Psychology and philosophy of mind — C2

Psychology and philosophy of mind, once distinct, have merged into a single C2 reading register. Aeon, Quanta, The New York Review of Books, Lawfare’s cognitive-policy pieces, Andy Clark, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Anil Seth, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Karl Friston — these writers and the journals they inhabit treat qualia, predictive processing, embodied cognition, and the free energy principle as one continuous vocabulary, even when the underlying disciplines (analytic philosophy, computational neuroscience, experimental psychology, behavioral economics) remain methodologically distinct. The C2 reader handles all of it: the hard problem and the easy problems, System 1 and System 2, prospect theory and the heuristics-and-biases program, the Bayesian-brain hypothesis and its critics.

This is also where the replication crisis (M05 Science) bites hardest. Many famous findings from the 1970s-2000s social-psychology canon have not replicated (ego depletion, power posing, priming effects); some have partially survived (prospect theory, anchoring); a few are now considered foundational error (Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram’s coverage). A C2 reader knows which findings remain canonical, which are contested, and which have been quietly retired.

The lesson divides the vocabulary into four overlapping registers: the phenomenology-and-consciousness register (philosophy-heavy), the cognitive-architecture register (psychology-and-neuroscience), the decision-theory register (behavioral economics and psychology), and the heuristics-and-biases vocabulary (Kahneman-Tversky and after).

Phenomenology, qualia, and the hard problem

The philosophy-of-mind register since Husserl, Nagel, Chalmers.

• phenomenology — (1) the philosophical tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, focused on the first-person structure of conscious experience; (2) in psychiatry and clinical contexts, the description of subjective experience itself.
• the phenomenal — having a felt quality.
• phenomenal consciousness vs access consciousness (Ned Block) — what-it’s-like vs available-for-reasoning-and-report.
• qualia (singular quale) — the qualitative felt properties of experience: the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the saltiness of salt.
• the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) — why is there subjective experience at all? Why isn’t all this processing happening in the dark?
• the easy problems — the various functional/cognitive capacities (attention, reportability, integration); easy by comparison, not in absolute terms.
• the explanatory gap (Levine) — the felt mismatch between physical description and phenomenal experience.
• physicalism — the metaphysical thesis that everything is physical.
• reductive physicalism — phenomenal facts reduce to physical facts.
• non-reductive physicalism — phenomenal facts supervene on but don’t reduce to physical.
• property dualism / dual-aspect theory — mental and physical as two properties of one substrate.
• panpsychism — the view (revived by Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, also flirted with by Chalmers) that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous in some form.
• functionalism — mental states defined by causal role, not implementation.
• multiple realizability — the same mental state can be realized in different physical substrates.
• the Chinese Room (Searle) — thought experiment arguing syntax doesn’t suffice for semantics.
• Mary’s Room (Jackson) — thought experiment about whether someone who knows everything physical about color would learn something new on seeing red.
• the zombie argument — conceivability argument against physicalism (philosophical zombies as creatures functionally identical to us but lacking experience).
• the conceivability-possibility step — the contested link in zombie arguments.

“Chalmers’s hard problem has not been solved in thirty years, but it has produced a generation of analytic philosophers who take consciousness seriously — and a generation of neuroscientists who, perhaps reluctantly, find themselves doing metaphysics whether they meant to or not.” — NYRB, 2024.

Theory of mind and social cognition

• theory of mind (ToM) — the capacity to attribute mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions) to oneself and others.
• mentalizing / mindreading — the active deployment of theory of mind.
• the false-belief task (Sally-Anne; Wimmer & Perner) — classical ToM test in developmental psychology.
• first-order belief vs second-order belief — she thinks X vs she thinks he thinks X.
• autism and ToM deficits — Baron-Cohen’s influential (and contested) framework.
• the broken-mirror hypothesis — autism explained via mirror-neuron dysfunction; now largely abandoned.
• mirror neurons — much-overhyped neuron class in macaque premotor cortex; popularized by Rizzolatti and Iacoboni; the popular literature dramatically exceeded the evidence.
• embodied simulation — Gallese-style account of how we understand others by simulating their bodily states.
• empathy — affective sharing (vs cognitive ToM).
• affective empathy vs cognitive empathy — feeling vs understanding.
• alexithymia — difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotional states.
• social cognition — the broader umbrella.
• the social brain hypothesis (Dunbar) — primate brain size correlates with social-group size; the hypothesis behind “Dunbar’s number” (~150).

Embodied, embedded, enactive, extended cognition (4E)

The “post-cognitivist” turn that rejects the brain-as-computer-doing-symbols framework.

• embodied cognition — the body shapes cognition (not just executes outputs).
• embedded cognition — cognition exploits structure of environment.
• enactive cognition — cognition is action-based, organism-environment coupling (Varela, Thompson, Rosch).
• extended cognition (Clark & Chalmers, “The Extended Mind”, 1998) — cognitive processes can include tools, notebooks, smartphones; the parity principle.
• the parity principle — if it would count as cognition in the head, it counts as cognition outside.
• scaffolding — environment structure that supports cognition.
• affordance (Gibson) — environmental property that affords action (a chair affords sitting).
• sensorimotor contingency — pattern of how sensory input changes with action.
• ecological psychology — Gibson’s framework; perception of affordances directly.
• the mind/world boundary problem — where does cognition end?
• distributed cognition (Hutchins) — cognition distributed across people and artifacts (cockpit, ship navigation).
• active inference — Friston’s framework treating action as inference.

“If you’ve ever found a phone number you couldn’t remember by dialing the keypad with your fingers, you’ve performed a tiny demonstration of extended cognition: the memory wasn’t in your head, but the finger-motor trace pulled it out of the body-and-keypad system.” — Aeon, 2023.

Predictive processing and the free energy principle

The most influential framework in 2020s cognitive neuroscience.

• predictive processing (PP) / predictive coding — the brain as a hierarchical prediction machine; perception as prediction-plus-error-correction.
• the Bayesian brain — broader umbrella; brain as approximate Bayesian inference engine.
• top-down vs bottom-up signals — predictions descend, prediction errors ascend.
• prediction error — mismatch between expected and actual input.
• precision-weighting — how reliable prediction error is judged to be (related to attention).
• generative model — the brain’s internal model of the world that produces predictions.
• the markov blanket — the statistical boundary separating an organism’s internal states from external states.
• the free energy principle (FEP, Friston) — organisms maintain themselves by minimizing variational free energy (a tractable upper bound on surprise).
• variational free energy — the quantity FEP says brains minimize.
• active inference — the action arm of FEP; we act to make predictions come true.
• interoception — perception of internal bodily states.
• interoceptive inference — applying PP framework to internal states; basis of Anil Seth’s “controlled hallucination” account.
• controlled hallucination (Seth) — perception as the brain’s best guess constrained by sensory input.
• the dark room problem — a much-discussed objection to FEP (why don’t organisms minimize surprise by staying in a dark room?); answer involves homeostatic priors and time scales.
• allostasis — predictive regulation of internal state (vs reactive homeostasis).
• predictive regulation — Lisa Feldman Barrett’s reframing of emotion construction via predictive processing.

“Friston’s free-energy principle is either the deepest insight cognitive science has produced in a generation or an unfalsifiable mathematical curiosity dressed in biological clothing — and which view you hold depends on how literally you read the equations.” — Aeon, 2024.

Dual-process theory and System 1/System 2

The Kahneman-Tversky framework now in Thinking, Fast and Slow form.

• dual-process theory — the umbrella claim that two distinct kinds of cognition coexist.
• System 1 — fast, automatic, intuitive, low-effort, hard to suppress.
• System 2 — slow, deliberate, analytic, high-effort, sequential.
• WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) — Kahneman’s term for System-1 confabulation from available evidence.
• attribute substitution — answering a hard question by substituting an easier one.
• the affect heuristic (Slovic) — using current emotional state as input to judgment.
• the availability heuristic — judging frequency by ease of recall.
• the representativeness heuristic — judging probability by similarity to a stereotype.
• the anchoring effect — initial number influencing subsequent judgments.
• base-rate neglect — ignoring background probabilities in favor of case-specific evidence.
• conjunction fallacy — judging A&B more probable than A (the Linda problem).
• cognitive ease vs cognitive strain — fluency-based affect on judgment.
• the planning fallacy — systematic underestimation of time and cost.
• the focusing illusion — overweighting whatever is currently attended to.
• ego depletion — Baumeister’s claim that self-control is a depletable resource; failed to replicate in large-scale studies.

Heuristics, biases, and the rationality wars

• the heuristics-and-biases program — Kahneman & Tversky’s foundational research program.
• the rationality assumption — classical economics’ assumption of rational choice; HB program empirically attacked it.
• bounded rationality (Simon) — cognition limited by computation and time.
• satisficing (Simon) — choosing good enough rather than optimal.
• fast-and-frugal heuristics (Gigerenzer) — the rival program that defends heuristics as ecologically rational.
• the great rationality debate — Kahneman vs Gigerenzer; both have a point.
• ecological rationality — rationality relative to environment structure.
• debiasing — efforts to reduce specific biases via training, structure, feedback.
• adversarial collaboration — methodological proposal where opposing researchers design joint experiments.
• Bayesian rationality — updating beliefs in proportion to evidence.
• probabilistic reasoning — handling uncertainty.
• the Linda problem — the canonical conjunction-fallacy demonstration.
• base-rate fallacy / base-rate neglect — ignoring priors.
• the gambler’s fallacy — believing past random events affect future ones (red came up six times, black is “due”).
• the hot-hand fallacy — believing in streaks; recent reanalysis (Miller & Sanjurjo) suggests the original Gilovich finding was an artifact and hot hands may be real.
• regression to the mean — extreme values drift toward the average.

Prospect theory and behavioral economics

The Nobel-winning framework (Tversky & Kahneman, 1979).

• prospect theory — descriptive model of choice under risk; reference-dependent value function and probability weighting.
• the reference point — the baseline from which gains and losses are measured.
• gains vs losses — asymmetric.
• loss aversion — losses loom larger than gains (~2x).
• diminishing sensitivity — marginal value decreases as outcomes get further from reference.
• the value function — S-shaped (concave for gains, convex for losses).
• the probability-weighting function — overweights small probabilities, underweights large ones.
• certainty effect — disproportionate weight to certain outcomes.
• possibility effect — disproportionate weight to the move from zero probability.
• the endowment effect — overvaluing what you already own.
• the status quo bias — preference for current state.
• mental accounting — treating money differently based on category.
• framing effects — same options described differently produce different choices.
• the gain frame vs the loss frame — 90% survive surgery vs 10% die in surgery.
• the Asian disease problem — Tversky & Kahneman’s canonical framing demonstration.
• nudge (Thaler & Sunstein, Nudge, 2008) — choice architecture preserving freedom while shifting outcomes.
• libertarian paternalism — Thaler-Sunstein’s controversial label.
• the default effect — defaults dramatically shape behavior (retirement savings, organ donation).
• opt-in vs opt-out — the default direction.

Memory, attention, and the cognitive-architecture vocabulary

• working memory — limited-capacity workspace; Baddeley’s model: phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, central executive.
• long-term memory — episodic, semantic, procedural.
• episodic memory — autobiographical events.
• semantic memory — facts and knowledge.
• procedural memory — skills and habits.
• implicit memory — non-conscious influence on behavior.
• explicit memory — conscious recall.
• consolidation — transition from labile to stable trace.
• reconsolidation — retrieved memories become labile again before re-storage; opens window for modification.
• the misinformation effect (Loftus) — post-event information altering recall.
• false memories — confidently held memories of events that didn’t happen.
• the cryptomnesia phenomenon — unconscious plagiarism; remembered as your own idea.
• executive function — set of higher cognitive controls: inhibition, switching, updating.
• inhibitory control — suppressing prepotent responses.
• set-shifting / cognitive flexibility — switching between tasks or rules.
• the Stroop task — classic inhibition test.
• attentional blink — temporary failure to detect a second target close to a first.
• inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock; Simons & Chabris) — missing visible events when not attending (the gorilla experiment).
• change blindness — failing to notice changes between similar scenes.
• the binding problem — how distributed features are integrated into unified objects/scenes.

Emotion theory and the constructionist turn

• basic-emotion theory (Ekman) — discrete universal emotions with biological signatures.
• the constructionist theory of emotion (Lisa Feldman Barrett) — emotions as constructed by the brain from interoceptive, affective, and conceptual inputs; no universal “fear circuit”.
• the conceptual act theory — emotion as concept-application.
• interoceptive prediction — brain predicting body’s internal state.
• valence — pleasantness-unpleasantness dimension.
• arousal — activation dimension.
• affect — the elemental valence/arousal feel; precognitive.
• emotion — affect plus categorization.
• emotion regulation (Gross) — cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, distraction.
• the somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio) — bodily-feeling signals shape decision.
• the iowa gambling task — Damasio’s classic experimental paradigm.
• emotional granularity (Barrett) — fineness of one’s emotion-concept differentiation; correlates with regulation capacity.
• alexithymia — impoverished access to emotion-concepts; difficulty naming feelings.
• the affective primacy debate (Zajonc vs Lazarus) — does affect precede or follow appraisal?

“Barrett’s constructionist account asks us to give up a folk theory we feel certain about: that fear lives in a brain region, that disgust is universal across cultures, that emotions are objects waiting to be named. The evidence has not been kind to that folk theory.” — Aeon, 2022.

Free will, determinism, and agency

• determinism — all events fully fixed by prior causes.
• hard determinism — determinism + incompatibility with free will = no free will.
• libertarian free will (philosophical sense, not political) — genuine, undetermined agent-causation.
• compatibilism — free will and determinism compatible if free will is appropriately analyzed.
• agent causation — the agent as a non-event cause.
• the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) — free action requires the genuine possibility of having done otherwise.
• Frankfurt cases (Harry Frankfurt) — counterexamples to PAP; alternate possibilities not required for moral responsibility.
• reasons-responsiveness (Fischer & Ravizza) — compatibilist account of free will via responsiveness to reasons.
• moral responsibility — the practice we care about even when free will is metaphysically suspect.
• the Libet experiments — neural readiness potentials preceding conscious decision; much-debated implications.
• the conscious will is an illusion literature (Wegner, others) — overstated, but still influential popularly.
• manipulation arguments (Pereboom) — compatibilist defenses tested against extreme manipulation cases.

AmE-specific psychology/philosophy vocabulary

Collocations

• a vivid memory / dream / hallucination / qualia
• a stable belief / disposition / attractor state
• a robust finding / replication / effect
• a fragile finding / replication
• a contested finding / claim / interpretation
• a foundational experiment / framework / theory
• an influential paper / framework / research program
• a generative model / framework / question
• a fine-grained distinction / analysis / measurement
• a precision-weighted prediction error
• a top-down prior / prediction / influence
• a bottom-up signal / input
• a load-bearing assumption / premise
• to entertain a hypothesis / a thought / a possibility
• to hold a belief / an attitude / a view
• to update on / in light of / given new evidence
• to map onto / to track the data
• to carve nature at the joints (Platonic phrase, still used)
• to bracket an assumption — set aside for the moment (phenomenological term, generalized)
• to take seriously — give philosophical weight to
• to make sense of — render intelligible
• to bear on / to speak to an issue
• to disambiguate / to operationalize / to falsify
• to fail to replicate

Phrases and locutions

• the hard problem — Chalmers’s coinage for the why-experience question
• the explanatory gap — Levine’s term
• the easy problems — by contrast
• what it’s like to be {a bat / X} — Nagel’s formulation
• the manifest image vs the scientific image — Sellars’s framework
• the space of reasons — Sellars’s term for the normative space
• the bird’s-eye view — the abstract/theoretical stance
• the view from nowhere — Nagel’s term for objective stance
• the view from somewhere — partial, situated
• the standard story — the consensus account
• the received view — the dominant position
• a Just-So story — pejorative for unfalsifiable narrative explanation
• a stipulative definition — defined-by-fiat
• a working hypothesis — provisional
• a sufficient condition vs a necessary condition vs necessary and sufficient
• a thought experiment — Gedankenexperiment, philosophy’s tool

Common Russian-speaker mistakes

1. *Psychiatrist* and *psychologist* used interchangeably. Russian психолог / психиатр exist but cultural usage often blurs them; in US English the distinction is sharp. Psychiatrist = MD, prescribes medication, often hospital-based; psychologist = PhD/PsyD, does psychotherapy and testing, does not prescribe (except in a handful of states); therapist / counselor = often masters-level, talk therapy. Saying I see a psychiatrist for anxiety implies medication; I see a psychologist for anxiety implies CBT or other therapy.
2. *Mental* as freestanding noun. Russians sometimes use the mental as shorthand. AmE: mental health is the noun phrase; mental alone is adjectival or pejorative slang (he’s mental = “he’s crazy”, informal/rude). For the philosophical/cognitive register, mind, mental states, cognition, the mental. The mental alone is grammatically awkward.
3. *Conscience* for consciousness. Catastrophic false friend with совесть/сознание. Conscience = moral sense (English/French/Latin shared root, narrow moral meaning in English). Consciousness = awareness, the explanandum of the hard problem. He lost conscience (calque for “lost consciousness”) is wrong and possibly comic; he lost consciousness is right.
4. *Memory* as countable for individual recollection events. A memory is fine for an event recalled (I have a memory of my grandfather’s farm). But cognitive-science register prefers a recollection, an episode, a memory trace, a remembered event. Russians sometimes use a remembrance — which is correct but high-register / often religious. I have a remembrance from childhood sounds Victorian; I have a memory or I remember is natural.
5. *To experience* with the wrong object. Russian испытывать is broader than English experience. AmE: you experience an emotion, a phenomenon, an event. You do not experience difficulties (use face, encounter, run into), experience needs (use feel or have), or experience a deficit (use lack, show a deficit). I experienced a need for water is wrong; I felt thirsty is right.
6. *Suffer from* overused. Russian страдать maps neatly to suffer, but English suffer from is heavily medicalized and somewhat pathologizing. AmE alternatives: struggle with depression (less stigma), deal with anxiety (active framing), live with a chronic condition (acceptance framing). He suffers from creativity blocks sounds melodramatic; he struggles with creative blocks is native.
7. *Persona* for personality. False friend; calque pattern. In English, persona is the public-presentation face one shows (Jungian and theater origin); personality is the broader psychological construct. His persona is introverted is wrong (or marks him as performing introversion); his personality is introverted is right. C2 readers should be aware: persona has migrated to mean social-media presentation (online persona) and to a Jungian shadow-and-persona framing.

Summary

• Phenomenology and the hard problem: qualia, phenomenal vs access consciousness, the explanatory gap, the zombie argument, panpsychism.
• Theory of mind: mentalizing, the false-belief task, first-order vs second-order beliefs.
• 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, enactive, extended; affordances, scaffolding, distributed cognition.
• Predictive processing: prediction error, precision-weighting, top-down priors, the free energy principle, active inference, controlled hallucination.
• Dual-process theory: System 1 vs System 2, WYSIATI, attribute substitution, heuristics-and-biases.
• Prospect theory: reference points, loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity, probability weighting, framing effects, endowment effect, defaults.
• Replication-crisis lens: many findings reanalyzed; ego depletion, power posing, money priming failed; anchoring, framing survived.
• AmE register: APA ambiguity, PsyD, CBT/DBT/ACT/EMDR.

Next theme: Relationships — C2 — attachment theory at clinical depth, parts work and Internal Family Systems, somatic experiencing, complex PTSD (C-PTSD), polyvagal theory, and the 2026 trauma-aware relational vocabulary.