Journal Entries

Go behind the scenes with philosophers and cognitive scientists to get their take on published journal articles, what they like about papers, what they maybe don't anymore, and where inquiry should take us next.

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Episodes

Tracking Hate Speech with Shannon Fyfe

When does hate speech cross the line into incitement of violence? And how does incitement get prosecuted around the world when it leads to violent atrocities like genocide? Are legal categories like incitement to genocide in international law all that effective at preventing or deterring this kind of speech? In her paper, Shannon Fyfe walks us through these complicated legal and philosophical questions as they played out in the trial of three media executives held by the International Criminal T...

Sep 24, 2021•33 min

Foul Behavior with Victor Kumar

Disgust is often thought of as a negative emotion, and even moreso when it comes to morality. Many have argued that the feeling we have when we are morally disgusted by others has a questionable evolutionary history, is not always reliably produced, and has inspired acts of great evil in our past. In his paper, Victor Kumar argues that it's not all bad though, and that moral disgust can sometimes be a fitting response to moral wrongs. Specifically, he argues that disgust is fitting when it is ev...

Sep 13, 2021•27 min

Alive Inside with Andrew Peterson

As we learn more and more about the brain, researchers are developing new neuroscientific methods that can help diagnose patients with traumatic brain injury. For example, some of these methods might even be able to tell us that patients who otherwise appear unresponsive are actually still "alive inside". That's an amazing idea, but the story doesn't stop there. As such technology develops, it raises a number of ethical questions about how it works and how to use. In this paper, Andrew and his c...

Sep 06, 2021•30 min

Knowledge Before Belief with Jonathan Phillips

An enormous amount of research in philosophy and cognitive science has been devoted to belief representation in theory of mind, or the capacity we have to figure out what other people believe. Because of all this focus on belief, one might be tempted to think that belief is one of the most basic theory of mind capacities we have. But is that really what the evidence shows? Jonathan and his coauthors argue that it doesn’t show that at all. Instead, they argue that it’s actually the capacity to fi...

Aug 31, 2021•33 min

Evidentialism and Moral Encroachment with Georgi Gardiner

Can the fact that something is morally wrong to believe affect whether the evidence you have justifies that belief? In her paper, Georgi Gardiner argues that the answer is "no". We should follow the evidence where it leads and align our beliefs with the evidence. And if we do that, she argues, we’ll discover that morally wrong beliefs—such as racist beliefs--simply don’t align with the evidence. On this view, racist beliefs are irrational because they are unsupported by evidence or reflect cogni...

Oct 16, 2020•38 min

The Science of Wisdom with Igor Grossmann

You've heard about "social-distancing" but what about emotional "self-distancing", can that help make you wiser? Are different people wiser than others and why? Is wisdom a stable trait and if so how should we measure it? In recent years there's been an explosion of research in cognitive science into answering these questions. But along with this there's also been many disagreements between researchers about what wisdom is, how best to measure it, how it develops, and how it manifests across dif...

Oct 05, 2020•44 min

Can’t Complain with Kathryn Norlock

Complaining about our pains is often viewed as weak or soft. Kant and Aristotle went so far as to say that it should never be done. And they say it's something a real man would never do. But could complaining actually be a virtue, even when you can't fix the thing that makes you sad or mad? When done well, complaining can expose our vulnerabilities, invite others to commiserate over share pains, affirm and validate experiences, and just maybe--help us all feel a little less alone. Links and Reso...

Jun 04, 2020•33 min

Situating Feminist Epistemology with Natalie Alana Ashton and Robin McKenna

There is often resistance to the claim from feminist philosophy that knowledge is somehow "socially constructed", but what does that actually mean and is it really all that radical? Sometimes, our social situations or experiences dictate the kind of evidence we are likely to encounter and put us in a better position than others to know what's going on around us. Other times, these experiences can impact what we consider to be good evidence or what a community considers to be justified in the fir...

Apr 28, 2020•41 min

Games and the Art of Agency with Thi Nguyen

Are games art and if so, why? Are they important or valuable and if so, how? A lot of work tries to answer these questions in aesthetics by comparing games to various properties of traditionally acknowledged works that scholars already agree are art. But does this obscure basic features of what games are all about? Unlike most fictions, game designers don't just create a stable object, like a book or a movie. Insead, they create goals, rules, and abilities that people slip into when playing and ...

Apr 15, 2020•33 min

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection with Eric Schwitzgebel

How well do you know your own feelings? Is our ability to know this about ourselves less reliable than what we know about the outside world around us? Is there anything we can do to make ourselves less "naive" and improve the reliability of introspection about conscious experiences? Links and Resources * Eric Schwitzgebel (https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/) * The Paper (http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Naive.htm) * The Splintered Mind (http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/) * Alison ...

Apr 08, 2020•31 min

Redefine Statistical Significance with Edouard Machery

Are decisions made by scientists one century ago still with us and weigh down science? One decision involves the rules scientists play by when it comes to statistical significance, and more specifically, the rule that results fall below a .05 threshold to count as significant. The point of this threshold is to help minimize false positives. But .05 is consistent with at least 33% of results being false...or worse! Links and Resources * Edouard Machery (https://www.edouardmachery.com/) * The pape...

Apr 04, 2020•52 min

Stop Talking About Fake News! with Joshua Habgood-Coote

What, if anything, does "fake news" or "post truth" actually mean? Are they thinly veiled political strategies that do as much harm to democracy as the things they attempt to describe? And if so why did so many academics and philosophers get caught up in using a series of terms with such serious problems? Links and Resources * Joshua Habgood-Coote (https://joshuahabgoodcoote.com/) * The paper (https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=HABSTA&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FHABSTA.docx) * Bl...

Apr 04, 2020•35 min

On Having Bad Persons as Friends with Jessica Isserow

"Nietzsche was friends with Wagner, Copperfield with Steerforth, Rick Blaine with Louis Renault...one who enters into a friendship with a bad person very much seems to have gone wrong somewhere," writes Isserow. But what is wrong, exactly, with choosing to make friends with bad people? Does it tell us something important about ourselves and could this fact maybe even reveal a glimmer of truth about cancel culture? Links and Resources * Jessica Isserow (https://www.jessicaisserow.com/) * The pape...

Apr 04, 2020•29 min

Causing and Nothingness with Helen Beebee

Can the absense of something ever be a cause? For example, image you forget to water your plants and your plants all die. Did your failure to water them cause the plants to die? Many people report the intuition you obviously have caused your plants to die, but shocking as it may at first seem, could this intuition actually be wrong? Links and Resources Helen Beebee (https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/Helen.Beebee.html) The paper - "Causing and Nothingness" (https://www.research.manches...

Apr 04, 2020•39 min

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