CCR members may be interested in these these seminars, run online by the Reading Centre for Health Humanities.
Author Archives: centre-for-cognition-research
Talk: Prof. Bart Geurts, 30th January
First Saying, then Believing: The Pragmatic Roots of Folk Psychology
Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen)
2-4pm
Thursday, 30th January 2020
Carrington 101
ABSTRACT
Historical linguistics has revealed several pathways of language change that may guide our understanding of the evolution of mental-state attribution. In particular, it has been established that verbs of saying are often exapted for attributing a variety of mental states, including beliefs and intentions. For example, there are quite a few languages in which the literal translation of, ‘Boris said, “I will win the elections”,’ may be used not only as a speech report, but also to convey that Boris thinks that he will win the elections or intends to win the elections. The objective of this paper is to analyse the pragmatic shifts underlying this pathway, and thus present the first articulate account of the evolution of belief/intention attribution.
All welcome.
Who’s in Control? Re-examining agency in a world of bias.
We are delighted to announce that CCR Director Prof. Emma Borg has been awarded a three year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for work exploring human agency and the extent to which our actions can be considered rational or irrational. The project starts in October 2020 and research events relating to it will appear here in due course.
Millikan, Meaning and Minimalism
CCR Director Emma Borg’s paper ‘Millikan, Meaning and Minimalism‘ has just been recognised as one of the Top 20 most downloaded papers from the journal *Theoria* in 2017-18. The paper, which explores connections between Ruth Millikan’s seminal naturalistic approach to meaning and Borg’s own ‘semantic minimalist’ account, was written on the occasion of the award of the Rolf Schock Prize to Millikan.
Reading Emotions Conference 2019: About Time
We are delighted to announce the eighth year of the ‘Reading Emotions’ meeting on 6th and 7th June, 2019. This year, our theme is
‘About time: Temporal perspectives on affective processes’, featuring talks by Randy McIntosh, Carien van Reekum, Katie Gray, Sonia Bishop, and Luiz Pessoa.
Affective processes are inherently dynamic, from both first and second person perspectives. How we perceive and respond to the expression of emotion in others, and how we experience emotion ourselves are time-dependent, dynamic processes. Yet, a substantial majority of emotion research ignores the temporal aspects of affective processes. This meeting will focus on empirical approaches to study the temporal aspects of affective processes, using multiple techniques to measure behaviour and brain activity.
https://sites.google.com/site/readingemotions/
Registration and Abstract submission is now open. The meeting has limited capacity, so please register ASAP.
Concepts, Pointers and Occasion-specific Thoughts
CCR members may be interested in this conference in London in June:
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CCR Summer Seminar 2019 details
Further details for Dan Dennett events, 8-10 May
Albert Wolters Lecture 2019: Professor Daniel Dennett
We are delighted to announce that Prof. Daniel Dennett will be visiting the University of Reading in May to deliver the prestigious Albert Wolters Lecture (9th May).
Before the lecture he will also give the keynote talk at a symposium on ‘Growing Autonomy in Human and Artificial Agents’ (8th May). Finally, in the run-up to his visit, we will be running two discussion sessions on Dennett’s work (20th and 27th March).
Further details of all events can be found here.
To book a place at the Albert Wolters lecture, please register here. For queries about the symposium, please contact Emma Borg (e.g.n.borg@reading.ac.uk).
CCR Summer Seminar Series 2019
We are delighted to announce the programme for the CCR summer seminar series 2019 (the seventh consecutive year of this seminar programme). This year’s topic is:
Developing and Applying New Quantitative Methods in Experimental Philosophy of Language