Juan Pablo BermúdezImperial College London | Imperial · Dyson School of Design Engineering
Juan Pablo Bermúdez
Doctor of Philosophy
About
32
Publications
16,841
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
110
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Publications
Publications (32)
Self-control, the capacity to resist temptations and pursue longer-term goals over immediate gratifications, is crucial in determining the overall shape of our lives, and thereby in our ability to shape our identities. As it turns out, this capacity is intimately linked with our ability to control the direction of our attention. This raises the wor...
In “Willpower with and without effort”, G. Ainslie advances our understanding of self-control by theoretically unifying multiple forms of willpower. But one crucial question remains unanswered: How do agents pick the right forms of willpower in each situation? I argue that willpower requires tactical skill, which detects willpower-demanding context...
Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which...
Unlabelled:
Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two beh...
Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain eff...
To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral...
Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self‐control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain eff...
Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically...
Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically...
For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether it makes sense to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a u...
Mind-wandering seems to be paradigmatically unintentional. However, experimental findings have yielded the paradoxical result that mind-wandering can also be intentional. In this paper, we first present the paradox of intentional mind-wandering and then explain intentional mind-wandering as the intentional omission to control one’s own thoughts. Fi...
It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper, we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitar...
Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studi...
Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill, an ability that threads cognitive and motivational processes together to achieve commitment-concordant action in the face of contrary motivations. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that ma...
Mind-wandering seems to be paradigmatically unintentional. However, experimental findings have yielded the paradoxical result that mind-wandering can also be intentional. In this paper, we first present the paradox of intentional mind-wandering and then explain intentional mind-wandering as the intentional omission to control one’s own thoughts. Fi...
In the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of th...
((A free e-print of this paper can be downloaded at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TVjGbz3bd73VMexvIGqU/full)) In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent's violations of best judgment and/or resol...
En este documento presento la primera traducción al español (en mi conocimiento) del fragmento de la obra atribuida a la filósofa pitagórica Esara de Lucania. El texto es de gran interés porque (1) en cuanto material filosófico introduce innovaciones en la tradicional teoría tripartita del alma y (2) en cuanto material pedagógico permite diversific...
( Download final version at https://bit.ly/2uF2SLi )
We propose two adjustments to the classic view of shared intentionality (our capacity to share mental states of various sorts) as based on conceptual-level cognitive skills. The first one takes into account the fact that infants and young children display this capacity, but lack conceptual-level...
How can we disagree so profoundly concerning matters of fact? I call the disposition to dismiss evidence and facts when they conflict with one’s moral or political perspective, or accept groundless claims when they reaffirm said perspective, the ‘post-truth temperament’. This temperament seems to be one of the key causes of the political polarizati...
Many philosophers consider that memory is just a passive information retention and retrieval capacity. Some information and experiences are encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved in a passive way, without any control or intervention on the subject’s part. In this chapter, we will defend an active account of memory according to which rememberin...
Scholarship on Aristotle's theory of action has recently veered toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by an anti-intellectualism revival, according to which character, and not reason, sets the goals of action. I argue that neither view ca...
Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates be...
Scholarship on Aristotle’s theory of action has recently tended towards an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of establishing the ends of actions. A resurgence of anti-intellectualism, according to which establishing ends is a task of character and not of reason, has placed this position under criticism. This paper arg...
From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; ant...
Interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of action in the last few decades has tended
toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of
setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by the
revival of anti-intellectualism (particularly from J. Moss’ work), according
to which character, and not reason...
Sánchez, Liliana Carolina. Traditio animae: la recepción aristotélica de las teorías presocráticas del alma. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2016. 348 pp.
This paper investigates the differences between ancient Greek and modern ethical naturalism, through the account of the whole classical tradition provided by Cicero in De finibus bonorum et malorum. Ever since Hume’s remarks on the topic, it is usually held that derivations of normative claims from factual claims require some kind of proper justifi...
Questions
Questions (2)
A group of colleagues and I are working on finding ways to generate value from organic waste. Composting is the most usual way to do this, but compost is generally thought of as an input for traditional soil farming practices. Some people say that you can use composting to generate the nutrient solutions needed for hydroponic farming, but I haven't been able to find a detailed description of this process. How is it done? Is it competitive when compared to non-organic nutrient solutions?
My research team is getting ready to use Amazon Mechanical Turk (or a similar service) as a platform for psychological experiments for the first time. We have programmed some of the relevant experiments in Eprime, but don't yet know whether they will work on MTurk, or how to make Eprime and MTurk work together. Can this be done? And what online resources are to there to help us achieve this? Thanks!
