Hot Thought

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

by Paul Thagard

Irregular Emotions

Bertrand Russell devised a word game he called “irregular verbs” with examples like: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pigheaded fool. These constructions provide excellent illustrations of the varying emotional associations of words. Read More

What are Values?

Values in science and technology are mind-brain processes that combine cognition and emotion, and they can be objective if they reflect human needs. Read More

What Is Evidence?

Medicine, psychology, and even philosophy should be based on evidence that is reliable, intersubjective, repeatable, robust, and causally correlated with the world. Read More

Why Memes Are a Bad Idea

Memes are bad ideas because of the substantial differences between biological and cultural evolution. The lumping of all cultural entities together as memes neglects the variety and complexity of mental representations. The processes by which mental representations are generated and selected are very different from the ones that operate in biological evolution. Read More

Motivated Ignorance

People succumb to motivated ignorance when their goals lead them to avoid learning potentially valuable information. Such avoidance of knowledge naturally happens with respect to important personal topics such as relationships and health. It is also common at the social and political level with respect to issues such as climate change. Read More

Eleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy

Philosophy attempts to answer fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and morals. In contrast to the dominant approach that uses the study of language and logic to analyze existing concepts, I prefer an approach that is closely tied to scientific investigations and aims to improve concepts. Read More

Ethics, Caring, and Reason

Being ethical requires good reasoning about rights, consequences, and principles; but it also requires caring about the people affected by actions. Ethical thought needs to be both cognitive and emotional. Read More

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

There are good theoretical and practical reasons to collaborate with people from other disciplines on projects such as trying to understand how the mind works. Here is some advice about how to collaborate productively. Read More

Take the Cognitive Science Quiz

What do you think the answers to eight questions are about the nature of the mind and intelligence? Read More

Procedural Creativity Invents New Methods

Procedural creativity – the generation of new methods – is important for scientific discovery, technological invention, artistic imagination, and social innovation. How do minds do it? Read More

Is Healthcare like Broccoli?

Some critics of U.S. President Obama’s healthcare plan have argued that requiring people to buy health insurance is as illegitimate as requiring them to eat broccoli. A psychological theory of analogy clarifies where this reasoning goes wrong. Read More

Should You Fear Death?

Many psychologists have claimed that people are heavily motivated by fear of their own mortality. This claim may well describe large numbers of people, but is it rational to fear death? Read More

What is Pseudoscience?

Science is different from pseudoscience in using mechanistic explanations, statistical thinking, critical evaluation of competing theories, and in progressing with new theories and applications. Read More

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.