Hot Thought

Psychology meets philosophy: knowledge, reality, morality, meaning.

by Paul Thagard

Mapping Values in Science and Society

Making decisions about social issues, including scientific ones such as climate change and bioengineering, requires values as well as facts. One good way to make such values explicit is to diagram them using cognitive-affective maps, which display emotional attitudes as well as conceptual structure. Read More

Should You Trust Your Intuitions?

Intuitions in everyday life and especially in philosophy are often unreliable. Intuition should only be trusted when a thinker has had ample opportunity to acquire knowledge about stable regularities in an environment. Read More

Your Brain on Drugs: Philosophical Implications

Studies of the neurochemical effects of drugs support the mind-brain identity theory over its chief rival, dualism, which claims that minds are distinct from bodies. Read More

Having a Hip Replacement

Joint replacement surgery is unavoidably scary. Here are some ways to make it easier. Read More

What’s New in Cognitive Science?

Cognitive science, the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, is increasingly concerned with neuroscience, statistics, embodiment, and culture. Read More

Zombie Ethics

Zombie ethics can contribute to assessment of people's obligations concerning the environment. Read More

Emotional Causes of Climate Change Denial

Kari Marie Norgaard provides a sophisticated account of why a group of well informed and politically progressive people nevertheless tend to deny that climate change is a serious problem. Read More

Facts about Grief

A new book clears up many misconceptions about grief, such as the common view that it unfolds in the five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Read More

Climate Change Denial

Climate change denial results from a natural thinking tendency called motivated inference, in which beliefs are based on people’s goals and emotions rather than on good evidence. Read More

What Matters?

Different philosophical views about what we ought to care about will determine how best to produce a more desirable world in 2050. Read More

Increasing Empathy

A new technique for mapping emotional values has potential for increasing empathy by helping people to grasp their own values as well as those of people with whom they have conflicts. Read More

What Is Consciousness?

Everybody consciously experiences perceptions, sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Will psychology and neuroscience ever be able to explain consciousness? Read More

The Joy of Thought

Many scientists have described the great joy that comes from making a discovery. Such emotions provide a major part of the motivation that keeps creative people working hard in the face of adversity. A new model of the Aha! experience provides a neural explanation of the joy of thought.
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How Free Is Your Will?

It was easy to suppose that people have free will when little was known about how brain processes produce decisions. But traditional ideas about free will are becoming increasingly implausible. Nevertheless, autonomy can remain an important ideal, even if free will is an illusion. Read More

Why Minds Are Like Smartphones

What do Blackberries, iPads, and brains have in common? All function well because of powerful integration of hardware and software, combining syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

In his recent best seller, the world’s most famous scientist proclaims that philosophy is dead. But those who ignore philosophy are condemned to repeat it.

Is the iPad a transformational, game-changing paradigm shift, or just a clever toy? Here’s how I use mine.

Embodiment is currently a hot topic in psychology and philosophy, for good reasons. Thinking is heavily influenced by physiological processes involved in perception and emotion. Embodiment is a useful extension to cognitive theories that explain thinking in terms of mental representations, but not an alternative theory. Read More

Banning Laptops in Classrooms

Wireless access to the Web has become very common in universities, and the number of students using laptops in classes has steadily increased. So in my two classes on cognitive science in the fall I’m planning to ban laptop use. Here’s why. Read More

Ethical Thinking Should be Rational AND Emotional

The ancient philosophical debate about whether ethics is primarily a matter of reason or emotion has spilled over into psychology, where there is much current discussion about the nature of ethical thinking. But sufficiently rich theories of inference and emotion can clarify how moral judgments at their best should be both rational and emotional. Read More

How to be Creative

Can people learn or be taught to be more creative? Creativity is valued in many areas of human activity, including scientific discovery, technological invention, artistic imagination, and social innovation. I know of no studies that show that creativity is teachable, but history provides some interesting suggestions about the habits of highly creative scientists. Read More

Endarkenment and “The Secret”

Millions of people have bought a book called The Secret that claims that people can increase their health, wealth, and happiness just by thinking intensely that they will get what they want. This view and other New Age ideas are symptoms of Endarkenment, the contemporary resurgence of magical, superstitious, and religious ideas. Read More

What Are Emotions?

Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the nature of emotions such as happiness. Are they states of supernatural souls, cognitive judgments about goal satisfaction, or perceptions of physiological changes? Advances in neuroscience suggest how brains generate emotions through a combination of cognitive appraisal and bodily perception. Read More

Challenging Scientific Consensus

Psychology, medicine, and even philosophy should be evidence-based, which requires looking to scientific experts for reviews of current beliefs. But it is part of the nature of science that sometimes the experts are wrong. When is it legitimate to challenge scientific consensus? Read More

Psychology Professor Hilariously Confronts Religion

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, is a clever and witty academic satire, focusing on two psychology professors. The book is highly entertaining, but also raises important psychological and philosophical issues about religious belief. Read More

What Makes Life Worth Living?

Here are some possible answers to the question of what makes life worth living: (1) nothing; (2) religion; (3) happiness; (4) love, work, and play. Evidence from psychology and neuroscience supports the fourth answer. Read More

Does everything happen for a reason?

When people have to cope with difficult situations in their lives, they sometimes reassure themselves by saying that everything happens for a reason. It can be distressing to think that bad things happen merely through chance or accident. But they do.

I'm currently teaching a course on medical ethics and telling my students about the movement toward evidence-based medicine. The students are surprised to learn that many medical treatments and practices are based more on tradition than on good evidence of effectiveness. Read More