Hot Thought

Psychology meets philosophy: knowledge, reality, morality, meaning

Paul Thagard Ph.D.

When Did Consciousness Begin?

Arthur Reber argues that consciousness began with bacteria and other single-celled organisms, but evidence supports a much later evolution of consciousness.

When All Else Fails, Lower Your Standards

You should change your goals when you realize that pursuing them does not contribute to satisfying your basic needs.

How Does Current AI Stack Up Against Human Intelligence?

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are impressive, including deep learning, IBM's Watson, and driverless cars. A video describes how human intelligence is still better.

How Fear Leads to Anger

Emotions cause other emotions—such as when people’s fears make them angry at those deemed responsible for making them afraid.

What Is Trust?

Trust and mistrust are emotional processes that operate in the brain through bindings of representations of persons, situations, appraisals, and physiology.

Kavanaugh Versus Blasey Ford: Who Is More Credible?

Explanatory coherence analyzes the logic of the question of whether Kavanagh assaulted Blasey Ford, and emotional coherence explains why people deviate from such logic.

The Psychology of Hothouse Earth

Weather disasters associated with the development of Hothouse Earth require education that affects both cognition and emotion.

If Truth Isn’t Truth, What Is It?

The correspondence theory of truth beats alternatives because it explains scientific agreement, the obstinacy of experiments against social influence, and technological successes.

Is Self-Esteem a Basic Human Need?

Self-esteem does not qualify as a basic human need because it has only a weak connection with accomplishments and relationships, and because its value is culture-bound.

Science and Philosophy Offer More for Grief than Religion

Philosophy that builds on science can help people to see that life can remain meaningful and morally valuable, even in the face of grief.

The Psychology of Dehumanization

The mental processes of dehumanization include categorization, imagery, metaphor, and transfer of emotions such as disgust, fear, and hatred.

Why You Are the Way You Are

Features such as personality, character, and intelligence result from interactions of genes, epigenetics, learning, and choice.

What Are Moods?

Moods are brain states that result from the same mechanisms that produce emotions: brain representations of physiological changes and appraisals of goal satisfaction.

Is Inequality Immoral?

Inequality is immoral when it keeps people from satisfying their biological needs such as food, and their psychological needs such as autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?

What makes you the same or different over the span your life depends on the interactions of molecular, neural, mental, and social mechanisms.

Jordan Peterson's Murky Maps of Meaning

Peterson's emphasis on religious myth provides a poor blueprint for understanding the origins of totalitarianism, and an even poorer guide to overcoming its evils.

Jordan Peterson’s Flimsy Philosophy of Life

Some people are taking Jordan Peterson to be profound about the nature of morality, reality, and life. How well do his views stand up to philosophical scrutiny?

Why Is Lithium Good for Both Batteries and Bipolar Disorder?

Understanding of how lithium works in a mental-health context has been slow to develop.

Will Robots Ever Have Emotions?

To be emotional like human beings, robots would have to approximate our cognitive appraisals, physiological perceptions, and linguistic and cultural contexts. How could they?

Do Animals Have Emotions? A Debate

The legitimacy of the argument that non-human animals have emotions is debated by an advocate and a skeptic.

What is a Psychological Theory?

Psychology needs theories to provide practical interventions and answers to fascinating questions about the mind. Causal mechanisms serve these needs better than associations.

Why Is There Evil?

People’s brains are equipped for caring and empathy, so why do people often hurt each other? Evil is like disease, resulting from malfunctions in mechanisms.

What Causes What?

Deciding whether something causes a spike in disease or a pattern like global warming requires careful inferences.

Was It Meant to Be?

When love affairs and jobs go wrong, people are sometimes told that it just wasn’t meant to be. Does such meaning come from God, the universe, fate, destiny, karma, or anything?

How Do Psychotherapists Think?

Psychotherapists need complex reasoning to determine how to help the people they treat. Such assessment is not simply matching features, but requires building a causal account.

Empathy in Literature and Film

Empathy in literature and film works by three modes of empathy: verbal analogies, physiological mimicry, and non-verbal simulation of chains of emotional experiences.

Daily Routines of Creative People

Most people have daily routines and rituals. According to a recent book, mornings are important productive times for many famous writers and other creative people.

In Defense of Empathy

A new book argues that empathy is not only overrated but actually harmful to morality. But it is often helpful in guiding ethical judgment and motivating appropriate actions.

Experimental Philosophy: Strengths and Limitations

Experimental philosophy is an important movement in which philosophers systematically collect data about how people think. It has 2 main strengths and 3 surmountable limitations.

What’s Wrong With Conflicts of Interest?

Conflicts of interest easily arise in government, science, and medicine. Cognition-emotion interactions in the brain lead people to violate their professional responsibilities.

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