Dear all,
This Thursday (Oct 20) at the Serious Metaphysics Group, James Hutton will be presenting 'Emotion as sensitivity to value: the implementation problem' (abstract below). The talk will be at 1.00-2.30pm, at the Philosophy faculty board room. For the rest of the Michaelmas term card, please do have a look here: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG [1] Best wishes, Li Li ABSTRACT How can emotions function as a sensitivity to evaluative properties? If we want to maintain that they can, then there are various problems we need to solve. One is the _Implementation Problem:_ can we explain how emotions track evaluative properties, without lamely invoking an unexplained faculty of intuition? The problem can be put more clearly, by distinguishing between three levels of description: the _function_; the _algorithm _that performs the function; and the biological processes that _implement _that algorithm. What kind of algorithm_ _could perform this epistemic function of tracking values? And how could the emotions implement_ _that algorithm? To fill in the _algorithm_-level, I draw an analogy with cases from the psychology of "expert intuition": the capacities of expert chess players, firefighters and neonatal nurses. These experts' "intuitive capacities" are constituted by subpersonal processes which exploit stable statistical correlations between cues and the 'intuited' facts. I argue that similar processes would suffice in the case of value, exploiting the supervenience of values on non-normative properties. I argue that the inputs and outputs of our emotion-systems make them capable of implementing such an algorithm. A question remains as to how our emotion-systems could become attuned to the relationship between cues and values. Understood as a causal question, we can answer with an explanation, involving upbringing and cultural evolution. The explanation leaves a residual sceptical worry, but this isn't as serious as it first appears. -- Li Li Tan PhD Candidate in Philosophy St Catharine's College Links: ------ [1] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
