Good Science

Good Science is an account of psychological research emphasizing the moral foundations of inquiry. This volume brings together existing disciplinary critiques of scientism, objectivism, and instrumentalism, and then discusses how these contribute to institutionalized privilege and to less morally responsive research practices. The author draws on historical, critical, feminist, and science studies traditions to provide an alternative account of psychological science and to highlight the irreducibly moral foundations of everyday scientific practice. This work outlines a theoretical framework for thinking about and practicing psychology in ways that center moral responsibility, collective commitment, and justice. The book then applies this framework, describing psychological research practices in terms of the their moral dilemmas. Also included are materials meant to aid in methods instruction and mentoring.

Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

The Epistemic Role of Outlaw Emotions

Outlaw emotions are emotions that stand in tension with one’s wider belief system, often allowing epistemic insight one may have otherwise lacked. Outlaw emotions are thought to play crucial epistemic roles under conditions of oppression. Although the crucial epistemic value of these emotions is widely acknowledged, specific accounts of their epistemic role(s) remain largely programmatic. There are two dominant accounts of the epistemic role of emotions: The Motivational View and the Justificatory View. Philosophers of emotion assume that these dominant ways of accounting for the epistemic role(s) of emotions in general are equipped to account for the epistemic role(s) of outlaw emotions. I argue that this is not the case. I consider and dismiss two responses that could be made on behalf of the most promising account, the Justificatory View, in light of my argument, before sketching an alternative account that should be favoured.

What Should We Believe About Belief?

This chapter aims to set the scene. First, it sets out why we should about beliefs, and about beliefs. To this end, it surveys some of the rich philosophical and psychological literature on how beliefs are acquired and updated. Second, it aims to show that the existing literature, illuminating though it is, doesn’t adequately explain how and why we come to believe what we do and act as we do. Against philosophers and cognitive scientists who argue that beliefs matter less than we might think, or that people have more accurate beliefs than they sometimes let on, the chapter argues that people’s beliefs matter for their behavior and that bad beliefs are an important phenomenon. It then goes on to review explanations of bad belief stemming from or inspired by dual process accounts of human reasoning. It argues that these accounts face difficulties significant enough to warrant developing an alternative account of belief formation.

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency.

Radical Everyday Practice. Gillian Rose, Ernst Bloch, and seven activist- philosophers of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa

<p>How are we to live? How do we sustain our emotional commitment to utopia? Answering these questions necessarily calls for a reconceptualisation of subjectivity and sociality, in order to overcome the depoliticisation, resignation and despair captured by the neoliberal subject. Drawing together qualitative and theoretical research under Ruth Levitas’ framework for the ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’ – Utopia as Method – I argue utopia is the otherwise that we navigate, create and learn of, together, through every moment. Where the neoliberal subject signals a collapse of subjectivity that contributes to the depoliticisation and resignation of our contemporary times, I offer an alternative account of subjectivity through Gillian Rose and Ernst Bloch. In an original theoretical encounter, I connect Rose’s concepts of reason and ‘inaugurated mourning’ with Bloch’s concepts ‘the darkness of the lived moment’ and the ‘not-yet,’ towards imagining subjectivity differently. Further, through six conversations with seven activist-philosophers from Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) – Jen Margaret, Jo Randerson, Thomas LaHood, Richard D. Bartlett, Benjamin Johnson, Cally O’Neill and Kassie Hartendorp – I make visible already-existing emancipatory practices and subjectivities from within radical Aotearoa (New Zealand,) from which we can learn and locally ground our imaginings. Combining the conversations held with the activist-philosophers with the alternative account of subjectivity developed, I move outwards – from the individual and the particular to the collective – to specifically name five key modes of radical everyday practice: embodiment, not knowing, trust, care, and imagining. Understood as an articulation of docta spes, or a praxis of educated hope, these five modes capture a sense of everyday sociality imagined otherwise, as well as articulate a collaborative, sustainable and localised account of the emotionally demanding pedagogical pursuit towards the realisation and experience of utopia. An answer to the first question – how are we to live? – is thus processually found within the second question – how do we sustain our emotional commitment to utopia?</p>

Radical Everyday Practice. Gillian Rose, Ernst Bloch, and seven activist- philosophers of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa

<p>How are we to live? How do we sustain our emotional commitment to utopia? Answering these questions necessarily calls for a reconceptualisation of subjectivity and sociality, in order to overcome the depoliticisation, resignation and despair captured by the neoliberal subject. Drawing together qualitative and theoretical research under Ruth Levitas’ framework for the ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’ – Utopia as Method – I argue utopia is the otherwise that we navigate, create and learn of, together, through every moment. Where the neoliberal subject signals a collapse of subjectivity that contributes to the depoliticisation and resignation of our contemporary times, I offer an alternative account of subjectivity through Gillian Rose and Ernst Bloch. In an original theoretical encounter, I connect Rose’s concepts of reason and ‘inaugurated mourning’ with Bloch’s concepts ‘the darkness of the lived moment’ and the ‘not-yet,’ towards imagining subjectivity differently. Further, through six conversations with seven activist-philosophers from Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) – Jen Margaret, Jo Randerson, Thomas LaHood, Richard D. Bartlett, Benjamin Johnson, Cally O’Neill and Kassie Hartendorp – I make visible already-existing emancipatory practices and subjectivities from within radical Aotearoa (New Zealand,) from which we can learn and locally ground our imaginings. Combining the conversations held with the activist-philosophers with the alternative account of subjectivity developed, I move outwards – from the individual and the particular to the collective – to specifically name five key modes of radical everyday practice: embodiment, not knowing, trust, care, and imagining. Understood as an articulation of docta spes, or a praxis of educated hope, these five modes capture a sense of everyday sociality imagined otherwise, as well as articulate a collaborative, sustainable and localised account of the emotionally demanding pedagogical pursuit towards the realisation and experience of utopia. An answer to the first question – how are we to live? – is thus processually found within the second question – how do we sustain our emotional commitment to utopia?</p>

Time to Pay Attention? Information Search Explains Amplified Framing Effects Under Time Pressure

Decades of research have established the ubiquity and importance of choice biases, such as the framing effect, yet why these seemingly irrational behaviors occur remains unknown. A prominent dual-system account maintains that alternate framings bias choices because of the unchecked influence of quick, affective processes, and findings that time pressure increases the framing effect have provided compelling support. Here, we present a novel alternative account of magnified framing biases under time pressure that emphasizes shifts in early visual attention and strategic adaptations in the decision-making process. In a preregistered direct replication ( N = 40 adult undergraduates), we found that time constraints produced strong shifts in visual attention toward reward-predictive cues that, when combined with truncated information search, amplified the framing effect. Our results suggest that an attention-guided, strategic information-sampling process may be sufficient to explain prior results and raise challenges for using time pressure to support some dual-system accounts.

Naïve Realism and the Colors of Afterimages

Along with hallucinations and illusions, afterimages have shaped the philosophical debate about the nature of perception. Often referred to as optical or visual illusions, experiences of afterimages have been abundantly exploited by philosophers to argue against naïve realism. This paper offers an alternative account to this traditional view by providing a tentative account of the colors of the afterimages from an objectivist perspective. Contrary to the widespread approach to afterimages, this paper explores the possibility that the colors of afterimages are not ontologically different from “ordinary” colors and that experiences of afterimages fail to provide a motivation for rejecting naïve realism.

The Radical Reformation, Paracelsian Networks, and Pseudo-Weigelian Alchemy

This chapter sketches theological and intellectual developments of the Reformation era that allowed rebirth to emerge as something distinct from baptism, after which it proceeds to show how rebirth came to be strongly associated with alchemy. Drawing on the legacy of Paracelsus, the spiritualist theologies of Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Weigel sharply contrasted inward rebirth with the outward ritual of baptism. Particularly Weigel and his followers departed from the conception of forensic justification dominant in Lutheran orthodoxy. They posited rebirth as an alternative account of how believers could attain salvation. Pseudepigraphic texts attributed to Weigel first closely associated this understanding of rebirth with alchemy in the late sixteenth century.