Notice Board

The Department of Philosophy will present the following research presentation.

Person identification and control: unifying the manifest and the scientific images
Guest Speaker:  Nicolas Bullot (U of A)
Friday, March 4, 2016
3:00 p.m.
D-632

This talk, which introduces central themes of my research into social cognition, focuses on two problems of the theory of identification. First, what kind of conceptual framework do we need to explain the identification of persons in a way that unifies what Wilfrid Sellars [1] called the “manifest image” (i.e., our common sense and normative understanding of persons and things) and the “scientific image” of the world? Second, what are the relations between person identification and person control? To address these questions, I propose a framework called “the psychohistorical model of identification and control” [2, 3]. I use the qualifier “psychohistorical” to denote research that aims to integrate  (i) contextualist  and historical explanations in philosophy [4-6] and the social sciences [7, 8] with (ii) mechanistic explanations of cognition in the psychological and biological sciences [9, 10]. Through refinements of the “manifest image,” contextualist theories of person identification have provided “thick” descriptions of the contextual and normative characteristics of person identification (e.g., its dependence on a unified spatiotemporal framework [4], the diverse types of identification enabling state policing [7], and the context-specificity of our norms of privacy and regulation of person tracking [8]). By contrast, mechanistic models of social identification rarely seek to explain these normative characteristics. To show the benefits of integrating of contextualist and mechanistic methods, I present psychohistorical hypotheses that reduce the conflict between the manifest and the scientific images of social identification. For example, I defend the hypothesis of Person Identification as Tracking [2, 11], which posits that contextual relevance regulates how we select tracking mechanisms for securing our capacity to identify persons (i.e., our selection of mechanisms like facial recognition, heuristics, and inference to the best explanation). I also discuss the hypothesis of Tracking for Person Control [3], which suggests that reliability in the causal and social control of a target person depends on the controller’s sensitivity to mechanisms that cause that target’s persistence. Lastly, I note that the psychohistorical model can also help us integrate the normativity of the “manifest image” of artistic practices with scientific models of art appreciation [12].

Everyone is welcome.