from month 02/2017

“True self” Journal Club General Discussion

Join the discussion of Nina Strohminger, George Newman, and Joshua Knobe's article and of the commentaries by Simon Cullen, Ophelia Deroy, Victoria Fomina, Larry Hirschfeld, Gloria Origgi, Brent Strickland, and Radu Umbres. To post a comment, you should be registered and logged in. Please ...

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Nina Strohminger’s response: A friendly desultory philippic

Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning in. I would like to start by saying the opinions expressed below are purely my own. Josh Knobe and George Newman may or may not be on board with anything I’m about to say, though I do try to give a fair representation of what we, as a team, argue for in ...

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Anthropological doubts about the moral “true self”

Do people everywhere believe there is a true self – a moral true self, what is more? This is a question of obvious anthropological relevance. Most anthropologists, however, would question the basic assumptions of the hypothesis , not to mention its validity for many of the societies they have ...

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Is there really no such thing as the true self?

In “The True Self: A psychological concept distinct from the self,” Strohminger, Knobe, and Newman (henceforth “SKN”) outline a fascinating and compelling body of research on people’s naïve intuitions regarding the “true self.” The evidence suggests that there is a cross-culturally ...

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The “true self,” more complex, more social

“I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself.” Thus wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the incipit of his Confessions, a narrative ...

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Truth and consequences

I was delighted to discover that deep down the authentic me is a happy go lucky sort of guy, and others recognize this too. I am also a little skeptical, to be honest. The authors of acknowledge that there may be some individual variation in this tableau—although the choice between psychopath and ...

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Article for February: All forms of writing

Hi everyone! For February we chose to read Greg Downey's critique of Stanislas Dehaene's  2009 book Reading in the Brain. In his article titled All Forms of Writing (Mind & Language 2014), Greg Downey discusses Dehaene's neural efficiency-based interpretation of evolution of writing and his ...

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The True Self, Supernatural Agents, and the Problem of Evil

Nina Strohminger, Joshua Knobe, and George Newman’s compelling and thought-provoking piece on the “True Self” presents an original theoretical intervention into the vast body of literature on the self, which spans across several different disciplinary and epistemological traditions. Aside ...

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To be or not to be two?

I could have been more courageous I will be more forgiving. Such thoughts are frequent, especially at the beginning of the year, like now. We believe that we stand for certain values, or deeper virtues, which might not be expressed or realized in our day-to-day actions. We fall short of a certain ...

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The true self and the situation

You are probably already familiar with Darley and Batson's (1973) study. Participants were students at the Princeton Theological Seminary. As part of the study, they were asked to give a short sermon in a nearby building. Half of the seminarians were told they were running late, so they’d better ...

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Précis of “The True Self: A psychological concept distinct from the self”

Some recent work in experimental philosophy and in social psychology addresses central issues in cognition and culture. Case in point: an  article by Nina Strohminger, George Newman, and Joshua Knobe entitled "The True Self: A psychological concept distinct from the self" (forthcoming in Perspec...

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