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10963 results in Psychology: general interest

Page 300 of 549

  • 1 - What psychology is

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp 1-32

  • Summary

    A science of mind

    We spend an enormous number of our waking hours thinking and talking about our thoughts, emotions, and experiences. For example, we wonder: Why did the waiter give me that unusual smile? Did my co-worker see me stealing those office supplies? How can I deflect my unwanted admirer's attention – or attract the attention of someone else? In trying to answer such questions, and in interpreting one another's behavior more generally, we make use of a vast body of lore about how people perceive, reason, desire, feel, and so on. So we say such things as: the waiter is smiling obsequiously because he hopes I will give him a larger tip; my co-worker does know, but he won't tell anyone, because he's afraid I’ll reveal his gambling problem; and so on. Formulating such explanations is part of what enables us to survive in a shared social environment.

    This everyday understanding of our minds, and those of others, is referred to as “folk psychology.” The term is usually taken as picking out our ability to attribute psychological states and to use those attributions for a variety of practical ends, including prediction, explanation, manipulation, and deception. It encompasses our ability to verbally produce accounts couched in the everyday psychological vocabulary with which most of us are conversant: the language of beliefs, desires, intentions, fears, hopes, and so on. Such accounts are the stuff of which novels and gossip are made. Although our best evidence for what people think is often what they say, much of our capacity to read the thoughts of others may also be nonverbal, involving the ability to tell moods and intentions immediately by various bodily cues – an ability we may not be conscious that we have.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
  • Daniel Weiskopf, Fred Adams
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015
  • Psychology aims to give us a scientific account of how the mind works. But what does it mean to have a science of the mental, and what sort of picture of the mind emerges from our best psychological theories? This book addresses these philosophical puzzles in a way that is accessible to readers with little or no background in psychology or neuroscience. Using clear and detailed case studies and drawing on up-to-date empirical research, it examines perception and action, the link between attention and consciousness, the modularity of mind, how we understand other minds, and the influence of language on thought, as well as the relationship between mind, brain, body, and world. The result is an integrated and comprehensive overview of much of the architecture of the mind, which will be valuable for both students and specialists in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

  • Preface

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp ix-xi

  • Summary

    Our topic here is psychology, the self-styled science of the mind. Psychology's aim is to explain mental phenomena by describing the underlying processes, systems, and mechanisms that give rise to them. These hidden causal levers underlie all of our mental feats, including our richest conscious perceptions, our most subtle chains of reasoning, and our widest-ranging plans and actions. Although the phenomena of mind are intimately related to events occurring in the brain, these psychological explanations are, we will argue, distinct and autonomous relative to explanations in terms of neural processes and mechanisms. According to the view we present here, psychology and neuroscience are different enterprises. We certainly wouldn't claim that our ever-increasing understanding of how the brain works has nothing to say to psychology: on the contrary, they are complementary, because neuroscience can provide invaluable input to psychological theorizing (and vice versa, a point that we think is not stressed often enough). But our task will be to give a thorough account of the scope, methods, content, and prospects for a distinctive science of our mental lives.

    This book is intended for students in philosophy, psychology, and the more cognitively oriented branches of neuroscience, as well as for readers who are merely curious about what these fields might have to contribute to our understanding of the mind. However, we hope that our professional colleagues will also find much to engage with here. So we’ve done our best to produce a book that holds interest on all levels – for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers alike. We have tried not to presuppose any significant background in any of the sciences that we discuss, and we hope that this book will serve as a useful companion for many of those pursuing the interdisciplinary study of cognition.

  • 7 - Attention and consciousness

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp 189-217

  • Summary

    The slipperiness of experience

    Consciousness and attention are two of the most vexing, hard-to-define aspects of mentality. No wonder, then, that even the most brilliant and articulate theorists, such as William James, are reduced to merely gesturing at them, or to seeming platitudes (“Every one knows what attention is”). Our everyday language for describing experience seems impoverished compared to the richness and dynamic pulse of the thing itself. Thoughts and intentions, daydreams and vivid bursts of emotion, coils and snippets of language, sights, aches, and the whole of the sensory world: these conscious experiences are always simply there, like a constant buzz. Take them away and, as Descartes astutely observed, it is hard to see what would be left of our minds as we know them.

    Attention, by contrast, is not merely there, but also there for us. It can be commanded, albeit sometimes unwillingly. Notice the shape of someone's hand. Now, without shifting your gaze, notice its color and the texture of their skin. Notice the web of tiny lines, the fine hairs, any nicks or scars. Focus on just one of them. We have no trouble focusing our attention in these ways. In doing so, the character of our conscious experience shifts also. Of course, attention can also be dragged away against our will, by the intrusive ping of a text message or a nagging itch. When this happens, our train of conscious thought is disrupted and the source of our distraction takes center stage. Here we chronicle some contemporary ways of modeling attention and explore the possibility that these links between attention and consciousness are no coincidence but rather evidence for a deep theoretical connection between the two. In this way, perhaps two elusive mental phenomena can be grasped at once.

  • 8 - The social mind

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp 218-245

  • Summary

    The minds of others

    The term “folk psychology” was coined by philosophers to refer to the everyday capacities we have for predicting and explaining each other's behavior, as well as understanding each another as conscious, thinking, social beings. These capacities are also known as “commonsense psychology,” “mindreading,” or “everyday mentalizing.” The term “folk,” although it has a somewhat patronizing air, just refers to those of us who attempt to navigate the social world without appeal to the institutional apparatus of scientific psychology. At a minimum, folk psychology involves seeing others as having minds and attributing particular mental states and processes to them. Those that lack this capacity are said to be “mindblind”: they may interpret the world as containing animate, biological creatures, but they do not understand these creatures’ behaviors as actions driven by reasons, where reasons can include their perceptions, motives, and beliefs (Baron-Cohen, 1995). They may not even see the world as populated by persons who have inner lives of their own.

    That we have such folk psychological skills from an early age is clear. However, folk psychology is not a transparent instrument. It cannot reliably be turned on itself to reveal its own inner workings. Although we often develop elaborate opinions about the operations of our own minds, they have at most prima facie standing as far as their accuracy is concerned. Our everyday perspective does not settle the question of how folk psychology itself operates: what sort of ability it is, what knowledge it draws on, and how it is situated vis-à-vis other cognitive systems. We turn now to some attempts to address these questions.

  • 4 - Nativism, development, and change

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp 95-125

  • Summary

    Explaining development

    Minds, like living creatures, are born, grow, and change. Developmental psychology aims to describe these processes of change, and to characterize what the initial state of the mind is and how it gets from that initial state to its relatively stable and enduring mature form. The task for developmental psychology is to understand the factors that produce the normal initial state of the mind, and that take it from that initial state to its mature state, in much the way that developmental biology considers how new organisms are produced (e.g., as zygotes) and develop from embryos to reproductively mature adults.

    In biology, early thinking about the origins of form involved preformationism, the doctrine that the form of a new organism somehow already existed, complete and entire, before its coming into material existence as an autonomous being. Where else could the form of a new, complete human being come from except from a tinier version of the same form, presumed to be curled up inside the parent cell, waiting until it could grow and be nourished in the womb? The theory, of course, only pushes the explanatory question back a step, since it fails as an ultimate explanation for the origins of biological form. This illustrates a common explanatory strategy: if there is no other plausible explanation for the existence of a certain form that appeals to known principles of assembly, then that form must not have been assembled at all. It must have already been present but hidden, just waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

  • 5 - Beyond the brain and body

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp 126-154

  • Summary

    The four E's

    So far we have been looking at the mind from the perspective of traditional cognitive science. In this chapter we discuss a set of new and purportedly revolutionary approaches to cognition that have been gathering force in the past decade or so. These approaches go under the headings of Embedded, Embodied, Enactive, and Extended Cognition. These “four E's” propose a radical re-examination of how cognition should be modeled by the sciences, and they encourage a metaphysical shift in our view of what cognition itself is. These views raise a fundamental challenge concerning the very nature of how cognitive processes are distinguished from noncognitive ones. An upshot of these discussions will be to highlight the need for the cognitive sciences to settle a major foundational question, namely what makes something a cognitive system in the first place – that is, what the “mark of the cognitive” might be.

    Very briefly, the four E's are as follows:

  • Embedded cognition is the view that minds arise for the online solving of cognitive tasks in time-dependent situations, and minds should be studied in light of this situatedness.

  • Enactivism is the idea that minds are for action. Cognition should not be conceived of or studied independently of action, or as a process that takes place in the brain and exists independently of action. Rather, minds should be conceived of as existing “in” the acting or arising from the acting. Minds don't cause action so much as minds are enacted in the unfolding of our behavioral engagements with the world. Thinking isn't a cause of doing, it is a kind of doing on this view. Because enactivist views have largely been defended in the context of theories of perception, we will defer our discussion of them until Chapter 6 (Section 6.6).

  • Embodied cognition is the idea that thinking doesn't take place sandwiched between perceptual inputs and motor outputs. Rather, cognition takes place all across the sensory-motor divide in the brain. In fact, on the embodied view, cognition can take place within parts of the body outside the brain. Embodied approaches reject a functionalist vision of the mind that permits the possibility of minds like ours existing independently of bodies like ours. Minds like ours are metaphysically dependent on our kind of bodies.

  • 2 - Autonomy and reduction in psychology

  • Daniel Weiskopf, Georgia State University, Fred Adams, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 January 2015, pp 33-63

  • Summary

    Mind–body relations

    Psychology deals with mental phenomena, but these phenomena are intimately related to events in the body and brain. From the inside out, desires lead to plans, which result in intentions, which lead to actions. From the outside in, the environment impinges on us, producing perceptual episodes that lead us to update our beliefs and other models of what is going on in the world. All of these activities, from perception through belief updating, planning, and acting, involve continuous changes to underlying bodily and neural states. How should we understand the relation between these psychological and physical states? This is the mind–body problem as it has traditionally been understood by philosophers. It is the general metaphysical problem of explaining how psychological phenomena are related to physical, biological, and neurophysiological ones.

    There are many possible philosophical stances on the mind–body relation, far too many for us to survey here. By far the greatest divide has historically been between dualists, who hold that the world contains two fundamentally distinct kinds of entities, the mental and the physical; and monists, who think that the world is fundamentally one type of thing through and through. Since at least the early twentieth century, dualism in most of its forms has been out of favor, paving the way for the rise of a thoroughgoing materialist or physicalist worldview. The demise of dualism has corresponded roughly with the increasing explanatory scope of the sciences. The more phenomena can be explained in physical and biological terms, the less need there is to posit special, nonphysical substances and properties. There gradually come to be fewer and fewer “gaps” in our understanding where dualistic explanations could carve out a distinctive role for themselves. But rejecting dualism only puts us on the side of some sort of monism. It does not tell us how we should understand the mind–body relation. For this, we need a positive theory.

Page 300 of 549