Dear all, A reminder that Nora Heizelmann (Munich) will be giving a paper entitled “Weakness of Will as a Cognitive Bias" (abstract below) tomorrow at the Serious Metaphysics Group.
Notice that the seminar will exceptionally run from 4:00 to 5:30pm this week, in the Board Room at the Philosophy Faculty. Hope to see you there, Carlo Abstract How is weakness of the will psychologically possible? A relatively recent answer to this question invokes economic delay discounting theory: agents devaluate a reward with its temporal delay. However, delay discounting models in their orthodox form are conceptually not suited to describe many prime examples of weakness of will, like marshmallow cases. I shall present a recent account that can overcome the issue: agents' processing of risks and uncertainty may crucially determine how they discount delayed rewards. As delays involve risks and uncertainties, delayed prospects are in turn discounted. The approach has implications for philosophical research. First, the psychological mechanism of weakness of will is plausibly a cognitive bias. Second, weakness of will thus understood is still irrational, yet it may be theoretically rather than practically irrational. It might thus no longer be meaningfully distinguishable from epistemic akrasia. Lastly, although agents do not have direct conscious control over the bias, they still have indirect control over the weak-willed behaviour caused by it, and are accordingly responsible and blameworthy for it. _____________________________________________________ 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.
