Bridging the Gap between Rationality, Normativity and Emotions

This paper argues that emotions play a key role in intentional explanation, because they can be conceived as rational. Furthermore, their rationality is specific as they make agents act and react with respect to values and norms. Indeed, emotions have cognitive bases and are reactions to the presence of values and are regimented by epistemic norms that can be constrained by social norms. Additionally, thanks to their action and cognitive tendencies emotions ground rational actions by providing, among other features of rationality, intentions to promote values through norms of action that can also be constrained by social norms. In that sense, emotions seem to bridge the gap between rationality and normativity by articulating the rational detection and production of values related to epistemic and action norms that can be both regimented by social norms.

PHILOSOPHICAL EGOISM: ITS NATURE AND LIMITATIONS

Egoism and altruism are unequal contenders in the explanation of human behaviour. While egoism tends to be viewed as natural and unproblematic, altruism has always been treated with suspicion, and it has often been argued that apparent cases of altruistic behaviour might really just be some special form of egoism. The reason for this is that egoism fits into our usual theoretical views of human behaviour in a way that altruism does not. This is true on the biological level, where an evolutionary account seems to favour egoism, as well as on the psychological level, where an account of self-interested motivation is deeply rooted in folk psychology and in the economic model of human behaviour. While altruism has started to receive increasing support in both biological and psychological debates over the last decades, this paper focuses on yet another level, where egoism is still widely taken for granted.Philosophical egoism(Martin Hollis’ term) is the view that, on the ultimate level of intentional explanation, all action is motivated by one of the agent's desires. This view is supported by the standard notion that for a complex of behaviour to be an action, there has to be a way to account for that behaviour in terms of the agent's own pro-attitudes.Psychologicalaltruists, it is claimed, arephilosophicalegoists in that they are motivated by desires that have the other's benefit rather than the agent's own for its ultimate object (other-directed desires). This paper casts doubt on this thesis, arguing that empathetic agents act on other people's pro-attitudes in very much the same way as agents usually act on their own, and that while other-directed desires do play an important role in many cases of psychologically altruistic action, they are not necessary in explanations of some of the most basic and most pervasive types of human altruistic behaviour. The paper concludes with the claim that philosophical egoism is really a cultural value rather than a conceptual feature of action.

Dimensions of Folk Psychiatry

This article presents a social-cognitive model of laypeople's thinking about mental disorder, dubbed “folk psychiatry.” The author proposes that there are 4 dimensions along which laypeople conceptualize mental disorders and that these dimensions have distinct cognitive underpinnings. Pathologizing represents the judgment that a form of behavior or experience is abnormal or deviant and reflects availability and simulation heuristics, internal attribution, and reification. Moralizing—the judgment that individuals are morally accountable for their abnormality—reflects a form of intentional explanation grounded in everyday folk psychology. Medicalizing represents the judgment that abnormality has a somatic basis and reflects an essentialist mode of thinking. Psychologizing—ascribing abnormality to psychological dysfunction—reflects an emergent form of mentalistic explanation that is neither essentialist nor intentional. Implications for psychiatric stigma and for cross-cultural variations in understandings of the psychiatric domain are discussed.

Intentions, goals, and the archaeological record

The underdetermination of intentional explanation by motor behavior complicates inferences drawn from preserved artifacts in the archaeological record to intentions in their production. Without knowledge of a producer's intentions, inferences drawn from those intentions to required cognitive abilities for having those intentions is also complicated.