Philosophical Psychology

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot, Rolf Reber Abstract People use their commonsense thinking about the past to inform their decisions. Intuitive historical thinking is therefore pervasive in the social and cognitive lives of humans. This type of cognition, however, has not been systematically researched. Recent philosophical psychology is dominated by works that investigate cognitive tools used by intuitive historical thinking – such as episodic memory, mental time travel, causalreas

Authors William Forde Thompson, Nicolas J. Bullot, and Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis Abstract Research has investigated psychological processes in an attempt to explain how and why people appreciate music. Three programsof research have shed light on these processes. The first focuses on the appreciation of musical structure. The second investigates self-oriented responses to music, including music-evoked autobiographical memories, the reinforcement of a sense of self, and ben

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract Research seeking to explain the perpetration of violence and atrocities by humans against other humans offers both social and individualistic explanations, which differ namely in the roles attributed to empathy. Prominent social models suggest that some manifestations of inter-human violence are caused by parochial attitudes (attitudes characterized by interests centred on one's own community) and obedience reinforced by within-group empathy.

Authors Rolf Reber and Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract This chapter introduces a research strategy – which we call conditional objectivism – that offers researchers a heuristic for taking into account a plurality of value systems while pursuing professional scientific research. This strategy aims to make empirical research in the social sciences available to value-based decision-making. Conditional objectivism draws from research in different branches of philosophy and the method

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To introduce the reader to the philosophical debates about the science of the arts, I review existing research and discuss three philosophical theses. As a background claim, I begin with the co-dependence thesis , which states that dependence relations have tied arts and sciences together in the past and continue to interlink them in the current historical context. One area in which the co-dependence thesis is contested is the debate about th

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent (“a tracker”) to track a human person (“a target”) and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification . First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people ( the face-recognition program ). Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identi-fication. In contrast to universalist the

Authors Nicolas J. Bullot Rolf Reber Abstract Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further speci