Stephen Gadsby

Recovery from eating disorders is known to be difficult. Individuals with eating disorders are generally poorly responsive to change: their eating behaviour is rigid, and they are often inflexible as regards their eating-related goals. This opens up questions about their agency in eating. Why do individuals with eating disorders not “just stop” performing problematic eating behaviour, despite the enormous burden this behaviour may inflict in their lives? In this article, we seek to answer this question by providing a clear view of individuals’ own role in the development of and recovery from their eating disorders. Specifically, we adopt a situated perspective on agency to explain the poor responsiveness to change characteristic of these conditions. We suggest that in the pursuit of eating-related goals, individuals with eating disorders develop a project-like relation to eating, which not only pervasively changes the arrangement and content of their lives, but also their lives’ meaning. On this basis, we argue that the goal-inflexibility and rigidity of eating behaviour often ascribed to them might not be grounded in disorders or impairments of agency, but can in fact be understood in terms of their agency in eating. This is what we call the “life project account” of eating disorders.

An important part of the explanatory role of concepts is that they enable us to combine a wide variety of objects, properties and relations in thought, with contents spanning diverse domains. I discuss an argument that appears to show that paradigmatic non-linguistic representational formats are unsuited to play this role, and thus conceptual representation could not occur in these formats. I show that this argument fails, because it overlooks the possibility of individual concepts being shared between a number of special purpose representational systems. Demonstrating this requires defending the possibility of cross-format redeployment of concepts.

I defend a view of the attitude of desire against a close rival. Both views are versions of “the guise of the good” thesis. The guise of the good says that a desire for P involves P appearing good in some respect. I defend a content-based account of value appearances against an attitude-based account. On the content view, a desire for P represents P as good while the attitude of that desire presents P’s value as true. In other words, a desire for P presents it as true that P is good. The attitude view says that a desire represents P non-evaluatively while the attitude of that desire presents P as good. In other words, a desire for P presents P as good. The attitude view struggles to explain the relationship between the qualitative character of desires and appearances of value. It must either implausibly deny that there is a close relationship between the two, or explain the relationship by introducing a poorly motivated, revisionist mental ontology. In the present state of the debate between the two views, this problem tips the scales in favor of the content view.

While research on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has traditionally focused on cognitive and behavioral deficits, there is increasing interest in exploring possible resources associated with the disorder. In this paper, we argue that the attention-patterns associated with ADHD can be understood as expressing an alternative style of inquiry, or “zetetic” style, characterized mainly by a lower barrier for becoming curious and engaging in inquiry, and a weaker disposition to regulate curiosity in response to the cognitive and practical costs associated with inquiry. Exploring this zetetic style from an epistemological perspective, we show that it is often epistemically rational and can be advantageous in important respects. We close by suggesting that the very aspects of the zetetic style that might at times render it disadvantageous from the point of view of individual subjects with ADHD, will often confer epistemic benefits to the social group that the subjects are part of.