ABSTRACT Appeals to the value of treating people with dignity are commonplace in certain community settings, especially in health, disability, and aged care. In contrast, dignity has been relatively neglected by philosophers, not receiving the careful scrutiny most other moral concepts have been afforded. This has recently changed, with a spate of new philosophical books and articles about the meaning and value of dignity. No consensus has emerged about what dignity means or about how it is distinct from other moral values. Here, we seek to advance the debate by integrating philosophical theory with findings from empirical studies. Specifically, we argue that when people appeal to dignity in community settings they are most likely appealing to the value of not humiliating people, where to humiliate another is to treat them as a social inferior. We review two previous empirical studies which we conducted to test how lay people understand dignity. By considering these two studies together and integrating our findings with philosophical debate about the meaning of dignity, we show in this paper that lay people indeed understand dignity in line with the view that dignity means treating others as our social equals.

ABSTRACT Similarity has been considered a problematic concept – too vague, too flexible, and too context-dependent to be of much use for philosophical purposes. These criticisms by analytic philosophers, most prominently Goodman, have impacted philosophy and cognitive science, leading to the impression that for similarity to be useful, it needs to be explained or defined in terms of more precise notions. This paper argues that such an endeavor is doomed to fail. The lesson to be drawn, however, is not that we need to eliminate this notion altogether, but that one should accept it as a foundational concept that resists definition and is all the more important and fruitful.

ABSTRACT Philosophers have long speculated that individual differences in temperament influence philosophical thinking, yet empirical research has rarely explored the role of neurodivergent traits in this domain. In this large online study (N = 1,254), we investigated whether participants with training in philosophy differ from the general population when it comes to six psychological traits – autism, ADHD, aphantasia, anendophasia, anauralia, and representational manipulation – and also whether these traits correlate with responses to two widely studied philosophical thought experiments: the “trolley problem” and the “rollback deterministic universe.” Compared to the general population, participants with training in philosophy had higher scores on measures of ADHD, internal verbalization, and representational manipulation, but lower scores on measures of visual imagery. These cognitive traits were also correlated with participants’ moral and metaphysical judgments (independent of their level of philosophical training) – e.g. participants who scored higher in visualization were less likely to judge that hitting the switch in the trolley problem is permissible but not obligatory, and also less likely to attribute free will and moral responsibility to agents in the rollback universe. Finally, we employed machine learning to develop predictive models that classify a randomly selected participant as either a philosopher or a non-philosopher. Models trained solely on responses to measures for neurodivergent traits achieved better performance than models trained solely on responses to philosophical thought experiments. This suggests that stable, trait-level neurodivergent characteristics may be more diagnostic of philosophical interest, aptitude, or training than judgments philosophers make on domain-relevant problems.

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of metaphors used in a series of interviews by a single healthy volunteer following four moderate-to-high dosing sessions with psilocybin. The interviews were conducted by members of a human psychedelic research lab in a deep-sampling fMRI and EEG brain imaging study, allowing the participant to recount experiences under the effects of the compound. The goal of this case analysis is to make theoretically informed inferences about the participant’s cognitive-phenomenal processes during the interviews and the psychedelic experiences. To this end, we use Conceptual Metaphor Theory to explain how the participant consistently uses metaphors that frame abstract introspective events in terms of more concrete, visible and interpersonal events. This instantiates a cognitive frame that is known as the Observer’s Model. The metaphor themes we identify also imply a recurring sense of cognitive defusion and heightened metacognitive awareness during the psilocybin sessions. Moreover, we find that literal descriptions of hallucinatory visual experiences correlate semantically with metaphorical expressions, suggesting that metaphorical thinking plays a role in motivating those experiences. We link these linguistic-analytical results to neuroscientific findings about psychedelics and explore psychological and therapeutic implications.

ABSTRACT Looping effects are often taken to undermine psychiatric validity by rendering diagnostic categories unstable once they are taken up by those they classify. I argue that this diagnosis of the problem is mistaken. Looping effects do not threaten psychiatric validity; they reveal its normative structure. Even where a diagnosis tracks a stable causal pattern, causal explanation alone cannot determine whether that pattern warrants classification as pathological. Disorder attribution irreducibly involves evaluative judgments about harm and impairment that cannot be insulated from classificatory uptake. I propose that psychiatric diagnoses are best understood as normatively constrained causal kinds whose validity depends on their capacity to sustain explanation and intervention while remaining normatively adequate under conditions of reflexive engagement. Psychiatric validity is therefore a dynamic epistemic achievement rather than a static correspondence to value-independent kinds.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the intersection between affective fictionalism and the neurodiversity movement, which advocates for the recognition of cognitive differences (e.g. autism, ADHD) as natural variations that, although potentially disabling, are not inner deficits. We argue that affective fictionalism, which views mental state attributions as normative evaluations rather than fact-stating claims, is well positioned to accommodate three desiderata that the neurodiversity paradigm imposes on any theory of folk psychology: (1) acknowledging a diversity of cognitive styles, (2) recognizing the openness to social change of mental attribution, and (3) mitigating different contributory and epistemic injustices faced by neurodivergent individuals. By analyzing disagreements and resistance within neurodiversity activism, we defend that affective fictionalism captures the evaluative nature of mental ascriptions and their role in shaping social dynamics.

ABSTRACT I compare Adam Toon’s pretense-theoretic mental fictionalism – which views folk psychology (FP) as reliant on indispensable metaphors of an ‘inner world’ – with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, interpreted therapeutically. First, I argue Toon’s theory presents a challenge to Wittgenstein. If FP metaphors are essential, as Toon claims, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic goal of eliminating misleading ‘pictures’ seems problematic. I propose a modified Wittgensteinian approach, ‘numbers to leave numbers’, suggesting therapeutic techniques can still be effective even if the problematic metaphors cannot be fully discarded. This involves cultivating a habit of focusing on behavioral criteria to transcend certain philosophical puzzles, irrespective of whether the underlying metaphors are optional. Second, I present a Wittgensteinian critique of Toon’s fictionalism. By examining debates in cognitive psychology, such as the status of the ‘mental lexicon’, I question whether Toon’s theory can adequately distinguish between harmless metaphorical pretense in FP and potentially problematic reifications in empirical science. I suggest that Toon’s account might struggle to define when extensions of folk metaphors become ‘too serious’. Alternative mental fictionalisms are briefly considered in this light.

ABSTRACT In psychological research, online body shaming is typically linked to objectification, where objectification is considered something to be avoided and fought. In this paper, we take a somewhat different perspective: while agreeing that objectification is indeed a key element to understand online body shaming, our starting point is that objectification cannot be avoided. We argue that online body shaming is grounded in a mismatch between the way one self-objectifies and the way in which one is objectified by another. Drawing on Sartre, we argue that objectification enables a meaningful experience of self and world, particularly through its link to shame. We then turn to Lacan, whose account of objectification—via the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic—sharpens our understanding of bodily shame and its conditions of emergence. Finally, we use this framework to explain key differences between online body shaming and other forms of body shaming.

ABSTRACT A commonly held view is that moral judgments should not change based on what other people think. In moral philosophy, Social Domain Theory presents a version of this view: it defines as moral those judgments that are insensitive to the presence/absence of consensus. We designed two studies to measure the consensus-sensitivity of moral judgments (N = 731). We measured peoples’ personal judgments and expectations about others’ judgments using a within-subjects design that manipulated whether an action aligned with or violated the local normative consensus. Across six diverse vignettes (five covering “moral” domains) participants consistently shifted their judgments in response to local consensus. To assess the robustness of this consensus effect, we also varied whether an authority endorsed the action, whether it involved harm, and whether it took place in an unfamiliar or temporally distant context, as qualified versions of Social Domain Theory stipulate that moral judgments may depend on these factors. In our studies, authority endorsement had a negligible impact. Even harmful acts became more acceptable when presented as consensus-supported. Sensitivity to consensus was further amplified in temporally distant or alien settings, suggesting that outside their own cultural milieu, subjects place greater weight on communal endorsement. Taken together, these findings challenge the sharp boundary often drawn between moral and conventional domains: moral judgments, though constrained by harm, still flex in light of perceived social approval. Our findings suggest the need for an alternative account of the distinction between moral and conventional judgments.