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In this paper, I describe and discuss two mental phenomena which are somewhat neglected in the philosophy of mind: focused daydreaming and mind-wandering. My aim is to show that their natures are rather distinct, despite the fact that we tend to classify both as instances of daydreaming. The first difference between the two, I argue, is that, while focused daydreaming is an instance of imaginative mental agency (i.e. mental agency with the purpose to voluntarily produce certain mental representations), mind-wandering is not—though this does not mean that mind-wandering cannot involve mental agency at all. This personal-level difference in agency and purposiveness has, furthermore, the consequence that instances of mind-wandering do not constitute unified and self-contained segments of the stream of consciousness—in stark contrast to focused daydreams. Besides, the two kinds of mental phenomena differ in whether they possess a narrative structure, and in how we may make sense of the succession of mental episodes involved.

Dựa trên kết quả của các nghiên cứu thực nghiệm về phán xét đạo đức của nhân dân, một số nhà nghiên cứu đã tuyên bố rằng một cái gì đó tương tự như Học Thuyết Hai Hiệu Quả (DDE) nổi tiếng có thể là một thành phần cơ bản, mặc dù vô thức, của tâm lý học đạo đức con người. Tuy nhiên, những người ủng hộ giả thuyết DDE tâm lý này lại ít đề cập đến việc làm thế nào sự phân biệt cốt lõi trong các cách diễn giải tiêu chuẩn của nguyên tắc — sự phân biệt giữa hậu quả được mong muốn và chỉ đơn thuần được dự kiến — có thể được nhận thức khi chúng ta đưa ra phán quyết đạo đức về hành động của con người. Đầu tiên, tôi nhấn mạnh vấn đề của việc chính xác xây dựng sự phân biệt giữa hậu quả được mong muốn và hậu quả dự kiến cũng như những tác động của nó đối với việc giải thích dữ liệu thực nghiệm về phán xét đạo đức của nhân dân. Sau đó, tôi phân biệt giữa ba cách tiếp cận khác nhau đối với vấn đề này mà những người ủng hộ DDE trong đạo đức chuẩn mực đã áp dụng: các cách giải thích được gọi là "sự gần gũi", các cách giải thích sử dụng khái niệm "ý định" được biết đến như là "nghiêm ngặt", và việc làm lại giả thuyết DDE của Warren Quinn dưới góc độ sự phân biệt giữa "đại lý trực tiếp" và "đại lý gián tiếp". Tôi cho thấy rằng khi được coi là các tuyên bố về tâm lý học đạo đức, những cách giải thích khác nhau này đưa ra những dự đoán thực nghiệm khá khác nhau về những phán quyết đạo đức của con người trong những trường hợp cụ thể. Dựa trên dữ liệu thực nghiệm hiện tại, tôi lập luận rằng một phiên bản của diễn giải DDE của Quinn là hợp lý nhất về mặt thực nghiệm, và việc áp dụng một diễn giải như vậy giúp làm giảm bớt nhiều (mặc dù không phải tất cả) các chỉ trích thực nghiệm gần đây về giả thuyết DDE.

Susan Wolf objects to the Real Self View (RSV) of moral responsibility that it is insufficient, that even if one’s actions are expressions of one’s deepest or “real” self, one might still not be morally responsible for one’s actions. As a counterexample to the RSV, Wolf offers the case of JoJo, the son of a dictator, who endorses his father’s (evil) values, but who is insane and is thus not responsible for his actions. Wolf’s data for this conclusion derives from what she takes to be our “pretheoretic intuitions” about JoJo. As it turns out, though, experimental data on actual pretheoretic intuitions does not seem to support Wolf’s claim. In this paper, we present such data and argue that, at least with respect to this particular objection, the RSV can survive Wolf’s attack intact.

The initial stage for the discussion is the distinction between bona fide and fiat objects drawn by Barry Smith and collaborators in the context of formal ontology. This paper aims at both producing a rationale for introducing a hitherto unrecognized kind of object—here called ‘Interactive Fiat Objects’ (IFOs)—into the ontology of objects, and casting light on the relationship between embodied cognition and interactive ontology with the aid of the concepts of affordance and ad hoc category. I conclude that IFOs are similar to fiat objects, affordances and ad hoc categories in a number of ways, yet they differ from these in important respects. Interaction is key to understanding the existence and peculiarities of IFOs. By adopting an embodied perspective on cognition, we can enrich our ontological typologies and highlight relevant features of our physical and symbolic environment that are otherwise overlooked. This should improve our understanding of object ontology and persuade us to include IFOs in our metaphysical inventories.

Framing effects occur when people respond differently to the same information, just because it is conveyed in different words. For example, in the classic ‘Disease Problem’ introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, people’s choices between alternative interventions depend on whether these are described positively, in terms of the number of people who will be saved, or negatively in terms of the corresponding number who will die. In this paper, I discuss an account of framing effects based on ‘fuzzy-trace theory’. The central claim of this account is that people represent the numbers in framing problems in a ‘gist-like’ way, as ‘some’; and that this creates a categorical contrast between ‘some’ people being saved (or dying) and ‘no’ people being saved (or dying). I argue that fuzzy-trace theory’s gist-like representation, ‘some’, must have the semantics of ‘some and possibly all’, not ‘some but not all’. I show how this commits fuzzy-trace theory to a modest version of a rival ‘lower bounding hypothesis’, according to which lower-bounded interpretations of quantities contribute to framing effects by rendering the alternative descriptions extensionally inequivalent. As a result, fuzzy-trace theory is incoherent as it stands. Making sense of it requires dropping, or refining, the claim that decision-makers perceive alternatively framed options as extensionally equivalent; and the related claim that framing effects are irrational. I end by suggesting that, whereas the modest lower bounding hypothesis is well supported, there is currently less evidence for the core element of the fuzzy trace account.

Many philosophers have tried to defend physicalism concerning phenomenal consciousness, by explaining dualist intuitions within a purely physicalist framework. One of the most common strategies to do so consists in interpreting the alleged “explanatory gap” between phenomenal states and physical states as resulting from a fallacy, or a cognitive illusion. In this paper, I argue that the explanatory gap does not rest on a fallacy or a cognitive illusion. This does not imply the falsity of physicalism, but it has consequences on the kind of physicalism we should embrace.

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances.

The construct “remembering” is equivocal between an epistemic sense, denoting a distinctive ground for knowledge, and empirical sense, denoting the typical behavior of a neurocognitive mechanism. Because the same kind of equivocation arises for other psychologistic terms (such as believe, decide, know, judge, decide, infer and reason), the effort to spot and remedy the confusion in the case of remembering might prove generally instructive. The failure to allow these two senses of remembering equal play in their respective domains leads, I argue, to unnecessary confusion about memory externalism, the possibility of episodic memory in non-human species, and the thesis of memory continuism. By distinguishing these equivocal senses of remembering, we thus gain leverage on understanding how the distinctive epistemic norms that define many of our psychologic terms are more plausibly related to the capacities studied by empirical science, given that neither identity nor elimination are possible.