Ongoing research projects

​Abstract​

This project explores the idea that conscious thought and deliberation are not only unnecessary for exhibiting rational agency, but that agency can be expressed more fully in their absence. The better you get at playing guitar, for example, the less you have to consciously plan and analyse your finger movements while playing, and the more it feels like a controlled, harmonious self-authored activity. It is more than just a figure of speech to say that expert guitarists ‘know what they are doing’, even though their playing is not driven by conscious deliberation. As a beginner you do consciously deliberate about your movement, and yet it feels uncontrolled and clunky. Moral theorists such as Bernard Williams have similarly pointed out how undermining and alienating it can be to appeal to moral theory in personal everyday interactions. In skills as well as in morally significant personal interactions, being explicitly deliberative does not enhance your agency, but rather undermines it, alienates you from it.

The aim of this project is to further explore this line of thinking by applying ideas about self-knowledge that have been developed mostly in the context of beliefs, namely that the right (that is, agential) kind of self-knowledge is not aimed at one’s own psychology, but at the outside world, to habitual and skilful action. The project focuses on the question: What kind of self-knowledge is involved in skilled and habitual action that is expressive of one’s agency? To answer this question, I will be drawing on contemporary psychology about the relation between conscious and automatic cognition, the role of meta-cognition / understanding, and about habits and skills. My main philosophical approach will be to make sense of the empirical by drawing on work in analytic philosophy of mind and action, by authors such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Moran and Harry Frankfurt. Another approach I would like to consider is a phenomenological analysis of action, to get clearer what the sense of control and agency in an action means. For example, one suggestion that comes from this tradition is that to understand the issue of control in action, we need to understand agency as inherently temporal. I am also interested to explore how my analysis could help to address or at least understand practical problems, such as (self-)destructive or addictive habitual behavior.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Martens Judith​
• Fellow: Michiel Esseling​

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project
  

Abstract

Evidence-based policy (EBP) is based on the idea that policy makers should use evidence as the basis for their policy decisions, in the hopes that the latter will work. EBP is highly important in present-day societies, and has been heavily discussed in the social sciences (i.a. public policy literature) and in philosophy and philosophy of science. If we look at what has been done, we see that many divergent definitions and characterizations of EBP have been proposed. As of yet there is no agreed upon definition of EBP. Furthermore, EBP faces many challenges in practice. For most of them it is not clear how they should be addressed, in part due to the lack of consensus about what EBP is or should be. This project wants to contribute to the solution to this problem by clarifying existing meanings of 'EBP', by tackling two specific epistemological problems relating to EBP and by striving towards a consensus definition.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Leuridan Bert
• Fellow: Del Grosso Paride

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is seen as an enactive and embodied technology, because its movement interfaces allow for interactive experiences. But one is still seen as 'disembodied' or only virtually embodied in the VR. The main feature of virtual engagements is not embodiment, but imagination, because imagination brings to mind unreal, fictional entities. What has not been thoroughly researched is the role of embodied/enactive imagination in VR. That is because this concept has not yet been fully developed. Also, the existing literature on VR sees imagination involved in VR as representational: virtual objects and environments, seen as fictions that do not exist, need to be represented in imagination. This creates a problem of how to explain immersing in the VR. This project brings the body into VR in a strong way. It defends a new ongoing embodied imagining (OEI) thesis for VR, which proposes that ongoing embodied processes (neural, motoric and explicit performances) allow us to anticipate future states or actions, also in virtual contexts. It sees virtual reality as a place of action possibilities available to an embodied being. This thesis is crucial for better understanding of virtual interactions. It can solve the problems to do with embodiment (is one truly embodied in the VR?) and immersion (can one be truly present in the VR?). This research will apply the OEI thesis in different contexts that utilize VR platforms, such as education, gaming, and sport.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Myin Erik
• Fellow: Rucinska Zuzanna Aleksandra

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

A standard view on group obligations holds that such obligations are simply collective properties in disguise, i.e. if they hold of a group of agents, it doesn't follow that they also hold of each member of that group. However, I will argue that this standard view is problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: group obligations are not just collective properties, conditions occurring in the standard definition are not jointly necessary, and, moreover, they encounter more or less formal objections w.r.t the deontic nature of obligations. I propose a research project at the interface of Philosophical Logic and Moral Philosophy that will address these issues. The central hypothesis that I will support throughout my project is that a closer look at the mereological properties of groups will lead to a proper understanding of these group obligations. My project will have three main original contributions. Its first contribution will be a class of concepts for group obligations. Its second contribution will be a study of the connection between mereological and normative concepts. Its third contribution will be the definition of a higher-order deontic logic for group obligations. My project will successfully address the issues encountered by the current standard definition of group obligations and will provide new insights on group obligations that will be useful both to logicians and moral philosophers.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Martens Judith
• Fellow: Miguel Flament​

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Both emotions and mental imagery play a crucially important role in our mental life and both have played a central role in understanding a wide variety of mental processes. But, somewhat surprisingly, there has not been any attempt in philosophy to examine how these two mental phenomena interact. Mental imagery has traditionally been understood as an emotion-free state and in the discussion of emotions the concept of mental imagery is rarely brought up. The present research project aims to explore the rich and varied interactions between emotions and mental imagery, which we think has important benefits both for the study of emotions and for the study of mental imagery. The central motivation behind it is that understanding how emotions and mental imagery are intertwined is not only of philosophical interest, but that it can also contribute to debates in psychology, cognitive science and even in some forms of clinical practices.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

A mother sits in a courtroom, overhearing evidence that her son has committed a grave crime. While the evidence convinces everyone else in the courtroom, the mother is unpersuaded—she refuses to believe her son is guilty. This mother is self-deceived about her own son's innocence. Self-deception is considered to be a driving feature of many contemporary issues, from political polarisation to mental disorders. Despite the importance of self-deception, there remains significant gaps in our understanding of the phenomenon. Three such gaps relate to the process of self-deception (how does one successfully deceive themselves?), the outcome of self-deception (what do the self-deceived believe?), and the value of self-deception (is self-deception always harmful or is it sometimes beneficial?). By connecting research on self-deception from philosophy and behavioural economics, I will make progress on each of these issues. First, I will provide a novel philosophical account of the process, outcome, and value of self-deception, based on principles drawn from behavioural economics. Second, I will directly test some of the key research questions from the philosophical literature, by using experimental paradigms adopted from behavioural economics. Finally, I will outline the importance of philosophy to behavioural economic accounts of self-deception.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence
• Fellow: Gadsby Stephen

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ideological bias concerning age, gender, ethnicity and social class is a major ethical concern in contemporary society, influencing human behaviour both at macro- and micro-levels. Recent studies have demonstrated that machine learning methods (from artificial intelligence) not only capture, but amplify the ideological biases in the data they are trained on. In this project, we aim to strategically turn this undesirable property to our advantage and exploit the study of ideological biases for visual cultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (c.1800-c.1940). Recent cognitive studies make clear how ideological biases largely result from processes of social learning. To study the construction and dissemination of ideological bias we put forth three case studies in crucial areas of social control: education (children's literature), mass communication (magic lantern slides and performances), and regulation (police reports). These interlinked areas of study come with a wealth of rights-free digitized material and pre-existing scholarship. Through the application of standard routines from machine learning, we aim to elicit implicit patterns and trends relating to ideological bias and confront these with received knowledge. The current project is innovative in its methodology through its study of pixel data through computer vision in the humanities which has received too little attention so far. Moreover, it uses data-driven technology to present a novel intersectional viewpoint on the construction of ideological bias in the past. Finally, by being embedded in recent cognitive studies, the project will be able to make claims on how implicit bias functioned in the past, understanding better what people thought and how such thinking structured behavioural interactions with their surrounding world.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence
• Co-promoter: Joosen Vanessa
• Co-promoter: Kestemont Mike
• Co-promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Vanhoutte Kurt

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Movement disorders related to perception and action, such as stroke, significantly impair functioning in daily living, severely impacting the life of affected individuals and having a huge economic impact. Although rehabilitation practice aims to restore functional ability through re-learning perception-action couplings, it leads to marginal improvements of daily functioning at best. Here it is argued that to improve effectiveness of rehabilitation a systems approach should be adopted to understand processes underlying perception-action disorders. A systems approach takes into account nonlinear interactions between components, enabling to explain for instance why patients do not respond stereotypical to rehabilitation training. REPAIRS (RE-learning Perception-Action In Rehabilitation from a Systems perspective) is a unique and timely training-through-research school, aiming to improve rehabilitation effectiveness. REPAIRS starts from systems-based fundamental knowledge on learning perception-action couplings to build applications to rehabilitation, while exploiting recent technology advancements. This research school provides the required critical mass of top-level researchers connecting European academic, clinical and technology experts to train the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs in this perspective. REPAIRS studies interaction between four levels of the perception-action cycle: brain, muscles & joints, agent-environment and social, which is integrated with requirements on translation from clinical, technology and philosophical domains. The focus on interactions between levels and domains naturally ensures an interdisciplinary and intersectoral training. Integrating this with a high-level training of transferrable skills, dissemination and communication while exploiting an Experiential Skill Learning Workshop, will boost the employability of the young researchers involved and the innovation potential of Europe through reshaping rehabilitation.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Myin Erik

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Musicians move. Evidently. To produce sound, to show their musical intentions to other musicians, to communicate with an audience. But, can movement be used to develop musical skills? To develop improvisation skills? In this project, I will explore the natural connection between music and movement as the basis for developing improvisation skills and study how artistic growth in improvisation can be steered and shaped by exploiting this connection. The driving questions are: How can movement be artistically deployed? Can movement become a basis for developing creative improvisation skills and my own musical language? In the past 10 years, I have studied movement in the instrumental learning process from a theoretical, didactic and empirical perspective (see publications.lucnijs.be). However, increasingly I feel confronted with the need to also search for an answer to such questions through my own artistic practice. I am convinced that my artistic practice must become a fundament that underpins my current work and constitutes the basis for its further development. So, I want to unfold an artistic path that explores the integration of music and movement through an iterative process using free artistic exploration and a constraints-led approach based on different movement approaches (e.g. Laban, Gaga, Viewpoints, Dalcroze). I will investigate my own artistic growth, using a methodology that involves 3 tracks: (1) desk research, participation in movement workshops, conceptual design and elaboration of the theoretical framework on kinemusical performance, (2) empirical work in several movement-oriented phases, combining quantitative measurement of motor involvement (using neuronmocap sensors) and musical outcomes with a phenomenological investigation (think aloud procedure, video stimulated recall, diary) of my lived experience, (3) the artistic use of the motion capture data for 'augmented' multimodal performances, in which my improvisations emerge from the interactive loop between music, movement and visuals. The envisaged outcomes are: a series of kinemusical performances, several publications in international peer-reviewed journals, a written thesis, a series of video performances and a photo report, a publication for the educational implementation, software for multimodal performances, an analysis method for de movement data.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Myin Erik

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Ruth believes it is racist to think that all black men are dangerous. Nevertheless, when she encounters a black man at night, she is afraid and tries to avoid this man. Ruth does not explicitly endorse the claim that all black man are dangerous but there seems to be an implicit aspect of her mind that does. This aspect is called "implicit bias". Psychological studies suggest that someone can be implicitly racist or sexist. Implicit bias is widely discussed, both in academia and in public debates about racism and sexism. Recently, the standard psychological models of implicit bias have been criticized. The standard models mistakenly claim that if a response is automatic (i.e. unintentionally activated and quick), it is the result of a mental shortcut which avoids a person's goals and desires. This project proposes a different model: the Reliable Bias Model of Implicit Cognition. The model can explain why some mental states are automatic but nevertheless goal-directed. Ruth's avoidant behaviour is guided by the goal to stay safe. It is not because a response is automatic that one's goals are not taken into account. This model will not only be useful for psychological research. There are also philosophical questions related to implicit bias, such as: Are we to blame for our implicit biases? Are we able to and should we control them? What does implicit bias tell us about our ability to gain knowledge? The project will use the Reliable Bias Model to answer these questions.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence
• Fellow: Goffin Kris

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project investigates the role of perspectives in scientific knowledge production. The general idea is that, e.g., a scientific model does not depict reality as it is per se; it rather offers one of multiple possible points of view for producing and evaluating knowledge for specific uses. Perspectives always arise out of a specific historical context. For example, whether a new measurement counts as knowledge depends not only on its correctness, but also on whether the experimental procedure lives up to the scientific community's knowledge standards. As such, perspectivists try to steer between absolutist scientific realism (absolute, ahistorical truth) and constructivism (everything-goes relativism). The current literature, however, is unclear on how to identify perspectives and their influence on knowledge production. As such, they are not yet really applicable to actual historical research. To improve on this I will study, for one episode where the historical literature shows a clear influence of different perspectives, how particular scientists distinguished these perspectives, and how these influenced their work. I will focus on how M. Abraham and P. Ehrenfest, between 1900 – 1912, used electron models from different perspectives (electromagnetic, relativity, and quantum) to interpret measurements of the electron's mass, and evaluated others' use of these models. This will then inform my work on a historically adequate account of perspectives and their influence.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Leuridan Bert
• Fellow: Potters Jan

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The aim of this research project is to bring together empirical findings about multimodal perception and empirical findings about (visual, auditory, tactile) mental imagery and argue that on occasions like the one described in the last paragraph, we have multimodal mental imagery: perceptual processing in one sense modality (here: vision) that is triggered by sensory stimulation in another sense modality (here: audition).

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The project in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science focuses on mental states that represent objects as edible, climbable, reachable. In other words, mental states that represent objects as affording actions for us. I make four claims about these mental states First, they play a very important role in our mental life, because each time we are performing an intentional action, we must be in a mental state of this kind. Second, these mental states are in fact perceptual states. It is an important question in the philosophy of perception what properties we perceive objects as having. Shape, size and color are obvious candidates. I argue that we perceive objects as having a property that is less obviously perceptual: the property of affording an action. Hence, I call these mental states action-oriented perceptual states. Third, I argue that animals and small children can be in action-oriented perceptual states. Even if they cannot have some more complex mental states, such as beliefs or thoughts, they must have action-oriented perceptual states. Thus, these mental states are evolutionarily and developmentally basic. Finally, I also claim that these mental states are explanatorily basic, in the sense that the way they represent the world can be explained in a relatively simple manner, one that does not apply in the case of more complex mental states. There is no monolithic explanation for how the mind works: different explanatory schemes apply in the case of different mental states. The underlying motivation for focusing on these action-oriented perceptual states is to emphasize the similarities between our mind and animal minds. A big chunk of what goes on in our mind is very similar to the simple mental processes of animals. Our complex linguistic and reasoning abilities could be described as the icing on the cake.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Nanay Bence
• Fellow: Nanay Bence

Research team(s)

• Centre for Philosophical Psychology

Project type(s)

• Research Project