How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language

[Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking—one of these, a quick, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive system to prepare for strenuous activity. This may seem paradoxical, but is in line with findings that reading math problems in a hard-to-read font makes people less likely to make careless mistakes.]

Read the full story | Scientific American

 

The Self is Moral

[So we’ve been thinking about the problem precisely backwards. It’s not that identity is centered around morality. It’s that morality necessitates the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison d’être…….

The lesson of the identity detector is this: when we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities.]

Read the full article here: The Self is Moral | Nina Strohminger for AEON

Beautiful, Old Language Trees

Read the full article here | MENTAL FLOSS

When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Lessons on language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring. Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram.

Consciousness | Actualism | Epiphenomenalism

[Ted Honderich | Oxford University Press Blog]

A decent theory or analysis of consciousness will also have the recommendation of answering a clear question. It will proceed from an adequate initial clarification of a subject. The present great divergence in theories of consciousness is mainly owed to people talking about different things. Some include what others call the unconscious mind.

But there are also the criteria for a good theory. We have two already — a good theory will make consciousness different and it will make consciousness itself effective. In fact consciousness is to us not just different, but mysterious, more than elusive. It is such that philosopher Colin McGinn has said before now that we humans have no more chance of understanding it than a chimp has of doing quantum mechanics. – See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2014/07/what-is-consciousness/#sthash.uiSnuG3u.dpuf

To Express It Is To Explain It | Philosophy Now

When we ask ourselves why we have a particular feeling or thought, engage in a particular behavior, experience awe or wonder or love, or, perhaps most importantly, suffer emotional pain or pursue self-destructive paths, what kind of answer do we expect? What would it mean to make sense of our inner lives?