Ambivalence for Cognitivists: A Lesson from Chrysippus?

Ambivalence—where we experience two conflicting emotional responses to the same object, person or state of affairs—is sometimes thought to pose a problem for cognitive theories of emotion. Drawing on the ideas of the Stoic Chrysippus, I argue that a cognitivist can account for ambivalence without retreating from the view that emotions involve fully-fledged evaluative judgments. It is central to the account I offer that emotions involve two kinds of judgment: one about the object of emotion, and one about the subject's response

Cognitive Individualism and the Child as Scientist Program

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper, I examine the charge that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s ‘Child as Scientist’ program, outlined and defended in their 1997 book Words, Thoughts and Theories is vitiated by a form of ‘cognitive individualism’ about science. Although this charge has often been leveled at Gopnik and Meltzoff’s work, it has rarely been developed in any detail. I suggest that we should distinguish between two forms of cognitive individualism which I refer to as ‘ontic’ and ‘epistemic’ cognitive individualism (OCI and ECI respectively). I then argue - contra Ronald Giere – that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s commitment to OCI is relatively unproblematic, since it is an easily detachable part of their view. By contrast, and despite their explicit discussion of the issue, their commitment to ECI is much more problematic

Must Punishment Be Intended to Cause Suffering?

Cataloged from PDF version of article.t It has recently been suggested that the fact that punishment involves an intention to cause suffering undermines expressive justifications of punishment. I argue that while punishment must involve harsh treatment, harsh treatment need not involve an intention to cause suffering. Expressivists should adopt this conception of harsh treatment

Collective Agents and Communicative Theories of Punishment

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper I argue that a communicative theory of punishment of the sort advocated by Anthony Duff – cannot be extended to cover corporate bodies, such as corporations and nations. The problem does not arise from the fact that on the communicative view the point of punishment is to induce regret or remorse, and that corporate bodies cannot be the subject of such emotions. This problem can be solved. A more difficult problem arises when we ask why we should care that certain agents feel and feeland express remorse or regret. The sorts of answers to this question that the communicative theorist can appeal to when the punishment of individuals is in question do not have any obvious analogue on the collective level

Posidonije o emocijama i nekonceptualnom sadržaju

In this paper I argue that the work of the unorthodox Stoic Posidonius - as reported to us by Galen - can be seen as making an interesting contribution to contemporary debates about the nature of emotion. Richard Sorabji has already argued that Posidonius\u27 contribution highlights the weaknesses in some well-known contemporary forms of cognitivism. Here I argue that Posidonius might be seen as advocating a theory of the emotions which sees them as being, in at least some cases, two-level intentional phenomena. One level involves judgments, just as the orthodox Stoic account does. But Posidonius thinks that emotions must also include an element sometimes translated as an "irrational tug". I suggest that we see the "irrational tug" as involving a second level of intentional, but non-conceptual representation. This view satisfies two desiderata: it is a view which would have been available to Posidonius and which is compatible with the views reported to us; and it is a view which is independently attractive. It also makes Posidonius\u27 position less far removed from that of orthodox Stoics than it might otherwise do, while remaining genuinely innovative.U ovome članku tvrdim da se djelo neortodoksnog stoika Posidonija, u obliku u kojemu o njemu izvješćuje Galen, može shvatiti kao zanimljiv doprinos suvremenim raspravama o prirodi emocije. Richard Sorabji je već tvrdio da Posidonijev doprinos naglašava slabosti nekih dobro poznatih suvremenih oblika kognitivizma. Ovdje tvrdim da bi se Posidonije mogao shvatiti kao zagovornik teorije koja emocije shvaća kao, barem u nekim slučajevima, intencionalne fenomene na dvjema razinama. Jedna razina obuhvaća sudove, kao u ortodoksnom stoičkom objašnjenju. No Posidonije smatra da emocije moraju sadržavati i element koji se ponekad prevodi kao "iracionalni poriv". Predlažem da "iracionalni poriv" shvatimo kao nešto što uključuje drugu razinu intencionalne ali nekonceptualne reprezentacije. To gledište zadovoljava dva dezideratuma: riječ je o gledištu koje je moglo biti dostupno Posidoniju i koje je kompatibilno s njegovim gledištima koja su nam poznata; k tome, riječ je o gledištu koje je iz neovisnih razloga privlačno. Posidonijevo je stajalište stoga manje udaljeno od ortodoksnog stoičkog stajališta, dok istodobno ostaje istinski inovativno

Non-paradigmatic punishments

This review article argues for a better acknowledgement by penal philosophers of the diversity of subjects, agents, and practices of punishment. Much current penal philosophy has an unhelpful hyper-focus on the criminal punishment of culpable adults, by states, often through imprisonment. This paradigmatic case is important, but other subjects, agents, and practices of punishment are not statistically insignificant side-issues, and a comprehensive account of punishment should address them. Our understanding of punishment as a whole can be enhanced by considering non-paradigmatic punishment, with implications for whether and when punishment is justified, how we should understand appropriate authority, and how we should understand and engage with abolitionist arguments. We explore non-paradigmatic penal practices (community punishments, suspended prison sentence, restorative justice, and alternative jurisprudence), non-paradigmatic punishing agents (International judicial bodies, schools, and religious communities; with practices such as boycotts, shaming and shunning) and non-paradigmatic subjects of punishment (collective agents, corporations and children)

Is folk psychology a Lakatosian research program?

It has often been argued, by philosophers and more recently by developmental psychologists, that our common-sense conception of the mind should be regarded as a scientific theory. However, those who advance this view rarely say much about what they take a scientific theory to be. In this paper, I look at one specific proposal as to how we should interpret the theory view of folk psychology-namely, by seeing it as having a structure analogous to that of a Lakatosian research program. I argue that although the Lakatosian model may seem promising-particularly to those who are interested in studying the development of children's understanding of the mind-the analogy between Lakatosian research programs and folk psychology cannot be made good because folk psychology does not possess anything analogous to the positive heuristic of a Lakatosian research program. I also argue that Lakatos' account of theories may not be the best one for developmental psychologists to adopt because of the emphasis which Lakatos places on the social embeddedness of scientific theorising

Making the lightness of being bearable: Arithmetical platonism, fictional realism and cognitive command

[No abstract available

Pre-punishment, communicative theories of punishment, and compatibilism

Saul Smilansky holds that there is a widespread intuition to the effect that pre-punishment - the practice of punishing individuals for crimes which they have not committed, but which we are in a position to know that they are going to commit - is morally objectionable. Smilanksy has argued that this intuition can be explained by our recognition of the importance of respecting the autonomy of potential criminals. (Smilansky, 1994) More recently he has suggested that this account of the intuition only vindicates it if determinism is false, and argues that this presents a problem for compatibilists, who, he says, are committed to thinking that the truth of determinism makes no moral difference (Smilansky, 2007). In this paper I argue that the intuitions Smilansky refers to can be explained and vindicated as consequences of the truth of a communicative conception of punishment. Since the viability of the communicative conception does not depend on the falsity of determinism, our intuitions about pre-punishment do not clash with (what Smilanksy calls) compatibilism. And if the communicative theory of punishment is - as Duff (2001) suggests - a form of retributivism, the account also meets New's (1992) challenge to retributivists to explain what is wrong with pre-punishment. © 2012 The Author

Rethinking expressive theories of punishment: why denunciation is a better bet than communication or pure expression

Many philosophers hold that punishment has an expressive dimension. Advocates of expressive theories have different views about what makes punishment expressive, what kinds of mental states and what kinds of claims are, or legitimately can be expressed in punishment, and to what kind of audience or recipients, if any, punishment might express whatever it expresses. I shall argue that in order to assess the plausibility of an expressivist approach to justifying punishment we need to pay careful attention to whether the things which punishment is supposed to express are aimed at an audience. For the ability of any version of expressivism to withstand two important challenges, which I call the harsh treatment challenge’ and the ‘publicity challenge’ respectively. will depend on the way it answers them. The first of these challenges has received considerable discussion in the literature on expressive theories of punishment; the second considerably less. This is unfortunate. For careful consideration of the publicity challenge should lead us to favor a version of the expressive theory which has been under-discussed: the view on which punishment has an intended audience, and on which the audience is society at large, rather than—as on the most popular version of that view—the criminal. Furthermore, this view turns out to be better equipped to meet the harsh treatment challenge, and to be so precisely because of the way in which it meets the publicity challenge. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht