Marta Caravà

Emotions like fear and anxiety can present a significant impediment to people’s subjective well-being, as well as the achievement of life goals like being healthy, longevity, and achieving a good level of education. The ability to manage these emotions is therefore crucial to achieving important goals. This paper will describe how people are unjustly prevented from effectively managing their fear and anxiety, specifically, via the existence of negative social norms, expectations and stereotypes relating to the emotions, what it means to have them, and who should express them. Due to these things, people who might help them to address and manage their emotions face a dilemma: whether they choose to draw attention to the emotions or not, they risk harming the people experiencing the emotions, leading them to engage in self-stereotyping, and stereotyping and distrust of others. It shall be argued that this situation represents an injustice for those who are experiencing the fear and anxiety, of an affective and epistemic kind: the Injustice of Neglected Affect. The acknowledgment that the Injustice of Neglected Affect is a jointly affective and epistemic injustice has implications for how to conceive both types of injustice, and the relationship between these injustices and attention.

Traditionally, philosophy of psychology has individuated mental states functionally or semantically. These approaches have shaped many of the debates surrounding cognitive architecture and perceptual experience. We argue that understanding perceptual learning requires a mechanistic approach, which focuses on the structure of the mental representations underlying learned perceptual abilities. We articulate the mechanistic approach, then show how it differs from functional and semantic approaches with regards to important debates about high‐level contents, cognitive permeation, and non‐conceptual content. Finally, we argue that our approach opens new avenues for explaining how perception contributes to important phenomena such as perceptual expertise and decision‐making.

How should we assess systems whose mnemonic status is contested? There are, for instance, debates over whether immune memory is “really” memory, or akin to memory as ordinarily attributed to human cognition. In this paper, I challenge two arguments often given by detractors in this debate. The first is that the system does not exhibit errors exemplified in human memory. The second is that it can be described and explained in causal terms alone. I argue that our limited knowledge of the causal basis of immunological phenomena and human memory undercuts our ability to conclude that one is merely causal while the other is not. By consequence, it is unclear why we should reject that the immune system exhibits these errors. With my challenges, I question whether we are consistent in assessing alleged mnemonic systems. Though we have schematic causal accounts of both systems, we have differing expectations of what we can conclude about them. Yet, it is unclear what might warrant appeals to these expectations.

The Simulation Theory of Memory states that to remember an episode is to simulate it in the imagination (Michaelian, 2016a, b ), making memory thus reducible to the act of imagining. This paper examines Simulation Theory’s resources to account for our ability to distinguish episodic memory from free imagination. The theory suggests that we can reliably do so because of the distinctive phenomenology episodic memory comes with (i.e., a _feeling of remembering_), which other episodic imaginings lack. I will raise two objections to how the feeling of remembering is engineered in the theory, followed by an exhaustive exploration of the theory’s resources to ground the mechanism underlying the elicitation of such feeling. I will conclude that the Simulation Theory cannot simultaneously defend the simulational character of episodic memory and ground our ability to discriminate between memories and imaginings.

This paper examines the plausibility of an attention-based version of moral perceptualism (amp). According to amp, our perception of moral properties is characterized by perceptual attentional patterns that reflect a sensitivity to morally salient features. First, I argue that the explanation for the empirical evidence offered to support amp primarily hinges on cognitive processes rather than perceptual ones. Second, while I acknowledge the critical importance of attention in recognizing moral properties, I contend that we must expand amp’s explanatory scope to address the question of what drives this attention. I propose an account of our (in)sensitivity to wrongness that builds on amp’s core statement. In this account, the notion of salience structure of information, defined by the varying accessibility of both perceptual and cognitive representations, plays a central explanatory role.

What fixes the referents of episodic memories? While developed theories are lacking, it is generally assumed that the causal production of a memory, via memory traces, determines its referent. Recently, it has been pointed out that the “promiscuity” of memory traces poses a problem for this approach. Proposed solutions focus on finding some nonpromiscuous causal link. In this paper, I refine the problem posed by promiscuous memory traces and show that these solutions fail. By developing the question of mnemonic episodic reference within the framework of informational signs, I argue that no pure “producer-side” theory of reference will work. The only solution, I argue, is to abandon pure producer-side theories for theories which appeal to consumer-side factors, i.e., factors concerning how referring signs are used. Once it is admitted that mnemonic episodic reference depends on consumer-side factors, the natural question is whether producer-side factors (i.e., causal production) play any role at all in mnemonic episodic reference. I conclude by outlining two possible pure consumer-side theories for mnemonic episodic reference, one based on the work of Imogen Dickie and one based on the work of Ruth Millikan. Both theories explain how the referents of episodic memories are fixed without any appeal to a causal link, and, hence, are compatible with “post-causal” theories of memory, like simulationism.

Grief is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We can also experience grief for people we have never met. Indeed, it is not just persons that we may grieve for. People report feeling grief over the death of their pets, or about the destruction the natural environment. In all these cases one factor that seems to stand out is loss. Despite being about very different things, these various forms of grief all involve a loss of some sort. Yet there is a further aspect of grief, which, on the face of it, does not quite follow this pattern. Grief can also be experienced before a loss has occurred. Grief can be experienced while the person that one is grieving for is still living and before one has (fully) suffered the loss. This phenomenon is known as anticipatory grief. The experience of anticipatory grief is a complex phenomenon, which resists easy classification. Nonetheless, we suggest that mental time travel, our ability to mentally project ourselves into the personal past (episodic memory) and personal future (episodic prospection), is a key mechanism that underpins experiences of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief can still be understood in terms of loss, but it is a loss that is brought to mind through memory and imagination.

Genealogical anxiety is the worry that the origins of beliefs, once revealed to be influenced by “irrelevant” factors such as personal histories and circumstances of upbringing, will undermine or cast doubt on those beliefs. Discussions on these irrelevant influences in the epistemological literature have so far primarily focused on their contingency. But there is another issue that merits further examination: the fact that epistemic environments condition beliefs suggests that epistemic agency is significantly curtailed. I present a model of belief-forming processes that highlights how networks of attention and trust/distrust influence these processes. The model suggests that, while there is a lot happening beyond our control that shapes what we come to believe, we still retain some degree of agency to the extent that we can rewire our networks of attention and trust/distrust. I conclude that, surprisingly, genealogical anxiety may in fact increase agency insofar as it may encourage critical resistance.

In the BBC show, The Repair Shop, members of the public bring their cherished but crumbling possessions into a workshop populated by expert craftspeople, who carry out restorations. These objects arrive as treasured possessions, which, despite their dilapidated state, still hold memories and meaning for their owners, albeit memories that may have faded as the object itself has aged. Something magical seems to take place after the objects are restored, however. The restored objects seem to reanimate and revive the memories that their owners have invested in them. How is it possible that this restoration can bring memories held by the objects back to life? What is special about The Repair Shop restoring objects to their former glory? We outline two ways in which objects can be evocative and embody emotion, memory, and meaning. We then outline the ways in which the restoration of these objects to something like their original form can improve scaffolded recall and bring memories back to life. For one class of evocative objects, the restoration enhances recall by reinstating details from the context in which the memories were encoded. For the second class of evocative objects, their restoration affords an imaginative connection to the past, which enables them to become powerful focal points of memory and shared narratives. In effect, The Repair Shop seems to work not only as a repair shop of objects but as a repair shop of memory too.

Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically, agents typically use willpower (synchronic regulation) to achieve their plans to avoid temptation (diachronic regulation). So even if cases of diachronic regulation seem to involve self-control, this may be because they are contaminated by synchronic regulation. We therefore developed a novel multifactorial method to disentangle synchronic and diachronic regulation. Using this method, we find that ordinary usage assumes that only synchronic––not diachronic––regulation counts as self-control. We find this pattern across four experiments involving different kinds of temptation, as well as a paradigmatic case of diachronic regulation based on the classic story of Odysseus and the Sirens. Our final experiment finds that self-control in a diachronic case depends on whether the agent uses synchronic regulation at two moments: when she (1) initiates and (2) follows-through on a plan to resist temptation. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that synchronic regulation is the sole difference maker in the folk concept of self-control.

In this paper, we argue that the concept of environmental scaffolding can contribute to a better understanding of our affective life and the complex manners in which it is shaped by environmental entities. In particular, the concept of environmental scaffolding offers a more comprehensive and less controversial framework than the notions of embeddedness and extendedness. We contribute to the literature on situated affectivity by embracing and systematizing the diversity of affective scaffolding. In doing so, we introduce several distinctions that provide classifications of different types of environmentally scaffolded affectivity. Furthermore, we differentiate eight dimensions (e.g., trust, individualization, or intent) that allow us to evaluate the quality and effectivity of scaffolds in particular applications. On that basis, we develop a taxonomy using paradigmatic examples of affective scaffolding. This taxonomy enriches the current debate by emphasizing distinctions that are often conflated and by identifying fields of application that are commonly overlooked.