Hostname: page-component-669899f699-7tmb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-30T21:40:34.768Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unconscious goals: Specific or unspecific? The potential harm of the goal/gene analogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2014

Bence Nanay
Bence Nanay*
Affiliation:
Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium. [email protected] or [email protected]://webh01.ua.ac.be/bence.nanay Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1RD, United Kingdom
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Huang & Bargh's (H&B's) definition of goals is ambiguous between “specific goals” – the end-state of a token action I am about to perform – and “unspecific goals” – the end-state of an action-type (without specifying how this would be achieved). The analogy with selfish genes pushes the authors towards the former interpretation, but the latter would provide a more robust theoretical framework.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 152 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Dehaene, S., Naccache, L., Le Clec'H, G., Koechlin, E., Mueller, M., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., van de Moortele, P. F. & Le Bihan, D. (1998) Imaging unconscious semantic priming. Nature 395:597–600.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2000) The replicator in retrospect. Biology and Philosophy 15:403–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodale, M. A. (2011) Transforming vision into action. Vision Research 51:1567–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jeannerod, M. (1997) The cognitive neuroscience of action. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nanay, B. (2002) The return of the replicator: What is philosophically significant in a general account of replication and selection? Biology and Philosophy 17:109–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nanay, B. (2011) Replication without replicators. Synthese 179:455–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nanay, B. (2013) Between perception and action. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar