Séminaire PhilSciCog

Nous aurons le plaisir d'écouter Christopher Stevens, Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives et Intégratives d’Aquitaine (INCIA), Univ. Bordeaux, sur le sujet suivant : "On doing what you didn't want to do: A philosophical and neurocognitive inquiry into unwilled voluntary action".

Résumé : You want to go get your pen, you come back with a book. You want to challenge your beliefs, you reinforce them. You want to go home after one drink, you stay out and get drunk. In all such situations, who is the ‘you’ who wants? Why does this ‘you’ fail to act as it intended? And who is that other ‘you’ who does what ‘you’ didn’t want to do?  Drawing on contemporary behavioral research in the domains of memory, bias, and addiction, this talk will introduce how the neurocognitive paths leading to "bad" outcomes are often paved with contrasting good intentions, and discuss some of the philosophical implications this cognitive fact has for questions related to selfhood, agency, and habit formation and revision.The methodology of this line of inquiry likewise relies on continuous transactional ‘crosstalk’ between both disciplines: employing conceptual instruments from philosophy to help harness empirical results from cognitive neuroscience, while in turn using these same observations to adjust and improve the philosophical instruments thus employed. To illustrate this method, I will borrow John Dewey’s conceptualizations of habit, self, and will – from Human Nature and Conduct (1922) – to show how these can help us understand recent neurocognitive observations in memory, bias, and addiction research, while also being themselves simultaneously updated in that same empirical light.