The Third Horse: On Unendorsed Association and Human Behavior

Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale)

Abstract

On one standard reading, Plato’s works contain at least two distinct views about the structure of the human soul. According to the first, there is a crucial unity to human psychology: there is a dominant faculty that is capable of controlling attention and behavior in a way that not only produces right action, but also “silences” inclinations to the contrary – at least in idealized circumstances. According to the second, the human soul contains multiple autonomous parts, and although one of them reason — normatively dominates the others, it may fail to do so descriptively: even in the face of full, explicit, well-reasoned, conscious awareness of the truth of a claim, a person may continue to feel residual inclinations towards disavowed, inappropriate and misguided experiences and courses of action. In this paper, I will argue that even the second of these views does not fully capture the ways in which reflective commitment fails to guide human action. Whereas the traditional multi-part soul view is well-suited to explaining phenomena that involve a cognitive conflict between our reflective attitudes and our non-reflective endorsements (such as weakness of the will), it falls short when we turn to the full array of human patterns of response, because it neglects a further source of challenge to reason’s rule, namely, the mediation of associative and heuristic processes. These processes introduce complications for which the simple faculty psychology view cannot adequately account. Because they produce challenges to reason’s rule that are phenomenologically invisible, traditional strategies for self-regulation cannot be straightforwardly applied to their management.

Biography

Tamar Gendler is the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, and Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives at Yale University, where she has taught since 2006. Previously, she taught Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Cornell and Syracuse Universities, after earning her PhD at Harvard University in 1996. Much of her recent philosophical work has focused a cluster of issues surrounding the relations between explicit and implicit attitudes, particularly in the context of habit, self-regulation, and implicit bias; other current interests include general questions about philosophical methodology, and a number of specific issues that arise from thinking about the relation between imagination and belief. Her earlier philosophical work addressed various topics in metaphysics and epistemology including conceivability and possibility, perceptual experience, personal identity, and the methodology of thought experiment. A collection of some of her papers was published under the title Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology (Oxford, 2010).

The inaugural address and symposia for the Joint Session are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, which is published digitally and in hardcover every June. The Supplementary Volume is sent to subscribing members of the Society in categories 4 and 5.

Members in other categories can purchase the hardcover Supplementary Volume from the Online Shop. Volumes will also be available at the registration desk during the conference.

The hardcover volume is printed in black on an 80gsm white book wove stock accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Binding is in dark blue Arbelave Library Buckram over 2500 micron boards blocked in gold on the spine. This makes for a strong, attractive and durable book with a scuff resistant and wipeable cover.

Subscriptions to the Supplementary Volume also includes online access via Wiley Online Library (please note that one-off purchases of the hardcover volume do not include membership or online access).

Learn more about the Supplementary Volume, including info on how to subscribe to the 2014 edition

Latest Release: View the abstracts and full papers for the 2013 Supplementary Volume LXXXVII