Continuing our series of pain events, we will have three visiting speakers next term (titles/rooms to follow):

4^th October, 2-3.30pm

Prof. Jaideep Pandit

St. John’s Oxford and Consultant Anaesthetist at the Oxford University Hospitals

(https://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/368-1129/Professor-Jaideep-Pandit.html)

25^th October, 2-3.30pm

Dr. Jennifer Corns

Philosophy, University of Glasgow

6^th December, 2-3.30pm

Professor Michael Brady

Philosophy, University of

Dr Miguel Sebastián (UNAM Philosophy) and Dr James Stazicker (Reading Philosophy) will present some joint work in progress at CCR on Tuesday 14th June (2.00-3.30pm in HumSS 73). Miguel is visiting Reading as part of his British Academy Newton Mobility Fund project working with James on perceptual discrimination:

Perceptual Discrimination

The talk will draw on predictions of Signal Detection Theory to criticise some philosophical theories of consciousness, as well as making some more positive proposals about what consciousness really is.

There will be a pain seminar next week but please note that (contra to the previous timetable) it will happen in the afternoon, not the morning. So details are:

Topic:                    Pain in different disciplines

Speakers:            Alison Black (Typography), Hannah Newton (History)

Date:                     Wednesday 25^th May

Time:                    2-3.30pm

Location:             CiNN seminar room

All welcome and apologies for changing the time of the seminar, hope this doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

We will be running the CCR Summer Seminar Series again this year – on the topic of ‘Understanding Pain’. The schedule is still under construction, and thus may be subject to change, but currently it’s as follows:

There will also be an additional summer CCR talk on Tuesday 14th June, details to follow.

Emma Borg (Reading)

Title: What is the basis of social cognition? On behaviour-reading, mirroring and mindreading.

When: 2pm, Tuesday 8th March

Where: URS 2s14 (Urban and Regional Studies Building)

Abstract

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with social cognition. The suggestion in both arenas is that the default mechanism for social cognition is a form of ‘smart behaviour-reading’ which does not require consideration of the mental states of a target. Instead humans and other animals are held to explain or predict the behaviour of conspecifics exclusively or largely through sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This paper examines the plausibility of this deflationary move and argues that, at least in the human case, it is a mistake to take the default method of social cognition to be smart behaviour-reading. Instead we should adopt a genuinely pluralist view on which both behaviour-reading and genuine mindreading have a critical role to play. I conclude by considering how the proposed view relates to discussions about two-system models and the ontology of social cognition.

The second AHRC research network conference on ‘Pervasive Context’, organised jointly by the Philosophy Departments of the University of Reading and Peking University, together with the Reading Centre for Cognition Research, will be held at the University of Reading, UK, on Saturday 25^th and Sunday 26^th June 2016. The full list of speakers is as follows:

• Jumbly Grindrod, Philosophy, University of Reading
• Qilin Li, Philosophy, Peking University.
• Eliot Michaelson, Philosophy, King’s College London.
• Nausicaä Pouscoulous, Linguistics, University College London.
• Luca Sbordone, Linguistics, Cambridge University.
• Robert Stainton, Philosophy, University of Western Ontario.
• Josef Stern, Philosophy, University of Chicago.
• Dan Zeman, University of the Basque Country.

Registration  details will be published on the Pervasive Context webpage early in 2016; all welcome!