SPP 2008

Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP), June 25-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Registration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5, 12:00pm EST.
Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved hotel block is likely to fill quickly.
http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/

The 2008 conference will feature presentations by:

George Ainslie, Michael L. Anderson, Louise Antony Peter Carruthers, Louis Charland, Anjan Chatterjee, David Danks, Felipe De Brigard, Michael Devitt Marthah Farah, Evelina Fedorenko, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth R. Foster, Lila R. Gleitman (President of SPP), George Graham, Bryce Huebner, Bertram F. Malle, Barbara Malt, Christopher Meacham, Dominic P. Murphy, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Kenneth Norman, Mike Oaksford, Erik Parens, Nancy Petry, Jeffrey Poland, Zenon Pylyshyn, Sarah Robins, Paul Rozin, Laurie R. Santos (the 2008 Stanton Prize winner), Michael Strevens, Justin Sytsma, Kelly Trogdon, Charles Wallis, Deena Weisberg, Daniel Weiskopf, Fei Xu, Carlos Zednik. . . among many others

On topics including:

-Addiction and Responsibility
-Concepts and Categorization
-Consciousness
-Bayesian Inference and Rationality
-Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
-Language & Mental Representation
-Moral Psychology
-Neuroethics
-Theory of Mind

Note that this year the conference will be preceded June
25-26 by a workshop on experimental philosophy
http://www.socphilpsych.org/workshop.html

More information on both the 2008 SPP conference and the
Experimental Philosophy Workshop can be found on the
website http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/

Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness

Suppose you discovered that someone has committed a horribly violent crime. And now suppose I tell you one additional fact about the person who performed this act: he or she is mentally ill. In fact, suppose I tell you that the reason he performed this act he is suffering from damage to a particular area of his brain. Would you still conclude that he could be morally responsible for what he had done?

At this point, you might be guessing that no one would hold an agent morally responsible in such a circumstance. After all, how could we hold someone morally responsible for behavior that was clearly the result of neurological illness? Surely, anyone would agree in such a case that the agent is not to blame for what he has done!

Guess again.  A new paper from the philosophers Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley and Felipe De Brigard shows that people actually are willing to ascribe moral responsibility in cases like that one. In their study, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Subjects in the 'abstract' condition received the following story:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has caused him to behave in certain ways. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

Just as you might expect, most subjects who received this story said that Dennis was not morally responsible for the behaviors he performs. But don't be too swift to assume that people with neurological conditions will get off the hook. Mandelbaum and colleagues also included a 'concrete' condition, in which subjects were told:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has, in the past, caused him to rape women. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

When the story is made more concrete in this way, people's intuitions change radically. They end up concluding that Dennis actually is morally responsible for what he'd done. 

It seems that, no matter how much we tell people about damage to an agent's brain, the impulse to blame will get the last word. It is as though people are thinking: 'Well, he does have a neurological condition... but then again, someone ended up getting raped.  We just can't let this go by without declaring at least one person to be morally responsible!'

GFP Reading Group: Haji's "The Manipulation Argument"

Two weeks have come and gone since the posting of Haji's article, "The Manipulation Argument".   It's a wonderful piece and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to present some of my own reactions to it. 

In broad strokes, Haji tackles three of the most central issues currently surrounding such arguments:

(A)      The proper interpretation of the Manipulation Argument (i.e. the formal structure shared by all manipulation arguments), and the relation between it and particular manipulation arguments.

(B)       Michael McKenna’s recent distinction between ‘hard-line’ and ‘soft-line’ response strategies, and the soundness of his argument that every ‘credible’ manipulation argument (including Pereboom’s Four-Case Argument) requires a hard-line reply. 

                                 

(C)       The dialectical role of “ultimate origination” principles in the success of manipulation arguments, especially that of Pereboom’s Principle O in the Four-Case Argument.

My comments are a bit long (sorry), but I hope that they will help kick off a great reading group discussion:

Download GFP_HAJI_demetriou.pdf

Return of GFP Reading Group

After a long absence, the GFP reading group  return to your screens. You have two weeks to read the following paper by Ish Haji,on Derk Pereboom's manipulation argument against compatibilism:

Download the_manipulation_argument.doc

Two weeks from now, Kristin Demetriou, a grad student at the University of Colorado (whose - so far unpublished - work Pereboom's 4 case argument is already getting citations) will post her comments on the paper. And then it will be your turn, dear reader.

Is Reactivity all of a Piece?

Things have been might quite around the garden for a while. In an attempt to see if can’t stir up a few of the ghosts of threads past, I will engage in my favorite activity: attacking semi-compatibilism, by way of my other favorite activity, mangling science.

More Free Willish Goodness from Science

The Libet studies, which have caused such a stir, apparently demonstrated that conscious choice lags behind by neural activity by around one third of a second. One of my favorite responses to these studies  - Dennett's - argues that the notion we can perform simultaneity judgments as to neural events and volitions depends upon the idea of the Cartesian Theatre, a place in the brain where everything comes together. But while that response looks plausible for a lag of one third of a second, it doesn't look quite so plausible when the gap is an enormous 7 seconds. That's the claim of a new study just published in Nature Neuroscience.

In the study, subjects engaged in a free choice task, choosing between pressing a button with their left or their right hands. The researchers found that they could predict with 60% accuracy which hand they would choose, a full 7 (and up to 10) seconds before the subject reported that the decision was made, by analysing activity in the PFC. The popular presentations of this study have not failed to draw the conclusion that this study threatens free will. 

One comment: I don't see why we shouldn't interpret the PFC activity as representing a disposition and not a choice (though PFC is involved in high level planning).

Galen Strawson’s Modest Requirement for Moral Responsibility.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a non-Smilansky related discussion (I wish I’d thought of Illusionism!), so I thought I’d post some thoughts I’ve expressed in comment threads but never really put out there for public criticism and ridicule. So here goes:

John noted that in his upcoming Hourani lectures he will accuse Strawson of having an unreasonably demanding requirement for moral responsibility, what he calls “total control.” Others have attacked Strawson for arguing that we need to be ‘wholly responsible’ for our characters in order to be morally responsibility for our actions, claiming that this is asking for too much. Now ‘total control’ and “wholly responsible” can mean a lot of things, but I believe that they are often interpreted in ways that do not do justice Strawson’s theory.

The source of the misconception, I believe, lies in Strawson’s use of the causa sui concept. The problem with the causa sui language (along the entertaining Nietzsche quote that inevitably accompanies it) is that there is rarely a discussion of how much of our character we would have to ultimately responsible for in order to be causa sui.

Congratulations to Neal Tognazzini

Neal has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation. The Fellowships are administered by Mellon and the ACLS. He'll use the fellowship to finish up his dissertation on moral responsibility. He'll also have the opportunity to work on a planned book on Harry Frankfurt's philosophy.

Congratulations on this richly deserved award!

Contest winner: A fog of philosophers

. . . all credit to the inimitable V. Alan White for the suggestion.

On Thursday morning at the Pacific APA I announced my choice for a new collective noun for philosophers. As the header says, the winner was a fog of philosophers. (Thanks, by the way, to everyone who attended the session, even those of you with devastating objections to my view.) I settled on 'fog' because where there is one philosopher there is hope for clarity; where there is two there is none. Plus, I do like alliteration.

As readers of this blog will know, there were a lot of really great suggestions for a new collective noun for philosophers. My personal favorites were Saul Smilansky's suggestions, including a Vargas of philosophers. And, I loved obviously excellent choices like 'gruep' and 'group*', among several others. However, I decided to deploy a set of standards that ruled out many worthwhile choices. These standards included (1) no confusing collective nouns (e.g., an argument of philosophers), (2) nothing cutesy, necessarily pun-involving, or insider-y (the last two ruled out many of my favorites), (3) nothing that presumed a particular philosophical tradition, subfield, or time period of philosophy, (4) nothing pre-existing, only because that would ruin the fun (and plus, my sense was that no existing convention had stuck), so I ruled out Lipton's wrangle of philosophers, rightly recommended by Hilary Kornblith, (5) nothing so offensive that it would make someone blush or offend delicate sensitivities. These standards narrowed the scope for me, and fog just seemed like the best choice at the time.

So, I hereby encourage the use of 'fog' as the collective noun for philosophers. However, if you don't like it or find it altogether intolerable, I can remind you that there are several species that admit of multiple collective noun terms. So, feel free to add your own unless you can't. :-)

Pacific APA

For those of you attending the Pacific APA in Pasadena, here are some sessions that might be of interest:

Thursday, March 20, 2008, 9 am-noon
Invited Symposium: Four Views on Free Will
Chair: Joseph Keim Campbell (Washington State University)
Speakers: Michael McKenna (Florida State University)
“Compatibilism”
Derk Pereboom (Cornell University)
“Hard Incompatibilism”
Robert Kane (University of Texas–Austin)
“Libertarianism”
Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco)
“Revisionism”

Thursday, March 20, 2008, 1-4 pm
Invited Symposium: The Problem of Evil
Chair: Thomas M. Crisp (Biola University)
Speakers: John Bishop (University of Auckland)
Ken Perszyk (Victoria University of Wellington)
“The Normatively Relativised Logical Argument from Evil”
Hugh McCann (Texas A&M University)
“On Grace and Free Will”
Michael Tooley (University of Colorado–Boulder)
“The Probability That God Exists”

Friday, March 21, 2008, 9 am-noon
Author-Meets-Critics: John Martin Fischer, My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility
Chair: Michael Tiboris (University of California–San Diego)
Critics: Randolph Clarke (Florida State University)
Calvin Normore (University of California–Los Angeles)
Gideon Yaffe (University of Southern California)
Author: John Martin Fischer (University of California–Riverside)

Friday, March 21, 2008, 9 am-noon
Author-Meets-Critics: Ernest Sosa, A Virtue Epistemology
Chair: Keith Lehrer (University of Arizona)
Critics: Paul Boghossian (New York University)
Stewart Cohen (Arizona State University)
Hilary Kornblith (University of Massachusetts–Amherst)
Author: Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)

[And, yes, I’m aware of the conflict but sometimes life isn’t fair!]

Hope to see you there!

Best, Joe