Eric Mandelbaum (CUNY)
Jules Holroyed (University of Sheffield)
Time: 15:00 – 17:00 h
Place: Barcelona, UB, Seminar María Zambrano
Jules Holroyd (University of Sheffield)
Responsibly Navigating Social Practices
In a recent exciting contribution, Cheshire Calhoun has developed an expanded picture of the morally responsible person. This picture focuses not only on the capacities needed to be accountable for violations of moral norms – as has been the focus of much of the literature on moral responsibility. Rather, Calhoun argues, we ought to consider also what capacities are needed to be fluent operators in social practices, in a way that enables others to form predictive expectations (what Calhoun calls ‘compliance responsibility’). This picture helps us to see what is valuable about being a responsible person; why it is a status that matters to us.
Our intervention focuses on Calhoun’s notion of compliance responsibility, and the questions of what capacities are involved in the navigation of social practices. Our contention is that what capacities are salient depends on the model of social practices we articulate, and the features of those practices brought into view. We will survey three models of social practices and argue that each one brings different capacities into view. We argue that, at least sometimes, a model which brings a richer and more complex notion of practices, and the corresponding set of capacities into view, is desirable. Our argument is intended as a constructive supplement, rather than a rival, to Calhoun’s picture.
Eric Mandelbaum (CUNY)
The underintellectualization of everyday life
Maximally simple models of the mind have dominated both empiricist and rationalist theorizing. From behaviorism to associationism to Chomskian Minimalism to resource rational Bayesianism, simplicity assumptions have reigned. As a consequence, philosophers and cognitive scientists have used simplicity as a guide to mental ontology, especially those regarding mental structure and animal cognition. I offer a different perspective, in which the importance of a task is linked to the multiplicity of ways of accomplishing that task: the more important the problem, the more types of solutions evolution has created to solve it. Sometimes this is due to multiple mental mechanisms aimed at similar contents, and at others it’s through redundant representations of the same contents. This type of importance/redundancy view leads to a much different picture of the mind, one that casts light on the underintellectualization of everyday life. From low-level perception to insect cognition, we should be inverting Morgan’s canon, and the default assumption should be that even seemingly rote or foolish behavior is backed by interesting complex computational/intentional machinery.
