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 Tribunal for Rwanda for incitement during the Rwandan genocide. She also discusses incitement in dome ..read more

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 evoked by moral wrongs that pollute social relationships by eroding shared expectations of trust. In t ..read more

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 coauthors investigate the benefits, harms, and costs of using neuroimaging to detect human consciousn ..read more

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 figure out what others know—rather than what they believe—that’s the more basic capacity. Links and Re ..read more

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 cognitive errors in statistical reasoning, not because they are immoral. Links and Resources Georgi Gard ..read more

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 different situations or cultures. In this episode, Igor Grossmann discusses the efforts of the Wisdom T ..read more

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 Resources Kathryn Norlock The paper Self-respect and protest by Bernard Boxill Whining, griping, and co ..read more

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 first place. Or maybe here's a simpler way to frame some of these ideas: when it comes to COVID-19 for ..read more

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 that guide their experiences. In other words, to some extent games also recreate us, which both reve ..read more

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 The Paper The Splintered Mind Alison Gopnik Introspection Self-Knowledge Edward Titchener Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener's Lab Manual Paper Quotes Descartes, I think, had it quite backwards when he said the mind—including especially c ..read more