Contemporary cognitive science clearly tells us that attention is modulated for speech and action. While these forms of goal-directed attention are very well researched in psychology, they have not been sufficiently studied by epistemologists. In this book, Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor develop and defend a theory of epistemic achievements that requires the manifestation of cognitive agency. They examine empirical work on the psychology of attention and assertion, and use it to ground a normative theory of epistemic achievements and virtues. The resulting study is the first sustained, naturalized virtue epistemology, and will be of interest to readers in epistemology, cognitive science, and beyond.
In Feelings of Believing: Psychology, History, Phenomenology, Ryan Hickerson demonstrates that philosophers as diverse as Hume, Descartes, Husserl, and William James all treated believing as feeling. He argues that doxastic sentimentalism, therefore, is considerably more central to modern epistemology than philosophers have recognized. When the empirical psychology of overconfidence and attention is brought to bear on the history of philosophy and the phenomenology of believing, all point toward belief as fundamentally affective. Understanding believing as feeling has the potential to make us better believers, both by encouraging suspicion of unexamined certainties and by focusing attention on credulity. Hickerson argues that believing is typically felt but not given attention by the believer, and he suggests that virtuous believers are those who pay careful attention to their own sentiments-- who attempt to raise their beliefs to the level of judgments.
Jonardon Ganeri presents an account of mind in which attention, not self, explains the experiential and normative situatedness of human beings in the world. Attention consists in an organisation of awareness and action at the centre of which there is neither a practical will nor a phenomenological witness. Attention performs two roles in experience, a selective role of placing and a focal role of access. Attention improves our epistemic standing, because it is in the nature of attention to settle on what is real and to shun what is not real. When attention is informed by expertise, it is sufficient for knowledge. That gives attention a reach beyond the perceptual: for attention is a determinable whose determinates include the episodic memory from which our narrative identities are made, the empathy for others that situates us in a social world, and the introspection that makes us self-aware. Empathy is other-directed attention, placed on you and focused on your states of mind; it is akin to listening. Empathetic attention is central to a range of experiences that constitutively require a contrast between oneself and others, all of which involve an awareness of oneself as the object of another's attention. An analysis of attention as mental action gainsays authorial conceptions of self, because it is the nature of intending itself, effortful attention in action, to settle on what to do and to shun what not to do. In ethics, a conception of persons as beings with a characteristic capacity for attention offers hope for resolution in the conflict between individualism and impersonalism. Attention, Not Self is a contribution to a growing body of work that studies the nature of mind from a place at the crossroads of three disciplines: philosophy in the analytical and phenomenological traditions, contemporary cognitive science and empirical work in cognitive psychology, and Buddhist theoretical literature.
Drawing on the work of Maria Montessori and contemporary virtue epistemologists such as Linda Zagzebski and Jason Baehr, Intellectual Agency and Virtue Epistemology presents a new interpretation of the nature of intellectual agency and its associated virtues. Focusing on Montessori's interpretation of specific virtues including sensory attentiveness, intellectual love and intellectual humility, it discusses why these are virtues, why one can be held responsible for them, and how they relate to each other. Moreover, it considers pedagogical implications of considering these capacities to be virtues. Intellectual Agency and Virtue Epistemology not only reveals the value of seeing Montessori as a virtue epistemologist, it encourages educationalists to take seriously the cultivation of intellectual virtues as an important part of the education of children.
This report discusses the results of occupation surveys administered to soldiers in selected Army military occupational specialties (MOSs) to assess the level and importance of the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed in these MOSs and to develop better crosswalks between military and civilian occupations. The report identifies both a broader range of military-civilian occupation matches and higher-quality matches than existing crosswalks.
Topic editor Dr Clarissa Lin Yasuda has received honoraria from UCB Pharma. All other topic editors declare no competing interests with regards to the Research Topic subject.
This edited volume provides managers, as well as students, with the best practices in effectively leading the 21st century workforce and managing change. It applies positive principles arising from the newly emerging fields of positive psychology, positive change, and positive organizational studies to the field of leadership and change; offering managers strategies and tools to lead change effectively, in the present-day boundary-less work environment. At its most fundamental level, the uniqueness of this volume lies in its anchorage in the moral and spiritual dimension of leadership, an approach most relevant for contemporary organizations.
This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4–6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time. For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time? The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices.
A rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work supporting the argument that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. But, Montemayor and Haladjian point out, attention is defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. They offer new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between consciousness and attention by examining their functional aspects. The book's ultimate conclusion is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. Undertaking a rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, Montemayor and Haladjian propose a spectrum of dissociation—a framework that identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention—ranging from identity to full dissociation. They argue that conscious attention, the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness, is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. Conscious attention, they claim, evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. Montemayor and Haladjian's goal is to help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines. A focused examination of conscious attention will, they believe, enable theoretical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind.