Attributing Mental States

Friday I attended James Dow‘s talk at the CUNY Cogsci Speaker Series. He was concerned with answering the question of how people are able to ascribe various mental states to themselves. In particular he was interested in critiquing the account offered by Bermudez and developing an alternative account inspired by P.F. Strawson. The standard account [...]

Unconscious Trait Inferences

Friday I attended social psychologist James Uleman‘s talk at the CUNY Cogsci Speaker Series. His topic was unconscious trait inferences. A trait inference is exemplified by the following. Subjects are presented with a sentence, for instance, “she solved the mystery half-way through” which reliably produces subjects to infer a trait. In this case the trait is [...]

Kripke on the Structure of Possible Worlds

Yesterday I attended Saul Kripke’s talk at the Graduate Center (there are quite a few interesting talk coming up…also looking good are the cogsci talks). The title of the talk was “The Structure of Possible Worlds: a Preface to a statement” and was subtitled, “Prolegomena to a talk on possible worlds, some considerations” so maybe [...]

I’m Back, Baby!

Wow, it’s already September! I have had a very busy summer. I have just recovered from a massive hard drive failure which has cost me all of my photos and three new papers that I have been working on. Damn you Dell!! I know, I know; I should have backed it up. I don’t know [...]