelian and Kantian moral outlooks: namely, is feeling the correct emotions necessary to virtue or is it an optional extra, which is permitted but not required. I argue that there are good reasons for siding with the Aristotelians: virtuous agents must experience the emotions appropriate to their situations. Moral virtue requires a change of heart
• Irene Switankowsky (2004). Justifying emotions: Pride and jealousy.   (More)
• Evan Thompson & Giovanna Colombetti, Enacting emotional interpretations with feeling.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: One way to think about Lewis’s portrayal of appraisal-emotion interactions is by comparison with dynamic sensorimotor approaches to perception and action (Varela et al. 1991; O’Regan & Noë 2001; Hurley & Noë 2003). According to these approaches, perception is as much a motor process as a sensory one. At the neural level, there is “common coding” of sensory and motor processes (e.g., Prinz 1997; Rizzolatti et al. 1997). At the psychological level, action and perception are not simply instrumentally related, as means-to-end, but are constitutively interdependent (Hurley 1998). These and other findings can be described by saying that perception is enactive: it is a kind of action (Varela et al. 1991; Noë 2004)
• David Weberman (1996). Heidegger and the disclosive character of the emotions.   (More)
• R. George Wright (ms). An emotion-based approach to freedom of speech.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      Free speech law often protects emotional expression. However, we lack an understanding of the scope and limits of protection for emotional expression. This Essay seeks to make progress toward such an understanding because a better understanding and grasp of the nature of emotion itself is crucial to achieving this goal. If we can arrive at an improved understanding of emotions and how they can be expressed, we will be better able to explain when we do and do not constitutionally protect the expression of emotion
• Ian Wright, Aaron Sloman & Luc Beaudoin (1996). Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: he design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analysed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group. We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention). The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of `perturbant', emotional episodes
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/703/0/Wright_Sloman_Beaudoin_grief.ps
  

Theories of Emotion

• Giovanna Colombetti (2009). From affect programs to dynamical discrete emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to Discrete Emotion Theory, a number of emotions are distinguishable on the basis of neural, physiological, behavioral and expressive features. Critics of this view emphasize the variability and context-sensitivity of emotions. This paper discusses some of these criticisms, and argues that they do not undermine the claim that emotions are discrete. This paper also presents some works in dynamical affective science, and argues that to conceive of discrete emotions as self-organizing and softly assembled patterns of various processes accounts more naturally than traditional Discrete Emotion Theory for the variability and context-sensitivity of emotions
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a913836437~fulltext=713240930
  
• John Dewey, Theory of emotions, the: The significance of emotions.   (More)
• Paul E. Griffiths (2004). Emotions as natural and normative kinds.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In earlier work I have claimed that emotion and some emotions are not `natural kinds'. Here I clarify what I mean by `natural kind', suggest a new and more accurate term, and discuss the objection that emotion and emotions are not descriptive categories at all, but fundamentally normative categories
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://paul.representinggenes.org/webpdfs/Griff.04.EmotionsNaturalNormative.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000998/00/Emotions_as_Natural_and_Normative_Kinds.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/09/98/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000998-00/Emotions_as_Natural_and_Normative_Kinds.pdf
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/425944
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?PHOS710521PDF
  http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/425944
  
• Paul E. Griffiths (2004). Is emotion a natural kind?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In _What Emotions Really Are: The problem of psychological categories_ I argued that it is unlikely that all the psychological states and processes that fall under the vernacular category of emotion are sufficiently similar to one another to allow a unified scientific psychology of the emotions. In this paper I restate what I mean by ?natural kind? and my argument for supposing that emotion is not a natural kind in this specific sense. In the following sections I discuss the two most promising proposals to reunify the emotion category: the revival of the Jamesian theory of emotion associated with the writings of Antonio Damasio and a philosophical approach to the content of emotional representations that draws on ?multi-level appraisal theory? in psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eprints1.library.pitt.edu/archive/00000566/00/Is_Emotion_a_Natural_Kind.PDF
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/05/66/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000566-00/Is_Emotion_a_Natural_Kind.PDF
  
• D. Moffat, N. H. Frijda & R. H. Phaf (1993). Analysis of a computer model of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the fields of psychology, AI, and philosophy there has recently been theoretical activity in the cognitively-based modelling of emotions. Using AI methodology it is possible to implement and test these complex models, and in this paper we examine an emotion model called ACRES. We propose a set of requirements any such model should satisfy, and compare ACRES against them. Then, analysing its behaviour in detail, we formulate more requirements and criteria that can be applied to future computational models of emotion. In arguing to support the new requirements, we find that they are desirable for autonomous systems in general. We also show how they can explain the psychological concept of regulation. Finally, we use the concepts developed to make a theoretical distinction between emotion and motivation
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/469/0/Analysis_of_ACRES.html
  

Somatic and Feeling Theories of Emotion

• Giovanna Colombetti & Evan Thompson (forthcoming). The feeling body: Towards an enactive approach to emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: For many years emotion theory has been characterized by a dichotomy between the head and the body. In the golden years of cognitivism, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, emotion theory focused on the cognitive antecedents of emotion, the so-called “appraisal processes.” Bodily events were seen largely as byproducts of cognition, and as too unspecific to contribute to the variety of emotion experience. Cognition was conceptualized as an abstract, intellectual, “heady” process separate from bodily events. Although current emotion theory has moved beyond this disembodied stance by conceiving of emotions as involving both cognitive processes (perception, attention, and evaluation) and bodily events (arousal, behavior, and facial expressions), the legacy of cognitivism persists in the tendency to treat cognitive and bodily events as separate constituents of emotion. Thus the cognitive aspects of emotion are supposedly distinct and separate from the bodily ones. This separation indicates that cognitivism’s disembodied conception of cognition continues to shape the way emotion theorists conceptualize emotion
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://individual.utoronto.ca/evant/FeelingBody.pdf
  http://people.exeter.ac.uk/gc243/index/GC&ET_FeelingBody.pdf
  http://polorovereto.unitn.it/~colombetti/docs/GC&ET_FeelingBody.pdf
  
• Craig DeLancey (2005). Review of Jesse J. Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion.   (More)
• Daniel C. Dennett (ms). Review of Damasio, Descartes' error.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The legacy of René Descartes' notorious dualism of mind and body extends far beyond academia into everyday thinking: "These athletes are prepared both mentally and physically," and "There's nothing wrong with your body--it's all in your mind." Even among those of us who have battled Descartes' vision, there has been a powerful tendency to treat the mind (that is to say, the brain) as the body's boss, the pilot of the ship. Falling in with this standard way of thinking, we ignore an important alternative: viewing the brain (and hence the mind) as one organ among many, a relatively recent usurper of control, whose functions cannot properly be understood until we see it not as the boss, but as just one more somewhat fractious servant, working to further the interests of the body that shelters and fuels it, and gives its activities meaning. This historical or evolutionary perspective reminds me of the change that has come over Oxford in the thirty years since I was a student there. It used to be that the dons were in charge, while the bursars and other bureaucrats, right up to the Vice Chancellor, acted under their guidance and at their behest. Nowadays the dons, like their counterparts on American university faculties, are more clearly in the role of employees hired by a central Administration, but from where, finally, does the University get its meaning? In evolutionary history, a similar change has crept over the administration of our bodies. Where resides the "I" who is in charge of my body? In his wonderfully written book, Antonio Damasio seeks to restore our appreciation for the perspective of the body, and the shared balance of powers from which we emerge as conscious persons
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/damasio.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000282/
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:282
  http://cogprints.org/282/1/damasio.htm
  http://cogprints.org/282/0/damasio.htm
  
• Irwin Goldstein (2002). Are emotions feelings? A further look at hedonic theories of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers sharply distinguish emotions from feelings. Emotions are not feelings, and having an emotion does not necessitate having some feeling, they think. In this paper I reply to a set of arguments people use sharply to distinguish emotions from feelings. In response to these people, I endorse and defend a hedonic theory of emotion that avoids various anti-feeling objections. Proponents of this hedonic theory analyze an emotion by reference to forms of cognition (e.g., thought, belief, judgment) and a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling. Given this theory,emotions are feelings in some important sense of "feelings", and these feelings are identified as particular emotions by reference to their hedonic character and the cognitive state that causes the hedonic feelings
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/ce/2002/00000003/00000001/art00003
  
• William James (1884). What is an emotion?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLidG8SAni&sig=V3zq9LfscsdGf4oGOproXo1Wq0k
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLiaG5YDsi&sig=sYiGSxFe99gcKuEctbFNpbgnvd4
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uKrdA6_yug&sig=poolF4z3P-T7oyIpMc9jvKnpngk
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLi9E4ZCpe&sig=evLwlKoRuLz-JDObx0vT1JjU93U
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uKrdFaTFlh&sig=hbtmhKbx1W36MXlVBZSwMr36UQM
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uKrdDaSHog&sig=79BOp82OcdnJoKVMQzJodQgjUP8
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLidA7XFri&sig=UMSewzuY2PmKXL8ZXvAwcm3eQvQ
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLieC9RHri&sig=LOvOPpE3h_w9wagYAto0fwvgdXI
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLibC6TFug&sig=-SHepy-NldiI8E1cZakqoSIpYKo
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLicE7SHof&sig=p4nBxgDwUP0eM5aVRSmRIWySWQ8
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLibI6Zyuj&sig=HwnxF5tlI478yRKasrq83oSQr1Q
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLifE9ZFqd&sig=n1qQDjmH1V3CHGoL5WAOAgA6kno
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLieI9WAmg&sig=XrvBBoGCk-b6dJUKXge2NybMdvE
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLiaA5UBoh&sig=ek3XvHuEVrJmh6eDipWv1QjIVng
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423(188404)1:9:34<188:WIAE>2.0.CO;2-8
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423(188404)1:9:34<188:WIAE>2.0.CO;2-8
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2246769.pdf
  
• Jesse J. Prinz (2005). Are emotions feelings?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2005/00000012/F0030008/art00001
  
• Jesse Prinz (2004). Emotions embodied.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In one of the most frequently quoted passages in the history of emotion research, William James (1884: 189f) announces that emotions occur when the perception of an exciting fact causes a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” The same idea occurred to Carl Lange (1984) around the same time. These authors were not the first to draw a link between the emotions and the body. Indeed, this had been a central theme of Descartes’ exquisite opus, The Passions of the Soul. But James and Lange wanted to push things farther than most, suggesting that emotions are exhausted by bodily changes or perceptions thereof. Other kinds of mental episodes might co-occur when we have an emotion state. For James, an emotion follows an exciting perception. But the exciting perception is not a part of the emotion it excited (Ellsworth, 1994, reads James differently, but see Reisenzein et al.’s 1995 convincing response). The majority of contemporary emotion researchers, especially those in philosophy, find this suggestion completely untenable. Surely, emotions involve something more. At their core, emotions are more like judgments or thoughts, than perceptions. They evaluate, assess, or appraise. Emotions are amendable to rational assessment; they report, correctly or incorrectly, on how we are faring in the world. Within this general consensus, there is a further debate about whether the body should figure into a theory of emotions at all. Perhaps James and Lange offer a theory that is not merely incomplete, but entirely off base. Where they view judgments as contingent and non-constitutive concomitants of emotions, it is actually bodily perceptions that deserve this demotion. Perhaps emotions can be, and often are, disembodied in some fundamental sense

Perceptual Theories of Emotion

• Craig DeLancey (2005). Review of Jesse J. Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion.   (More)
• Peter Goldie (2004). Emotion, feeling, and knowledge of the world.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There is a view of the emotions (I might tendentiously call it ‘cognitivism’) that has at present a certain currency. This view is of the emotions as playing an essential role in our gaining evaluative knowledge of the world. When we are angry at an insult, or afraid of the burglar, our emotions involve evaluative perceptions and thoughts, which are directed towards the way something is in the world that impinges on our well-being, or on the well-being of those that matter to us. Without emotions, we would be worse off, prudentially and morally: we would not see things as they are, and accordingly we would not act as we should. Emotions are, according to this view a Good Thing. No wonder we have evolved as creatures capable of emotion.[1]
• Jesse Prinz (online). Emotion and aesthetic value.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Aesthetics is a normative domain. We evaluate artworks as better or worse, good or bad, great or grim. I will refer to a positive appraisal of an artwork as an aesthetic appreciation of that work, and I refer to a negative appraisal as aesthetic depreciation. (I will often drop the word “aesthetic.”) There has been considerable amount of work on what makes an artwork worthy of appreciation, and less, it seems, on the nature of appreciation itself. These two topics are related, of course, because they nature of appreciation may bear on what things are worthy of that response, or at least on what things are likely to elicit it. So I will have some things to say about the latter. But I want to focus in this discussion on appreciation itself. When we praise a work of art, when we say it has aesthetic value, what does our praise consist in? This is a question about aesthetic psychology. I am interested in what kind of mental state appreciation is. What kind of state are we expressing when we say a work of art is “good”? This question has parallels in other areas of value theory. In ethics, most notably, there has been much attention lavished on the question of what people express when they refer to an action as “morally good.” One popular class of theories, associated with the British moralists and their followers, posits a link between moral valuation and emotion. To call an act morally good is to express an emotion toward that act. I think this approach to morality is right on target (Prinz, 2007). Here I want to argue that an emotional account of aesthetic valuation is equally promising. There are important differences between the two domains, but both have an affective foundation. I suspect that valuing of all kinds involves the emotions. Here I will inquire into the role of emotions in aesthetic valuing. I will not claim that artworks express emotions or even that they necessarily evoke emotions..
• Jesse Prinz (2004). Emotions embodied.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In one of the most frequently quoted passages in the history of emotion research, William James (1884: 189f) announces that emotions occur when the perception of an exciting fact causes a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” The same idea occurred to Carl Lange (1984) around the same time. These authors were not the first to draw a link between the emotions and the body. Indeed, this had been a central theme of Descartes’ exquisite opus, The Passions of the Soul. But James and Lange wanted to push things farther than most, suggesting that emotions are exhausted by bodily changes or perceptions thereof. Other kinds of mental episodes might co-occur when we have an emotion state. For James, an emotion follows an exciting perception. But the exciting perception is not a part of the emotion it excited (Ellsworth, 1994, reads James differently, but see Reisenzein et al.’s 1995 convincing response). The majority of contemporary emotion researchers, especially those in philosophy, find this suggestion completely untenable. Surely, emotions involve something more. At their core, emotions are more like judgments or thoughts, than perceptions. They evaluate, assess, or appraise. Emotions are amendable to rational assessment; they report, correctly or incorrectly, on how we are faring in the world. Within this general consensus, there is a further debate about whether the body should figure into a theory of emotions at all. Perhaps James and Lange offer a theory that is not merely incomplete, but entirely off base. Where they view judgments as contingent and non-constitutive concomitants of emotions, it is actually bodily perceptions that deserve this demotion. Perhaps emotions can be, and often are, disembodied in some fundamental sense

Cognitive Theories of Emotions

• John Bolender (2003). The genealogy of the moral modules.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   This paper defends a cognitive theory of those emotional reactions which motivate and constrain moral judgment. On this theory, moral emotions result from mental faculties specialized for automatically producing feelings of approval or disapproval in response to mental representations of various social situations and actions. These faculties are modules in Fodor's sense, since they are informationally encapsulated, specialized, and contain innate information about social situations. The paper also tries to shed light on which moral modules there are, which of these modules we share with non-human primates, and on the (pre-)history and development of this modular system from pre-humans through gatherer-hunters and on to modern (i.e. arablist) humans. The theory is not, however, meant to explain all moral reasoning. It is plausible that a non-modular intelligence at least sometimes play a role in conscious moral thought. However, even non-modular moral reasoning is initiated and constrained by moral emotions having modular sources
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/RM_PDFs/Bolender_Moral_Modules_2003.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/content/q7n5167tkk520772/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/q7n5167tkk520772/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=396399&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/Q7N5167TKK520772.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2003/00000013/00000002/00396399
  
• Jason Brennan (2008). What if Kant Had Had a Cognitive Theory of the Emotions?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Emotional cognitivists, such as the Stoics and Aristotle, hold that emotions have cognitive content, whereas noncognitivists, like Plato and Kant, believe the emotions to be nonrational bodily movements. I ask, taking Martha Nussbaum's account of cognitivism, what if Kant had become convinced of a cognitive theory of the emotions, what changes would this require in his moral philosophy. Surprisingly, since this represents a radical shift in his psychology, it changes almost nothing. I show that Kant's account of continence, virtue, the evaluation of inclinations, and his argument for morality taking the form of categorical imperatives, are immune to such a change, despite the prima facie deep connection (on the received view) between these and his moral psychology.
• Ronald de Sousa (online). Emotion.   (More)
• Ronnie de Sousa (2007). Review of Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us.   (More)
• Gary Hatfield (2007). Did Descartes have a Jamesian theory of the emotions?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Philosophical Psychology 20 (2007), 413–40. Key words: Cognitive theories of emotion, Rene Descartes, embodiment, emotions, evolution, historical methodology, instinct, mechanistic theories of behavior, mind–brain relations, passions, William James
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a780355076~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/780355076.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a780355076~fulltext=713240930
  
• Joe Lau (ms). The nature of emotions comments on Martha Nussbaum's upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Nussbaum’s theory of the emotions draws heavily on the Stoic account. In her theory, emotions are a kind of value judgment or thought. This is in stark contrast to the well-known proposal from William James, who took emotions to be bodily feelings. There are various motivations for taking emotions as judgments. One main reason is that emotions are intentional mental states. They are always about something, directed at particular objects or state of affairs. For example, fear seems to involve the anticipation of danger. To grief for the passing of a loved one involves the thought that someone dear to us is now gone. In Upheavals of Thought and also in her Hochelaga Lecture, Nussbaum analyzed compassion as a set of judgments, including for example the judgment that someone is experiencing serious suffering, and that the person in question does not deserve the suffering

Theories of Emotion, Misc

• Christian Coseru (2004). A Review Essay of Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama.   (More)
• Louis Charland (ms). The heat of emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Philosophical discussions regarding the status of emotion as a scientific domain usually get framed in terms of the question whether emotion is a natural kind. That approach to the issues is wrongheaded for two reasons. First, it has led to an intractable philosophical impasse that ultimately misconstrues the character of the relevant debate in emotion science. Second, and most important, it entirely ignores valence, a central feature of emotion experience, and probably the most promising criterion for demarcating emotion from cognition and other related domains. An alternate philosophical hypothesis for addressing the issues is pro- posed. It is that emotion is a naturally occurring valenced phenomenon that is..
• Richard J. Davidson & C. van Reekum (2005). Emotion is not one thing.   (More)
• Ronald de Sousa (online). Emotion.   (More)
• John Dewey, Theory of emotions, the: Emotional attitudes.   (More)
• Tom Cochrane (2009). Eight Dimensions for the Emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The author proposes a dimensional model of our emotion concepts that is intended to be largely independent of one’s theory of emotions and applicable to the different ways in which emotions are measured. He outlines some conditions for selecting the dimensions based on these motivations and general conceptual grounds. Given these conditions he then advances an 8-dimensional model that is shown to effectively differentiate emotion labels both within and across cultures, as well as more obscure expressive language. The 8 dimensions are: (1) attracted—repulsed, (2) powerful—weak, (3) free—constrained, (4) certain—uncertain, (5) generalized—focused, (6) future directed—past directed, (7) enduring—sudden, (8) socially connected—disconnected.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.affective-sciences.org/publication/2221
  
• Irwin Goldstein (2002). Are emotions feelings? A further look at hedonic theories of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers sharply distinguish emotions from feelings. Emotions are not feelings, and having an emotion does not necessitate having some feeling, they think. In this paper I reply to a set of arguments people use sharply to distinguish emotions from feelings. In response to these people, I endorse and defend a hedonic theory of emotion that avoids various anti-feeling objections. Proponents of this hedonic theory analyze an emotion by reference to forms of cognition (e.g., thought, belief, judgment) and a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling. Given this theory,emotions are feelings in some important sense of "feelings", and these feelings are identified as particular emotions by reference to their hedonic character and the cognitive state that causes the hedonic feelings
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/ce/2002/00000003/00000001/art00003
  
• Peter Goldie (2005). Imagination and the distorting power of emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: _In real life, emotions can distort practical reasoning, typically in ways that it is_ _difficult to realise at the time, or to envisage and plan for in advance. This fea-_ _ture of real life emotional experience raises difficulties for imagining such expe-_ _riences through centrally imagining, or imagining ‘from the inside’. I argue_ _instead for the important psychological role played by another kind of imagin-_ _ing: imagining from an external perspective. This external perspective can draw_ _on the dramatic irony involved in imagining these typical cases, where one_ _knows outside the scope of the imagining what one does not know as part of the_ _content of what one imagines: namely, that the imagined emotion is distorting_ _one’s reasoning. Moreover, imagining from an external perspective allows one_ _to evaluate the imagined events in a way that imagining from the inside does not._
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2005/00000012/F0030008/art00007
  
• Christophe Menant (ms). Performances of self-awareness used to explain the evolutionary advantages of consciousness (2004).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The question about evolution of consciousness has been addressed so far as possible selectional advantage related to consciousness ("What evolutionary advantages, if any, being conscious might confer on an organism ? "). But evidencing an adaptative explanation of consciousness has proven to be very difficult. Reason for that being the complexity of consciousness. We take here a different approach on subject by looking at possible selectional advantages related to the performance of Self Awareness that appeared during evolution millions of years before consciousness as we know it for humans. The interest of such an approach is that the analysis of selectional advantage is done at an evolution step sigificantly simpler that the step of Human Consciousness. We analyse how evolutionary advantages have resulted from this specific Self Awareness step. This is done by taking into consideration the possibility for a subject to identify with a conspecific at this level of evolution. We use the results made available by Mirror Neuron researchs where intersubjectivity and some level of identification with conspecifics have been evidenced for non human primates. Selectional advantages related to Self Awareness are analysed two ways: - Reformulating the performances of imitation and of development of language. - Showing that Self Awareness within group life can naturaly produce an important increase in fear/anxiety for a subject, and that the means implemented by the subject to overcome this fear/anxiety can act as significant evolution advantages opening the road to Human Consciousness. Such approach brings new elements supporting the view that consciousness is grounded in emotions. It also proposes some more evolutionist explanations to the widely dicussed subject of Empathy (S. Preston & F. de Waal) in terms of specific behaviour implemented to limit fear/anxiety increase. This approach also provides some explanation for limited anxiety within dolphins and introduces a basis for a possible phylogenesis of emotions
• Aaron Sloman (ms). What are emotion theories about?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: findings from affective neuroscience research. I shall focus mainly on (a), but in a manner which, I hope is..

Varieties of Emotion

• Paul Griffiths (2001). Basic emotions, complex emotions, machiavellian emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The current state of knowledge in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology allows a fairly robust characterization of at least some, so-called ?basic emotions? - short-lived emotional responses with homologues in other vertebrates. Philosophers, however are understandably more focused on the complex emotion episodes that figure in folk-psychological narratives about mental life, episodes such as the evolving jealousy and anger of a person in an unraveling sexual relationship. One of the most pressing issues for the philosophy of emotion is the relationship between basic emotions and these complex emotion episodes. In this paper, I add to the list of existing, not necessarily incompatible, proposals concerning the relationship between basic emotions and complex emotions. I analyze the writings of ?transactional? psychologists of emotion, particularly those who see their work as a contribution to behavioral ecology, and offer a view of the basic emotion that focuses as much on their interpersonal functions as on their intrapersonal functions. Locating basic emotions and their evolutionary development in a context of processes of social interaction, I suggest, provides a way to integrate our knowledge of basic emotions into an understanding of the larger emotional episodes that have more obvious implications for philosophical disciplines such as moral psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000604/00/Machiavellian_Emotions.pdf
  http://eprints1.library.pitt.edu/archive/00000604/00/Machiavellian_Emotions.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/06/04/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000604-00/Machiavellian_Emotions.pdf
  
• Paul E. Griffiths (2003). Basic emotions, complex emotions, machiavellian emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The current state of knowledge in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology allows a fairly robust characterization of at least some, so-called ‘basic emotions’ - short-lived emotional responses with homologues in other vertebrates. Philosophers, however are understandably more focused on the complex emotion episodes that figure in folk-psychological narratives about mental life, episodes such as the evolving jealousy and anger of a person in an unraveling sexual relationship. One of the most pressing issues for the philosophy of emotion is the relationship between basic emotions and these complex emotion episodes. In this paper, I add to the list of existing, not necessarily incompatible, proposals concerning the relationship between basic emotions and complex emotions. I analyze the writings of ‘transactional’ psychologists of emotion, particularly those who see their work as a contribution to behavioral ecology, and offer a view of the basic emotion that focuses as much on their interpersonal functions as on their intrapersonal functions. Locating basic emotions and their evolutionary development in a context of processes of social interaction, I suggest, provides a way to integrate our knowledge of basic emotions into an understanding of the larger emotional episodes that have more obvious implications for philosophical disciplines such as moral psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000604/00/Machiavellian_Emotions.pdf
  http://eprints1.library.pitt.edu/archive/00000604/00/Machiavellian_Emotions.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/06/04/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000604-00/Machiavellian_Emotions.pdf
  
• John A. Lambie & Anthony J. Marcel (2002). Consciousness and the varieties of emotion experience: A theoretical framework.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11990318&dopt=Citation
  

Varieties of Emotion, Misc

Classifying Emotions

• Giovanna Colombetti (online). Envy as an empathic emotion (2003). Abstract for Conn.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: (2003). Abstract for Consciousness and Experiential Psychology conference (Oxford)
• Julien A. Deonna (2007). The structure of empathy.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: If Sam empathizes with Maria, then it is true of Sam that (1) Sam is aware of Maria's emotion, and (2) Sam ‘feels in tune’ with Maria. On what I call the transparency conception of how they interact when instantiated, I argue that these two conditions are collectively necessary and sufficient for empathy. I first clarify the ‘awareness’ and ‘feeling in tune’ conditions, and go on to examine different candidate models that explain the manner in which these two conditions might come to be concomitantly instantiated in a subject. I dismiss what I call the parallel and oscillation models for not satisfying the transparency condition, i.e. for failing to capture that, if Sam empathizes with Maria, then Sam's own emotional experience towards the object of Maria's emotion has to be mediated by Maria's own emotional experience. I conclude in favour the fusion model as the only model capable of satisfying the transparency condition, and I argue that the suggested proposal illuminates the difference between it and other ways in which we understand the emotions of others. Finally, I expand and clarify the conception of empathy as transparency through responses to obvious objections that the view raises. Key Words: empathy • emotion • philosophy • psychology • simulation
• Tom Cochrane (2009). Eight Dimensions for the Emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The author proposes a dimensional model of our emotion concepts that is intended to be largely independent of one’s theory of emotions and applicable to the different ways in which emotions are measured. He outlines some conditions for selecting the dimensions based on these motivations and general conceptual grounds. Given these conditions he then advances an 8-dimensional model that is shown to effectively differentiate emotion labels both within and across cultures, as well as more obscure expressive language. The 8 dimensions are: (1) attracted—repulsed, (2) powerful—weak, (3) free—constrained, (4) certain—uncertain, (5) generalized—focused, (6) future directed—past directed, (7) enduring—sudden, (8) socially connected—disconnected.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.affective-sciences.org/publication/2221
  
• Paul E. Griffiths (2004). Is emotion a natural kind?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In _What Emotions Really Are: The problem of psychological categories_ I argued that it is unlikely that all the psychological states and processes that fall under the vernacular category of emotion are sufficiently similar to one another to allow a unified scientific psychology of the emotions. In this paper I restate what I mean by ?natural kind? and my argument for supposing that emotion is not a natural kind in this specific sense. In the following sections I discuss the two most promising proposals to reunify the emotion category: the revival of the Jamesian theory of emotion associated with the writings of Antonio Damasio and a philosophical approach to the content of emotional representations that draws on ?multi-level appraisal theory? in psychology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eprints1.library.pitt.edu/archive/00000566/00/Is_Emotion_a_Natural_Kind.PDF
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/05/66/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000566-00/Is_Emotion_a_Natural_Kind.PDF
  
• Daniel M. Haybron (2001). Happiness and pleasure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper argues against hedonistic theories of happiness. First, hedonism is too inclusive: many pleasures cannot plausibly be construed as constitutive of happiness. Second, any credible theory must count either attitudes of life satisfaction, affective states such as mood, or both as constituents of happiness; yet neither sort of state reduces to pleasure. Hedonism errs in its attempt to reduce happiness, which is at least partly dispositional, to purely episodic experiential states. The dispositionality of happiness also undermines weakened nonreductive forms of hedonism, as some happiness-constitutive states are not pleasures in any sense. Moreover, these states can apparently fail to exhibit the usual hedonic properties; sadness, for instance, can sometimes be pleasant. Finally, the nonhedonistic accounts are adequate if not superior on grounds of practical and theoretical utility, quite apart from their superior conformity to the folk notion of happiness
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00072.x
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(200105)62:3<501:HAP>2.0.CO;2-L
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(200105)62:3<501:HAP>2.0.CO;2-L
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2653534.pdf
  
• Jesse Prinz, Is empathy necessary for morality?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is widely believed that empathy is a good thing, from a moral point of view. It is something we should cultivate because it makes us better people. Perhaps that’s true. But it is also sometimes suggested that empathy is somehow necessary for morality. That is the hypothesis I want to interrogate and challenge. Not only is there little evidence for the claim that empathy is necessary, there is also reason to think empathy can interfere with the ends of morality. A capacity for empathy might make us better people, but placing empathy at the center of our moral lives may be ill‐advised. That is not to say that morality shouldn’t centrally involve emotions. I think emotions are essential for moral judgment and moral motivation (Prinz, 2007). It’s just that empathetic emotions are not ideally suited for these jobs. Before embarking on this campaign against empathy, I want to say a little more about the target of the attack. What is empathy? And what would it mean to say empathy is necessary for morality? With respect to the first question, much has been written. Theories of empathy abound. Batson et al. (1995: 1042) define empathy as, “as an other‐oriented emotional response congruent with the perceived welfare of another person.” This is not the definition I will be using. Batson’s construct might be better characterized as “concern,” because of its focus on another person’s welfare. Indeed, in much of his research he talks about “empathetic concern.” Notice that this construct seems to be a combination of two separable things. Being concerned for someone is worrying about their welfare, which is something one can do even if one doesn’t feel what it would be like to be in their place. One can have concern for a plant, for example, and an insect, or even an artifact, like a beautiful building that has into disrepair. Empathy, seems to connote a kind of feeling that has to be at last possible for the object of empathy. If so, “empathetic concern” combines two different things—a find of feeling‐for an object and a feeling‐on‐behalf‐of an object. Much of the empirical literature, including the superb research that Batson has done, fails to isolate these components, and, as a result, some of the existing studies are confounded. They purport to show the value of empathy, but may really show the value of concern. My focus below will be on empathy, and I leave it as an open possibility that concern is highly important, if not necessary, for morality. Indeed, concern often seems to involve an element kind of moral anger, which I will argue is very important to morality. It is also important to distinguish empathy from sympathy. Suppose I feel outraged for someone who has been brainwashed into thinking she should follow a cult leader who is urging mass suicide. That would not necessarily qualify as empathy. As Darwall (1998: 261) points out, sympathy is a third‐person emotional response, whereas empathy involves putting oneself in another person’s shoes. But 1 Darwall’s definition is also somewhat problematic. He says, “Empathy consists in feeling what one imagines he feels, or perhaps should feel (fear, say), or in some imagined copy of these feelings, whether one comes thereby to be concerned … or not.” This definition has two features, which I would like to avoid. First, the appeal to imagination seems overly intellectual. Imagination sounds like a kind of mental act that requires effort on the part of the imaginer. As Darwell recognizes, empathy in its simplest form empathy is just emotional contagion: catching the emotion that another person feels (Hatfield et al., 1994; Hoffman, 2000). It seems inflated to call contagion an imaginative act. Also, I want to resist Darwall’s application of “empathy” to cases where one has a feeling that someone should feel, but does not feel. The problem is that this tends to blur the distinction between empathy and sympathy. Suppose I encounter a member of a cult who is delighted by the cult leader’s nefarious plans. The cult member should by afraid, but is not. If I feel fear on the cult member’s behalf, that is not putting myself in the cult member’s shoes. As I will use the term, empathy requires a kind of emotional mimicry. I do not wish to imply that empathy is always an automatic process, in the way that emotional contagion is. Sometimes imagination is requires, and sometimes we experience emotions that we think someone would be experiencing, even if we have not seen direct evidence that the emotion is, in fact, being experienced. For example, one might feel empathetic hope for a marathon runner who is a few steps behind the runner is first place, or anxiety for the first place runner, and the second place runner catches up. We can experience these feelings even if the runners’ facial expressions reveal little more than muscular contortions associated with concentration and physical exertion. A situation can reveal a feeling. The core idea, as I will use the term, is that empathy is a kind of vicarious emotion: it’s feeling what one takes another person to be feeling. And the “taking” here can be a matter of automatic contagion or the result of a complicated exercise of the imagination. I don’t think there is anything anachronistic about this notion of empathy. I think it has a long tradition in moral philosophy, even though the term “empathy” is only 100 years old. The British moralists, including David Hume and Adam Smith, used “sympathy” in way that is similar to the way I want to use “empathy.” Here is Smith (1759: II.i): “Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator.” My question, in the pages that follow, is whether empathy so‐defined is necessary for morality. I should note again, in advance, that the empirical literature does not always distinguish between the constructs I have been discussing, but I do think that all the studies I discuss below can, by inference at least, shed some light on empathy as defined here. The suggestion that empathy is necessary for morality can be interpreted in at least three different ways. One might hold the view that empathy is necessary for making moral judgment. One might think empathy is necessary for moral development. And one might think empathy is necessary for motivating moral conduct. I think each of these conjectures is false. Empathy is not necessary for any of these things. We can have moral systems without empathy. Of course, it doesn’t follow directly that empathy should be eliminated from morality. One might think the modal question—Can there be morality without empathy?—and the related....
• Jesse J. Prinz (2004). Which emotions are basic?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There are two major perspectives on the origin of emotions. According to one, emotions are the products of natural selection. They are evolved adaptations, best understood using the explanatory tools of evolutionary psychology. According to the other, emotions are socially constructed, and they vary across cultural boundaries. There is evidence supporting both perspectives. In light of this, some have argued both approaches are right. The standard strategy for compromise is to say that some emotions are evolved and others are constructed. The evolved emotions are sometimes given the label “basic,” and there is considerable agreement about a handful of emotions in this category. My goal here is to challenge all of these perspectives. I don’t think we should adopt a globally evolutionary approach, nor indulge the radical view that emotions derive entirely from us. I am equally dissatisfied with approaches that attempt to please Darwinians and constructivists by dividing emotions into two separate classes. I will defend another kind of ecumenicalism. Every emotion that we have a name for is the product of both nature and nurture. Emotions are evolved and constructed. The dichotomy between the two approaches cannot be maintained. This thesis will require making some claims that would be regarded as surprising to many emotion researchers. First, while there is a difference between basic emotions and nonbasic emotions, it is not a structural difference. All emotions are fundamentally alike. Second, the standard list of basic emotions, though by many to be universal across cultures, are not basic after all. We don’t have names for the basic emotions. All emotions that we talk about are culturally informed. And finally, this concession to constructivism does not imply that emotions are cognitive in any sense. Emotions are perceptual and embodied. They are gut reactions, and they are not unique to our species..
• June P. Tangney, Jeff Stuewig & Debra J. Mashek (ms). Moral emotions and moral behavior.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      Moral emotions represent a key element of our human moral apparatus, influencing the link between moral standards and moral behavior. This chapter reviews current theory and research on moral emotions. We first focus on a triad of negatively valenced "self-conscious" emotions - shame, guilt, and embarrassment. As in previous decades, much research remains focused on shame and guilt. We review current thinking on the distinction between shame and guilt, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of these two moral emotions. Several new areas of research are highlighted: research on the domain-specific phenomenon of body shame, styles of coping with shame, psychobiological aspects of shame, the link between childhood abuse and later proneness to shame, and the phenomena of vicarious or "collective" experiences of shame and guilt. In recent years, the concept of moral emotions has been expanded to include several positive emotions - elevation, gratitude, and the sometimes morally relevant experience of pride. Finally, we discuss briefly a morally relevant emotional process - other-oriented empathy

Emotions and Appraisals

• Paul E. Griffiths, Appraisal and machiavellian emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Emotional appraisal happens at more than one level. Low-level appraisals involve representations that are semantically coarse-grained, fuse the functional roles of belief and desire and have impoverished inferential roles, making it best to think of them as sub-conceptual. Multi-level theories of emotional appraisal are thus best conceived, not as theories of the actual conceptual content of emotional appraisals, but as ecological theories that identify the aspects of the environment that appraisal processes are tracking using diverse cognitive means. These aspects of the environment are what the environment ‘affords’ the organism. Some of these affordances are ‘goal-affordances’ - possibilities for future action. This perspective on emotional appraisal lends support to the idea that emotional appraisal is in part ‘Machiavellian’ or ‘strategic’. Organisms take into account the payoffs resulting from an emotional response when determining whether the eliciting situation ‘warrants’ that emotion
• Paul E. Griffiths (2004). Toward a "machiavellian" theory of emotional appraisal.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The aim of appraisal theory in the psychology of emotion is to identify the features of the emotion-eliciting situation that lead to the production of one emotion rather than another². A model of emotional appraisal takes the form of a set of dimensions against which potentially emotion-eliciting situations are assessed. The dimensions of the emotion hyperspace might include, for example, whether the eliciting situation fulfills or frustrates the subject’s goals or whether an actor in the eliciting situation has violated a norm. Richard Lazarus’s well-known model of emotional appraisal has six dimensions, and the regions of the resulting hyperspace that correspond to particular emotions are summarized by Lazarus as the ‘core relational themes’ of those emotions. Anger, for examples, is elicited by the core relational theme ‘a demeaning offence against me and mine’, sadness by ‘having experienced an irrevocable loss’ and guilt by ‘having transgressed a moral imperative’ (Lazarus, 1991)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://paul.representinggenes.org/webpdfs/Griff.Gray.04.DSPerspective.pdf
  http://paul.representinggenes.org/webpdfs/Grif.04.MachiavellianAppraisal.pdf
  
• Jesse Prinz (2004). Emotions embodied.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In one of the most frequently quoted passages in the history of emotion research, William James (1884: 189f) announces that emotions occur when the perception of an exciting fact causes a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” The same idea occurred to Carl Lange (1984) around the same time. These authors were not the first to draw a link between the emotions and the body. Indeed, this had been a central theme of Descartes’ exquisite opus, The Passions of the Soul. But James and Lange wanted to push things farther than most, suggesting that emotions are exhausted by bodily changes or perceptions thereof. Other kinds of mental episodes might co-occur when we have an emotion state. For James, an emotion follows an exciting perception. But the exciting perception is not a part of the emotion it excited (Ellsworth, 1994, reads James differently, but see Reisenzein et al.’s 1995 convincing response). The majority of contemporary emotion researchers, especially those in philosophy, find this suggestion completely untenable. Surely, emotions involve something more. At their core, emotions are more like judgments or thoughts, than perceptions. They evaluate, assess, or appraise. Emotions are amendable to rational assessment; they report, correctly or incorrectly, on how we are faring in the world. Within this general consensus, there is a further debate about whether the body should figure into a theory of emotions at all. Perhaps James and Lange offer a theory that is not merely incomplete, but entirely off base. Where they view judgments as contingent and non-constitutive concomitants of emotions, it is actually bodily perceptions that deserve this demotion. Perhaps emotions can be, and often are, disembodied in some fundamental sense

Emotions and Feelings

• Lisa Barrett, Batja Mesquita, Kevin N. Ochsner & ­James J. Gross (ms). The experience of emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      Experiences of emotion are content-rich events that emerge at the level of psychological description, but must be causally constituted by neurobiological processes. This chapter outlines an emerging scientific agenda for understanding what these experiences feel like and how they arise. We review the available answers to what is felt (i.e., the content that makes up an experience of emotion) and how neurobiological processes instantiate these properties of experience. These answers are then integrated into a broad framework that describes, in psychological terms, how the experience of emotion emerges from more basic processes. We then discuss the role of such experiences in the economy of the mind and behavior
• Ronald de Sousa (online). Emotion.   (More)
• Irwin Goldstein (2002). Are emotions feelings? A further look at hedonic theories of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many philosophers sharply distinguish emotions from feelings. Emotions are not feelings, and having an emotion does not necessitate having some feeling, they think. In this paper I reply to a set of arguments people use sharply to distinguish emotions from feelings. In response to these people, I endorse and defend a hedonic theory of emotion that avoids various anti-feeling objections. Proponents of this hedonic theory analyze an emotion by reference to forms of cognition (e.g., thought, belief, judgment) and a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling. Given this theory,emotions are feelings in some important sense of "feelings", and these feelings are identified as particular emotions by reference to their hedonic character and the cognitive state that causes the hedonic feelings
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/ce/2002/00000003/00000001/art00003
  
• Gary Hatfield (2007). Did Descartes have a Jamesian theory of the emotions?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Philosophical Psychology 20 (2007), 413–40. Key words: Cognitive theories of emotion, Rene Descartes, embodiment, emotions, evolution, historical methodology, instinct, mechanistic theories of behavior, mind–brain relations, passions, William James
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a780355076~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/780355076.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a780355076~fulltext=713240930
  
• Bennett W. Helm (2009). Emotions as evaluative feelings.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essentially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires rejecting traditional understandings of intentionality and so coming to see emotions as a distinctive and irreducible class of mental states lying at the intersection of intentionality, phenomenology, and motivation
• William James (1884). What is an emotion?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLidG8SAni&sig=V3zq9LfscsdGf4oGOproXo1Wq0k
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLiaG5YDsi&sig=sYiGSxFe99gcKuEctbFNpbgnvd4
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uKrdA6_yug&sig=poolF4z3P-T7oyIpMc9jvKnpngk
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLi9E4ZCpe&sig=evLwlKoRuLz-JDObx0vT1JjU93U
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uKrdFaTFlh&sig=hbtmhKbx1W36MXlVBZSwMr36UQM
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uKrdDaSHog&sig=79BOp82OcdnJoKVMQzJodQgjUP8
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLidA7XFri&sig=UMSewzuY2PmKXL8ZXvAwcm3eQvQ
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLieC9RHri&sig=LOvOPpE3h_w9wagYAto0fwvgdXI
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLibC6TFug&sig=-SHepy-NldiI8E1cZakqoSIpYKo
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLicE7SHof&sig=p4nBxgDwUP0eM5aVRSmRIWySWQ8
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLibI6Zyuj&sig=HwnxF5tlI478yRKasrq83oSQr1Q
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLifE9ZFqd&sig=n1qQDjmH1V3CHGoL5WAOAgA6kno
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLieI9WAmg&sig=XrvBBoGCk-b6dJUKXge2NybMdvE
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FjiL_Y_NsiUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA11&ots=uLiaA5UBoh&sig=ek3XvHuEVrJmh6eDipWv1QjIVng
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423(188404)1:9:34<188:WIAE>2.0.CO;2-8
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423(188404)1:9:34<188:WIAE>2.0.CO;2-8
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2246769.pdf
  
• Jesse J. Prinz (2005). Are emotions feelings?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2005/00000012/F0030008/art00001
  
• Jesse Prinz (2004). Emotions embodied.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In one of the most frequently quoted passages in the history of emotion research, William James (1884: 189f) announces that emotions occur when the perception of an exciting fact causes a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” The same idea occurred to Carl Lange (1984) around the same time. These authors were not the first to draw a link between the emotions and the body. Indeed, this had been a central theme of Descartes’ exquisite opus, The Passions of the Soul. But James and Lange wanted to push things farther than most, suggesting that emotions are exhausted by bodily changes or perceptions thereof. Other kinds of mental episodes might co-occur when we have an emotion state. For James, an emotion follows an exciting perception. But the exciting perception is not a part of the emotion it excited (Ellsworth, 1994, reads James differently, but see Reisenzein et al.’s 1995 convincing response). The majority of contemporary emotion researchers, especially those in philosophy, find this suggestion completely untenable. Surely, emotions involve something more. At their core, emotions are more like judgments or thoughts, than perceptions. They evaluate, assess, or appraise. Emotions are amendable to rational assessment; they report, correctly or incorrectly, on how we are faring in the world. Within this general consensus, there is a further debate about whether the body should figure into a theory of emotions at all. Perhaps James and Lange offer a theory that is not merely incomplete, but entirely off base. Where they view judgments as contingent and non-constitutive concomitants of emotions, it is actually bodily perceptions that deserve this demotion. Perhaps emotions can be, and often are, disembodied in some fundamental sense
• Timothy Schroeder (2008). Unexpected pleasure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”

Moods

• William Fish (2005). Emotions, moods, and intentionality.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Under the general heading of what we might loosely call emotional states, a familiar distinction can be drawn between emotions (strictly so-called) and moods. In order to judge under which of these headings a subject’s emotional episode falls, we advance a question of the form: What is the subject’s emotion of or about? In some cases (for example fear, sadness, and anger) the provision of an answer is straightforward: the subject is afraid of the loose tiger, or sad about England’s poor performance in the World Cup, or angry with her errant child. Although the ways we find natural to talk in such situations can alter (afraid of, sad about, angry with, and so on), in each case the emotion has what Ronald de Sousa, following Wittgenstein, calls a target—“an actual particular to which that emotion relates.” (de Sousa, 1987, p.116)

Aspects of Emotion

Knowledge of Emotion

• Mitchell Green (2010). Perceiving emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I argue that it is possible literally to perceive the emotions of others. This account depends upon the possibility of perceiving a whole by perceiving one or more of its parts, and upon the view that emotions are complexes. After developing this account, I expound and reply to Rowland Stout's challenge to it. Stout is nevertheless sympathetic with the perceivability-of-emotions view. I thus scrutinize Stout's suggestion for a better defence of that view than I have provided, and offer a refinement of my own proposal that incorporates some of his insights
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123471800/PDFSTART
  
• Michael Lacewing (2005). Emotional self-awareness and ethical deliberation.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2005.00271.x/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2005.00271.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118648335/PDFSTART
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/rati/2005/00000018/00000001/art00005
  
• Luiz Pessoa, Shruti Japee & Leslie G. Ungerleider (2005). Visual awareness and the detection of fearful faces.   (More)
• Baljinder Sahdra & Paul R. Thagard (2003). Self-deception and emotional coherence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   This paper proposes that self-deception results from the emotional coherence of beliefs with subjective goals. We apply the HOTCO computational model of emotional coherence to simulate a rich case of self-deception from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.We argue that this model is more psychologically realistic than other available accounts of self-deception, and discuss related issues such as wishful thinking, intention, and the division of the self
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/self-deception.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/v31892257w12jr51/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5112381&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/V31892257W12JR51.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2003/00000013/00000002/05112381
  
• Stephen D. Smith & M. Barbara Bulman-Fleming (2004). A hemispheric asymmetry for the unconscious perception of emotion.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15223188&dopt=Citation
  

Emotional Expression

• Bill Brewer (2002). Emotion and other minds.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What is the relation between emotional experience and its behavioural expression? As very preliminary clarification, I mean by ‘emotional experience’ such things as the subjective feeling of being afraid of something, or of being angry at someone. On the side of behavioural expression, I focus on such things as cowering in fear, or shaking a fist or thumping the table in anger. Very crudely, this is behaviour intermediate between the bodily changes which just happen in emotional arousal, such as sweating or the secretion of adrenalin, and reasoned actions done ‘out of an emotion’, such as breathing deeply to clam down, or writing a letter of complaint, for which a standard rationalizing explanation can be given.1 I pursue the relation between this experience and expression in a somewhat roundabout manner. First, I note an analogy between a problem of other minds, and Berkeley’s (1975) challenge to Locke’s (1975) realism. Second, I sketch what I regard as the correct strategy for meeting this challenge. Third, I develop and defend a parallel response to the problem of other minds, as this applies to certain basic directed emotions. This yields the following answer to my opening question. Reference to the appropriate expressive behaviour is essential to the identification of the way in which various emotional experiences present their worldly objects

Aspects of Emotion, Misc

Emotion and Reason

• Will Angelette (ms). Rationality, emotion, and belief revision: Waller's move beyond CBT & REBT.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      Sarah Waller proposes that cognitive therapists and philosophical counselors ought to consider the feelings of the client of paramount importance in belief system change rather than the rationality of the belief system. I offer an alternative strategy of counseling that reinstates the place of rational belief revision while still respecting the importance of emotions. Waller claims that, because of the problem of under-determination, the counseling goal of rational belief revision can be trumped by the goal of improved client affect. I suggest that, if we consider a different ontology for the domain of counseling - one whose objects are dialogues (the goal of counseling becomes greater information of dialogues), we can accommodate a place for emotions in rational belief revision. I then note some limitations of the new proposal and the possibility of incommensurability in the comparison of our different views
• Daniel C. Dennett (ms). Review of Damasio, Descartes' error.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The legacy of René Descartes' notorious dualism of mind and body extends far beyond academia into everyday thinking: "These athletes are prepared both mentally and physically," and "There's nothing wrong with your body--it's all in your mind." Even among those of us who have battled Descartes' vision, there has been a powerful tendency to treat the mind (that is to say, the brain) as the body's boss, the pilot of the ship. Falling in with this standard way of thinking, we ignore an important alternative: viewing the brain (and hence the mind) as one organ among many, a relatively recent usurper of control, whose functions cannot properly be understood until we see it not as the boss, but as just one more somewhat fractious servant, working to further the interests of the body that shelters and fuels it, and gives its activities meaning. This historical or evolutionary perspective reminds me of the change that has come over Oxford in the thirty years since I was a student there. It used to be that the dons were in charge, while the bursars and other bureaucrats, right up to the Vice Chancellor, acted under their guidance and at their behest. Nowadays the dons, like their counterparts on American university faculties, are more clearly in the role of employees hired by a central Administration, but from where, finally, does the University get its meaning? In evolutionary history, a similar change has crept over the administration of our bodies. Where resides the "I" who is in charge of my body? In his wonderfully written book, Antonio Damasio seeks to restore our appreciation for the perspective of the body, and the shared balance of powers from which we emerge as conscious persons
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/damasio.htm
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000282/
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:282
  http://cogprints.org/282/1/damasio.htm
  http://cogprints.org/282/0/damasio.htm
  
• Ronald de Sousa (online). Emotion.   (More)
• Jon Elster (1996). Rationality and the emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In an earlier paper (Elster, 1989 a), I discussed the relation between rationality and social norms. Although I did mention the role of the emotions in sustaining social norms, I did not focus explicitly on the relation between rationality and the emotions. That relation is the main topic of the present paper, with social norms in a subsidiary part
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ideas.repec.org/a/ecj/econjl/v106y1996i438p1386-97.html
  http://culturalheritage.ceistorvergata.it/virtual_library/Art. - Rationality and emotions - J. ELSTER.pdf
  http://orton.catie.ac.cr/cgi-bin/wxis.exe/?IsisScript=IDEA.xis&method=post&formato=2&cantidad=1&expresion=mfn=001739
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0133(199609)106:438<1386:RATE>2.0.CO;2-T
  
• Patricia S. Greenspan (2004). Emotions, rationality, and mind-body.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper attempts to connect recent cross-disciplinary treatments of the cognitive or rational significance of emotions with work in contemporary philosophy identifying an evaluative propositional content of emotions. An emphasis on the perspectival nature of emotional evaluations allows for a notion of emotional rationality that does not seem to be available on alternative accounts
• Patricia S. Greenspan (2004). Practical reasoning and emotion.   (More)
• Bennett W. Helm (2001). Emotions and practical reason: Rethinking evaluation and motivation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The motivational problem is the problem of understanding how we can have rational control over what we do. In the face of phenomena like weakness of the will, it is commonly thought that evaluation and reason can always remain intact even as we sever their connection with motivation; consequently, solving the motivational problem is thought to be a matter of figuring out how to bridge this inevitable gap between evaluation and motivation. I argue that this is fundamentally mistaken and results in a conception of practical reason that is motivationally impotent. Instead, I argue, a proper understanding of evaluation and practical reason must include not only evaluative judgments but emotions as well. By analyzing the role of emotions in evaluation and the rational interconnections among emotions, desires, and evaluative judgments, I articulate a new conception of evaluation and motivation according to which there is a conceptual connection between them, albeit one that allows for the possibility of weakness of the will
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0029-4624.00293
  
• Bennett W. Helm (2009). The import of human action.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: My central philosophical concern for many years has been with what it is to be a person. Of course, we persons are agents, indeed agents of a special sort, so understanding personhood has of course led me to think about that special sort of agency. Yet my background in the philosophy of mind leads me to think that any account of this special sort of agency must appeal to psychological capacities that are themselves grounded in an account of the relation between the mind and the body. Here I have in mind not the thought that we must provide a compatibilist account of free will (though I do think that is true) but rather the thought that it is all to easy for philosophers of action to make what turn out to be false presuppositions about the nature of psychological capacities like belief and desire and the role they play in motivation. Conversely, I think, philosophers of mind, focused too narrowly on worries about intentionality and consciousness, have offered accounts of various psychological capacities that are inadequate to understanding the sort of agency characteristic of us persons. Before I begin, I need to acknowledge my general orientation in philosophy of mind. Mental states and capacities are to be understood in terms of their place within an explanatory framework. Psychological explanation, however, I take to be fundamentally normative, a matter of locating particular phenomena within a broader pattern of rationality. This is a broadly Davidsonian or Dennettian orientation to the mind, according to which, as Davidson says, rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental.1 In..
• Karen Jones (2004). Emotional Rationality as Practical Rationality.   (More)
• Matteo Mameli (2004). The role of emotions in ecological and practical rationality.   (More)
• Shaun Nichols, Emotions, norms, and the genealogy of fairness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In The Grammar of Society, Bicchieri maintains that behavior in the Ultimatum game (and related economic games) depends on people’s allegiance to ‘social norms’. In this article, I follow Bicchieri in maintaining that an adequate account of people’s behavior in such games must make appeal to norms, including a norm of equal division; I depart from Bicchieri in maintaining that at least part of the population desires to follow such norms even when they do not expect others to follow them. This generates a puzzle, however: why do norms of equal division have such cultural resilience? One possibility is that our natural emotional propensity for envy makes norms of equal division emotionally appealing. An alternative (but complementary) possibility is that deviations from a norm of equal division would naturally be interpreted as threats to status, which would facilitate the moralization of such norms
• Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (1978). Explaining emotions.   (More)
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  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=drdAFkliQ9UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=6TxUKfJNoE&sig=R8H65SQA6s0GnpOZcSuucuUzQjM
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=drdAFkliQ9UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=6TyRJhBFtD&sig=BYa495I1LeZzc3fTRISHmMuIH3E
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X(197803)75:3<139:EE>2.0.CO;2-H&size=LARGE
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X(197803)75:3<139:EE>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X(197803)75:3<139:EE>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2025425.pdf
  

Objects and Contents of Emotions

• Lisa Barrett, Batja Mesquita, Kevin N. Ochsner & ­James J. Gross (ms). The experience of emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      Experiences of emotion are content-rich events that emerge at the level of psychological description, but must be causally constituted by neurobiological processes. This chapter outlines an emerging scientific agenda for understanding what these experiences feel like and how they arise. We review the available answers to what is felt (i.e., the content that makes up an experience of emotion) and how neurobiological processes instantiate these properties of experience. These answers are then integrated into a broad framework that describes, in psychological terms, how the experience of emotion emerges from more basic processes. We then discuss the role of such experiences in the economy of the mind and behavior
• Julien A. Deonna & Klaus R. Scherer (2010). The Case of the Disappearing Intentional Object: Constraints on a Definition of Emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Taking our lead from Solomon’s emphasis on the importance of the intentional object of emotion, we review the history of repeated attempts to make this object disappear. We adduce evidence suggesting that in the case of James and Schachter, the intentional object got lost unintentionally. By contrast, modern constructivists (in particular Barrett) seem quite determined to deny the centrality of the intentional object in accounting for the occurrence of emotions. Griffiths, however, downplays the role objects have in emotion noting that these do not qualify as intentional. We argue that these disappearing acts, deliberate or not, generate fruitless debate and add little to the advancement of our understanding of emotion as an adaptive mechanism to cope with events that are relevant to an organism’s life.
• Julien A. Deonna (2007). The structure of empathy.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: If Sam empathizes with Maria, then it is true of Sam that (1) Sam is aware of Maria's emotion, and (2) Sam ‘feels in tune’ with Maria. On what I call the transparency conception of how they interact when instantiated, I argue that these two conditions are collectively necessary and sufficient for empathy. I first clarify the ‘awareness’ and ‘feeling in tune’ conditions, and go on to examine different candidate models that explain the manner in which these two conditions might come to be concomitantly instantiated in a subject. I dismiss what I call the parallel and oscillation models for not satisfying the transparency condition, i.e. for failing to capture that, if Sam empathizes with Maria, then Sam's own emotional experience towards the object of Maria's emotion has to be mediated by Maria's own emotional experience. I conclude in favour the fusion model as the only model capable of satisfying the transparency condition, and I argue that the suggested proposal illuminates the difference between it and other ways in which we understand the emotions of others. Finally, I expand and clarify the conception of empathy as transparency through responses to obvious objections that the view raises. Key Words: empathy • emotion • philosophy • psychology • simulation
• Ronald de Sousa (online). Emotion.   (More)
• Randall R. Dipert (ms). The nature and structure of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Philosophers have almost always said something about emotions and passions whenever they have discussed human mental life. Many have asserted that it is some emotions or, more broadly, passions, that are to be primarily valued and sought. These valued passionate states of mind might include emotions, moods, desires, belief-like feelings of conviction and commitment, and romantic or erotic love, which are typically scarcely distinguished. Not only are these states of mind lumped together, but the reasons why they are valued may likewise be various: they may be valued because of their intrinsic feeling (especially insofar as they are intense), through their long-term or deep effects on the rest of our practical and mental lives, through their effects on others’ lives, or even in the glimpse they give us of an object that transcends our mundane and superficial concerns, as in love, peak experiences, or intimations of God, Beauty, or Nature. Others have claimed that it is in the subduing or elimination of some or all of these passions that the ideal human life consists. Again, what precisely are the objectionable passions is typically not delineated, and why such mental states are objectionable may be diverse and even unspecified. One might resent their "disruptive" nature on our mental life, especially insofar as some of them stem from external, uncontrollable sources, and instead seek a calm state that is within one’s control and not subject to these whimsical externalities. Or one can see many or all passions as disruptive of control and success in our inner or outer life, or in the lives of others. We might call this latter group the anti-emotional Rationalists, and the former group the pro-emotional Romantics
• William Fish (2005). Emotions, moods, and intentionality.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Under the general heading of what we might loosely call emotional states, a familiar distinction can be drawn between emotions (strictly so-called) and moods. In order to judge under which of these headings a subject’s emotional episode falls, we advance a question of the form: What is the subject’s emotion of or about? In some cases (for example fear, sadness, and anger) the provision of an answer is straightforward: the subject is afraid of the loose tiger, or sad about England’s poor performance in the World Cup, or angry with her errant child. Although the ways we find natural to talk in such situations can alter (afraid of, sad about, angry with, and so on), in each case the emotion has what Ronald de Sousa, following Wittgenstein, calls a target—“an actual particular to which that emotion relates.” (de Sousa, 1987, p.116)
• Patricia S. Greenspan (2004). Emotions, rationality, and mind-body.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper attempts to connect recent cross-disciplinary treatments of the cognitive or rational significance of emotions with work in contemporary philosophy identifying an evaluative propositional content of emotions. An emphasis on the perspectival nature of emotional evaluations allows for a notion of emotional rationality that does not seem to be available on alternative accounts
• Paul E. Griffiths, Appraisal and machiavellian emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Emotional appraisal happens at more than one level. Low-level appraisals involve representations that are semantically coarse-grained, fuse the functional roles of belief and desire and have impoverished inferential roles, making it best to think of them as sub-conceptual. Multi-level theories of emotional appraisal are thus best conceived, not as theories of the actual conceptual content of emotional appraisals, but as ecological theories that identify the aspects of the environment that appraisal processes are tracking using diverse cognitive means. These aspects of the environment are what the environment ‘affords’ the organism. Some of these affordances are ‘goal-affordances’ - possibilities for future action. This perspective on emotional appraisal lends support to the idea that emotional appraisal is in part ‘Machiavellian’ or ‘strategic’. Organisms take into account the payoffs resulting from an emotional response when determining whether the eliciting situation ‘warrants’ that emotion
• Peter M. S. Hacker (2004). The conceptual framework for the investigation of the emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The experimental study of the emotions as pursued by LeDoux and Damasio is argued to be flawed as a consequence of the inadequate conceptual framework inherited from the work of William James. This paper clarifes the conceptual structures necessary for any discussion of the emotions. Emotions are distinguished from appetites and other non-emotional feelings, as well as from agitations and moods. Emotional perturbations are distinguished from emotional attitudes and motives. The causes of an emotion are differentiated from the objects of an emotion, and the objects of an emotion are distinguished into formal and material ones. The links between emotions and reasons for the emotion, for associated beliefs and for action are explored, as well as the connection between emotion and care or concern, and between emotion and fantasy. The behavioural criteria for the ascription of an emotion are clarified. In the light of this conceptual network, Damasio’s theory of the emotions is subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15511749&dopt=Citation
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/713995252.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cirp/2004/00000016/00000003/art00004
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/carfax/cirp/2004/00000016/00000003/art00004
  
• Bennett W. Helm (2009). Emotions as evaluative feelings.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essentially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires rejecting traditional understandings of intentionality and so coming to see emotions as a distinctive and irreducible class of mental states lying at the intersection of intentionality, phenomenology, and motivation
• Gregory Johnson (2008). LeDoux's Fear Circuit and the Status of Emotion as a Non-cognitive Process.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: LeDoux (1996) has identified a sub-cortical neural circuit that mediates fear responses in rats. The existence of this neural circuit has been used to support the claim that emotion is a non-cognitive process. In this paper I argue that this sub-cortical circuit cannot have a role in the explanation of emotions in humans. This worry is raised by looking at the properties of this neural pathway, which does not have the capacity to respond to the types of stimuli that are generally taken to trigger emotion responses. In particular, the neurons in this pathway cannot represent the stimulus as a complete object or event, rather they represent the simple information that is encoded at the periphery. If it is assumed that an object or event in the world is what, even in simple cases, causes an emotion, then this sub-cortical pathway has limited use in a theory of emotion.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~db=all~content=a906069006~fulltext=713240930
  
• Joe Lau (ms). The nature of emotions comments on Martha Nussbaum's upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Nussbaum’s theory of the emotions draws heavily on the Stoic account. In her theory, emotions are a kind of value judgment or thought. This is in stark contrast to the well-known proposal from William James, who took emotions to be bodily feelings. There are various motivations for taking emotions as judgments. One main reason is that emotions are intentional mental states. They are always about something, directed at particular objects or state of affairs. For example, fear seems to involve the anticipation of danger. To grief for the passing of a loved one involves the thought that someone dear to us is now gone. In Upheavals of Thought and also in her Hochelaga Lecture, Nussbaum analyzed compassion as a set of judgments, including for example the judgment that someone is experiencing serious suffering, and that the person in question does not deserve the suffering
• Matteo Mameli (2006). Norms for emotions: Biological functions and representational contents.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Normative standards are often applied to emotions. Are there normative standards that apply to emotions in virtue solely of facts about their nature? I will argue that the answer is no. The psychological, behavioural, and neurological evidence suggests that emotions are representational brain states with various kinds of biological functions. Facts about biological functions are not (and do not by themselves entail) normative facts. Hence, there are no nor- mative standards that apply to emotions just in virtue of their having various kinds of biolog- ical functions. Moreover, the peculiar features of emotions make the view that representational content is essentially normative very implausible. Hence, the representational properties of emotions cannot be seen as entailing normative standards. The conclusion is that there are no normative standards that apply to emotions solely in virtue of their nature. Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16473270&dopt=Citation
  
• Kevin Mulligan (1997). The spectre of inverted emotions and the space of emotions.   (More)
• David Owen, Hume on representation, reason and motivation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification. When I am angry, I am actually possest with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high. 'Tis impossible, therefore, that this passion can be oppos'd by, or be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas, consider'd as copies, with those objects, which they represent. (T 415)
• Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (1978). Explaining emotions.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=drdAFkliQ9UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=6TxUKfJNoE&sig=R8H65SQA6s0GnpOZcSuucuUzQjM
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=drdAFkliQ9UC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=6TyRJhBFtD&sig=BYa495I1LeZzc3fTRISHmMuIH3E
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X(197803)75:3<139:EE>2.0.CO;2-H&size=LARGE
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X(197803)75:3<139:EE>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X(197803)75:3<139:EE>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2025425.pdf
  
• Aaron Sloman (1982). Towards a grammar of emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: My favourite leading question when teaching Philosophy of Mind is ‘Could a goldfish long for its mother?’ This introduces the philosophical technique of ‘conceptual analysis’, essential for the study of mind (Sloman 1978, ch. 4). By analysing what we mean by ‘A longs for B’, and similar descriptions of emotional states we see that they inv olve rich cognitive structures and processes, i.e. computations. Anything which could long for its mother, would have to hav e some sort of representation of its mother, would have to believe that she is not in the vicinity, would have to be able to represent the _possibility _of being close to her, would have to desire that possibility, and would have to be to some extent pre-occupied or obsessed with that desire. That is, it should intrude into and interfere with other activities, like admiring the scenery, catching smaller fish, etc. If the desire were there, but could be calmly put aside, whilst other interests were pursued, then it would not be truly a state of longing. It might be a state of preferring. Thus longing involves computational interrupts. The same seems to be true of all emotions

Emotions, Misc

• Christian Coseru (2004). A Review Essay of Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama.   (More)
• Aaron Sloman & Monica Croucher (ms). Why robots will have emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Emotions involve complex processes produced by interactions between motives, beliefs, percepts, etc. E.g. real or imagined fulfilment or violation of a motive, or triggering of a 'motive-generator', can disturb processes produced by other motives. To understand emotions, therefore, we need to understand motives and the types of processes they can produce. This leads to a study of the global architecture of a mind. Some constraints on the evolution of minds are disussed. Types of motives and the processes they generate are sketched
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/705/0/Aaron.Sloman_why_robot_emotions.ps
  

Mental Imagery

• John R. Anderson (1978). Arguments concerning representations for mental imagery.   (More)
• J. Campbell (2002). Berkeley's puzzle.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: But say you,surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees,for instance,in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no dif?culty in it:but what is all this,I beseech you,more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~jcampbel/documents/Berkeley.pdf
  
• D. Chambers & Daniel Reisberg (1992). What an image depicts depends on what an image means.   (More)
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  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1582171&dopt=Citation
  
• David Cole (online). Images and thinking: Critique of arguments against images as a medium of thought.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The Way of Ideas died an ignoble death, committed to the flames by behaviorist empiricists. Ideas, pictures in the head, perished with the Way. By the time those empiricists were supplanted at the helm by functionalists and causal theorists, a revolution had taken place in linguistics and the last thing anyone wanted to do was revive images as the medium of thought. Currently, some but not all cognitive scientists think that there probably are mental images - experiments in cognitive psychology (e.g. Shepard and Metzler 1971) have shown it to be plausible to posit mental images. Even so, the phenomenon of mental imagery has been largely regarded as peripheral in cognition, perhaps even epiphenomenal. Images cannot fix the content of thought (intentions, rules), the Wittgenstein story went. The central processes of thought, so the post-Wittgenstein story goes, require a propositional representation system, a language of thought, universal and modeled on the machine languages of computers. The language of thought is compositional, productive, and, leading advocates argue, has a causal semantics. Images lack all of these essential qualities and so are hopeless as key players in thinking
• Daniel C. Dennett (2002). Does your brain use the images in it, and if so, how?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The presence of spatial patterns of activity in the brain is suggestive of image-exploiting processes in vision and mental imagery, but not conclusive. Only behavioral evidence can confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about whether, and how, the brain uses images in its information-processing, and the arguments based on such evidence are still inconclusive
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=145738&jid=BBS&volumeId=25&issueId=02&aid=145737
  
• Martha J. Farah (1988). Is visual imagery really visual: Some overlooked evidence from neuropsychology.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.linguistics.pomona.edu/lcs11fall04/readings/farah 1988.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=3043530&dopt=Citation
  
• Willard C. Gore (1904). Image or sensation?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0160-9335(19040804)1:16<434:IOS>2.0.CO;2-V
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0160-9335(19050216)2:4<97:IOS>2.0.CO;2-7
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0160-9335(19040804)1:16<434:IOS>2.0.CO;2-V
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2011904.pdf
  
• Stevan Harnad (1993). Exorcizing the ghost of mental imagery.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The problem seems apparent even in Glasgow's term ``depict'', which is used by way of contrast with ``describe''. Now ``describe'' refers relatively unproblematically to strings of symbols, such as those in this written sentence, that are systematically interpretable as propositions describing objects, events, or states of affairs. But what does ``depict'' mean? In the case of a picture -- whether a photo or a diagram -- it is clear what depict means. A picture is an object (I will argue below that it is an analog object, relative to what it is a picture of) and it DEPICTS yet another object: the object it is a picture OF. But in the case of an array, whether described formally, with numerical coordinates, or stored in a machine, or ``depicted'' diagrammatically by way of a secondary illustration, it is not at all clear whether the entity in question is indeed a picture, or merely yet another set of symbols that is INTERPRETABLE as referring to a picture, which picture in turn depicts an object! It is clear that we are dealing with many layers of interpretation here already, and so far we are still talking only about external objects (such as pictures, symbols and objects simpliciter). We still have not gotten to MENTAL objects, such as mental ``images''
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eprints.resist.ecs.soton.ac.uk/3365/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001590/
  http://cogprints.org/1590/00/harnad93.imagery.html
  http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/90/
  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/3365/02/harnad93.imagery.html
  http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad93.imagery.html
  http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad93.imagery.html
  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003365/02/harnad93.imagery.html
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001590/00/harnad93.imagery.html
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1590
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1590
  
• Amy Kind (online). Imagery and imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Both imagery and imagination play an important part in our mental lives. This article, which has three main sections, discusses both of these phenomena, and the connection between them. The first part discusses mental images and, in particular, the dispute about their representational nature that has become known as the _imagery debate_ . The second part turns to the faculty of the imagination, discussing the long philosophical tradition linking mental imagery and the imagination—a tradition that came under attack in the early part of the twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism. Finally, the third part of this article examines modal epistemology, where the imagination has been thought to serve an important philosophical function, namely, as a guide to possibility
• Stephen M. Kosslyn (2001). The strategic eye: Another look.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/l76k78811850n155/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=313880&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/L76K78811850N155.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2001/00000011/00000002/00313880
  
• Wilfrid Lay (1904). Organic images.   (More)
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  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0160-9335(19040204)1:3<68:OI>2.0.CO;2-K
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0160-9335(19040204)1:3<68:OI>2.0.CO;2-K
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2012134.pdf
  
• Eric Lormand (2005). Phenomenal impressions.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=paqmMMfP8t0C&oi=fnd&pg=PA316&ots=_ol-wcvxAO&sig=w2fuz0p42C7KYUpUZgCqnay8MFM
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WUW3sLZ9tIAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA316&ots=I0WGkBy6jy&sig=yEW2j3v7f6YumQj3VovotWnfvSQ
  
• Zenon Pylyshyn (2004). Imagery.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In Gregory, Richard. Oxford Companion to the Mind (Second Edition, 2006) Oxford University Press
• Zenon Pylyshyn (2002). Is the "imagery debate" over? If so, what was it about?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Jacques Mehler was notoriously charitable in embracing a diversity of approaches to science and to the use of many different methodologies. One place where his ecumenism brought the two of us into disagreement is when the evidence of brain imaging was cited in support of different psychological doctrines, such as the picture-theory of mental imagery. Jacques remained steadfast in his faith in the ability of neuroscience data (where the main source of evidence has been from clinical neurology and neuro-imaging) to choose among different psychological positions. I personally have seen little reason for this optimism so Jacques and I frequently found ourselves disagreeing on this issue, though I should add that we rarely disagreed on substantive issues on which we both had views. This particular bone of contention, however, kept us busy at parties and during the many commutes between New York and New Jersey, where Jacques was a frequent visitor at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Now that I am in a position where he is a captive audience it seems an opportune time to raise the question again
• Zenon W. Pylyshyn (2002). Mental imagery: In search of a theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning by using mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite more than thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind to what is called the cognitive architecture, and ones that are attributable to tacit knowledge used to simulate what would happen in a visual situation. With this distinction in mind, the paper then considers in detail the widely held assumption that in some important sense images are spatially displayed or are depictive, and that examining images uses the same mechanisms that are deployed in visual perception. I argue that the assumption of the spatial or depictive nature of images is only explanatory if taken literally, as a claim about how images are physically instantiated in the brain, and that the literal view fails for a number of empirical reasons – for example, because of the cognitive penetrability of the phenomena cited in its favor. Similarly, while it is arguably the case that imagery and vision involve some of the same mechanisms, this tells us very little about the nature of mental imagery and does not support claims about the pictorial nature of mental images. Finally, I consider whether recent neuroscience evidence clarifies the debate over the nature of mental images. I claim that when such questions as whether images are depictive or spatial are formulated more clearly, the evidence does not provide support for the picture-theory over a symbol-structure theory of mental imagery. Even if all the empirical claims were true, they do not warrant the conclusion that many people have drawn from them: that mental images are depictive or are displayed in some (possibly cortical) space. Such a conclusion is incompatible with what is known about how images function in thought. We are then left with the provisional counterintuitive conclusion that the available evidence does not support rejection of what I call the “null hypothesis”; namely, that reasoning with mental images involves the same form of representation and the same processes as that of reasoning in general, except that the content or subject matter of thoughts experienced as images includes information about how things would look
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Pylyshyn/
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/zpimagery.htm
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/pylyshyn03mental.html
  http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/doesyourbrain.pdf
  http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/pylyshyn2002.pdf
  http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/19/46/index.html
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ftp/pub/papers/bbs2002_reprint.pdf
  http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/19/46/bbs00001946-00/Pylyshyn.pdf
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=145706&jid=BBS&volumeId=25&issueId=02&aid=145705
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12744144&dopt=Citation
  http://journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=145706
  http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0140525X02000043
  http://journals.cambridge.org/article_S0140525X0222004X
  
• Zenon W. Pylyshyn (2003). Return of the mental image: Are there really pictures in the brain?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the past decade there has been renewed interest in the study of mental imagery. Emboldened by new findings from neuroscience, many people have revived the idea that mental imagery involves a special format of thought, one that is pictorial in nature. But the evidence and the arguments that exposed deep conceptual and empirical problems in the picture theory over the past 300 years have not gone away. I argue that the new evidence from neural imaging and clinical neuropsychology does little to justify this recidivism because it does not address the format of mental images. I also discuss some reasons why the picture theory is so resistant to counterarguments and suggest ways in which non-pictorial theories might account for the apparent spatial nature of images.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/pylyshyn03return.html
  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/pylyshyn/tics_imagery.pdf
  http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/273/pylyshyn_TICS_2003.pdf
  http://www.wheaton.edu/psychology/undergrad/faculty/phinney/Psy772Readings2006/Pylyshyn2003TiCS.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12639692&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/13646613/2003/00000007/00000003/art00003
  
• Zenon Pylyshyn (ms). The medium of thought: Do we think in pictures, words, concepts, or what?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: People have always wondered how thinking takes place and what thoughts are constructed from. We typically experience our thoughts as involving pictorial (or sensory) contents or as being in words. Although this idea has been enshrined in psychology as the “dual code” theory of reasoning and memory, serious questions have been raised concerning this view. It appears that whatever the form of our thoughts it is unlikely that it is anything like our experience of them. But if thought is not in pictures or words, what form does it take? If we do not sometimes think in words, then what actually goes on when we think by engaging in an “inner dialogue”? And if we do not sometimes think in pictures, what goes on when we reason by creating and examining “mental images”?
• Zenon W. Pylyshyn (1973). What the mind's eye tells the mind's brain: A critique of mental imagery.   (More)
• Mark Rollins (2001). The strategic eye: Kosslyn's theory of imagery and perception.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/u85571317h427622/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=271578&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/U85571317H427622.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2001/00000011/00000002/00271578
  
• Jörg R. J. Schirra, Connecting visual and verbal space: Preliminary considerations concerning the concept 'mental image'.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: AI research concerning the connection between seeing and speaking mainly employs what is called reference semantics. Within this framework, the notion of `mental image' is often used while explaining how somebody not situated in the same perceptual context is able to anchor his understanding of an utterance describing the scene visually perceived by the speaker. We give a foundation for considering mental images as propositions with respect to a certain field of concepts: these fields have to provide a syntactically dense set of concepts distinguishing locations. The use of such propositions in the reference semantic explanations of understanding utterances about visually perceived scenes is motivated by applying Kant's idea of the introduction of new types of objects: we conceive spatial relations as relations only applicable to sortal objects, i.e., individuated objects which are synthetically introduced on a syntactically dense field providing their potential locations. The concept `mental image' which results from these preliminary studies is applied to two current projects in AI, one dealing with the semantics of particular spatial prepositions, and the other more generally concerned with the logic of the connection between visual and verbal space
• Jörg R. J. Schirra (1995). Understanding radio broadcasts on soccer: The concept `mental image' and its use in spatial reasoning.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Most cognitive theories agree that a listener of a sports broadcast on radio usually imagines the scene described; the concept `mental image' appears in a specific sort of explanations. In contrast to this conception, it is argued that this concept should rather be understood as part of a certain kind of grounding explanations of the radio listener's understanding. This particular conception is based on the distinction between `specification' and `implementation' as found in the theory of abstract data types. Its application to the field of spatial concepts leads to a computational system (ANTLIMA) which exemplifies how the expression `mental image' could be used while explaining a speaker's ability to control the resolvability of ambiguities in an objective report of what the speaker sees
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1517/0/magde.ps
  
• Peter Slezak (1991). Can images be rotated and inspected? A test of the pictorial medium theory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: images. But clearly, it only begs the deeper questions
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://hps.arts.unsw.edu.au/hps_core_links/staff_homepages/p_slezak_site/Article Links/Slezak-Images Inspected.pdf
  
• Peter Slezak (2002). The imagery debate: Déjà vu all over again? Commentary on Zenon Pylyshyn.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The imagery debate re-enacts controversies persisting since Descartes. The controversy remains important less for what we can learn about visual imagery than about cognitive science itself. In the tradition of Arnauld, Reid, Bartlett, Austin and Ryle, Pylyshyn’s critique exposes notorious mistakes being unwittingly rehearsed not only regarding imagery but also in several independent domains of research in modern cognitive science
• Peter Slezak (1995). The “philosophical” case against visual images.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In their study of reasoning with diagrammatic and non-diagrammatic representations, Larkin and Simon (1987) are concerned with _external_ representations and explicitly avoid drawing inferences about the bearing of their work on the issue of internal, mental representations. Nonetheless, we may infer the bearing of their work on internal representations from the theories of Kosslyn, Finke and other ‘pictorialists’ who take internal representations to be importantly like external ones regarding their ‘privileged’ spatial properties of depicting and resembling their referents. Thus, Finke (1990) suggests that “perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be “interpreted” much like physical objects” (1990, p. 18). Elsewhere he suggests that “The image discoveries which then ‘emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects” (1990, p. 171)
• Peter Slezak (online). When can visual images be re-interpreted? Non-chronometric tests of pictorialism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: are needed on which the contending accounts deliver different predictions. The question of re-interpreting images can be seen
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://hps.arts.unsw.edu.au/hps_core_links/staff_homepages/p_slezak_site/Article Links/Slezak-Images Reinterpreted.pdf
  
• Norman Y. Teng (online). The depictive nature of visual mental imagery.   (More)
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (online). A non-symbolic theory of conscious content: Imagery and activity.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Until a few years ago, Cognitive Science was firmly wedded to the notion that cognition must be explained in terms of the computational manipulation of internal representations or symbols. Although many people still believe this, the consensus is no longer solid. Whether it is truly threatened by connectionism is, perhaps, controversial, but there are yet more radical approaches that explicitly reject it. Advocates of "embodied" or "situated" approaches to cognition (e.g., Smith, 1991; Varela _et al_ , 1991, Clancey, 1997) argue that thought cannot be understood as entirely internal. Furthermore, it is argued that autonomous robots can be designed to behave more intelligently if representationalist programming techniques are avoided (Brooks, 1991), and that the way our brains control our behavior is better understood in terms of chaos and dynamical systems theory rather than as any sort computation (e.g., Freeman & Skarda, 1990; Van Gelder & Port, 1995; Van Gelder, 1995; Garson, 1996)
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (1999). Are theories of imagery theories of imagination? An active perception approach to conscious mental content.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi-pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the "traditional" symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recent *situated cognition* and *active vision* approaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non-discursiveness, creativity, and *seeing as*) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non-discursive and relates it closely to *seeing as*. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1555/1/im-im-cp.htm
  http://www.imagery-imagination.com/im-im/im-im.pdf
  http://www.imagery-imagination.com/im-im/im-im.htm
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog2302_3
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1207/s15516709cog2302_3
  http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/1999v23/i02/p0207p0245/MAIN.PDF
  http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/thomas (1999) are theories of imagery.pdf
  http://cogprints.org/1555/1/im%2Dim%2Dcp.htm
  http://cogprints.org/5018/1/im%2Dim%2Dcp.htm
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (ms). Coding dualism: Conscious thought without cartesianism or computationalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The principal temptation toward substance dualisms, or otherwise incorporating a question begging homunculus into our psychologies, arises not from the problem of consciousness in general, nor from the problem of intentionality, but from the question of our awareness and understanding of our own mental contents, and the control of the deliberate, conscious thinking in which we employ them. Dennett has called this "Hume's problem". Cognitivist philosophers have generally either denied the experiential reality of thought, as did the Behaviorists, or have taken an implicitly epiphenomenalist stance, a form of dualism. Some sort of mental duality may indeed be required to meet this problem, but not one that is metaphysical or question begging. I argue that it can be solved in the light of Paivio's "Dual Coding" theory of mental representation. This theory, which is strikingly simple and intuitive (perhaps too much so to have caught the imagination of philosophers) has demonstrated impressive empirical power and scope. It posits two distinct systems of potentially conscious representations in the human mind: mental imagery and verbal representation (which is not to be confused with 'propositional' or "mentalese" representation). I defend, on conceptual grounds, Paivio's assertion of precisely two codes against interpretations which would either multiply image codes to match sense modes, or collapse the two, admittedly interacting, systems into one. On this basis I argue that the inference that a conscious agent would be needed to read such mental representations and to manipulate them in the light of their contents can be pre-empted by an account of how the two systems interact, each registering, affecting and being affected by developing associative processes within the other
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (1989). Experience and theory as determinants of attitudes toward mental representation: The case of Knight Dunlap and the vanishing images of J.b. Watson.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Galton and subsequent investigators find wide divergences in people's subjective reports of mental imagery. Such individual differences might be taken to explain the peculiarly irreconcilable disputes over the nature and cognitive significance of imagery which have periodically broken out among psychologists and philosophers. However, to so explain these disputes is itself to take a substantive and questionable position on the cognitive role of imagery. This article distinguishes three separable issues over which people can be "for" or "against" mental images. Conflation of these issues can lead to theoretical differences being mistaken for experiential differences, even by theorists themselves. This is applied to the case of John B. Watson, who inaugurated a half-century of neglect of image psychology. Watson originally claimed to have vivid imagery; by 1913 he was denying the existence of images. This strange reversal, which made his behaviorism possible, is explicable as a "creative misconstrual" of Dunlap's "motor" theory of imagination
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/5019/1/dun-wat-cp.htm
  http://cogprints.org/3750/1/dun%2Dwat%2Dcp.htm
  http://cogprints.org/5019/1/dun%2Dwat%2Dcp.htm
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (1997). Imagery and the coherence of imagination: A critique of white.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article defends tradition and common sense against a widespread and rarely questioned contemporary philosophical orthodoxy that underpins the entrenched and exorbitant "lingualism" of so much 20th century thought, and leads the way to extreme doctrines like cognitive relativism and eliminative materialism. It also plugs what might otherwise have seemed to be a significant hole in the argument of my Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? (which I regard as my main positive contribution so far to the understanding of the mind). For a relatively brief overview of the situation in cognitive theory and consciousness studies, as I see it, see A Stimulus to the Imagination. Click here to view the full article: Imagery and the Coherence of Imagination: a Critique of White. Earlier drafts of this article, one entitled "The White Images of Imagery and Imagination: A Critique and an Alternative", were formerly available on the net. Please make any citations to the published version. - N.J.T.T
• Evan Thompson (2007). Look again: Phenomenology and mental imagery.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper (1) sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery; (2) applies this analysis to the mental imagery debate in cognitive science; (3) briefly sketches a neurophenomenological approach to mental imagery; and (4) compares the results of this discussion with Dennett’s heterophenomenology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/rp8161400t58757m/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/RP8161400T58757M.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phen/2007/00000006/F0020001/00009031
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (online). Mental imagery.   (More)
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (2005). Mental Imagery, Philosophical Issues About.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: An introduction to the science and philosophy of mental imagery.
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (online). New support for the perceptual activity theory of mental imagery.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Since the publication of my "Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An _Active Perception_ Approach to Conscious Mental Content," (Thomas, 1999 - henceforth abbreviated as ATOITOI on this page), a good deal of published material has appeared or has come to my attention that either provides additional support for the Perceptual Activity Theory PA theory) of mental imagery presented in ATOITOI, or that throws further doubt on the rival (picture and description) theories that are criticized there. Other relevant evidence was not mentioned in ATOITOI because I lacked the space for a proper explanation of its relevance. I hope eventually to write and publish a new account of

  PA

  theory, that will make use of much of this material. In the meantime this page provides citations (and, where possible, links) to the "new" support, and discussion sections that briefly explain the relevance of the cited material. Quite apart from presenting new lines of supporting evidence and argument, I hope this page will help to clarify many aspects of
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (2003). The false dichotomy of imagery.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Pylyshyn's critique is powerful. Pictorial theories of imagery fail. On the other hand, the symbolic description theory he manifestly still favors also fails, lacking the semantic foundation necessary to ground imagery's intentionality and consciousness. But, contrary to popular belief, these two theory types do not exhaust available options. Recent work on embodied, active perception supports the alternative perceptual activity theory of imagery
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=145824&jid=BBS&volumeId=25&issueId=02&aid=145823
  http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0140525X02510049
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (2009). Visual Imagery and Consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Defining Imagery: Experience or Representation?
  Historical Development of Ideas about Imagery
  Subjective Individual Differences in Imagery Experience
  Theories of Imagery, and their Implications for Consciousness
  Picture theory
  Description theory
  Enactive theory

Imagination

• Eckhart Arnold, The dark side of the force: When computer simulations lead us astray and ``model think'' narrows our imagination --- pre conference draft for the models and simulation conference, Paris, June 12-14 ---.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper is intended as a critical examination of the question of when the use of computer simulations is beneficial to scientific explanations. This objective is pursued in two steps: First, I try to establish clear criteria that simulations must meet in order to be explanatory. Basically, a simulation has explanatory power only if it includes all causally relevant factors of a given empirical configuration and if the simulation delivers stable results within the measurement inaccuracies of the input parameters. If a simulation is not explanatory, it can still be meaningful for exploratory purposes, but only under very restricted conditions. In the second step, I examine a few examples of Axelrod-style simulations as they have been used to understand the evolution of cooperation (Axelrod, Schüßler) and the evolution of the social contract (Skyrms). These simulations do not meet the criteria for explanatory validity and it can be shown, as I believe, that they lead us astray from the scientific problems they have been addressed to solve and at the same time bar our imagination against more conventional but still better approaches
• Michael Berman (2006). Imagining bodies: Merleau-ponty's philosophy of imagination.   (More)
• Leo Bostar (1990). The wake of imagination. Toward a postmodern culture, by Richard kearny.   (More)
• H. G. Callaway (2007). Emerson and Santayana on Imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper examines Santayana on imagination, and related themes, chiefly as these are expressed in his early work, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). My hypothesis is that Santayana under-estimates, in this book, the force and significance of the prevalent distinction between imagination and fancy, as this was originally put forward by Coleridge and later developed in Emerson’s late essays. I will focus on some of those aspects of Santayana’s book which appear to react to or to engage with Emerson’s views and aim to bring Santayana’s treatment of the theme of imagination into relation with Emerson. Understanding the differences in greater detail we stand a better chance of reasoned evaluation of alternative conceptions of imagination. I will argue that the Coleridge-Emersonian conception of the distinction between imagination and fancy is a crucial element of the background of Peircean abduction, and in this fashion, contributes to the continuity of Emerson’s writings with the pragmatist tradition.
• Ben Caplan (ms). Creatures of fiction, myth, and imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the nineteenth century, astronomers thought that a planet between Mercury and the Sun was causing perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, and they introduced ‘Vulcan’ as a name for such a planet. But they were wrong: there was, and is, no intra-Mercurial planet. Still, these astronomers went around saying things like (2) Vulcan is a planet between Mercury and the Sun. Some philosophers think that, when nineteenth-century astronomers were theorizing about an intra-Mercurial planet, they created a hypothetical planet
• Mark Collier (2010). Hume's Theory of Moral Imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: David Hume endorses three claims that are difficult to reconcile: (1) sympathy with those in distress is sufficient to produce compassion towards their plight, (2) adopting the general point of view often requires us to sympathize with the pain and suffering of distant strangers, but (3) our care and concern is limited to those in our close circle. Hume manages to resolve this tension, however, by distinguishing two types of sympathy. We feel compassion towards those around us because associative sympathy causes us to mirror their pain and suffering, but our ability to enter into the afflictions of those remote from us involves cognitive sympathy and merely requires us to reflect upon how we would feel in their shoes. This hybrid theory of sympathy receives support from recent work on affective mirroring and cognitive pretense. Hume’s account should appeal to contemporary researchers, therefore, who are interested in the nature of moral imagination.
• Lesley Dean-Jones (2007). In the grip of disease: Studies in the greek imagination, by G.e.R. Lloyd.   (More)
• Fabian Dorsch, Moran on imagination and fictional emotions.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: One of the central concerns of Moran's essay The Expression of Feeling in Imagination1 is to address the problem of fictional emotions - that is, of our emotional responses towards fictional characters, situations or events – and to clarify whether it is essentially related to some form of imagining or another.2 Moran's specific aim is thereby to criticise Walton's solution to the problem in terms of (as it seems) propositional imagining, and to present his own alternative account in terms of emotional imagining. In this paper, I will primarily be concerned with the question of whether he has succeeded in this aim. But I intend also to briefly introduce and discuss towards the end a third approach to the problem and, especially, to the issue of whether imagining plays a central role in the occurrence of fictional emotions
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://sfhd.exre.org/files/mife.pdf
  
• Sara Ebenreck (1996). Opening pandora's box: The role of imagination in environmental ethics.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: While the activity of imagination is present in much writing about environmental ethics, little direct attention has been given to clarifying its role. Both its significant presence and provocative theoretical work showing the central role of imagination in ethics suggest a need for discussion of its contributions. Environmental ethicists especially should attend to imagination because of the pervasive influence of metaphorical constructs of nature and because imaginative work is required to even partially envision the perspective of a nonhuman being. Without clear awareness of the limits of contemporary Western metaphoric constructs of nature, environmental ethicists may overlook or even contribute to the cultural extinction of ideas of nature present in the imaginative visions of indigenous cultures. In this article, I briefly review the reasons why the dominant Western philosophical tradition ranks imagination below the power of abstract reasoning, survey contemporary ideas about the role of imagination in ethics, and consider the implications of these ideas for environmental ethics. The work of imaginative empathy in constructing what might be the experience of nonhuman beings, the role of diverse metaphors and symbols in understanding nature, and the process of envisioning the possible future are developed as three central contributions of imagination to environmental ethics. Imaginative work is not peripheral, butcomplementary to the work of reason in shaping an environmental ethic
• Andreas Elpidorou (2010). Imagination in Non-representational Painting.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/books/details/9780415550963/
  
• M. Oreste Fiocco (2007). Conceivability, imagination and modal knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The notion of conceivability has traditionally been regarded as crucial to an account of modal knowledge. Despite its importance to modal epistemology, there is no received explication of conceivability. One purpose of this paper is to argue that the notion is not fruitfully explicated in terms of the imagination. The most natural way of presenting a notion of conceivability qua imaginability is open to cogent criticism. In order to avoid such criticism, an advocate of the modal insightfulness of the imagination must broaden the idea of what it is to be imaginable. I argue that this required broadening renders the imagination idle (in this context). Consequently, I distinguish two different accounts of the evidential basis of modal knowledge and present a more general argument that concludes that the very notion of conceivability should be eschewed in modal epistemology
• Gabriel A. Gottlieb (2007). Kant and the power of imagination.   (More)
• Rick Grush (ms). Manifolds, coordinations, imagination, objectivity.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Each of us distinguishes between himself and states of himself on the one hand, and what is not himself or a state of himself on the other. What are the conditions of our making this distinction, and how are they fulfilled? In what way do we make it, and why do we make it in the way we do?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://mind.ucsd.edu/papers/manifolds/manifoldshtml/manifolds-text.html
  
• B. Janz (online). Making a scene: Place-making imagination, artistic production, and narratives in urban space.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: INVENT-L Conference, UF, Gainesville, FL, 22-24 February 2007)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://institute.emerson.edu/vma/faculty/john_craig_freeman/imaging_place/about/research_ensembles/abstracts.html#Janz
  
• Lindsay Judson (1991). Mind and imagination in Aristotle.   (More)
• Richard Kearney (1988). Paul Ricoeur and the hermeneutic imagination.   (More)
• Elizabeth Loftus (ms). Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories
• Christopher P. Long (1998). Two powers, one ability: The understanding and imagination in Kant's critical philosophy.   (More)
• Ann N. Michelini (1992). Did the greeks believe in their myths?: An essay on the constitutive imagination.   (More)
• Conrad Montell (2002). On evolution of God-seeking mind: An inquiry into why natural selection would favor imagination and distortion of sensory experience.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The earliest known products of human imagination appear to express a primordial concern and struggle with thoughts of dying and of death and mortality. I argue that the structures and processes of imagination evolved in that struggle, in response to debilitating anxieties and fearful states that would accompany an incipient awareness of mortality. Imagination evolved to find that which would make the nascent apprehension of death more bearable, to engage in a search for alternative perceptions of death: a search that was beyond the capability of the external senses. I argue that imagination evolved as flight and fight adaptations in response to debilitating fears that paralleled an emerging foreknowledge of death. Imagination, and symbolic language to express its perceptions, would eventually lead to religious behavior and the development of cultural supports. Although highly speculative, my argument draws on recent brain studies, and on anthropology, psychology, and linguistics
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/2726/1/81%2DMontell.pdf
  
• Mary Morgan, Imagination and imaging in economic model building.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Modelling became one of the primary tools of economic research in the 20th century and economists understand their mathematical models as giving some kind of representation of the economic world, one adequate enough for the purpose of reasoning about that world. But when we look at examples of how non-analogical models were first built in economics, both the process of making representations and aspects of the representing relation remain opaque. Like early astronomers, economists have to imagine how the hidden parts of their world are arranged and to make images, that is, create models, to represent how they work. The case of the Edgeworth Box, a widely used model in 20th century economics, provides a good example to explore the role of imagination and images in the process of making representations of the economy
• Shaun Nichols (forthcoming). Imagination and immortality: Thinking of me.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recent work in developmental psychology indicates that children naturally think that psychological states continue after death. One important candidate explanation for why this belief is natural appeals to the idea that we believe in immortality because we can’t imagine our own nonexistence. This paper explores this old idea. To begin, I present a qualified statement of the thesis that we can’t imagine our own nonexistence. I argue that the most prominent explanation for this obstacle, Freud’s, is problematic. I go on to describe some central features of contemporary cognitive accounts of the imagination, and I argue that these accounts provide an independently motivated explanation for the imaginative obstacle. While the imaginative obstacle does not dictate a belief in immortality, it does, I maintain, facilitate such a belief
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/g6561823uj0u5207/fulltext.pdf
  
• Shaun Nichols (2006). Just the imagination: Why imagining doesn't behave like believing.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to recent accounts of the imagination, mental mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination-based inputs (pretense representations) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. That is, such a mechanism should produce similar outputs whether its input is the belief that p or the pretense representation that p. Unfortunately, there seem to be clear counterexamples to this hypothesis, for in many cases, imagining that p and believing that p have quite different psychological consequences. This paper sets out some central problem cases and argues that the cases might be accommodated by adverting to the role of desires concerning real and imaginary situations
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2006.00286.x
  
• Thomas Nigel (1998). Imagination, eliminativism, and the pre-history of consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Classical and medieval writers had no term for consciousness in anything like the modern sense, and their philosophy seems not to have been troubled by the mind-body problem. Contemporary eliminativists find strong support in this fact for their claim that consciousness does not exist, or, at least, is not an appropriate scientific explanandum. They typically hold that contemporary conceptions of consciousness are artefacts of Descartes' (now outmoded) views about matter and his unrealistic craving for epistemological certainty. Essentially, they say, our belief in consciousness is a residue of once pressing, but now irrelevant, intellectual tensions between religion and the rising new science of the Early Modern period. With the attempts of Descartes and his successors to resolve these tensions, Western thought began down a track toward the conceptual cul-de-sac of the "hard problem". Plausibly, the problem will only be (dis)solved, and the onward march of science assured, when we are able to shake off the pervasive influence of the Cartesian tradition in a way that goes far beyond the mere rejection of dualism. But when we do so, eliminativists contend, the distinctively Cartesian notion of consciousness will simply drop out of our world-picture, like phlogiston or the vital entelechy
• Dmitri Nikulin (2008). Imagination and mathematics in Proclus.   (More)
• Lucy F. O'Brien (2005). Imagination and the motivational role of belief.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8284.2005.00524.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118641606/PDFSTART
  
• David Papineau (2007). Review of Daniel Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness.   (More)
• Giovanni Pezzulo & Cristiano Castelfranchi (2009). Thinking as the Control of Imagination: a Conceptual Framework for Goal-Directed Systems.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper offers a conceptual framework which (re)integrates goal-directed control, motivational processes, and executive functions, and suggests a developmentalpathway from situated action to higher level cognition. We first illustrate a basic computational (control-theoretic) model of goal-directed action that makes use of internalmodeling. We then show that by adding the problem of selection among multiple actionalternatives motivation enters the scene, and that the basic mechanisms of executivefunctions such as inhibition, the monitoring of progresses, and working memory, arerequired for this system to work. Further, we elaborate on the idea that the off-line re-enactment of anticipatory mechanisms used for action control gives rise to (embodied)mental simulations, and propose that thinking consists essentially in controlling mental simulations rather than directly controlling behavior and perceptions. We concludeby sketching an evolutionary perspective of this process, proposing that anticipationleveraged cognition, and by highlighting specific predictions of our model.
• Giovanni Pezzulo & Cristiano Castelfranchi (2009). Thinking as the Control of Imagination: a Conceptual Framework for Goal-Directed Systems.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper offers a conceptual framework which (re)integrates goal-directed control, motivational processes, and executive functions, and suggests a developmentalpathway from situated action to higher level cognition. We first illustrate a basic computational (control-theoretic) model of goal-directed action that makes use of internalmodeling. We then show that by adding the problem of selection among multiple actionalternatives motivation enters the scene, and that the basic mechanisms of executivefunctions such as inhibition, the monitoring of progresses, and working memory, arerequired for this system to work. Further, we elaborate on the idea that the off-line re-enactment of anticipatory mechanisms used for action control gives rise to (embodied)mental simulations, and propose that thinking consists essentially in controlling mental simulations rather than directly controlling behavior and perceptions. We concludeby sketching an evolutionary perspective of this process, proposing that anticipationleveraged cognition, and by highlighting specific predictions of our model.
• Glen Mazis (1988). La Chair et L'Imaginaire: The Developing Role of the Imagination in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy.   (More)
• Jeffrey Reid (2006). Hegel's theory of imagination.   (More)
• Richard K. Sherwin (ms). Sublime jurisprudence: On the ethical education of the legal imagination in our time.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      The broad dissemination of digital communication technologies is raising disturbing questions about the nature of truth as representation. This epistemological crisis shares an uncanny affinity with the crisis of representation that lay at the heart of the baroque era during the 17th century in Europe. The resolution of that crisis, through the work of Descartes and others, came on the heels of a philosophical shift from the image to the sign. Not incidentally, that move was accompanied by significant political and juridical developments, including: the origin of legal positivism, the rise of conventionalism (or nominalism), the disenchantment of nature and the decline of natural law, and the emergence of the modern nation-state. The semiotic model today, however, is strained to the breaking point. Infinitely mutable digital signs proliferate as copies of copies; signifiers have been shorn of the signified. The ensuing mutation of the Cartesian sign into the digital image has been accompanied by significant political and juridical developments. Individual autonomy, universal reason, and calculative rationality - the traditional foundation for core Liberal values - are being challenged by digital practices. Like the baroque crisis of visuality that preceded it, the current crisis of the digital neo-baroque will not ease until confidence is restored not only in acceptable forms of truth as representation, but also in the mimetic faculty itself, which is to say, in the human capacity to represent self and others. 'Sublime jurisprudence' is a metaphysical model that seeks to address this need
• Joel Smith (2006). Bodily awareness, imagination, and the self.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Common wisdom tells us that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These senses provide us with a means of gaining information concerning objects in the world around us, including our own bodies. But in addition to these five senses, each of us is aware of our own body in way in which we are aware of no other thing. These ways include our awareness of the position, orientation, movement, and size of our limbs (proprioception and kinaesthesia), our sense of balance, and our awareness of bodily sensations such as pains, tickles, and sensations of pressure or temperature. We can group these together under the title
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.joelsmith.net/documents/Bodily Awareness Imagination and the Self.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/ejop/2006/00000014/00000001/art00003
  
• Tracey Stark (1992). Book review of Rudolf M. Makkreel imagination and interpretation in Kant: The hermeneutical import of the critique of judgment: Review: Rudolf M. Makkreel, imagination and interpretation in Kant: The hermeneutical import of the critique of judgment. The university of chicago press: Chicago and London, 1990. $24.95.   (More)
• Tracey Stark (1997). Review essay : Richard Kearney's hermeneutic imagination: Richard Kearney, poetics of modernity: Toward a hermeneu tic imagination (atlantic highlands, nj: Humanities press, 1995) also under consideration by Richard Kearney: Poetics O f imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (london: Rout ledge, 1994); modern movements in european philosophy (2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester university press, 1994); states of mind (Manchester: Manchester university press, 1995).   (More)
• Robert Sweeney (1998). Review essay : Richard Kearney, poetics of modernity: Toward a hermeneutic imagination (highlands, nj: Humanities press, 1995.   (More)
• Aaron Szymkowiak (2007). Hutcheson's painless imagination and the problem of moral beauty.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A peculiar feature of Hutcheson’s system is his claim that there exist no original pains in the imagination, and hence no real displeasures concerning form or beauty. This position, when set against a clear emphasis upon the pains of the moral sense in apprehending evil, seems to render tenuous his frequent analogies between the experiences of beauty and goodness. In light of this apparent discrepancy in Hutcheson’s argument, the repeated use of the term “moral beauty” presents interpretive difficulties, particularly on the matter of whether, and in what way, goodness is itself a species of beauty. These problems can be surmounted by way of close attention to Hutcheson’s connection and ordering of the various “senses.” On the present interpretation, Hutcheson denies formal displeasure aspart of a broader theological argument concerning the moral function of the imagination. On this view, “moral beauty” is a special type of imaginative pleasure
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (online). Attitude and image, or, what will simulation theory let us eliminate?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Stich & Ravenscroft (1994) have argued that (contrary to most people's initial assumptions) a simulation account of folk psychology may be consistent with eliminative materialism, but they fail to bring out the full complexity or the potential significance of the relationship. Contemporary eliminativism (particularly in the Churchland version) makes two major claims: the first is a rejection of the orthodox assumption that realistically construed propositional attitudes are fundamental to human cognition; the second is the suggestion that with the advancement of scientific understanding of the mind it will be possible to entirely eliminate the mentalistic and intentional from our ontology, thus dissolving the mind-body problem. The first claim (which has been argued in detail) supplies the principal grounds for accepting the second, much more ambitious and significant, claim. Robert Gordon's (1995, 1996, 2000) radical simulation theory of "folk psychology", proposed initially (Gordon, 1986) as an alternative to "theory theory" accounts of self and interpersonal understanding, but subsequently developing into a quite general challenge to symbolic computational accounts of mind, is not merely consistent with, but actually provides considerable additional support for, the first eliminativist claim. However, although radical simulationism has no use for reified propositional attitudes, it relies on another family of mentalistic and intentional notions, including perspective taking, "seeing as", pretending, imagery, and, most centrally, imagination. It is thus inconsistent with eliminativist metaphysical ambitions. Nevertheless, from this perspective the mind-body problem is transformed. Its solution no longer depends on accounting directly for the intentionality of the attitudes, but rather on accounting for the intentionality of imagination. Although standard accounts of imagination derive its intentionality from that of the attitudes, the recently proposed "perceptual activity" theory of imagery and imagination (Thomas, 1999) can provide a direct account of the intentionality of imagination that is consistent with physicalism..
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://Attitude and image, or, What will simulation theory let us eliminate?
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (1999). Are theories of imagery theories of imagination? An active perception approach to conscious mental content.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi-pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the "traditional" symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recent *situated cognition* and *active vision* approaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non-discursiveness, creativity, and *seeing as*) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non-discursive and relates it closely to *seeing as*. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1555/1/im-im-cp.htm
  http://www.imagery-imagination.com/im-im/im-im.pdf
  http://www.imagery-imagination.com/im-im/im-im.htm
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog2302_3
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1207/s15516709cog2302_3
  http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/1999v23/i02/p0207p0245/MAIN.PDF
  http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/thomas (1999) are theories of imagery.pdf
  http://cogprints.org/1555/1/im%2Dim%2Dcp.htm
  http://cogprints.org/5018/1/im%2Dim%2Dcp.htm
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (1998). Imagination, eliminativism, and the pre-history of consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Classical and medieval writers had no term for consciousness in anything like the modern sense, and their philosophy seems not to have been troubled by the mind-body problem. Contemporary eliminativists find strong support in this fact for their claim that consciousness does not exist, or, at least, is not an appropriate scientific explanandum. They typically hold that contemporary conceptions of consciousness are artefacts of Descartes' (now outmoded) views about matter and his unrealistic craving for epistemological certainty. Essentially, they say, our belief in consciousness is a residue of once pressing, but now irrelevant, intellectual tensions between religion and the rising new science of the Early Modern period. With the attempts of Descartes and his successors to resolve these tensions, Western thought began down a track toward the conceptual cul-de-sac of the "hard problem". Plausibly, the problem will only be (dis)solved, and the onward march of science assured, when we are able to shake off the pervasive influence of the Cartesian tradition in a way that goes far beyond the mere rejection of dualism. But when we do so, eliminativists contend, the distinctively Cartesian notion of consciousness will simply drop out of our world-picture, like phlogiston or the vital entelechy
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.imagery-imagination.com/im-c-abs.htm
  http://htpprints.yorku.ca/archive/00000220/01/iepc2.htm
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (2003). Imagining minds.   (More)
• Alan Thomas (online). Perceptual knowledge, representation and imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The focus of this paper will be on the problem of perceptual presence and on a solution to this problem pioneered by Kant [1781; 1783] and refined by Sellars [Sellars, 1978] and Strawson [Strawson, 1971]. The problem of perceptual presence is that of explaining how our perceptual experience of the world gives us a robust sense of the presence of objects in perception over and above those sensory aspects of the object given in perception. Objects possess other properties which are, one might say, phenomenologically present even though they are admittedly sensorily absent. The general form of the solution to this problem that Kant developed seems to me to be a neglected resource in contemporary work on perceptual consciousness. Kant solves the problem of perceptual presence by appealing to that which he called the productive use of the imagination. This faculty of mind supplies schematic representations of the object of perception that explains a phenomenological sense of perceptual presence even of those features that are not, in a sense to be further clarified,
• Nigel Thomas (ms). The study of imagination as an approach to consciousness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The concept of consciousness appears to have had little currency before the 17th century. Not only did philosophers before Descartes fail to worry about how consciousness fitted into the natural world, they did not even claim to be conscious. If we are conscious, however, we must assume that they were too, and it hardly seems plausible that they could have been unaware of it. In fact, when the mind was discussed in former ages, both before and within the work of Descartes, the concept of imagination filled most (not all) of the key conceptual roles that consciousness fills today. Although it was not considered uniquely problematic, in the way that consciousness is, imagination continued to be used in these ways long after the Cartesian revolution. It was both the mental arena where thinking took place - where ideas (images) had their being and their interaction - and, implicitly, the power whereby the deliverances of the material sense organs were integrated and rendered meaningful (and, thereby, rendered 'mental'). This suggests that the study of the imagination (in the relevant senses) ought to have a considerable bearing on the study of consciousness, and it may even provide a way to outflank the notorious 'hard problem' that seems to stand in the way of a direct scientific assault on consciousness itself
• Kenneth Turnbull (1994). Aristotle on imagination: De Anima III.   (More)
• Mark Turner, Imagination and creativity: Lectures at the college de France, 2: The invention of meaning (l'imagination et la créativité: Confèrences au collège de France, 2: L'invention du sens).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      The second of four lectures at the Collège de France in 2000 on the subject of conceptual mappings and conceptual structure
• Mark Turner, Imagination and creativity: Lectures at the college de France, 4: The cognitive neuroscience of creativity (l'imagination et la créativité: Confèrences au collège de France, 4: La neuroscience cognitive de la créativité).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      The fourth of four lectures at the Collège de France in 2000 on the subject of conceptual mappings and conceptual structure
• Brian Weatherson (ms). Morality in fiction and consciousness in imagination.   (More)
• Patricia H. Werhane (2006). A place for philosophers in applied ethics and the role of moral reasoning in moral imagination: A response to Richard Rorty.   (More)
• Tine Wilde (2002). The 4th Dimension. Wittgenstein on Colour and Imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this paper I first discuss the colour-octahedron and the position of this model as an idealized system with respect to the remarks on colour-concepts in Remarks on Colour (RC). The next part examines the notion of apsect seeing in the light of the colour-octahedron and RC. From there a connection is made with On Certainty (OC). By linking the remarks on colour, seeing aspects and certainty, it may become clear that the investigations of Wittgenstein concerning colour and certainty direct us towards a reflective dynamics and an anthropological interpretation of his ideas.

Imaginative Resistance

• Aaron Smuts (2006). V. F. Perkins' Functional Credibility and the Problem of Imaginative Resistance.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Echoing Beardsley's trinity of unity, complexity, and intensity, Perkins develops three interrelated criteria on which to base an evaluation of film: credibility, coherence, and significance. I assess whether Perkins criteria of credibility serves as a useful standard for film criticism. Most of the effort will be devoted to charitably reconstructing the notion of credibility by bringing together some of Perkins' particular comments. Then I will briefly examine whether Perkins has successfully achieved his goal of developing standards of judgment by holding credibility up to his own criteria of successful meta-criticism: "The clarification of standards should help to develop the disciplines of criticism without seeking to lay obligations on the film-maker" (p. 59). Although I argue that Perkins fails to achieve his goal, his criterion of credibility remains a useful mechanism for evaluating artistic attempts to achieve a particular end, namely spectator immersion. A limited domain of application for his criteria might seem to leave us with little more than an idiosyncratic expression of his classicist artistic taste, but Film as Film also contains valuable insights relevant to the so called "problem of imaginative resistance."
• Brian Weatherson (2004). Morality, fiction, and possibility.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://quot.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0004.003
  

Imagination and Imagery

• Alex Byrne (2010). Recollection, perception, imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. Our first question is
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/2624082436471512/fulltext.pdf
  
• Mostyn W. Jones (1995). Inadequacies in current theories of imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Interest in imagination dates back to Plato and Aristotle, but full-length works have been devoted to it only relatively recently by Sartre, McKellar, Furlong, Casey, Johnson, Warnock, Brann, and others. Despite their length and variety, however, these current theories take overly narrow views of this complex phenomenon. (1) Their definitions of “imagination” neglect the multiplicity of its meanings and tend to focus narrowly on the power of imaging alone (which produces images and imagery). But imagination in the fullest, most encompassing sense centers instead on creativity, which involves both imaging and reasoning powers. (2) Current accounts of the operations of imagination narrowly construe it in fixed, immutable terms. But it’s instead a dynamic, evolving synergy of its psychological roots (images and symbols) and sociobiological roots (cultures and instincts). This synergy has transformed the roles of images and symbols in imagination (as Vygotsky, Goody, etc. note). For example, in the shift from mytheopic to scientific imagination, literacy and formal education fostered abstract symbolic thinking (reason), which differs from mytheopic thinking based on richly concrete associations (imagery). The result was “more than cool reason”, but experimental studies (by Perkins, Clement, etc.) show that it’s also more than just dreamy imagery. It’s a dynamic synergy of the two that has transformed both. (3) Current evaluations of imagination’s potentials are also narrow. They tend to focus on its role in mental life while ignoring social and political life. Also, they tend to follow romantic and existentialist customs of extolling imagination’s virtues without soberly critiquing its limitations. Again, they ignore the synergy of psychological, sociological and biological forces that shape mental and social evolution, and promote and constrain imagination in complex ways. For example, Sartre surreally asks us to choose our own nature with an imagination emancipated from institutional and instinctual strictures. Yet making intelligible choices depends on these strictures. (4) In conclusion, current theories define imagination narrowly in terms of imaging, they describe its operations in fixed and immutable terms, and they evaluate its potentials without examining the full interplay of forces shaping it. These shortcomings are remedied by a broader perspective that defines imagination more adequately and comprehensively, and that recognizes it’s complex roots, dynamic operations, and evolving potentials.
• Amy Kind (online). Imagery and imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Both imagery and imagination play an important part in our mental lives. This article, which has three main sections, discusses both of these phenomena, and the connection between them. The first part discusses mental images and, in particular, the dispute about their representational nature that has become known as the _imagery debate_ . The second part turns to the faculty of the imagination, discussing the long philosophical tradition linking mental imagery and the imagination—a tradition that came under attack in the early part of the twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism. Finally, the third part of this article examines modal epistemology, where the imagination has been thought to serve an important philosophical function, namely, as a guide to possibility
• Amy Kind (2001). Putting the image back in imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. The philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://phil-rlst.claremontmckenna.edu/akind/PIBII.doc
  http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/phil-rlst/akind/PIBII.doc
  http://phil-rlst.academic.claremontmckenna.edu/akind/PIBII.doc
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(200101)62:1<85:PTIBII>2.0.CO;2-Y
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00042.x
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(200101)62:1<85:PTIBII>2.0.CO;2-Y
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2653590.pdf
  
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (ms). Are There People Who Do Not Experience Imagery? (And why does it matter?).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of Galton's original work (1880, 1883), Sommer's brief case study (1978), and Faw's (1997, 2009) articles, this is the only really substantial discussion of the phenomenon of non-brain-damaged "non-imagers" available anywhere.
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (ms). Coding dualism: Conscious thought without cartesianism or computationalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The principal temptation toward substance dualisms, or otherwise incorporating a question begging homunculus into our psychologies, arises not from the problem of consciousness in general, nor from the problem of intentionality, but from the question of our awareness and understanding of our own mental contents, and the control of the deliberate, conscious thinking in which we employ them. Dennett has called this "Hume's problem". Cognitivist philosophers have generally either denied the experiential reality of thought, as did the Behaviorists, or have taken an implicitly epiphenomenalist stance, a form of dualism. Some sort of mental duality may indeed be required to meet this problem, but not one that is metaphysical or question begging. I argue that it can be solved in the light of Paivio's "Dual Coding" theory of mental representation. This theory, which is strikingly simple and intuitive (perhaps too much so to have caught the imagination of philosophers) has demonstrated impressive empirical power and scope. It posits two distinct systems of potentially conscious representations in the human mind: mental imagery and verbal representation (which is not to be confused with 'propositional' or "mentalese" representation). I defend, on conceptual grounds, Paivio's assertion of precisely two codes against interpretations which would either multiply image codes to match sense modes, or collapse the two, admittedly interacting, systems into one. On this basis I argue that the inference that a conscious agent would be needed to read such mental representations and to manipulate them in the light of their contents can be pre-empted by an account of how the two systems interact, each registering, affecting and being affected by developing associative processes within the other
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (online). Imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A brief historical and conceptual account of the concept of imagination
• Nigel J. T. Thomas (2005). Mental Imagery, Philosophical Issues About.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: An introduction to the science and philosophy of mental imagery.
• Nigel J. T. Thomas, The multidimensional spectrum of imagination:.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A comprehensive theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination, and its relationship to perceptual experience, is developed, largely through a critique of the account propounded in Colin McGinn's Mindsight. McGinn eschews the highly deflationary (and unilluminating) views of imagination common amongst analytical philosophers, but fails to develop his own account satisfactorily because (owing to a scientifically outmoded understanding of visual perception) he draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception (following Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others), and because of his fatally flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. In fact, however, an understanding of perception informed by modern visual science will enable us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework

Imagination and Pretense

• Radu J. Bogdan (2005). Pretending as imaginative rehearsal for cultural conformity.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.tulane.edu/~bogdan/publications.dwt
  http://www.wmich.edu/cognition/current/index.html
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/W4PV3467000P7V32.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/jocc/2005/00000005/F0020001/art00008
  
• Peter Carruthers (2003). Review of Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology.   (More)
• Tyler Doggett & Andy Egan (2007). Wanting things you don't want: The case for an imaginative analogue of desire.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: You’re imagining, in the course of a different game of make-believe, that you’re a bank robber. You don’t believe that you’re a bank robber. You are moved to point your finger, gun-wise, at the person pretending to be the bank teller and say, “Stick ‘em up! This is a robbery!”
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://quot.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0007.009
  
• Andy Egan (2008). Pretense for the complete idiom.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121376195/PDFSTART
  
• Stacie Friend (2007). Review of Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction.   (More)
• Tamar Gendler (2002). Review of Paul Harris, The Work of the Imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I had a structural worry about the relation of Gaita’s three chapters on truth, interesting though these chapters are, to the rest of Gaita’s project. And I had some residual questions left after reading the book: What are persons? How do we know when we are encountering one, and when are we justified (we must be sometimes: compare the various sorts of animal) in a decision that something we encounter is not a person? Do evil actions always involve a sort of blindness to what is being done? If so, how easy is it to explain how agents who do evil can be held responsible for their cognitive deficiencies? These may of course be questions that Gaita was not trying to answer; but in any case, as I hope I have conveyed, I found A Common Humanity a striking and revelatory read, and I warmly recommend it
• Tamar Szabó Gendler (2003). On the relation between pretense and belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that pretense-episode (e.g. the child does not expect that ‘spilling’ ( pretend) ‘tea’1 will result in the table really being wet), or more generally, to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the pretended state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world. Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues (e.g. the child does expect that if she up-ends the teapot above the table, then the table will become wet in the pretense), or, more generally to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YI5T-5sOm1EC&oi=fnd&pg=PA125&dq=On+the+relation+between+pretense+and+belief+Gendler&ots=rc-yF5fAMh&sig=_Hpv9w2F4VoLnlOkWneVUv8-hw8
  
• Tamar Gendler (2007). Self-deception as pretense.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I propose that paradigmatic cases of self-deception satisfy the following conditions: (a) the person who is self-deceived about not-P pretends (in the sense of makes-believe or imagines or fantasizes) that not-P is the case, often while believing that P is the case and not believing that not-P is the case; (b) the pretense that not-P largely plays the role normally played by belief in terms of (i) introspective vivacity and (ii) motivation of action in a wide range of circumstances. Understanding self-deception in this way is highly natural. And it provides a non-
  paradoxical characterization of the phenomenon that explains both its distinctive patterns of instability and its ordinary association with irrationality. Why, then, has this diagnosis been overlooked? I suggest that the oversight is due to a failure to recognize the philosophical significance of a crucial fact about the human mind, namely, the degree to which attitudes other than belief often play a central role in our mental and practical lives, both by “influenc[ing our]. . . passions and imagination,” and by “governing. . .our actions.”
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2007.00127.x
  http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/SelfDeceptionAsPretenseProofs.pdf
  
• Shaun Nichols (2002). Imagination and the puzzles of iteration.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Iteration presents opposing puzzles for a theory of the imagination. The first puzzle, noted by David Lewis, is that when a person pretends to pretend, the iteration is often preserved. Let’s call this the puzzle of ‘pre- served iteration’. At the other pole, Gregory Currie has noted that very often when we pretend to pretend, the iteration does collapse. We might call this the puzzle of ‘collapsed iteration’. Somehow a theory of the imagination must be able to address these two puzzles. I argue that an empirically inspired cognitive theory of the imagination (Nichols & Stich 2000) can accommodate both puzzles
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/journals/analysis/preprints/NICHOLS.pdf
  http://www.hum.utah.edu/philosophy/faculty/nichols/Papers/iteration.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-8284.00417
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8284.00417
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/2003/00000063/00000279/art00003
  
• Neil Van Leeuwen (2011). Imagination is where the action is.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Imaginative representations are crucial to the generation of action--both pretense and plain action. But well-known theories of imagination on offer in the literature [1] fail to describe how perceptually-formatted imaginings (mental images) and motor imaginings function in the generation of action and [2] fail to recognize the important fact that spatially rich imagining can be integrated into one's perceptual manifold. In this paper, I present a theory of imagining that shows how spatially rich imagining functions in the generation of action. I also describe the imaginative structures behind two under-explored forms of action: semi-pretense and pretense layering. In addition, I suggest that my theory of imagining meshes better than the competitors with current work in cognitive and affective neuroscience.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/../issues/108/2/1.pdf
  
• D. S. Neil van Leeuwen (2009). The Motivational Role of Belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper claims that the standard characterization of the motivational role of belief should be supplemented. Beliefs do not only, jointly with desires, cause and rationalize actions that will satisfy the desires, if the beliefs are true; beliefs are also the practical ground of other cognitive attitudes, like imagining, which means beliefs determine whether and when one acts with those other attitudes as the cognitive inputs into choices and practical reasoning. In addition to arguing for this thesis, I take issue with Velleman's argument that belief and imagining cannot be distinguished on the basis of motivational role.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a913821660&db=all
  
• John Zeimbekis, Thought experiments and mental simulations.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Thought experiments have a mysterious way of informing us about the world, apparently without examining it, yet with a great degree of certainty. It is tempting to try to explain this capacity by making use of the idea that in thought experiments, the mind somehow simulates the processes about which it reaches conclusions. Here, I test this idea. I argue that when they predict the outcomes of hypothetical physical situations, thought experiments cannot simulate physical processes. They use mental models, which should not be confused with process-driven simulations. A convincing case can be made that thought experiments about hypothetical mental processes are mental simulations. Concerning moral thought experiments, I argue that construing them as simulations of mental processes favours certain moral theories over others. The scope of mental simulation in thought experiments is primarily limited by the constraint of relevant similarity on source and target processes: on one hand, this constraint disqualifies thought from simulating external natural processes; on the other hand, it is a source of epistemic bias in moral thought experiments. In view of these results, I conclude that thought experiments and mental simulations cannot be assimilated as means of acquiring knowledge.

Imagination, Misc

• Alex Byrne (2010). Recollection, perception, imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. Our first question is
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/2624082436471512/fulltext.pdf
  
• Charles Crittenden (2007). Review of Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein's Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, ##243-315.   (More)
• John B. Dilworth (2008). Imaginative Versus Analytical Experiences of Wines.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The highly enjoyable experiences associated with drinking good wines have been widely misunderstood. It is common to regard wine appreciation as an analytical or quasi-scientific kind of activity, in which wine experts carefully distinguish the precise sensory qualities of each wine, and then pass on their accumulated factual knowledge to less experienced wine enthusiasts. However, this model of wine appreciation is seriously defective. One good way to show its defects is to provide a better and more fundamental scientific account of what is involved in wine appreciation. In order to do so, I outline a novel, evolutionarily based theory of perceptual consciousness that explains why there must be imaginative as well as analytical kinds of experiences of wines. In addition, imaginative wine experiences, unlike typical imaginative artistic experiences, may be shown to involve highly individualistic, improvisatory elements that help to give wine drinking a unique place among the recreational arts
• Tyler Doggett & Andy Egan (2007). Wanting things you don't want: The case for an imaginative analogue of desire.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: You’re imagining, in the course of a different game of make-believe, that you’re a bank robber. You don’t believe that you’re a bank robber. You are moved to point your finger, gun-wise, at the person pretending to be the bank teller and say, “Stick ‘em up! This is a robbery!”
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://quot.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0007.009
  
• Andy Egan (online). Imagination, delusion, and self-deception.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Subjects with delusions profess to believe some extremely peculiar things. Patients with Capgras delusion sincerely assert that, for example, their spouses have been replaced by impostors. Patients with Cotard’s delusion sincerely assert that they are dead. Many philosophers and psychologists are hesitant to say that delusional subjects genuinely believe the contents of their delusions.2 One way to reinterpret delusional subjects is to say that we’ve misidentified the content of the problematic belief. So for example, rather than believing that his wife is has been replaced by an impostor, we might say that the victim of Capgras delusion believes that it is, in some respects, as if his wife has been replaced by an impostor. Another is to say that we’ve misidentified the attitude that the delusional subject bears to the content of their delusion. So for example, Gregory Currie and co-authors have suggested that rather than believing that his wife has been replaced by an impostor, we should say that the victim of Capgras delusion merely imagines that his wife has been replaced by an impostor.3
• Peter Goldie (2005). Imagination and the distorting power of emotion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: _In real life, emotions can distort practical reasoning, typically in ways that it is_ _difficult to realise at the time, or to envisage and plan for in advance. This fea-_ _ture of real life emotional experience raises difficulties for imagining such expe-_ _riences through centrally imagining, or imagining ‘from the inside’. I argue_ _instead for the important psychological role played by another kind of imagin-_ _ing: imagining from an external perspective. This external perspective can draw_ _on the dramatic irony involved in imagining these typical cases, where one_ _knows outside the scope of the imagining what one does not know as part of the_ _content of what one imagines: namely, that the imagined emotion is distorting_ _one’s reasoning. Moreover, imagining from an external perspective allows one_ _to evaluate the imagined events in a way that imagining from the inside does not._
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2005/00000012/F0030008/art00007
  
• Peter Goldie (2006). Wollheim on emotion and imagination.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/74xvk833r046x507/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/74XVK833R046X507.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2006/00000127/00000001/00001727
  
• Robert Hanna (2003). Review of Martin Weatherston, Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality.   (More)
• Lars Hertzberg (1991). Imagination and the sense of identity.   (More)
• Jonathan Ichikawa (2009). Dreaming and imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Penultimate draft; please refer to published version. I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that contrary to an orthodox view, dreams do not typically involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has argued that we do not have misleading sensory experience while dreaming, and partially in agreement with Ernest Sosa, who has argued that we do not form false beliefs while dreaming. Rather, on my view, dreams involve mental imagery and propositional imagination. I defend the imagination model of dreaming from some objections
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philosophy.jollyutter.net/papers/dai.pdf
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121647698/PDFSTART
  
• Jonathan Ichikawa (2008). Skepticism and the imagination model of dreaming.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Penultimate draft; please refer to published version -- especially important in this case, as the official version has been Britishized; even the title's second letter is not the same. Abstract. Ernest Sosa has argued that the solution to dream skepticism lies in an understanding of dreams as imaginative experiences – when we dream, on this suggestion, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them. Sosa rebuts skepticism thus: dreams don’t cause false beliefs, so my beliefs cannot be false, having been caused by dreams. I argue that, even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dreaming, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model, I suggest, is to recharacterize the way we think about dream skepticism: the skeptical threat is not, after all, that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams don’t involve false beliefs, they still pose a skeptical threat, which I elaborate
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://philosophy.jollyutter.net/papers/simd.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120084235/PDFSTART
  
• Julia Jansen (2006). Review of Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger.   (More)
• Mostyn W. Jones (1995). Inadequacies in current theories of imagination.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Interest in imagination dates back to Plato and Aristotle, but full-length works have been devoted to it only relatively recently by Sartre, McKellar, Furlong, Casey, Johnson, Warnock, Brann, and others. Despite their length and variety, however, these current theories take overly narrow views of this complex phenomenon. (1) Their definitions of “imagination” neglect the multiplicity of its meanings and tend to focus narrowly on the power of imaging alone (which produces images and imagery). But imagination in the fullest, most encompassing sense centers instead on creativity, which involves both imaging and reasoning powers. (2) Current accounts of the operations of imagination narrowly construe it in fixed, immutable terms. But it’s instead a dynamic, evolving synergy of its psychological roots (images and symbols) and sociobiological roots (cultures and instincts). This synergy has transformed the roles of images and symbols in imagination (as Vygotsky, Goody, etc. note). For example, in the shift from mytheopic to scientific imagination, literacy and formal education fostered abstract symbolic thinking (reason), which differs from mytheopic thinking based on richly concrete associations (imagery). The result was “more than cool reason”, but experimental studies (by Perkins, Clement, etc.) show that it’s also more than just dreamy imagery. It’s a dynamic synergy of the two that has transformed both. (3) Current evaluations of imagination’s potentials are also narrow. They tend to focus on its role in mental life while ignoring social and political life. Also, they tend to follow romantic and existentialist customs of extolling imagination’s virtues without soberly critiquing its limitations. Again, they ignore the synergy of psychological, sociological and biological forces that shape mental and social evolution, and promote and constrain imagination in complex ways. For example, Sartre surreally asks us to choose our own nature with an imagination emancipated from institutional and instinctual strictures. Yet making intelligible choices depends on these strictures. (4) In conclusion, current theories define imagination narrowly in terms of imaging, they describe its operations in fixed and immutable terms, and they evaluate its potentials without examining the full interplay of forces shaping it. These shortcomings are remedied by a broader perspective that defines imagination more adequately and comprehensively, and that recognizes it’s complex roots, dynamic operations, and evolving potentials.
• Wilfrid Sellars, The role of imagination in Kant's theory of experience.   (More)
• Jonathan M. Weinberg & Aaron Meskin (2006). Puzzling over the imagination: Philosophical problems, architectural solutions.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/1437736/2006/00000001/00000001/art00013
  

Memory

• Aristotle, On memory.   (More)
• Aristotle, On memory and reminiscence.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Aristotle/memory.htm
  http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/memory/
  http://www.4literature.net/Aristotle/Memory_and_Reminiscence
  
• Jay David Atlas, Qualia, consciousness, and memory: Dennett (2005), Rosenthal (2002), Ledoux (2002), and Libet (2004).   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In his recent (2005) book "Sweet Dreams: philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness," Dennett renews his attack on a philosophical notion of qualia, the success of which attack is required if his brand of Functionalism is to survive. He also articulates once again what he takes to be essential to his notion of consciousness. I shall argue that his new, central argument against the philosophical concept of qualia fails. In passing I point out a difficulty that David Rosenthal's "higher-order thought" theory of consciousness also faces in accounting for qualia. I then contrast Dennett's newest account of consciousness with interestingly different conceptions by contemporary neuro-scientists, and I suggest that philosophers should take the recent suggestions by neuro-scientists more seriously as a subject for philosophical investigation
• David Aubin (2008). 'The memory of life itself': Bénard's cells and the cinematography of self-organization.   (More)
• William Bechtel (ms). Molecules, systems, and behavior: Another view of memory consolidation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: From its genesis in the 1960s, the focus of inquiry in neuroscience has been on the cellular and molecular processes underlying neural activity. In this pursuit neuroscience has been enormously successful. Like any successful scientific inquiry, initial successes have raised new questions that inspire ongoing research. While there is still much that is not known about the molecular processes in brains, a great deal of very important knowledge has been secured, especially in the last 50 years. It has also attracted the attention of a number of philosophers, some of whom have viewed it as evidence for a ruthlessly reductionistic program that will eventually explain how mental processes are performed in the brain in purely molecular terms. As neuroscience developed, however, there emerged a smaller group of researchers who focused on systems, behavioral, and cognitive neuroscience. These investigators have also made impressive advances in the last 50 years and they have been the focus of an even larger group of philosophers, who have appealed to systems level understanding of the brain as providing the appropriate point of connection to the information processing accounts advanced in psychology
• Olga N. Nikitina-den Besten, Elena Rozhdestvenskaya & Victoria Semenova, Women's biographies and women's memory of war.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      This article is the English-language pre-print version of the chapter published in "Hitlers Sklaven" (in German). The volume "Hitlers Sklaven" (2008) is a result of a massive international oral history project aimed to study forced and slave labour for the Nazi regime during World War II. Within this volume, our article focuses specifically on the experiences of Russian women - former slave labourers. Biographical interviews with these now elderly women were carried out in 2005 in Pskov. The Russian region of Pskov borders on Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia, and was occupied by the Germans from July, 1941 to July, 1944. This resulted, in particular, in approximately 150,000 people deported from Pskov region only (out of the estimated 3 mln people deported from the USSR as a whole).The article distinguishes between several categories of interviewees: women - civilians, deported to forced works from occupied territories; women subjected to the draft, who were then taken prisoners and forced to work; and finally, women who worked in occupation. The work could be in industry, construction, or agriculture. Girls often baby-sat for babies and younger children in a camp or at a farm. Themes of pre-war childhood memories, childhood labour, love during the war are also featured in the article.The article highlights the gender-specific nature of war memories. It is revealed in the way of constructing a biographical story around the souvenirs of feelings, rather than of particular events, and also constructing different gendered identities through such a story.The article also outlines the strategies of the respondents' adaptation to post-war life in the Soviet Union, where the interviewees were often repressed or stigmatised. Such biographical strategies include normalisation, compensation and hyper-compensation, and anonymisation. Besides, the article tells about narrative strategies of coping with a trauma, such as fragmentation (having gaps in the life story) and emotional detachment. These findings and the oral history material featured in the article are especially important in the context of Russia where public discourse was dominated, until recently, by the silence about people deported to Germany, and this didn't allow them to fully overcome their traumatic experiences
• Bernd Binder, Spacetime memory: Phase-locked geometric phases.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Spacetime memory is defined with a holonomic approach to information processing, where multi-state stability is introduced by a non-linear phase-locked loop. Geometric phases serve as the carrier of physical information and geometric memory (of orientation) given by a path integral measure of curvature that is periodically refreshed. Regarding the resulting spin-orbit coupling and gauge field, the geometric nature of spacetime memory suggests to assign intrinsic computational properties to the electromagnetic field
• Susan J. Blackmore, Gavin Brelstaff, Katherine Nelson & Tom Troscianko (1995). Is the richness of our visual world an illusion? Transsaccadic memory for complex scenes.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p241075
  http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/perc1995.htm
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8552459&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8552459&dopt=Abstract
  
• B. Anthony Bogues (2000). Political memory and the radical caribbean intellectual tradition: Rupert Lewis's Walter Rodney's intellectual and political thought.   (More)
• Giacomo Bonanno (2004). A characterization of Von Neumann games in terms of memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   An information completion of an extensive game is obtained by extending the information partition of every player from the set of her decision nodes to the set of all nodes. The extended partition satisfies Memory of Past Knowledge (MPK) if at any node a player remembers what she knew at earlier nodes. It is shown that MPK can be satisfied in a game if and only if the game is von Neumann (vN) and satisfies memory at decision nodes (the restriction of MPK to a player's own decision nodes). A game is vN if any two decision nodes that belong to the same information set of a player have the same number of predecessors. By providing an axiom for MPK we also obtain a syntactic characterization of the said class of vN games
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/l414661744k23674/fulltext.pdf
  
• Giacomo Bonanno (ms). Memory and perfect recall in extensive games.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: ∗I am grateful to two anonymous referees for helpful and constructive comments. A first version of this paper was presented at the fifth conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT5), Torino, June 2002
• Nick Bostrom (online). Cortical integration: Possible solutions to the binding and linking problems in perception, reasoning and long term memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The problem of cortical integration is described and various proposed solutions, including grandmother cells, cell assemblies, feed-forward structures, RAAM and synchronization, are reviewed. One method, involving complex attractors, that has received little attention in the literature, is explained and developed. I call this binding through annexation. A simulation study is then presented which suggests ways in which complex attractors could underlie our capacity to reason. The paper ends with a discussion of the efficiency and biological plausibility of the proposals as integration mechanisms for different regions and functions of the brain
• George Bragues (ms). Memory and morals in memento: Hume at the movies.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      In the hopes of directing students to the great philosophic texts through the entertainment fare they consume, this article analyzes the philosophic significance of Memento, a 2000 film directed by Christopher Nolan. We understand the film as a thought experiment in which memory capacity is partially removed from the main character, Leonard Shelby. The experiment is run with Leonard's thoughts and behavior according with Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology. As a result, Memento ends up illustrating Hume's positions on personal identity, the character of justice, and the intellectual limitations of the human mind
• Denis Bradley (2003). Review of Peter A.Redpath (ed.), A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson.   (More)
• R. A. Brown (1997). Consciousness in a self-learning, memory-controlled, compound machine.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=12662520&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/08936080/1997/00000010/00000007/art00057
  
• J. Case (2004). Offloading memory to the environment: A quantitative example.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/v38705833611179g/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/V38705833611179G.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2004/00000014/00000003/05267380
  
• Jim Chen (ms). Mastering Eliot's paradox: Fostering cultural memory in an age of illusion and allusion.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      The craft of librarianship should inform the law governing the acquisition, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. Drawing upon T.S. Eliot's works of literary criticism, part I of this article describes the contradictory role of cultural memory in a society saturated with new information. Even as the accumulation of information in a technologically explosive society heightens the value of the most prominent cultural landmarks, each distinct cultural expression commands an ever-diminishing amount of attention. Parts II and III turn from literary theory to legal doctrine. After reviewing the Supreme Court's cases on library management, part II endorses two basic principles within the law of librarianship as a branch of First Amendment jurisprudence. First, decisions to acquire material should lie beyond judicial challenge. Second, legislative mandates to exclude material should draw strict scrutiny and should be presumed unconstitutional. Part III concludes that uncertainty within the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on librarianship should be resolved in favor of more liberal access to information
• David Christensen & Hilary Kornblith (1997). Testimony, memory and the limits of the a priori.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A number of philosophers, from Thomas Reid1 through C. A. J. Coady2, have argued that one is justified in relying on the testimony of others, and furthermore, that this should be taken as a basic epistemic presumption. If such a general presumption were not ultimately dependent on evidence for the reliability of other people, the ground for this presumption would be a priori. Such a presumption would then have a status like that which Roderick Chisholm claims for the epistemic principle that we are justified in believing what our senses tell us
• Joanne B. Ciulla (2007). The man with a hole in his heart: In memory of Robert C. Solomon 1942–2007.   (More)
• Axel Cleeremans, Filling one gap by creating another one: Memory stabilization is not all-or-nothing either.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In a laudable effort to move beyond simplistic "All-or-Nothing" views on the role of sleep in memory consolidation, Walker proposes that memory traces acquired during a learning episode further undergo at least two distinct sorts of modifications after practice has ended (that is, "off-line"): Consolidation-based stabilization (CBS) and consolidation-based enhancement (CBE). The first set of processes would be dependent on wakefulness, while the second would be dependent on sleep. While we certainly agree with the author that previous characterizations of the role of sleep during memory formation has tended to focus on simplistic distinctions, it also appears to us that Walker's own proposal, in which a sharp distinction is made between wake-dependent CBS and sleep-dependent CBE, falls into the same trap
• Rebecca Copenhaver (online). Reid on memory and personal identity.   (More)
• Daniel C. Dennett (1995). Is Perception the "Leading Edge" of Memory?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Daniel C. Dennett

  Is Perception the 'Leading Edge' of Memory?

  Consciousness appears to us to consist of a sequence of contentful items, arranged in a sequence, the so-called "stream of consciousness," in which each item in turn bursts quite suddenly into consciousness and thereby enters memory, perhaps only briefly to be remembered, and then forgotten. I think that hidden in this comfortable and largely innocent picture of consciousness is a deep and seductive mistake. I intend to expose and elucidate that mistake, and describe an alternative vision
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/dennett.memory.html
  
• Pieter Duvenage (1999). The politics of memory and forgetting after auschwitz and apartheid.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article focuses on the politics of memory and forgetting after Auschwitz and apartheid. In the first two sections Habermas' critical contribution to the German Historikerstreit is discussed. Important in this regard is the moral dimension of our relation to the past. In the next two sections the emphasis shifts to South Africa and more specifically the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The article ends with a general discussion of the dilemma of historical 'truth' and representation in contemporary societies. Key Words: apartheid • Habermas • Historikerstreit • history • South Africa
• Andrée Ehresmann & Jean-Paul Vanbremeersch, Semantics and communication for memory evolutive systems.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In a series of preceding papers, the authors have developed the theory of Memory Evolutive Systems which represents a mathematical model (based on Category theory) for natural open self-organizing systems, such as biological, sociological or neural systems. In these systems, the dynamics is modulated by the cooperative or/and competitive interactions between the global system and a net of internal more or less specialized Centers of Regulation (CR) with a differential access to a central hierarchical Memory. Each CR operates at its own complexity level and time-scale, but their strategies are competitive, whence a 'dialectics between heterogeneous CRs which is at the root of higher order cognition. The problem tackled in the present paper is the emergence of a Semantics in the MES modeling a cognitive system; it relies on the detection of specific invariances by the CRs that leads to classify objects according to their main attributes, and form new formal units representing their invariance classes. The idea is that a (lower) CR, say E, classifies two objects B and C as having 'the same shape' if they activate the same pattern of its actors; however this classification remains implicit for E itself and it can be apprehended only by a higher Ievel CR which may memorize the invariance class by a higher object, called a 'E-concept'. The concepts with respect to the various CRs form the semantic memory which gives more flexibility in the evaluation, selection and memorization of appropriate strategies, as well as in internal or external communications
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/2075/0/Baden-Baden_92.htm
  http://cogprints.org/2075/0/Baden%2DBaden_92.htm
  
• Eric Eich, J. L. Reeves & R. L. Katz (1985). Anesthesia, amnesia, and the memory/awareness distinction.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.anesthesiaandanalgesia.com/cgi/content/abstract/64/12/1143
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=4061894&dopt=Citation
  
• Jordi Fernandez (2006). Memory and perception: Remembering snowflake.   (More)
• Jordi Fernández (2006). Memory and perception: Remembering snowflake.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: If I remember something, I tend to believe that I have perceived it. Similarly, if I remember something, I tend to believe that it happened in the past. My aim here is to propose a notion of mnemonic contentaccounts for these facts. Certain proposals build perceptual experiences into the content of memories. I argue that they Have trouble with the second belief. Other proposals build references to temporal locations into mnemonic content. I argue that they have trouble with the second one. I propose a notion of mnemonic Content that can account for the rationality of both beliefs
• Jordi Fernandez (2008). Memory, past and self.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to determine how we should construe the content of memories. First, I distinguish two features of memory that a construal of mnemic content should respect. These are the ‘attribution of pastness’ feature (a subject is inclined to believe of those events that she remembers that they happened in the past) and the ‘attribution of existence’ feature (a subject is inclined to believe that she existed at the time that those events that she remembers took place). Next, I distinguish two kinds of theories of memory, which I call ‘perceptual’ and ‘self-based’ theories. I argue that those theories that belong to the first kind but not the second one have trouble accommodating the attribution of existence. And theories that belong to the second kind but not the first one leave the attribution of pastness unexplained. I then discuss two different theories that are both perceptual and self-based, which I eventually reject. Finally, I propose a perceptual, self-based theory that can account for both the attribution of pastness and the attribution of past existence
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/88873857245700k5/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/88873857245700k5.pdf
  
• Alan Fox (ms). Book review: In the mirror of memory: Reflections on mindfulness and remembrance in indian and tibetan buddhism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This book is the outgrowth of a panel of papers on the theme of "memory," presented at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion. Four of the contributors to this volume, including Western phenomenologist Edward Casey from SUNY Stony Brook, participated in that panel, though the papers were obviously further developed since that inceptional presentation. The book focusses on the crucial but heretofore almost entirely overlooked topic of memory and remembrance as it appears in the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. There are 11 papers here, plus an editor's introduction, and though some of them seem to overlap somewhat, none makes any of the others completely redundant or unnecessary. The result is a very thorough and novel treatment of a crucially important subject for Buddhologists, and is further a fine example of Comparative Philosophy
• Liane Gabora, Revenge of the 'neurds': Characterizing creative thought in terms of the structure and dynamics of memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Empirical results suggest that defocusing attention results in primary process or associative thought , conducive to finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in secondary process or analytic thought , conducive to rule-based operations. Creativity appears to involve both. It is widely believed that it is possible to escape mental fixation by spontaneously and temporarily engaging in a more divergent or associative mode of thought. The resulting insight (if found) may be refined in a more analytic mode of thought. The question addressed here is: how does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and what is happening at the neural level when one shifts between them? Recent advances in neuroscience shed light on this. It was demonstrated that activated cell assemblies are composed of multiple ‘neural cliques’, groups of neurons that respond differentially to general or context-specific aspects of a situation. I refer to neural cliques that would not be included in the assembly if one were in an analytic mode, but would be if one were in an associative mode, as ‘neurds’. It is posited that the shift to a more associative mode of thought conducive to insight is accomplished by recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical subsymbolic microfeatures of the problem or situation. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable this fosters remindings and the forging of creative connections to potentially relevant items previously encoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought involves neither randomness, nor search through a space of predefined alternatives, but emerges naturally through the recruitment of neurds. It is suggested this occurs when there is a need to resolve conceptual gaps in ones’ internal model of the world, and resolution involves context-driven actualization of the potentiality afforded by its fine-grained associative structure
• Sanford C. Goldberg (1997). Self-ascription, self-knowledge, and the memory argument.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: is tendentious. (Throughout this paper I shall refer to this claim as
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-8284.00078/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8284.00078
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/1997/00000057/00000255/art00078
  
• Sanford C. Goldberg (2005). The dialectical context of Boghossian's memory argument.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Externalism1 is the thesis that some propositional attitudes depend for their individuation on features of the thinker’s (social and/or physical) environment. The doctrine of self-knowledge of thoughts is the thesis that for all thinkers S and occurrent thoughts that p, S has authoritative and non-empirical knowledge of her thought that p. A much-discussed question in the literature is whether these two doctrines are compatible. In this paper I attempt to respond to one argument for an incompatibilist conclusion, Boghossian’s 1989 ‘Memory Argument.’
• Charles Hanly & Christopher Nichols (2001). A disturbance of psychoanalytic memory: The case of John Rickman's three-person psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article deals with two aspects of psychoanalytic history. The first is the history of ideas, specifically the notions of a one- and two-person psychology that are in such wide use today. Second, the authors attend, much more critically, to a disturbance of memory (repeated distortion, omission, selective representation, and misrepresentation) that has accompanied scholarly discussion of these ideas for the past 50 years. Finally, the authors attempt to restore the original meaning of the person-psychology concept and illustrate its relevance for contemporary psychoanalytic debate
• David B. Hershenov (2007). The memory criterion and the problem of backward causation.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Lockeans, as well as their critics, have pointed out that the memory criterion is likely to mean that none of us were ever fetuses or even infants due to the lack of direct psychological connections between then and now. But what has been overlooked is that the memory criterion leads to either backward causation and a violation of Locke’s own very plausible principle that we can have only one origin, or backward causation and a number of overlapping people where we thought there was just one. I will argue that such problems cannot be avoided by replacing direct psychological connections with overlapping chains of connectedness—what has been called “psychological continuity.”
• Christoph Hoerl (1999). Memory, amnesia, and the past.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper defends the claim that, in order to have a concept of time, subjects must have memories of particular events they once witnessed. Some patients with severe amnesia arguably still have a concept of time. Two possible explanations of their grasp of this concept are discussed. They take as their respective starting points abilities preserved in the patients in question: (1) the ability to retain factual information over time despite being unable to recall the past event or situation that information stems from, and (2) the ability to remember at least some past events or situations themselves (typically because retrograde amnesia is not complete). It is argued that a satisfactory explanation of what it is for subjects to have a concept of time must make reference to their having episodic memories such as those mentioned under (2). It is also shown how the question as to whether subjects have such memories, and thus whether they possess a concept of time, enters into our explanation of their actions
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0017.00111
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0017.00111
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/mila/1999/00000014/00000002/art00111
  
• Michael Huemer (ms). The problem of memory knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: both the initial justification for adopting it and the justification for retaining it provided by seeming memories. This view captures our intuitions about justification in several cases, while none of the alternative views can
• Alumit Ishai & D. Sagi (1998). Visual imagery and visual perception: The role of memory and conscious awareness.   (More)
• Jenann Ismael (ms). Memory and temporal phenomenology.   (More)
• Richard Joyce (1997). Cartesian memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission
• Frank C. Keil, W. Carter Smith & Cedric L. Williams, Leammg and memory: Systems anaiysis.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: ces, learning facts and gaining conceptual knowlge, recognizing objects and people, and acquiring ills and habits. Scientific thinking about memory was minated for many years by the assumption that mory is a unitary or monolithic entityRi2;a single ulty of the mind and brain. However, the assumpri of a unitary memory has been challenged by conging evidence from psychology and neuroscience inting toward multiple memory systems that can be sociated from one another. This chapter provides a torical introduction to the issue and summarizes..
• Marvin Eli Kirsh, The universe framed with respect to paradox: Is memory physically all that exists?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      If all of the motive forces of the physical world, physically of the world, can be agreed upon to occur from the conceptual/ethereal as a confrontation of the logically entailed with its' antithesis, as the paradox, a scheme might be evolved to detail all phenomenon as occurrences that are the result of an elemental universal construction effected by the inversion, then one might account for the sciences, its' theory, the questions of nature, natural history, human history, rather than as explanation, as if seeking explanation for existence in the third person, but as an accounting that is closer conceptually to the innately perceived. If it is at the juncture of paradox where the pursuits of civilization seem to expand in a never ending seeking, perhaps one might reorient his frame to define in terms of paradox. Though this reorientation does not appear on the surface as potentially productive, does not resolve the paradox, one might assume it to be the only route available and, if not productive, one might also potentially assume that all efforts to extract a knowledge of nature are in vain in the sense that one might only arrive at paradox, originating itself from an active pursuit to bear fruit for continuance. At the surface of this inquiry is presentation of a valid criteria for the ubiquitous existence of paradox throughout all of nature, though more in line with presentation first of paradox and subsequently exposed as ubiquitous and employed for explanation. Since paradox arises from the willed/active application of the intellect to the external world there is no ground to assume that it is innate itself in a simpler setting of nature, the natural world and its' processes, in this presentation I will try to establish that paradox, defined as logically irreconcilable conflict, other than being solely the product of active perception, is, in an analogous corresponding form, ubiquitously companioned ,and tangential to direction, a partner to the inversion that pervades the universe. The inversion is given as a substrate for the faces of the paradox and the two combined as an elemental unit of nature. With regards to paradoxes of mind and matter, an ultimate conceptually/philosophically arrived paradox, a synthesis of the physical/biological/philosophical concepts with the empirical, DNA is given a role as the actual embodiment of all that can and does ensue in the universe - path and memory. In light of theory and current research results in the science of physics, DNA is elevated, with potential, scientific validity, to possess both a ubiquitous nature and unique existence confined to biological entities as 'a physical piece of physical path', a biological source of all memory, perception and cognition, a physically energetic absolute and fixed differential standard of path/emergence in physical form, contained physical emergence that serves to energetically emerge, and defining of all from a first perspective beholding to the possessor of life as a sole criteria for perspective and reference with which to scientifically organize experiences of nature
• Klaas (2002). Externalism, Memory, and Self-Knowledge.   (More)
• Jon Pérez Laraudogoitia (2004). Essays on the history of mechchanics: In memory of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell and edoardo Benvenuto.   (More)
• Daniel T. Levin, Daniel J. Simons, Bonnie L. Angelone & Christopher Chabris (2002). Memory for centrally attended changing objects in an incidental real-world change detection paradigm.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/reprints/
  http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Levin2002.pdf
  http://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~cfc/Levin2002.pdf
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/levin02memory.html
  http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Levin2002.pdf
  http://www.vanderbilt.edu/psychhumdev/levin/labpage/papers/LevinSimAngCha.pdf
  http://edata.ub.unimaas.nl/www-ereaders/FdP-readers/e-readerdocs/Levin-Memory.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12230832&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12230832&dopt=Abstract
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpsoc/bjp/2002/00000093/00000003/art00001
  
• Peter Ludlow (1999). First-person authority and memory.   (More)
• Bruce J. MacLennan, Mixing memory and desire: Want and will in neural modeling.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Values are critical for intelligent behavior, since values determine interests, and interests determine relevance. Therefore we address relevance and its role in intelligent behavior in animals and machines. Animals avoid exhaustive enumeration of possibilities by focusing on relevant aspects of the environment, which emerge into the (cognitive) foreground, while suppressing irrelevant aspects, which submerge into the background. Nevertheless, the background is not invisible, and aspects of it can pop into the foreground if background processing deems them potentially relevant. Essential to these ideas are questions of how contexts are switched, which defines cognitive/behavioral episodes, and how new contexts are created, which allows the efficiency of foreground/background processing to be extended to new behaviors and cognitive domains. Next we consider mathematical characterizations of the foreground/background distinction, which we treat as a dynamic separation of the concrete space into (approximately) orthogonal subspaces, which are processed differently. Background processing is characterized by large receptive fields which project into a space of relatively low dimension to accomplish rough categorization of a novel stimulus and its approximate location. Such background processing is partly innate and partly learned, and we discuss possible correlational (Hebbian) learning mechanisms. Foreground processing is characterized by small receptive fields which project into a space of comparatively high dimension to accomplish precise categorization and localization of the stimuli relevant to the context. We also consider mathematical models of valences and affordances, which are an aspect of the foreground. Cells processing foregound information have no fixed meaning (i.e., their meaning is contextual), so it is necessary to explain how the processing accomplished by foreground neurons can be made relative to the context. Thus we consider the properties of several simple mathematical models of how the contextual representation controls foreground processing. We show how simple correlational processes accomplish the contextual separation of foreground from background on the basis of differential reinforcement. That is, these processes account for the contextual separation of the concrete space into disjoint subspaces corresponding to the foreground and background. Since an episode may comprise the activation of several contexts (at varying levels of activity) we consider models, suggested by quantum mechanics, of foreground processing in superposition. That is, the contextual state may be a weighted superposition of several pure contexts, with a corresponding superposition of the foreground representations and the processes operating on them. This leads us to a consideration of the nature and origin of contexts. Although some contexts are innate, many are learned. We discuss a mathematical model of contexts which allows a context to split into several contexts, agglutinate from several contexts, or to constellate out of relatively acontextual processing. Finally, we consider the acontextual processing which occurs when the current context is no longer relevant, and may trigger the switch to another context or the formation of a new context. We relate this to the situation known as "breakdown" in phenomenology
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/84/0/MMD.ps
  
• Mohan Matthen (2010). Is memory preservation?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I want to know whether I consumed the Canada Health recommended portion of fruits and vegetables yesterday. I try to remember, and I conclude that I ate five servings of fruits and vegetables during the course of the day. Presumably, propositions like the following figure in my calculations: 1. For lunch yesterday, I ate a grilled tomato with my hamburger. Usually, the remembered image of eating the tomato will figure in the provenance of remembering 1
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/r42540524wpk1j78/fulltext.pdf
  
• Ferdi Memelli (ms). Memory and metaphysics: a joint reading of Time and Being and What is metaphysics.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Abstract The article is a reading, in conjunction with one-another, of Time and Being and What is metaphysics. Its scope is that of raising questions on certain Heideggerian topics that are here formulated as thesis. Namely, first that the turn in Heidegger’s thinking is not a change in his process of thinking, but rather an essential trait of what Heidegger calls the matter at hand (Sachverhalt). Secondly, that this turn of the matter at hand is in itself memory in a twofold way: as metaphysics in its relation to being and time, and as questioning of this metaphysical relation. And finally, that this turn is a technical one, in the sense of technique as this latter is, in Heidegger’s thinking, the original determination of Being as Anwesenheit.
• Paul Mendes-Flohr (2007). The secularisation of jewish cultural memory: Epistemological and hermeneutical reflections.   (More)
• Philip M. Merikle & M. Daneman (1996). Memory for unconsciously perceived events: Evidence from anesthetized patients.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~pmerikle/papers/Merikle.ConsCogn.1996.pdf
  http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/courses/3702/readings/MerikleDaneman1996.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9063614&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9063614&dopt=Abstract
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ap/cc/1996/00000005/00000004/art00031
  
• Arthur I. Miller (2007). Unconscious thought, intuition, and visual imagery: A critique of "working memory, cerebellum, and creativity".   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1080/10400410701277456
  
• Cathleen Moore (2001). Inattentional blindness: Perception or memory and what does it matter?   (More)
• Gabriel Motzkin (2007). Memory and the other.   (More)
• Glen Mazis (1988). Merleau-Ponty: The Depth of Memory as the Depth of the World.   (More)
• Yujin Nagasawa (2002). Externalism and the memory argument.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://phonline.org/paper.php?keynum=206
  http://www.cappe.edu.au/people/nagayu/3Memory.pdf
  http://www.philosophy.bham.ac.uk/pdf/Nagasawa/Memory.pdf
  http://www.philosophy.bham.ac.uk/staff/nagasawa_Memory.pdf
  http://www.ptr.bham.ac.uk/staff/docs/nagasawa_externalism.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2002.tb00249.x
  http://www.yujinnagasawa.com/resources/memory.pdf
  
• Jennifer Nagel (online). Factual memory, metacognition and internalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I believe that pandas eat bamboo shoots, that Kampala is in Uganda and that Buffalo Bill’s last name was Cody. I can’t remember how I first acquired these beliefs, and can’t support them by appeal to anything else I know about pandas, African geography or the Wild West. In recent years, beliefs of just this type— call them trivia beliefs—have attracted considerable attention from participants in epistemology’s internalism-externalism debate.1 Externalists see trivia beliefs as clear counterexamples to the internalist theory of justification, the theory that maintains that all of the factors determining whether a belief is justified must be accessible to the subject. Externalists claim that (1) there is nothing accessible to the subject to support trivia beliefs; and (2) such beliefs are nonetheless obviously justified, or enjoy some positive epistemic status.2 It does seem odd to suggest we should give up such beliefs, or that we are irresponsible to hold them: indeed we’re inclined to say that these little tidbits of forgotten origin are things that we know. Pondering the status of trivia beliefs in light of these externalist arguments, it can start to seem mysterious why anyone would have been attracted to internalism in the first place
• Ralph Nelson (2005). A thomistic tapestry: Essays in memory of étienne Gilson.   (More)
• Dmitri Nikulin (2008). Memory and history.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article traces some modern conceptions of memory in history (Halbwachs, Nora), indirectly comparing them with the ancient poetic tradition of so-called “catalogue poetry.” In the discussion of memory and oblivion, I argue that history encompasses multiple histories rather than constituting one single teleological and universal history. Every history is produced by a historical narrative that follows and interprets what may be called the historical proper, which comprises lists of names of people, things, or events that have to be kept and transmitted within a history. The historical and the narrative within a history are relatively independent, insofar as the narrative that interprets the historical may in principle change, whereas the historical has to be preserved, which is the primary task of historical memory. Historical being, then, is being remembered within a history
• Gregory Nixon (2010). Hollows of Memory: From Individual Consciousness to Panexperientialism and Beyond.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Preface/Introduction
  
  The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects – how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself.
  
  
  
  What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my websty awaiting its call. “From Panexperiential-ism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the recently closed Karl Jaspers Forum (for discussion purposes only).
  
  
  
  I have put them in a different sequence here, for reasons of logical sense. Up first, “Panexperientialism” deals with an idea difficult for many to accept, namely that conscious experience is a particular mode of symbolically reflected experience that is largely unique to our species. However, I aver that experienced sensation in itself (as found, for example, in autonomic sensory response systems) goes “all the way down” into nature, and thus the title, panexperientialism.
  
  
  
  Understanding this idea is helpful to dealing with the focus on language in Part I of “Hollows”, next, since here speech and general symbolic interaction in general are found to be the catalysts for the creation of our consciously experienced world (our “lived reality”). In Part II, however, I explore how experienced sensations must be coeval with existence, and, with even greater temerity, how all this sensational existence might have arisen within some literally inconceivable background of awareness-in-itself that yet has a dynamism that occasionally breaks into existence as experiential events and entities. (The latter may sound wacky, but physicists and cosmologists are themselves attempting to come to terms with that which seethes with vast potential energy in what they refer to as the quantum vacuum.)
  
  
  
  “Myth and Mind” was put third since it deals with a major lacuna in “Hollows” – that presumed prehistoric period when members of our species made the painful crossing of the symbolic threshold into the beginnings of cultural consciousness. Speech plays a central role here, too, but I look more at narrative structures from the dawn of self-awareness when ritual and myth became vital to human survival. Why would fantastic stories and bizarre rituals be necessary? I speculate that growing foresight led to the unavoidable realization of certain mortality, from which, in turn, emerged the secondary realization that we were now alive. In contrast to our yet-to-come death, we have life here and now, and by ritually identifying with a symbolically expanded mythic, i.e., sacred, reality, we may continue to live on after bodily death, just as our ancestors and loved ones must also do. Language and mythmaking are necessary to avoid mortal despair and they remain at the core of human consciousness.
  
  
  
  As Ernst Cassirer (1944) has noted, language and myth are “twin creatures”, both metaphoric webs over a reality we can never wholly comprehend. We live in the symbolic and construct our works of imagination and wars of conquest to make life meaningful, to feel immortal, and to sense that we ourselves participate in a reality greater than ourselves. No doubt we do, but this does not mean our culturally constructed self-identities survive the death of our bodies, and it does not imply that our symbolic concepts can ever indicate the ultimate truth. We simply must symbolize an extended reality that was sacred to our ancestors: “Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imagi-nary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?” (Crapanzano, p. 210)
  
  
  
  Of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to admit that this venture of mine must inevitably be another attempt at meaningful mythmaking. But what else could it be? This is certainly not a scientific proof though it is indeed an academically rigorous exploration. (Just try to count the citations!) I hope the reader will judge my thesis on the basis of its coherence, the sense of meaning it evokes, my intellectual responsibility, and, finally, the engagement it inspires. If you have read my expositions and found yourself immersed in the timeless questions I here call forth, I would call these writings successful (even if you violently disagree with my answers).
  
  
  
  I am very grateful to Huping Hu for granting me this special issue of JCER in which to present my ideas in some detail. He has patiently dealt with my exuberant approach and allowed the many changes I kept coming up with right until the final publication date. I also wish to thank the many potential commentators who politely replied to my invitation, and, even more, I thank those who made time to write actual commentaries.
  
  
  
  References
  
  
  
  Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Hu-man Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP.
  
  
  
  Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.
  
  
  
  Gregory M. Nixon
  
  University of Northern British Columbia
  
  Prince George, British Columbia, Canada
  
  Email: doknyx@shaw.ca
  
  Websty: http://members.shaw.ca/doknyx
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  
  
  Preface/Introduction 213
  
  
  
  From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience:
  
  The Continuum of Experience 216
  
  
  
  Hollows of Experience 234
  
  
  
  Myth and Mind:
  
  The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred 289
  
  
• Angelica Nuzzo (2008). History and memory in Hegel's phenomenology.   (More)
• David J. Owens (1999). The authority of memory.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0378.00091
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0378.00091
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/ejop/1999/00000007/00000003/art00091
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/ejop/1999/00000007/00000003/art00002
  
• Max Pensky (1989). On the use and abuse of memory: Habermas, "anamnestic solidarity," and the historikerstreit.   (More)
• W. A. Phillips (1974). On the distinction between sensory storage and visual short-term memory.   (More)
• Nancy Potter (2006). Relational remembering: Rethinking the memory wars.   (More)
• Eyal Reingold (ms). On the perceptual specificity of memory representations.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The present paradigm involved manipulating the congruency of the perceptual processing during the study and test phases of a recognition memory task. During each trial, a gaze-contingent window was used to limit the stimulus display to a region either inside or outside a 108 square centred on the participant’s point of gaze, constituting the Central and Peripheral viewing modes respectively. The window position changed in real time in concert with changes in gaze position. Four experiments documented better task performance when viewing modes at encoding and retrieval matched than when they mismatched (i.e., perceptual specificity effects). Viewing mode congruency effects were demonstrated with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. The present research is motivated and discussed in terms of theoretical views proposed in the 1970s including the levels-of-processing framework and the proceduralist viewpoint. In addition, implications for current processing and multiple systems views of memory are outlined
• Ronald Rensink (ms). Rapid resumption: A new form of memory in visual search.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: We report on a new visual search task in which observers make highly accurate two-alternative forced-choice responses within 100-400 ms of display onset. This is a striking result, since accurate responding in a difficult search of this kind is usually possible only after at least 500 ms from display onset. The conditions under which such rapid responses are obtained involve brief initial glimpses of a search display interrupted by either a blank screen or a glimpse of a second display. On re-presentation of the original display, a significant proportion of responses are made within 100-500 ms. Since these responses are never made in the absence of display re-presentation, they are evidence of "rapid resumption" of the search task. We report experiments exploring the conditions critical for rapid resumption and consider its implications for memorial processes in visual search
• Mario Saenz (1991). Memory, enchantment and salvation: Latin american philosophies of liberation and the religions of the oppressed.   (More)
• John T. Sanders (1985). Experience, memory and intelligence.   (More)
• Lokendra Shastri (2002). Episodic memory and cortico-hippocampal interactions.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/shastri02episodic.html
  http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri/psfiles/ShastriTicsEM02.pdf
  http://www.paed.uni-muenchen.de/~allg1/lehrveranstaltungen/akt_arb/Shastri2002.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11912039&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/13646613/2002/00000006/00000004/art01868
  
• Michael Stanford (1994). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative.   (More)
• John Sutton (2000). Author's response to reviews by Catherine Wilson, Michael mascuch, and Theo Meyering.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics
• John Sutton (2007). Batting, habit, and memory: The embodied mind and the nature of skill.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: in Jeremy McKenna (ed), At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book in the series Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis)
• John Sutton (2008). Between individual and collective memory: Interaction, coordination, distribution.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: in special collective memory issue of Social Research: an international quarterly of the social sciences (winter 2007-08, volume 75 number 1)
• John Sutton (2002). Cognitive conceptions of language and the development of autobiographical memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The early development of autobiographical memory is a useful case study both for examining general relations between language and memory, and for investigating the promise and the difficulty of interdisciplinary research in the cognitive sciences of memory. An otherwise promising social-interactionist view of autobiographical memory development relies in part on an overly linguistic conception of mental representation. This paper applies an alternative, ‘supra-communicative’ view of the relation between language and thought, along the lines developed by Andy Clark, to this developmental framework. A pluralist approach to current theories of autobiographical memory development is sketched: shared early narratives about the past function in part to stabilize and structure the child’s own autobiographical memory system
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/SuttonCognitiveConceptionsLanguage.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/02715309/2002/00000022/00000003/art00013
  
• John Sutton (2007). Integrating the philosophy and psychology of memory: Two case studies.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: in Massimo Marraffa, Mario de Caro, & Francesco Ferretti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: philosophy & psychology in intersection (Springer), pp. 81-92
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Cartographies_Sutton_memory.doc
  
• John Sutton (2007). Material agency, skills, and history: Distributed cognition and the archaeology of memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: for Lambros Malafouris and Carl Knappett (eds), Material Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach (Springer, late 2007)
• John Sutton (2008). Material agency, skills and history: Distributed cognition and the archaeology of memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: If cognition is distributed as well as embodied, then explanation in cognitive science must often highlight more or less transient extended systems spanning embodied brains, social networks or resources and key parts of the natural and the cultural world. These key parts of material culture are not simply cues which trigger the truly cognitive apparatus inside the head but instead form ‘‘a continuous part of the machinery itself’’, as ‘‘systemic components the interaction of which brings forth the cognitive process in question’’ (Malafouris, 2004:58). On this view, cognitive science is thus not just the study of the brain: indeed, even neuroscience cannot be the study of the brain alone, for brains coupled with external resources may have unique functional and dynamical characteristics apparent only when we also attend to the nature of those resources and the peculiarities of the interaction. This chapter argues that if cognition is indeed thus distributed, then cognition is also historical and heterogeneous and must also be analysed diachronically and differentially. If mind is extended, that is to say, then historical cognitive sciences are essential to the interdisciplinary enterprise. This is not just because individual brains themselves are ‘‘biosocial organs permeated by history’’ (Cowley, 2002:75) but also on the longer scale because of dramatic historical diversity in the nature, properties and use of cognitive artefacts. According to Andy Clark, ‘‘the single most important task’’ for ‘‘a science of the bio-technological mind’’ is to understand ‘‘the range and variety of types of cognitive scaffolding and the different ways in which non-biological scaffolding can augment (or impair) performance’’ (Clark, 2002:29, my italics). Unique historical and cultural features of human beings extended cognitive make-up are thus not accidental extras added to a basic biologically given mind. Rather, such changing media, objects, routines, institutions and practices have....
• John Sutton (2002). Porous memory and the cognitive life of things.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/cognitivelifeofthings.htm
  
• John Sutton (ms). Running head: From individual to collective memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The Psychological Study of Social Memory Phenomena Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And “in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event” (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p.129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime they happened to witness together. Psychology is at the heart of recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the relationships between an individual remembering alone, an individual remembering in a group, and the group itself remembering
• John Sutton (2004). Representation, reduction, and interdisciplinarity in the sciences of memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. Introduction: memory and interdisciplinarity (footnote 1) Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, in a daunting range of disciplines, and with a vast array of methods. Is there any sense at all in which memory theorists - from neurobiologists to narrative theorists, from the developmental to the postcolonial, from the computational to the cross-cultural - are studying the same phenomena? This exploratory review paper sketches the bare outline of a positive framework for understanding current work on memory, both within the various cognitive sciences and across the gulfs between the cognitive and the social sciences
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Sutton_representation_memory.html
  
• Jakub Szymanik (2010). Quantifiers and Working Memory.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The paper presents a study examining the role of working
  memory in quantifier verification. We created situations similar to the
  span task to compare numerical quantifiers of low and high rank, parity
  quantifiers and proportional quantifiers. The results enrich and support
  the data obtained previously in and predictions drawn from a computational
  model.
• Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu (2010). Enhancing Eyewitness Memory in a Rape Case.   (More)
• Author unknown (online). Memory.   (More)
• Roger Wasserman (2008). On a common and unmooted (neo-)platonic source for the Husserlian and Augustinian conceptions of memory: A response to Michael R. Kelly.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Although Michael Kelly, in his article, “On the Mind’s Pronouncement of Time” (Proceedings of the ACPA 78 [2005]: 247–62), is correct to maintain that Augustine and Husserl share a common conception of time-consciousness, I argue that the similarity does not lie where he thinks nor is it restricted to Husserl’s early period. Instead I locate the source of this commonality in a shared response to a particular Platonic problematic, which I find expressed at Parmenides 151e–152e. This essay shows how the Neoplatonic conception of time, which I claim inspired Augustine, emerged from that problematic and how Husserl, in a thought experimentfrom 1901, wrestles with a similar problematic before adopting a model of time-consciousness roughly analogous to that of Augustine. It is suggested that Kelly is misled by his Aristotelian approach, which causes him to regard the Augustinian and Husserlian models of memory as “trapped” in the present. The point is a significant one if, as I conclude, there is no escaping the conception of time as absolute flow, once we abandon the Platonic view of time as a completedsuccession of nows, eternally fixed
• Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (2009). Wittgenstein and the Memory Debate.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper surveys the impact on neuropsychology of Wittgenstein's elucidations of memory. Wittgenstein discredited the storage and imprint models of memory, dissolved the conceptual link between memory and mental images or representations and, upholding the context-sensitivity of memory, made room for a family resemblance concept of memory, where remembering can also amount to doing or saying something. While neuropsychology is still generally under the spell of archival and physiological notions of memory, Wittgenstein's reconceptions can be seen at work in its leading-edge practitioners. However, neuroscientists, generally, are finding memory difficult to demarcate from other cognitive and noncognitive processes, and I suggest this is largely due to their considering automatic responses as part of memory, termed nondeclarative or implicit memory. Taking my lead from Wittgenstein's On Certainty, I argue that there is only remembering where there is also some kind of mnemonic effort or attention, and, therefore, that so-called implicit memory is not memory at all, but a basic, noncognitive certainty.
• James Wetzel (2007). The force of memory: Reflections on the interrupted self.   (More)
• Robert A. Wilson (2005). Collective memory, group minds, and the extended mind thesis.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ualberta.ca/~philosop/faculty/wilson/collectmem.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/K37446N775180100.pdf
  
• Dahlia W. Zaidel & Asa Kasher (1989). Hemispheric memory for surrealistic versus realistic paintings.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The issue of hemispheric processing of art works, either alone or in relation to a certain aspect of language, was investigated in normal subjects. Three experiments were performed. In the first, memory for surrealistic versus realistic pictures was investigated. In the second, memory for metaphoric versus literal titles of these pictures was measured. In the third, memory for the paintings was determined as a function of the same titles. The results of the first experiment showed a right visual field (RVF) advantage for the surrealistic pictures. No field difference emerged for the realistic pictures. The results of the second experiment indicated a RVF advantage in memory for metaphoric titles. Moreover, in the RVF, there was an advantage for titles from surrealistic-metaphoric pairs over all other pairings. Results of experiment three showed a RVF advantage in remembering pictures from surrealistic-metaphoric pairs and in the left visual field (LVF) there was advantage for pictures with literal titles. Taken together, the results suggest left hemisphere advantage in processing meaningful, yet incongruous arrays, both pictorial and linguistic. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/943/0/artpdf.pdf
  

Epistemology of Memory

Memory and Cognitive Science

• Bernard J. Baars & Stan Franklin (2003). How conscious experience and working memory interact.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://ccrg.cs.memphis.edu/assets/papers/TICSarticle2003.pdf
  http://www.nsi.edu/users/baars/other/BaarsFranklinTICS2003.pdf
  http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/baars/other/BaarsFranklinTICS2003.pdf
  http://www.paed.uni-muenchen.de/~allg1/lehrveranstaltungen/akt_arbWS03/baars.pdf
  http://www.paed.uni-muenchen.de/~allg1/lehrveranstaltungen/akt_arbWS03/Baars.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12691765&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/13646613/2003/00000007/00000004/art00056
  
• William P. Bechtel (2001). The compatibility of complex systems and reduction: A case analysis of memory research.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   Some theorists who emphasize the complexity of biological and cognitive systems and who advocate the employment of the tools of dynamical systems theory in explaining them construe complexity and reduction as exclusive alternatives. This paper argues that reduction, an approach to explanation that decomposes complex activities and localizes the components within the complex system, is not only compatible with an emphasis on complexity, but provides the foundation for dynamical analysis. Explanation via decomposition and localization is nonetheless extremely challenging, and an analysis of recent cognitive neuroscience research on memory is used to illustrate what is involved. Memory researchers split between advocating memory systems and advocating memory processes, and I argue that it is the latter approach that provides the critical sort of decomposition and localization for explaining memory. The challenges of linking distinguishable functions with brain processes is illustrated by two examples: competing hypotheses about the contribution of the hippocampus and competing attempts to link areas in frontal cortex with memory processing
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/research/compatibilityofcomplexsystemsandreduction.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/content/p0027tt048356n56/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/p0027tt048356n56/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=352665&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/P0027TT048356N56.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2001/00000011/00000004/00352665
  
• Christopher J. Berry, David R. Shanks & Richard N. A. Henson (2006). On the status of unconscious memory: Merikle and Reingold (1991) revisited.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16822158&dopt=Citation
  
• Laurie T. Butler & Dianne C. Berry (2001). Implicit memory: Intention and awareness revisited.   (More)
• Bill Faw (2003). Pre-frontal executive committee for perception, working memory, attention, long-term memory, motor control, and thinking: A tutorial review.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.paed.uni-muenchen.de/~allg1/lehrveranstaltungen/akt_arbWS03/Faw.pdf
  http://www.paed.uni-muenchen.de/~allg1/lehrveranstaltungen/akt_arbWS03/faw.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12617864&dopt=Abstract
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12617864&dopt=Citation
  
• John M. Gardiner (2002). Episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: A first-person approach.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11571027&dopt=Citation
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0962-8436(20010929)356:1413<1351:EMAACA>2.0.CO;2-U
  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1088519
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/rsl/rtb/2001/00000356/00001413/art00003
  
• Anthony G. Greenwald, R. L. Abrams, Lionel Naccache & Stanislas Dehaene (2003). Long-term semantic memory versus contextual memory in unconscious number processing.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Subjects classified visible 2-digit numbers as larger or smaller than 55. Target numbers were preceded by masked 2-digit primes that were either congruent (same relation to 55) or incongruent. Experiments 1 and 2 showed prime congruency effects for stimuli never included in the set of classified visible targets, indicating subliminal priming based on long-term semantic memory. Experiments 2 and 3 went further to demonstrate paradoxical unconscious priming effects resulting from task context. For example, after repeated practice classifying 73 as larger than 55, the novel masked prime 37 paradoxically facilitated the “larger” response. In these experiments task context could induce subjects to unconsciously process only the leftmost masked prime digit, only the rightmost digit, or both independently. Across 3 experiments, subliminal priming was governed by both task context and long-term semantic memory
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/greenwald02longterm.html
  http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/GAN&D.JEPLMC(2003).pdf
  http://www.unicog.org/publications/Greenwald_ContextualNumberPriming_JEPLMC2003.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12696812&dopt=Citation
  
• S. B. Hamann & L. R. Squire (1997). Intact perceptual memory in the absence of conscious memory.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9267663&dopt=Citation
  
• John H. Mace (2003). Involuntary aware memory enhances priming on a conceptual implicit memory task.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12762179&dopt=Citation
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9556(200322)116:2<281:IAMEPO>2.0.CO;2-D
  
• Dawn M. McBride & B. Dosher (2002). A comparison of conscious and automatic memory processes for picture and word stimuli: A process dissocation analysis.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12435377&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ap/cc/2002/00000011/00000003/art00007
  
• Philip M. Merikle & Eyal M. Reingold (1991). Comparing direct (explicit) to indirect (implicit) measures to study unconscious memory.   (More)
• Pascale Piolino, Béatrice Desgranges, David Clarys, Bérengère Guillery-Girard, Laurence Taconnat, Michel Isingrini & Francis Eustache (2006). Autobiographical memory, autonoetic consciousness, and self-perspective in aging.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16953713&dopt=Citation
  
• Roger Ratcliff & Gail McKoon (1995). How should implicit memory phenomena be modeled.   (More)
• A. Richardson-Klavehn & J. M. Gardner (1996). Cross-modality priming in stem completion reflects conscious memory, but not voluntary memory.   (More)
• John Sutton (2003). Constructive memory and distributed cognition: Towards an interdisciplinary framework.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, with a vast array of methods, and in a daunting range of disciplines and subdisciplines. Is there any sense in which these various memory theorists – from neurobiologists to narrative psychologists, from the computational to the cross-cultural – are studying the same phenomena? In this exploratory position paper, I sketch the bare outline of a positive framework for understanding current work on constructive remembering, both within the various cognitive sciences, and across gulfs between the cognitive and the social sciences. I pinpoint some lines of psychological theory and research which offer promising and compatible ways of thinking about individual memory and shared or social memory simultaneously. These are obviously ambitious projects, and this paper seeks more to elicit help with forging these connections than to present firm results. The aim is to draw out some consequences of empirical work on social memory and in developmental psychology
• John Sutton (2006). Introduction: Memory, embodied cognition, and the extended mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, J
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Sutton_PP_Intro.pdf
  http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/index/1312Q202H7808RT3.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a747697835~fulltext=713240930
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/P30W444011537529.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/P816529H7705H410.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/R727516236873154.pdf
  
• John Sutton (2007). Language, memory, and concepts of memory: Semantic diversity and scientific psychology.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: There are many different ways to think about what has happened before. I think about my own recent actions, and about what happened to me a long time ago; I can think about times before I lived, and about what will happen after my death. I know many things about the past, and about what has happened because people did things before now, or because some good or bad things happened to me
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Sutton_Language_Memory.rtf
  
• Teresa McCormack & Christoph Hoerl (2008). Temporal Decentering and the Development of Temporal Concepts.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This article reviews some recent research on the development of temporal cognition, with reference to Weist's (1989) account of the development of temporal understanding. Weist's distinction between two levels of temporal decentering is discussed, and empirical studies that may be interpreted as measuring temporal decentering are described. We argue that if temporal decentering is defined simply in terms of the coordination of the temporal locations of three events, it may fail to fully capture the properties of mature temporal understanding. Characterizing the development of mature temporal cognition may require, in addition, distinguishing between event-dependent and event-independent thought about time. Experimental evidence relevant to such a distinction is described; these findings suggest that there may be important changes between 3 and 5 years in children's ability to think about points in time independently of the events that occur at those times.
• R. F. Thompson & J. J. Kim (1996). Memory systems in the brain and the localization of a memory.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/93/24/13438
  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/93/24/13438?terms=consciousness&searchqstr=tyear:1997!fyear:1996!fmonth:Nov!tmonth:Nov!tdatedef:11+November+1997!fdatedef:12+November+1996!hits:10!fulltext:consciousness!sendit:Search
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=97098414&dopt=Citation
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8942954&dopt=Citation
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-8424(19961126)93:24<13438:MSITBA>2.0.CO;2-H
  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=33628
  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=33628
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40920.pdf
  
• Andrew P. Yonelinas (2001). Consciousness, control, and confidence: The 3 cs of recognition memory.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11561915&dopt=Citation
  

Memory, Misc

The Nature of Memory

• Christoph Hoerl (2008). On being stuck in time.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is sometimes claimed that non-human animals (and perhaps also young children) live their lives entirely in the present and are cognitively ‘stuck in time’. Adult humans, by contrast, are said to be able to engage in ‘mental time travel’. One possible way of making sense of this distinction is in terms of the idea that animals and young children cannot engage in tensed thought, which might seem a preposterous idea in the light of certain findings in comparative and developmental psychology. I try to make this idea less preposterous by looking into some of the cognitive requirements for tensed thought. In particular, I suggest that tensed thought requires a specific form of causal understanding, which animals and young children may not possess.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/r661578282402028/fulltext.pdf
  
• David Mark Kovacs (2009). Memory and Imagery in Russell's The Analysis of Mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to the theory Russell defends in The Analysis of Mind, ‘true memories’ (roughly, memories that are not remembering-hows) are recollections of past events accompanied by a feeling of familiarity. While memory images play a vital role in this account, Russell does not pay much attention to the fact that imagery plays different roles in different sorts of memory. In most cases that Russell considers, memory is based on an image that serves as a datum (imagebased memories), but there are other cases in which memory judgment requires an image without being based on it (answer-memories). A good example for the former is when a person, asked what the colour of the sea was last afternoon, recalls an image and forms a judgment on this basis. In the second case she may recognize the sea and entertain a memory image of it without ‘reading off’ the memory judgment from this picture. That is, the image does not prompt but itself is part of the propositional content of answer memories. Since in this latter case the feeling of familiarity is constitutive of the recollection but cannot serve as its explanans, answer memories do not conform to Russell’s account. According to Lindsay Judson this is not a vice of the theory, since Russell never meant to extend it to answer memories. Despite having a certain appeal of benevolence, Judson’s interpretation is not supported by textual evidence. Taking side with David Pears, I will argue that Russell did not properly differentiate between image-based memory and answer memory, and illegitimately extended his theory to the latter.
• John Sutton (forthcoming). The Feel of the World: exograms, habits, and the confusion of types of memory.   (More)

Mental Actions

• Andrei A. Buckareff (2007). Mental Overpopulation and Mental Action: Protecting Intentions from Mental Birth Control.   (More)
• Jacques P. Dubucs & Wioletta Miśkiewicz (forthcoming). Logic, Act and Product.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Logic and psychology overlap in judgment, inference and proof. The problems raised by this commonality are notoriously difficult, both from a historical and from a philosophical point of view. Sundholm has for a long time addressed these issues. His beautiful piece of work [A Century of Inference: 1837-1936] begins by summarizing the main difficulty in the usual provocative manner of the author: one can start, he says, by the act of knowledge to go to the object, as the Idealist does; one can also start by the object to go to the act, in the Realist mood; never the two shall meet. He is himself inclined to accept the first perspective as the right one and he has eventually developed an original version of antirealism which starts, not from considerations about the publicity of meaning, in the manner of Dummett, but from an epistemic standpoint, trying to search in a non-Fregean tradition of analysis of judgement and cognate notions a way of founding constructivist semantics. The present paper ploughes the same field. We concentrate on the significance, for Sundholm’s program, of the perspective that has been opened by Twardowski in his important essay on acts and products (1912.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www-ihpst.univ-paris1.fr/fichiers/publications/1530_logic_act_and_product.pdf
  
• Joëlle Proust (2001). A plea for mental acts.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalready know how to act in order to reach somepredefined result? A crucial element in the solutionof these puzzles consists in making explicit thecontingency between mental acts and mentaloperations, parallel to the contingency betweenphysical acts and bodily movements. The paper finallydiscusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mentalacts; it is shown that the capacity to refer tooneself is not a necessary condition of the successfulexecution of mental acts
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000079/en/
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/k6112780220900r5/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=271327&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/K6112780220900R5.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/synt/2001/00000129/00000001/00271327
  
• Jonathan Y. Tsou (2009). Rationality and compulsion: Applying action theory to psychiatry – by Lennart Nordenfelt.   (More)

Pain

• Colin Allen (2005). Deciphering animal pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this paper we1 assess the potential for research on nonhuman animals to address questions about the phenomenology of painful experiences. Nociception, the basic capacity for sensing noxious stimuli, is widespread in the animal kingdom. Even rel- atively primitive animals such as leeches and sea slugs possess nociceptors, neurons that are functionally specialized for sensing noxious stimuli (Walters 1996). Vertebrate spinal cords play a sophisticated role in processing and modulating nociceptive signals, providing direct control of some motor responses to noxious stimuli, and a basic capacity for Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning (Grau et al. 1990; Grau 2002). Higher brain systems provide additional layers of association, top-down control, and cognition. In humans, at least, these higher brain systems also give rise to the conscious experiences that are characteristic of pain. What can be said about the experiences of other animals who possess nervous systems that are similar but not identical to humans?
• R. J. Gatchel, Colin Allen & P. N. Fuchs (2006). Ethical issues in chronic pain research.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: As the above quote clearly highlights, it is the responsibility of researchers and research supervisors to be certain that their research staff and students assistants are very familiar with all of the ethical principles and current standards relevant to the research they are conducting. Indeed, they must take an active role in being certain that their research staff and students complete appropriate training in these ethical principles and standards, and how they apply them to the research context in which they are working. This is especially important in areas in which there may be physical harm such as chronic pain research
• Peter Alward (2004). Is phenomenal pain the primary intension of 'pain'?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: two-dimensional modal framework introduced by Evans [2] and developed by Davies and Humberstone. [3] This framework provides Chalmers with a powerful tool for handling the most serious objection to conceivability arguments for dualism: the problem of..
• Peter Alward (2004). Mad, Martian, but not mad Martian pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Functionalism cannot accommodate the possibility of mad pain—pain whose causes and effects diverge from those of the pain causal role. This is because what it is to be in pain according to functionalism is simply to be in a state that occupies the pain role. And the identity theory cannot accommodate the possibility of Martian pain—pain whose physical realization is foot-cavity inflation rather than C-fibre activation (or whatever physiological state occupies the pain-role in normal humans). After all, what it is to be in pain according to the identity theory is to be in whatever state that occupies the pain role for us
• Murat Aydede (2009). Is feeling pain the perception of something?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: According to the increasingly popular perceptual/representational accounts of pain (and other bodily sensations such as itches, tickles, orgasms, etc.), feeling pain in a body region is perceiving a non-mental property or some objective condition of that region, typically equated with some sort of (actual or potential) tissue damage. In what follows I argue that given a natural understanding of what sensory perception requires and how it is integrated with (dedicated) conceptual systems, these accounts are mistaken. I will also examine the relationship between perceptual views and two (weak and strong) forms of representationalism about experience. I will argue that pains pose very serious problems for strong representationalism as well
• Murat Aydede (2001). Naturalism, introspection, and direct realism about pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper examines pain states (and other intransitive bodily sensations) from the perspective of the problems they pose for pure informational/representational approaches to naturalizing qualia. I start with a comprehensive critical and quasi-historical discussion of so-called Perceptual Theories of Pain (e.g., Armstrong, Pitcher), as these were the natural predecessors of the more modern direct realist views. I describe the theoretical backdrop (indirect realism, sense-data theories) against which the perceptual theories were developed. The conclusion drawn is that pure representationalism about pain in the tradition of direct realist perceptual theories (e.g., Dretske, Tye) leaves out something crucial about the phenomenology of pain experiences, namely, their affective character. I touch upon the role that introspection plays in such representationalist views, and indicate how it contributes to the source of their trouble vis-à-vis bodily sensations. The paper ends by briefly commenting on the relation between the affective/evaluative component of pain and the hedonic valence of emotions
• Murat Aydede (online). Pain.   (More)
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• Murat Aydede (2008). Review of Nikola Grahek, Feeling Pain and Being in Pain.   (More)
• Murat Aydede & Guven Guzeldere (2002). Some foundational problems in the scientific study of pain.   (More)
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  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3081099.pdf
  
• David Bain (2003). Intentionalism and pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The pain case can appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory, I argue. After categorising versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an “objectivist” and “non-mentalist” version is the most promising, provided it can withstand two objections: concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of the pain case. I rebut these objections, in a way that’s available to both opponents and adherents of the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. In doing so I illuminate peculiarities of somatosensory perception that should interest even those who take a different view of pain experiences
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  http://www.davidbain.org/research
  http://hwww.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9213.00328
  
• David Bain (forthcoming). McDowell, pain, and subjectivism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: David Bain Abstract: It can seem natural to say that, when in pain, we undergo experiences representing certain experience-dependent particulars, namely pains. As part of his wider approach to mind and world, John McDowell has elaborated an interesting but neglected version of this account of pain. Here I set out McDowell’s account at length, and place it in context. I argue that his subjectivist conception of the objects of pain experience is incompatible with his requirement that such experience be presentational, rationalising, and classificatory.
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  http://www.davidbain.org/research
  
• David Bain (2007). The location of pains.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains
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  http://www.davidbain.org/research
  
• H. Clark Barrett & E. Hagen (online). Perinatal sadness among shuar women: Support for an evolutionary theory of psychic pain.   (More)
• K. P. Chandroo, S. Yue & R. D. Moccia (2004). An evaluation of current perspectives on consciousness and pain in fishes.   (More)
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  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1467-2679.2004.00163.x/pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-2679.2004.00163.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/faf/2004/00000005/00000004/art00002
  
• Nick Chater & Raymond J. Dolan, The price of pain and the value of suffering.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Estimating the financial value of pain informs issues as diverse as the market price of analgesics, the cost-effectiveness of clinical treatments, compensation for injury, and the response to public hazards. Such costs are assumed to reflect a stable trade-off between relief of discomfort and money. Here, using an auction-based health market experiment, we show the price people pay for relief of pain is strongly determined by the local context of the market, determined either by recent intensities of pain, or their immediately disposable income, but not overall wealth. The absence of a stable valuation metric suggests that the dynamic behaviour of health markets is not predictable from the static behaviour of individuals. We conclude that the results follow the dynamics of habit formation models of economic theory, and as such, the study provides the first scientific basis for this type of preference modelling
• Robert C. Coghill, John G. McHaffie & Ye-Fen Yen (2003). Neural correlates of interindividual differences in the subjective experience of pain.   (More)
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  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003PNAS..100.8538C
  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/14/8538
  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/14/8538?ck=nck
  http://info.med.yale.edu/neurobio/yeckel/principles_2005/Principles_05_articles/Green_3.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12824463&dopt=Citation
  
• Terry Dartnall (2001). The pain problem.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: How can a pain wake you up? You were not dreaming, nor did any bodily stimuli filter into your consciousness. You did not just wake up and realize you were in pain, as you might wake up and realize it is Saturday. You were deeply, dreamlessly asleep, and suddenly you were awake, and in pain. How is this possible? If pain exists only inasmuch as it is experienced, it seems that the pain did not exist when you were asleep, and so could not have woken you up. I shall argue that you were woken by a pain sensation that you did not know you had, so that the distinction between what is and what is known holds even for the contents of consciousness. This illuminates the relationship between consciousness and attention, and casts light on the Classical Empiricist tradition that identifies the foundations of knowledge with direct experience
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  http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/handle/10072/3779
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a713690491~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a713690489~fulltext=713240930
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/CX6AGJQJNEP7584W.pdf
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/GU0A7QLNY7RWGUDT.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/GU0A7QLNY7RWGUDT.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/CX6AGJQJNEP7584W.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cphp/2001/00000014/00000001/art00008
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cphp/2001/00000014/00000001/art00006
  
• S. Derbyshire (2001). Fetal pain: An infantile debate.   (More)
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  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118982780/PDFSTART
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-8519.00213
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8519.00213
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/biot/2001/00000015/00000001/art00006
  
• Matthew Evans, Plato and the meaning of pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Most readers of ancient Greek psychology will agree that the Philebus is where we find Plato’s best attempt to theorize about bodily pain.1 But they will probably also agree that the account he develops there has no real chance of being true, and so should not have much appeal to us today — at least insofar as we are philosophers rather than historians. It’s this second conviction that I want to challenge in what follows. More specifically, I want to argue for two connected claims about the merits of Plato’s account: first, that despite its flaws — which are significant — it is stronger and more subtle than most commentators have yet realized; and second, that it anticipates in interesting ways a view that has become both increasingly popular and increasingly controversial in the last couple of decades: the view that pains — like beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears — are mental states with representational content. I will call this view representationalism
• Carlos Gómez-Jara, Communicative retribution as a constructivist theory of punishment - penal pain as a communicative artifact?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Theories of punishment accentuating its communicative dimension have soared for the past years, not only in Europe but also in the U.S. Some academics have criticized their inability to adequately explain the physical dimension of punishment, i.e., the so-called “penal pain”. This essay aims at providing the foundations of a communicative theory of punishment based on constructivist epistemology which conceives of “penal pain” as a communicative artefact used by the legal system
• P. M. S. Hacker (2005). Of knowledge and knowing that someone is in pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. First person authority: the received explanation Over a wide range of psychological attributes, a mature speaker seems to enjoy a defeasible form of authority on how things are with him. The received explanation of this is epistemic, and rests upon a cognitive assumption. The speaker’s word is a authoritative because when things are thus-and-so with him, then normally he knows that they are. This is held to be because the speaker has direct and privileged access to the contents of his consciousness by means of introspection, conceived as a faculty of inner sense. Like perceptual knowledge, introspective knowledge is held to be direct and non-evidential. Accordingly, the first-person utterances ‘I have a pain’, ‘I believe that p’, ‘I intend to V’ are taken to be descriptions of what is evident to inner sense. Many classical thinkers held such subjective knowledge to be not only immediate, but also infallible and indubitable. The challenge to the received conceptions came from Wittgenstein. He denied the cognitive assumption, arguing that it cannot be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know that I am in pain. For what is that supposed to mean — except perhaps that I am in pain?1 If it makes no sense to say that one knows that one is in pain, then the epistemic explanation is a non-starter, since it explains the special authoritative status of a person’s avowal of pain by reference to the putative fact that the subject of pain knows, normally knows, or cannot but know, that he is in pain when he is. It is important to note that Wittgenstein did not mechanically generalize the case of pain across the whole domain of firstperson utterances. The case of pain constitutes only one pole of a range of such utterances. Avowals and averrals of belief and intention approximate the other pole, and require independent analysis and grammatical description..
• Peter Hanks, Conceiving of pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Kripke’s modal argument against the mind-body identity thesis is by now familiar (Kripke 1980): 1. It is possible for there to be pain without C-fiber stimulation, and vice versa.1 2. If pain = C-fiber stimulation, then it is not possible for there to be pain without..
• Robert Hanna (ms). What is it like to be a bat in pain? Kinds of animal minds and the moral comparison principle.   (More)
• Bennett W. Helm (2002). Felt evaluations: A theory of pleasure and pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper argues that pleasure and pains are not qualia and they are not to be analyzed in terms of supposedly antecedently intelligible mental states like bodily sensation or desire. Rather, pleasure and pain are char- acteristic of a distinctive kind of evaluation that is common to emotions, desires, and (some) bodily sensations. These are felt evaluations: pas- sive responses to attend to and be motivated by the import of something impressing itself on us, responses that are nonetheless simultaneously con- stitutive of that import by virtue of the broader rational patterns of which they are a part and that they serve to de?ne. This account of felt eval- uations makes sense of the way in which pleasures and pains grab our attention and motivate us to act and of the peculiar dual objectivity and subjectivity of their implicit evaluations, while o?ering a phenomenology adequate to both emotional and bodily pleasures and pains
• Christopher S. Hill (ms). The paradox of pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is generally possible to distinguish between the appearance of an empirical phenomenon and the corresponding reality. Moreover, generally speaking, the appearance of an empirical phenomenon is ontologically and nomologically independent of the corresponding reality: it is possible for the phenomenon to exist without its appearing to anyone that it exists, and it is possible for it to appear to exist without its actually existing. It is remarkable, therefore, that our thought and talk about bodily sensations presupposes that the appearance of a bodily sensation is linked indissolubly to the sensation itself. This is true, in particular, of our thought and talk about pain. Thus, we presuppose that the following principles are valid
• Daniel Howard-Snyder, Theism, the hypothesis of indifference, and the biological role of pain and pleasure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Following Hume’s lead, Paul Draper argues that, given the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems, the observed facts about pain and pleasure in the world are antecedently much more likely on the Hypothesis of Indifference than on theism. I examine one by one Draper’s arguments for this claim and show how they miss the mark
• John Hyman (2003). Pains and places.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I argue that itches, tickles, aches and pains—sensations of all sorts—are generally in the places where we say they are. So, for example, if I say that I have an itch in the big toe on my left foot, then, by and large, that is the very place where the itch is. James denied this in the 1890s; Russell and Broad denied it in the 1920s; Wittgenstein and Ryle denied it in the 1940s; Lewis and Armstrong denied it in the 1960s; and since then various kinds of materialists have denied it. But if itches etc. are states of the sensitive parts of bodies, then it is true
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  http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0031819103000019
  http://journals.cambridge.org/article_S0031819103000019
  
• David H. Jaggar (1982). Alternatives to pain in experiments on animals.   (More)
• Colin Klein (2007). An imperative theory of pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy
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  http://beta.philosophyonline.org/xtf/data/jph/104-10/jph_0104_0010_0517_0532.pdf
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/issues/104/10/2.pdf
  http://beta.philosophyonline.orghttp://beta.philosophyonline.org/xtf/data/jph/104-10/jph_0104_0010_0517_0532.pdf
  http://www.journalofphilosophy.org/articles/../issues/104/10/2.pdf
  
• Colin Klein, Phantom Limbs and the imperative account of pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Amputation of a limb can result in the persistent hallucination that the limb is still present [Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1998]. Distressingly, these socalled ‘phantom limbs’ are often quite painful. Of a friend whose arm had been amputated due to gas gangrene, W.K. Livingston writes: I once asked him why the sense of tenseness in the hand was so frequently emphasized among his complaints. He asked me to clench my fingers over my thumb, flex my wrist, and raise the arm into a hammerlock position and hold it there. He kept me in this position as long as I could stand it. At the end of five minutes I was perspiring freely, my hand and arm felt unbearably cramped, and I quit. But you can take your hand down, he said. (quoted in [Melzack, 1973] 53) In addition to the obvious medical issues, phantom limb pain also presents philosophical problems. Here’s a thorny one: are phantom limb pains hallucinations of pain?
• Colin Klein (2010). Response to Tumulty on pain and imperatives.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Maura Tumulty has raised two objections to my imperative account of pain.1 First, she argues that there is a disanalogy between pains and other imperative sensations like itch, hunger, and thirst. Suppose (with Hall) one thinks that an itch says “Scratch here!”2 Scratch the itch, and it dutifully disappears. Not so with pain. The pain of a broken ankle has the content ‘Do not put weight on that ankle!’ Yet the coddled ankle still throbs: obeying the imperative does not extinguish it. Second, Tumulty argues that the imperative account cannot handle certain pains, particularly pains of the deep viscera. On my account, pains proscribe against taking action with the painful body part. Yet some pains are associated with body parts over which we have no control. Kidney stones cause intense pain, but I cannot (voluntarily) control my kidney. What action, then, could that pain possibly proscribe? Lacking such a story, it is hard to say (as I do) that pains are exhausted by their imperative content
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• Tetsuo Koyama, John G. McHaffie, Paul J. Laurienti & Robert C. Coghill (2005). The subjective experience of pain: Where expectations become reality.   (More)
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  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005PNAS..10212950K
  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/36/12950
  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/36/12950?ck=nck
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16150703&dopt=Citation
  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1200254
  
• Jody Lynee Madeira (ms). Recognizing Odysseus' scar: Reconceptualizing pain and its empathic role in civil adjudication.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      This Article proffers a consideration of how the expression of pain impacts the interpersonal dimensions of personal injury proceedings, contesting through philosophical logic and textual analyses of case law and legal practitioners' texts the conclusion of scholars such as Elaine Scarry and Robert Cover that pain unmakes both the word and the world. Seeing pain as something that can and must be communicated, albeit in a different form than pain embodied, makes pain a much more profound force, comports with our understanding of pain as a physical yet interpersonally meaningful sensation, and has many evidentiary ramifications. Taking as its premise the perspective that legal constructions of pain are intrinsically relational and empathic, this Article proposes a reformulation of pain as a dual construct, at once experiential and expressionistic, that is supported by both semiotic theory and by Wittgenstein's refutation of the private language argument associated with Cartesian dualism. Pain as a dual construct is the most appropriate model for the legal construction of pain in personal injury litigation. This Article then turns to the implications of reformulating pain as a dual construct, examining how its grounding in social practice demands a more complex analysis than the existing model put forth by Elaine Scarry, who posits that imagination enables nonsufferers to access another's suffering; this model is inadequate because pain-full phenomena must instead be grounded in social practice and structured by and through language. Only then is it possible to elucidate the development of an empathic connection between a sufferer and another and the legal consequences of that relation. This Article concludes by describing how the model of pain that law currently adopts in principle (but not in practice) extinguishes pain's interactive potential, demonstrating the necessity of a conscious recognition of interpersonal pain-full reality
• Marvin Minsky (ms). Chapter III. From pain to suffering.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: §3-1. Being in Pain.............................................................................................................................................. 1 §3-2. Why does Persistent Pain lead to Suffering?.............................................................................................. 2 §3-3. The Machinery of Suffering....................................................................................................................... 4..
• Marvin L. Minsky (online). From pain to suffering.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: “Great pain urges all animals, and has urged them during endless generations, to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering. Even when a limb or other separate part of the body is hurt, we often see a tendency to shake it, as if to shake off the cause, though this may obviously be impossible.” —Charles Darwin[1]
• Dan Moller (2002). Parfit on pains, pleasures, and the time of their occurrence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Parfit (1984, 165) which I will paraphrase as follows: You are in the hospital to have an extremely painful but completely safe operation for which you can be given no anaesthetic. In order to ease recovery, you know that the hospital will give you drugs that cause you to forget your operation as soon as it is completed. You wake up, not remembering having gone to sleep, and ask the nurse if your operation has been completed. She tells you that there were two patients for this operation and she cannot remember which you are: either you already had your operation and it was the longest such operation ever performed, lasting ten hours, or else you are the other patient in which case your operation is imminent, but will last only one hour. 1. I wish to thank Sarah Broadie for comments on a version of this paper and Derek Parfit for conversations on this subject
• Yutaka Nakamura & R. Chapman (2002). Measuring pain: An introspective look at introspection.   (More)
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  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ap/cc/2002/00000011/00000004/art00019
  
• Paul Noordhof (2001). In pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: When I feel a pain in my leg, how should we understand the
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  http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~pjpn500/paulnpapers/PaulNoordhof_InPain.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8284.00277
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/2001/00000061/00000270/art00001
  
• Paul Noordhof (ms). More in pain … 153.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In his response, Michael Tye writes as if I reject Representationalism about pain. But in my original paper (Noordhof 2001) I hoped to make clear that I did not. For instance, I remarked that I had sympathy with the position (95) and, on the subsequent page, outlined what I thought the Represen- tationalist should say. My proposal was that when we experience a pain in the finger, the experience is veridical only if the cause of this experience is a disordered state of the finger. My appeal to the notion of a state was not made with any ambitions for ontological reduction (e.g. denying that there are pains but only states of having pain). So I’m afraid that Tye’s objections deriving from attributing to me such a view and pointing out that Repre- sentationalism is needed to capture, amongst other things, the fact that we experience pains in phantom limbs are all beside the point
• Abraham Olivier (2006). The spatiality of pain.   (More)
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• Thomas W. Polger & Kenneth J. Sufka (ms). Closing the gap on pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A widely accepted theory holds that emotional experiences occur mainly in a part of the human brain called the amygdala. A different theory asserts that color sensation is located in a small subpart of the visual cortex called V4. If these theories are correct, or even approximately correct, then they are remarkable advances toward a scientific explanation of human conscious experience. Yet even understanding the claims of such theories
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  http://homepages.uc.edu/~polgertw/PolgerSufka-ClosingGapPain.pdf
  
• Thomas W. Polger & Kenneth J. Sufka (2005). Closing the gap on pain: Mechanism, theory, and fit.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A widely accepted theory holds that emotional experiences occur mainly in a part of the human brain called the amygdala. A different theory asserts that color sensation is located in a small subpart of the visual cortex called V4. If these theories are correct, or even approximately correct, then they are remarkable advances toward a scientific explanation of human conscious experience. Yet even understanding the claims of such theories—much less evaluating them—raises some puzzles. Conscious experience does not present itself as a brain process. Indeed experience seems entirely unlike neural activity. For example, to some people it seems that an exact physical duplicate of you could have different sensations than you do, or could have no sensations at all. If so, then how is it even possible that sensations could turn out to be brain processes?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://homepages.uc.edu/~polgertw/PolgerSufka-ClosingGapPain.pdf
  
• J. D. Rose (2002). The neurobehavioral nature of fishes and the question of awareness and pain.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/Fishwelfare/Rose.pdf
  http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/index/FUMGQ6WF8WKNUC20.pdf
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/727073496.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tandf/brfs/2002/00000010/00000001/art00001
  
• William Ruddick (ms). Do doctors undertreat pain?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: At graduation, some North American medical students repeat the Prayer of Maimonides "never to forget that the patient is a fellow creature in pain, not a mere vessel of disease." [2] How could a physician ever forget that a patient is in pain? Don't physicians confront constant reminders­moans, groans, winces, and other obvious manifestations of pain? Yes, but it is those very "reminders," as I shall explain, that provoke at least two kinds of forgetting common among physicians­one, psychological and the other, conceptual. The psychological kind of forgetting is primarily self-protective, but the conceptual kind has deeper roots in the very definition of modern Medicine as curative and life-preserving. If my analysis is right, more lecture time on pain and pain relief in medical schools will do little to correct this "forgetting" of pain. But there may be better remedies for pain-forgetting, some already at work in North American medical practices
• Peter Singer (1990). Do animals feel pain?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/singer03.pdf
  
• Paul Skokowski (online). Is the pain in Jane felt mainly in her brain?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Harvard Review of Philosophy, Vol 15, Fall (2007)
• Kenneth J. Sufka & Thomas W. Polger (2005). Closing the gap on pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A widely accepted theory holds that emotional experiences occur mainly in a part of the human brain called the amygdala. A different theory asserts that color sensation is located in a small subpart of the visual cortex called V4. If these theories are correct, or even approximately correct, then they are remarkable advances toward a scientific explanation of human conscious experience. Yet even understanding the claims of such theories—much less evaluating them—raises some puzzles. Conscious experience does not present itself as a brain process. Indeed experience seems entirely unlike neural activity. For example, to some people it seems that an exact physical duplicate of you could have different sensations than you do, or could have no sensations at all. If so, then how is it even possible that sensations could turn out to be brain processes?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://oz.uc.edu/~polgertw/PolgerSufka-ClosingGapPain.pdf
  http://homepages.uc.edu/~polgertw/PolgerSufka-ClosingGapPain.pdf
  
• Harper Jean Tobin, Confronting misinformation on abortion: Informed consent, deference, and fetal pain laws.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      In the last few years, several states have adopts laws requiring that some women seeking abortions be told that their fetus may experience pain. These measures are the latest in a growing body of specific informational requirements for abortion procedures, many steeped in scientific controversy. These laws abandon well-settled principles of informed consent -- which give discretion to medical professionals to determine what information is crucial for patients -- in favor of legislative judgments about what particular facts should be told to patients and how these facts should be shared. This Article argues that, to the extent these laws go beyond flagging topics that should be discussed by health care providers and prescribe specific factual claims that must be conveyed to patients, they should be subject to non-deferential judicial review of their accuracy and fairness. Part I provides an overview of abortion informed consent jurisprudence since Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. Part II suggests a framework for analyzing challenges to specific informed consent provisions. Part II.A argues that false or misleading statements are unconstitutional under either the undue burden or rational basis standards. Part II.B proposes false advertising cases as an instructive analogue, arguing that the accuracy of informed consent provisions should be analyzed similarly. Part II.C considers the principle of judicial deference to legislative fact-finding from several angles, and argues that it should be applied in weak form, or not at all, in the informed consent context. Part III analyzes several states' mandated information on fetal pain within this framework and concludes that they are unconstitutional
• Illan Rua Wall, On pain and the sense of human rights.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Human rights law inscribes a relation between the political and suffering. This relation is twofold, it facilitates the radical aspect of human rights’ struggle against domination, but at the same time seems to reduce the human rights horizon to the short-term philantropism of humanitarianism. We will argue that this twofold structure is crucial to understanding human rights. We can begin to imagine a different, non-metaphysical, human rights through thinking a different concept of suffering with emphasis on ‘sense’ and ‘vulnerability’. This article is an attempt to think a future of human rights, a future which is not determined by possessive individualism and the closure of the subject
• Daniel M. Wegner & Kurt Gray, Blaming God for our pain: Human suffering and the divine mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine
• J. O. Wisdom (1993). Review essays : The observation of kinky sexrobert J. Stoller, pain and passion: A psychoanalyst explores the world of S & M. plenum, new York, 1991. Pp. X, 306, $24.95 (cloth.   (More)
• Stephen Yablo (ms). Grokking pain.   (More)

The Concept of Pain

Location of Pain

• David Bain (forthcoming). Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, edited by Murat Aydede.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://6401145269503135037-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/dtbain/research/ReviewofMuratAydede-draft3dec2009.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cowrTIWwe4SNEqGSY-0WSkVnXgfFbRncB_Ot5r5Phtnw7hGeHbJFARdWFAtd-xvP7RjwPQsLRLsY5ocaX8hCVWOVaBasPFAS4SrAN1L_Fajkk9-tGc4OOGPuyIHAiaYRJl6v5FtAz9mBc8NUG7CgW-5abblumVXik_PWLI7N3E8AG4i1y4Ph7_lKe4Bu5QKgQZj3iSTrFvWaOJIbQrBbIGyfFfAZLHEirq9opJm2RFknUW3-RQ%3D&attredirects=0
  

Pain and Pain Experience

• David Bain (forthcoming). Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, edited by Murat Aydede.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://6401145269503135037-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/dtbain/research/ReviewofMuratAydede-draft3dec2009.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cowrTIWwe4SNEqGSY-0WSkVnXgfFbRncB_Ot5r5Phtnw7hGeHbJFARdWFAtd-xvP7RjwPQsLRLsY5ocaX8hCVWOVaBasPFAS4SrAN1L_Fajkk9-tGc4OOGPuyIHAiaYRJl6v5FtAz9mBc8NUG7CgW-5abblumVXik_PWLI7N3E8AG4i1y4Ph7_lKe4Bu5QKgQZj3iSTrFvWaOJIbQrBbIGyfFfAZLHEirq9opJm2RFknUW3-RQ%3D&attredirects=0
  
• Guy Kahane (2010). Feeling pain for the very first time: The normative knowledge argument.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this paper I present a new argument against internalist theories of practical reason. My argument is inpired by Frank Jackson's celebrated Knowledge Argument. I ask what will happen when an agent experiences pain for the first time. Such an agent, I argue, will gain new normative knowledge that internalism cannot explain. This argument presents a similar difficulty for other subjectivist and constructivist theories of practical reason and value. I end by suggesting that some debates in meta-ethics and in the philosophy of mind might be more closely intertwined than philosophers in either area would like to believe
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123226703/PDFSTART
  
• Guy Kahane (2009). Pain, dislike and experience.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is widely held that it is only contingent that the sensation of pain is disliked, and that when pain is not disliked, it is not intrinsically bad. This conjunction of claims has often been taken to support a subjectivist view of pain’s badness on which pain is bad simply because it is the object of a negative attitude and not because of what it feels like. In this paper, I argue that accepting this conjunction of claims does not commit us to this subjectivist view. They are compatible with an objectivist view of pain’s badness, and with thinking that this badness is due to its phenomenal quality. Indeed, I argue that once the full range of options is in view, the most plausible account of pain is incompatible with subjectivism about value.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=6081840&jid=UTI&volumeId=21&issueId=03&aid=6081832
  

Pain and Perception

Pain, Misc

• David Bain (forthcoming). Pain: New Essays on Its Nature and the Methodology of Its Study, edited by Murat Aydede.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://6401145269503135037-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/dtbain/research/ReviewofMuratAydede-draft3dec2009.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cowrTIWwe4SNEqGSY-0WSkVnXgfFbRncB_Ot5r5Phtnw7hGeHbJFARdWFAtd-xvP7RjwPQsLRLsY5ocaX8hCVWOVaBasPFAS4SrAN1L_Fajkk9-tGc4OOGPuyIHAiaYRJl6v5FtAz9mBc8NUG7CgW-5abblumVXik_PWLI7N3E8AG4i1y4Ph7_lKe4Bu5QKgQZj3iSTrFvWaOJIbQrBbIGyfFfAZLHEirq9opJm2RFknUW3-RQ%3D&attredirects=0
  

Pain and Mental Objects

Pleasure

• Julia Annas (1987). Epicurus on pleasure and happiness.   (More)
• William Casement (1986). William Morris on labor and pleasure.   (More)
• Peter Hadreas (2004). The functions of pleasure in nicomachean ethics X 4-.   (More)
• Chris Heathwood (online). The reduction of sensory pleasure to desire.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: sub> One of the leading approaches to the nature of sensory pleasure reduces it to desire: roughly, a sensation quali?es as a sensation of pleasure just in case its subject wants to be feeling it. This approach is, in my view, correct, but it has never been formulated quite right; and it needs to defended against some compelling arguments. Thus the purpose of this paper is to discover the most defensible for- mulation of this rough idea, and to defend it against the most interesting objections
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~cheathwo/RSPD.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/g742225723837jh7/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/G742225723837JH7.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2007/00000133/00000001/00009004
  
• Bennett W. Helm (2002). Felt evaluations: A theory of pleasure and pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper argues that pleasure and pains are not qualia and they are not to be analyzed in terms of supposedly antecedently intelligible mental states like bodily sensation or desire. Rather, pleasure and pain are char- acteristic of a distinctive kind of evaluation that is common to emotions, desires, and (some) bodily sensations. These are felt evaluations: pas- sive responses to attend to and be motivated by the import of something impressing itself on us, responses that are nonetheless simultaneously con- stitutive of that import by virtue of the broader rational patterns of which they are a part and that they serve to de?ne. This account of felt eval- uations makes sense of the way in which pleasures and pains grab our attention and motivate us to act and of the peculiar dual objectivity and subjectivity of their implicit evaluations, while o?ering a phenomenology adequate to both emotional and bodily pleasures and pains
• Daniel Howard-Snyder, Theism, the hypothesis of indifference, and the biological role of pain and pleasure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Following Hume’s lead, Paul Draper argues that, given the biological role played by both pain and pleasure in goal-directed organic systems, the observed facts about pain and pleasure in the world are antecedently much more likely on the Hypothesis of Indifference than on theism. I examine one by one Draper’s arguments for this claim and show how they miss the mark
• Pamela M. Huby (1992). Pleasure, knowledge, and being: An analysis of Plato's philebus.   (More)
• Erick Raphael Jiménez (2008). Pleasure in Aristotle's ethics.   (More)
• Ward E. Jones (2006). The function and content of amusement.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?jid=211&id=25960
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?jid=211&id=25960&layout=abstract
  
• Leonard D. Katz (online). Pleasure.   (More)
• Iain Law, Evil pleasure is good for you!   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many people are uncomfortable with the idea that pleasure from certain sources is genuinely beneficial. These sources can be sorted into two classes: ones that involve others’ pain; and ones that involve what seems to be damage rather than benefit to the person involved. Here’s an example of the latter: a woman who claims that she enjoys her work performing in hard-core pornographic films. Some find it hard to take such a claim at face value – they instinctively assume that the woman is insincere or self-deceived.1 The reason seems a strongly paternalistic one: because the activity is assumed to be bad, it’s thought that only someone who was in some way damaged could genuinely like it. A statement from Brian Hill, the director of a documentary about such women, illustrates this: ‘I felt certain that she couldn’t enjoy what she does, that there must be some reason why she’s undergoing this kind of experience. But there was nothing: no messed-up childhood, no sense of pain or humiliation.’ (Smith, 2003, 17) Forced to conclude that the woman in question really does enjoy her work, Hill changes his view to imply that the pleasure gained cannot be truly beneficial: ‘When I hear a young woman talking about doing videos of fisting and asphyxiation, I have to wonder what it’s doing to her – even if she says that she’s having fun.’ (Smith, 2003, 17)
• Donovan Miyasaki (2004). Freud or Nietzsche: the Drives, Pleasure, and Social Happiness.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Many commentators have remarked upon the striking points of correspondence that can be found in the works of Freud and Nietzsche. However, this essay argues that on the subject of desire their work presents us with a radical choice: Freud or Nietzsche. I first argue that Freud’s theory of desire is grounded in the principle of inertia, a principle that is incompatible with his later theory of Eros and the life drive. Furthermore, the principle of inertia is not essentially distinct from his later theory of the death drive. Consequently, Freud’s theory of desire can only be interpreted consistently as a monism of the death drive. I then analyze Nietzsche’s attempt to ground his theory of desire in the concept of the will to power. I argue that Nietzsche’s view of desire is fundamentally opposed to the key elements of Freud’s theory of desire: the principle of constancy, the Freudian definition of the drive, and the pleasure principle. Next, I explicate the stakes of this opposition by analyzing the social consequences of each view for morality and justice. I argue that the Freudian subject seeks to dominate the social other, and that there is an insurmountable conflict between the satisfaction of desire and the demands of social life. Consequently, Freud’s view allows only for a negative conception of the social good in which morality is defined as the intrinsically impossible task of eliminating evil, and justice can be achieved only through the equal distribution of instinctual frustration. Finally, I argue that in Nietzsche’s theory of desire there is no essential conflict between individual desire and social life. The Nietzschean subject desires to manifest power in the form of activity that is independent of external agents, not to dominate the other. Consequently, Nietzsche’s view allows for the possibility of a positively defined concept of the social good in which morality is the affirmation and enhancement of every subject’s happiness, and justice can be achieved through the promotion and protection of an equality of power among subjects.
• Jessica Moss, Pleasure and illusion in Plato.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the many, deception seems to come about on account of pleasure. For while it is not the good, it appears to be. They choose the pleasant as being good, then, and avoid pain as being bad. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1113a33-b2) Plato is suspicious of pleasure. He devotes the whole of the Philebus and a significant portion of the Gorgias to attacks on hedonism. He declares that “the soul of a true philosopher…keeps away from pleasures and appetites and pains and fears as much as it can (Phaedo 83b5-7)” and denounces pleasure as “evil’s greatest lure” (Timaeus 69d1).1 And even when acknowledging that some pleasures are good, and that the good life (the philosopher’s life) is supremely pleasant, he holds that the very best life – the life of the gods – is a life with no pleasure at all (Philebus 33b)
• Jessica Moss (2007). The doctor and the pastry chef: Pleasure and persuasion in Plato's gorgias.   (More)
• Roman A. Ohrenstein (ms). The talmudic doctrine of the 'benefit of a pleasure': Psychological well-being in talmudic literature.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:      In this article, we attempt to analyze the Talmudic notion of well-being in the light of modern hedonic psychology. First, we examine the thoughts of Hebrew "wisdom" and Greek "sophia" concerning the phenomenon of happiness. We then discuss the Talmudic doctrine of "optimality", a concept similar to that of the Pareto improvement. This is followed by a discourse deemed to be of extraordinary significance - the idea of "mutual benefit", which may be described as "super optimum". Thereafter, the doctrine of the "Benefit of a Pleasure" is demonstrated to be a "pleasure-measure" of reciprocal and nonreciprocal happiness. Finally, it is argued, that although Plato, according to Professor Lowry, detailed precise "trade-offs" between degrees of pleasure, pain, and time, it was applied to "moral values" only, whereas the Talmudists posited the existence of a "psychoeconomic" category, in which pleasure itself is equated with money
• Nickolas Pappas (2008). Plato on pleasure and the good life.   (More)
• Richard D. Parry (2007). Plato on pleasure and the good life.   (More)
• Stuart Rachels (2000). Is unpleasantness intrinsic to unpleasant experiences?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Unpleasant experiences include backaches, moments of nausea, moments of nervousness, phantom pains, and so on. What does their unpleasantness consist in? The unpleasantness of an experience has been thought to consist in: (1) its representing bodily damage; (2) its inclining the subject to fight its continuation; (3) the subject's disliking it; (4) features intrinsic to it. I offer compelling objections to (1) and (2) and less compelling objections to (3). I defend (4) against five challenging objections and offer two reasons to believe it. Hence, I advocate "Intrinsic Nature," the idea that unpleasantness is intrinsic to unpleasant experiences.
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jamesrachels.org/stuart/Unpleasantness.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1q2534n65556g52/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=207158&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/X1Q2534N65556G52.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2000/00000099/00000002/00207158
  
• Stuart Rachels (2004). Six theses about pleasure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I defend these claims: (1) 'Pleasure' has exactly one English antonym: 'unpleasure.' (2) Pleasure is the most convincing example of an organic unity. (3) The hedonic calculus is a joke. (4) An important type of pleasure is background pleasure. (5) Pleasures in bad company are still good. (6) Higher pleasures aren't pleasures (and if they were, they wouldn't be higher). Thesis (1) merely concerns terminology, but theses (2)-(6) are substantive, evaluative claims
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2004.00028.x/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2004.00028.x
  
• Bernard Reginster (2005). Nietzsche on pleasure and power.   (More)
• Timothy Schroeder (2008). Unexpected pleasure.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”
• David Wolfsdorf (2006). Review of Daniel C. Russell, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life.   (More)

Pleasure and Pain

Pleasure, Misc

The Value of Pleasure

Thought and Thinking

• Robert A. Wilson (online). Review of Derek Melser, The Act of Thinking.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This is a book that challenges the current orthodoxy, both in the philosophy of mind and in the cognitive sciences, that thinking (construed broadly to include perceiving, imagining, remembering, etc.) is a mental process in the head. Such a view has been largely taken for granted since the demise of behaviorism in the 1960s, and it underpins both the representational and computational theories of mind, including their connectionist and dynamicist variants. While the orthodoxy has been rejected in recent years by a motley collection of e-theorists—externalists, embodiers, embedders, and extended minders—Melser’s view is quite distinct from such views. For Melser, rather than thinking being a process that begins in the head but extends beyond it (as most e-theorists hold), it is a personal-level activity, something that a person does through her actions. Since Melser views such activities as being disjoint from natural processes, thinking is not a natural process at all, the sort of thing that we might study scientifically. Thus, thinking is a personal action that calls for a different kind of study, one that draws on empathy, interpretation, and hermeneutics. That is the view defended at the core of the book (chh.1-7), and if it makes it sound like a very old-fashioned book, that’s because it is. Melser’s antecedents are philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, and Stuart Hampshire, both in style and in content. Apart from Melser’s heavy reliance on selective parts of developmental psychology, there is minimal discussion of substantive work in contemporary cognitive science. That is what might be expected from an author whose view is that whatever it is cognitive scientists are doing, it is not (much to their surprise, no doubt) the investigation of thinking. As I will try to show in a moment, however, the central argument of the book could have been strengthened by more direct engagement with such empirical work
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ualberta.ca/~philosop/faculty/wilson/melserrev.pdf
  
• Nick Zangwill (1998). Direction of fit and normative functionalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What is the difference between belief and desire? In order to explain the difference, recent philosophers have appealed to the metaphor of
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/mgkr37j7w4186162/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/MGKR37J7W4186162.pdf
  

Mental States, Misc

• Andrei A. Buckareff, Acceptance does not entail belief.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: D.S. Clarke has defended the claim that accepting that p entails believing that p. He refers to this thesis as “the entailment thesis.” In this paper I argue that we ought to reject the entailment thesis. Many philosophers have defended the claim that acceptance and belief are different types of mental states, or, at the very least, that there are ways of accepting propositions that are distinct from doxastic acceptance.1 Many would claim that belief and non-doxastic acceptance differ in some or all of the following six ways. First, belief aims at truth, while acceptance aims at utility or success. Second, belief is shaped by evidence; acceptance need not be shaped by evidence. Third, belief is contextindependent insofar as it is not shaped by an agent’s purposes, but acceptance is often context-dependent and shaped by an agent’s purposes. Fourth, belief is subject to an ideal of agglomeration, and acceptance is not regulated by any such ideal. Fifth, belief comes in degrees while acceptance is all or nothing. Finally, belief is not subject to direct voluntary control, while acceptance can be under our direct voluntary control (some holding that acceptance is also a mental action type). Not all of those who claim that there is a real difference between (non-doxastic) acceptance and belief take it that all of six of these are real distinctions between the two types of attitudes. And some take ‘acceptance’ to be a rather broad type that includes attitudes such as assuming, having faith, hypothesizing, imagining, trusting, and believing as ways of accepting propositions
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://sites.google.com/site/andreibuckareff/AcceptanceDoesNotEntailBelief.pdf
  
• Tamás Demeter (2009). Where Rationality Is.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The paper contrasts Robert Brandom’s account of rationality with that of Daniel Dennett. It argues that neither of them is tenable, and sketches an alternative outlook that avoids the problems. In spite of their fundamental differences, both Brandom and Dennett employ a robust, i.e. explanatory and predictive notion of rationality, and for different reasons they both fail to offer a plausible theory supporting it. The lesson offered here is that rationality should not be treated alongside other norms prescribing behaviour, as it cannot be accounted for in the same terms. Instead of ascribing rationality a robust role in a philosophical understanding of behaviour, it should be assigned a more modest one: its function should be located not in the context of explaining and predicting behaviour, but in the context of narratives folk psychological interpretation offers.