Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...
Evan Westra
@evanwestra.bsky.social
Philosopher writing about theory of mind, moral psychology, character judgment, social norms. I bore undergraduates for a living. All opinions are my own. #philosophy #philsky he/him https://sites.google.com/site/ewestraphilosophy/
Nature did a nice, accessible write up of a recent piece I wrote with @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and @carlbergstrom.com. Also, check out Carl's more detailed thread (with link to the paper in both). "Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well'" www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts
Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.
nature.com
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
“To demand that the AAUP remain silent about the political attack on academia is ridiculous. To demand that the AAUP should do nothing to fight for academic freedom is wrong.” #academicsky
Critics of the AAUP and the Delusions of Neutrality
The AAUP is not and must not be neutral in defense of academic freedom.
insidehighered.com
A nice new paper from @adealwis.bsky.social raises an important challenge for the factive mindreading hypothesis: how can it explain desire attribution, which (like knowledge) is easier to represent than belief, but is also very much nonfactive?
Akshan deAlwis@adealwis.bsky.social · 6d agoMy paper 'Desire, decoupling, and factive mentalizing' is forthcoming at Mind and Language! Attributing desire requires the complicated stuff for attributing belief, but empirical work suggests it's easier to do. What gives? Check out more here: philpapers.org/rec/DEADDA-5
"We can now see the difference between students contesting speech—that is, open debates about the value of certain speech on campus—and real authoritarian suppression of speech, because the latter is happening every day in America. " newrepublic.com/article/2135...
The Campus Free Speech Wars Are Over. MAGA Won.
The right spent years trying to convince us that campus lefties were authoritarians in waiting. But then an actual authoritarian became president.
newrepublic.com
Is polarization rational? Many ask this question, but they only address belief polarization, never affective polarization. Paul Wheatley and I ask: is it rational to be affectively polarized? Our answer: no. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
The Rationality of Affective Polarization | Philosophy | Cambridge Core
The Rationality of Affective Polarization
cambridge.org
The literature on the philosophy of social norms has gotten really exciting over the past few years. The latest example: @ledaberio.bsky.social and Kristina Musholt's awesome new paper in Phil Imprint: "Seeing What To Do: Norms, Scripts, and Social Affordances" www.researchgate.net/publication/...
(PDF) Seeing What To Do: Norms, Scripts, and Social Affordances
PDF | Human cognition and behavior are guided by a myriad of norms which enable us to successfully navigate our social environment and our interactions... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...
researchgate.net
I am very confident that Steve is correct about this.
Steve Downes@stevemdownes.bsky.social · 2w agoDunning-Kruger running amok in academic philosophy.
Thrilled to share my new guest post over at The Brains Blog: "The Pluralistic Evolution of Mindreading"! Huge thanks to the editorial team for the opportunity to share some of my recent work in this space. 🦧🐦 Read it here: philosophyofbrains.com/2026/07/21/g...
Gavin Robert Foster: The Pluralistic Evolution of Mindreading — The Brains Blog
The Pluralistic Evolution of Factive Mindreading Gavin Robert FosterPurdue University The following is a significantly abridged version of a much-longer paper. As such, there are certain qualificat…
philosophyofbrains.com
It’s not a metaphor.
Simon Fisher@profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 3w ago“Somewhere along the way, we've forgotten the computer is just a metaphor for the brain. A powerful metaphor but still a metaphor. We always get into trouble when we confuse a metaphor with the thing itself – the map with the territory.” Lucid piece by @anilseth.bsky.social on LLMs & consciousness.🧪
Everything you heard about Sheep Detectives is true.
I read REGIME CHANGE by Haberman & Swan. Their theory of the Trump regime is basically that he's motivated by whim, vindictiveness, and ego, rather than a coherent ideology. This framing centers Trump's psychology and downplays real political analysis of the regime itself.
Writing single-authored papers in first-person plural so that people will think I have friends
If you had to make a short list of "THE BEST CONTRIBUTIONS FROM _____ PHILOSOPHY TO PSYCHOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE", what would you include, both for Continental and Analytic?
So I found this magical monkey's paw in my basement and I wished for the NYT to publish a positive article about philosophy majors. *Whispering* Oh it's out? Is it good?
Here's a new one for the list onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Animal empathy reconsidered: a multidimensional profile account
Empathy is the glue that holds societies together and yet several fundamental questions about empathy persist. What is empathy (the definitional question)? Is it uniquely human and, if not, which non...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The Agentic Value of Intrusive Thoughts #philsky
Evan Westra@evanwestra.bsky.social · last mo.My not-very-online colleague Maria Waggoner @caic-at-purdue.bsky.social @purduephilosophy.bsky.social just published an incredibly interesting and original paper in Phil Imprint on the agential value of intrusive thoughts. Y'all should check it out! journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/articl...
My not-very-online colleague Maria Waggoner @caic-at-purdue.bsky.social @purduephilosophy.bsky.social just published an incredibly interesting and original paper in Phil Imprint on the agential value of intrusive thoughts. Y'all should check it out! journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/articl...
Whatever the talk was about, Evan asks this in every q&a
Evan Westra@evanwestra.bsky.social · last mo.What if I just want to watch YouTube videos of wrestling matches from the early 2000s?
Are the many “Intellectual Freedom Centers” being placed on college campuses nationwide really just mandatory ideological indoctrination centers? 🤔 #AcademicSky
A précis of my book is now out in Philosophical Psychology as part of an upcoming book symposium. PP is the first journal in which I ever published an article. It’s a pleasure to come full circle. I’m looking forward to engaging with the thoughtful commentaries. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
What the self does for psychiatry: testimony, cognitive science, and participatory objectivity
Reclaiming The Self in Psychiatry: Centering Personal Narratives for a Humanist Science argues that contemporary scientific psychiatry has sidelined its most essential object of study: the self. Dr...
tandfonline.com
A propos of the recent report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences:
Evan Westra@evanwestra.bsky.social · 5mo ago2. Within the academy, there are these internecine fights that invoke academic freedom and concern the boundaries of socially acceptable debate. But these fights aren't really about academic freedom. Really, they're about 1) substantive moral disagreements, and 2) jockeying for social dominance.
Average philosophy Q&A participant trying to be less aggressive
🚨 Out in Mind & Language Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.
Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations
We argue that intentionalist accounts of ostensive-inferential communication fail to adequately explain the role of external representations in human communication. We propose that the contents of a ...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com