6 responses to “De-Freuding Implicit Attitudes -Edouard Machery”
Man this guy’s cutting a swathe through philosophy of psych. (I highly recommend his Doing Without Concepts). It’ll be interesting to see where the IA debate is in a year or two. Traits seem to be a little harder for those with normative axes to grind to get a hold of, but it does seem to be more elegantly responsive to situational considerations.
For someone like myself, it’s way too conservative, of course, but that conservativism is the very thing that serves to nudge the game closer to my lonely end of the court. I guess I just wish he would frame the issue in terms that were more ontologically neutral, frame psychological posits in terms of the low information ecologies that spawned them, as ways to *cope* with the lack of information. It would make the job of eliciting their heuristic features easier. Instead, he stamps his foot on the hard ground of blind consensus, and waves the spectre of eliminativism away with a verbal wand, when he has no more idea what a ‘mental state’ could be than anyone else.
Such is life. I’m guessing he’ll come around some day though.
ah ya know trying to walk folks thru it bit by bit, bias by bias, Andy Clark seems to be miles ahead of most of these philosopher folks, some of his current talks are on this site. Recently been trying to get my math-challenged head around machine learning:
Way cool. Selectivity, selectivity, selectivity.
In meta-analyses of empirical findings across multiple studies:
– Explicit attitudes correlate positively with implicit attitudes.
– Explicit attitudes are more strongly predictive of behavior than are implicit attitudes; however,
– implicit attitudes contribute additional incremental predictive power independent of explicit attitudes;
– Implicit attitudes are more predictive of habitual behaviors, whereas
– explicit attitudes are more predictive of novel and infrequent behaviors.
These findings suggest that attitudes might best be regarded neither as states nor as traits but as habits, which strengthen and become automatic through repetition.
synthetic zerØ 
Man this guy’s cutting a swathe through philosophy of psych. (I highly recommend his Doing Without Concepts). It’ll be interesting to see where the IA debate is in a year or two. Traits seem to be a little harder for those with normative axes to grind to get a hold of, but it does seem to be more elegantly responsive to situational considerations.
For someone like myself, it’s way too conservative, of course, but that conservativism is the very thing that serves to nudge the game closer to my lonely end of the court. I guess I just wish he would frame the issue in terms that were more ontologically neutral, frame psychological posits in terms of the low information ecologies that spawned them, as ways to *cope* with the lack of information. It would make the job of eliciting their heuristic features easier. Instead, he stamps his foot on the hard ground of blind consensus, and waves the spectre of eliminativism away with a verbal wand, when he has no more idea what a ‘mental state’ could be than anyone else.
Such is life. I’m guessing he’ll come around some day though.
Had to look this up, since it’s one of the best debates I’ve seen on PhilTV: http://www.philostv.com/edouard-machery-and-jesse-prinz/
yeah that’s a good one, some Prinz here as well.
ah ya know trying to walk folks thru it bit by bit, bias by bias, Andy Clark seems to be miles ahead of most of these philosopher folks, some of his current talks are on this site. Recently been trying to get my math-challenged head around machine learning:
Way cool. Selectivity, selectivity, selectivity.
In meta-analyses of empirical findings across multiple studies:
– Explicit attitudes correlate positively with implicit attitudes.
– Explicit attitudes are more strongly predictive of behavior than are implicit attitudes; however,
– implicit attitudes contribute additional incremental predictive power independent of explicit attitudes;
– Implicit attitudes are more predictive of habitual behaviors, whereas
– explicit attitudes are more predictive of novel and infrequent behaviors.
These findings suggest that attitudes might best be regarded neither as states nor as traits but as habits, which strengthen and become automatic through repetition.