Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.

https://www.motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf

The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

The primary objectives of this article are (a) to put forth an explicit operational formulation of positive human health that goes beyond prevailing "absence of illness" criteria; (b) to clarify that positive human health does not derive from extant medical considerations, which are not about wellness, but necessarily require a base in philosophical accounts of the "goods" in life; (c) to provoke a change of emphasis from strong tendencies to construe human health as exclusively about the mind or the body toward an integrated and positive spiral of mind-body influences; (d) to delineate possible physiological substrates of human flourishing and offer future directions for understanding the biology of positive health; and (e) to discuss implications of positive health for diverse scientific agendas (e.g., stress, class and health, work and family life) and for practice in health fields (e.g., training, health examinations, psychotherapy, and wellness intervention programs).

The Contours of Positive Human Health

This paper concerns relationships among focus of attention, choice of referring expression, and perceived coherence of utterances within a discourse segment. It presents a framework and initial theory of centering intended to model the local component of attentional state. The paper examines interactions between local coherence and choice of referring expressions; it argues that differences in coherence correspond in part to the inference demands made by different types of referring expressions, given a particular attentional state. It demonstrates that the attentional state properties modeled by centering can account for these differences.

/pdf/centering-a-framework-for-modeling-the-local-coherence-of-hvb4n7dktx.pdf

Centering: a framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse

(2004). TARGET ARTICLES: 'Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings, and Implications' Psychological Inquiry: Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 197-215.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20447229

Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings, and Implications

Morality dignifies and elevates. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God said "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" (Gen. 3:22). In many of the world's religious traditions, the good go up, to heaven or a higher rebirth, and the bad go down, to hell or a lower rebirth. Even among secular people, moral motives are spoken of as the "highest" and "noblest" motives, whereas greed and lust are regarded as "baser" or "lower" instincts. Morality is therefore like the temple on the hill of human nature: It is our most sacred attribute, a trait that is often said to separate us from other animals and bring us closer to God. For 2,400 years, the temple has been occupied by the high priests of reason. Plato (4th century B.C./1949) presented a model of a divided self in which reason, firmly ensconced in the head, rules over the passions, which rumble around in the chest and stomach (Timaeus, 69). Aristotle had a similar conception of reason as the wise master and emotion as the foolish slave: "anger seems to listen to reason, but to hear wrong, like hasty servants, who run off before they have heard everything their master tells them, and fail to do what they were ordered, or like dogs, which bark as soon as there is a knock without waiting to see if the visitor is a friend" (Ethics, 1962, 1149a). Throughout the long history of moral philosophy, the focus has generally been on moral reasoning, whereas the moral emotions have been regarded with some suspicion (Solomon, 1993). Even when moral psychology finally separated itself from moral philosophy and began to make its own empir-

The moral emotions.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Truth and its Deformities

Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This volume, an expanded edition of the philosophy of language issue of the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy (1977), includes essays by some of the foremost exponents of the most influential current approaches to the philosophy of language. There are new contributions to this edition by Keith S. Donnellan, Jerrold J. Katz, Barbara Partee, John Searle, Richmond Thomason and Zeno Vendler. Essays drawn from the original edition are by W. V. Quine, Keith S Donnellan, Stephen Schiffer, Donnis W. Stampe, Baruch A Brody, Panayot Butchvarov, Fred I. Dretske, Jaegwon Kim, David Shwayder, J. O. Urmson, Michael Levin, David E. Cooper, John Wallace, Hector-Neri Castaneda, Howard K Wettstein, Herbert Hochberg, Nelson Goodman, Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Root, Bruce Aune, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke. Of special interest in the original edition was Kripke's paper "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference, Descriptions, and Anaphora," Presents a rebuttal to Kripke's essay and attempts to establish referential attributive distinction as semantically significant.

Contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of language

Although generally philosophers have put a high valuation on reason, increasingly the role of emotions in motivating action is being recognized. The essays in this volume explore the emotions from a variety of perspectives, ranging from Aristotelian views of the passions to the new findings of cognitive science, and from such diverse starting points as medieval literature and psychological studies.

Howard K. Wettstein

Papers

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Truth and its Deformities

Contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of language

Philosophy of the Emotions

Demonstrative reference and definite descriptions

Has semantics rested on a mistake