Roy Dings

Ruhr-Universität Bochum | RUB · Institut für Philosophie II

Despite experience-based expertise being increasingly common in health care, what experiential knowledge consists of remains a topic for debate. Here I propose a philosophical approach to clarify experiential knowledge, drawing on an analogous debate in philosophy of mind, which similarly targets the intuition that experience may generate unique kn...

There is thought to be a rich connection between the self and the phenomenology of episodic memory. Despite the emphasis on this link, the precise relation between the two has been underexplored. In fact, even though it is increasingly acknowledged that there are various facets of the self, this notion of the multifaceted self has played very littl...

The idea that (former) patients are experts who could contribute to mental health care practices is gaining traction. Experts-by-Experience are increasingly employed by institutions to contribute to various levels of care, organization and policy-making. However, the success of this movement is hindered by conceptual and epistemological ambiguities...

The article provides a conceptualization of self(-illness) ambiguity and investigates to what extent self(-illness) ambiguity is ‘special’. First, we draw on empirical findings to argue that self-ambiguity is a ubiquitous phenomenon. We suggest that these findings are best explained by a multidimensional account, according to which selves consist o...

Rationale: It is widely assumed that autobiographical memories rely on an integration of episodic memories with the self-model. We hypothesize that this integration process is influenced by the affective valence and the specific emotions that are elicited by an experience. More specifically, negative experiences that are incongruent with the self-m...

It has been argued that affordances are not meaningful and are thus not useful to be applied in contexts where specifically meaningfulness of experience is at stake (e.g. clinical contexts or discussions of autonomous agency). This paper aims to reconcep-tualize affordances such as to make them relevant and applicable in such contexts. It starts by...

I argue that the importance of self–illness ambiguity for the social perception of autism is not sufficiently acknowledged, and offer some suggestions for follow-up research.

Episodic memories can no longer be seen as the re-activation of stored experiences but are the product of an intense construction process based on a memory trace. Episodic recall is a result of a process of scenario construction. If one accepts this generative framework of episodic memory, there is still a be big gap in understanding the role of th...

In this paper, we argue that a crucial component of ‘self-management’ as management of the self consists of reducing what John Sadler has called ‘self-illness ambiguity’ (Sadler 2007). The paper seeks to supplement Sadler’s view on self-illness ambiguity in two ways. First, we zoom out of self-illness ambiguity and provide a philosophical analysis...

In this commentary to Heras-Escribano's target article, I argue that any approach to affordances that stays close to the letter of the law (of traditional Gibsonian ecological psychology) is not able to account for human agency and meaningful experience. I sketch how an approach that follows the spirit of the law can account for these phenomena.

Although there is an increase in research into how narrative identity interrelates with embodiment, the mechanisms underlying this interplay are hardly addressed. In this paper, I target this hiatus in the literature by proposing two mechanisms that can help to (non-exhaustively) elucidate the dynamic interplay of narrative identity and embodiment....

Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment. Recent research on affordances holds that there are differences in how people experience such possibilities for action. However, these differences have not been properly investigated. In this paper I start by briefly scrutinizing the existing literature on this issue, and then arg...

The article proposes a theoretical model to account for changes in self due to Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). First, we argue that most existing models postulate a very narrow conception of self, and thus fail to capture the full range of potentially relevant DBS-induced changes. Second, building on previous work by Shaun Gallagher, we propose a mod...

Our think tank tasked by the Dutch Health Council, consisting of Radboud University Nijmegen Honours Academy students with various backgrounds, investigated the implications of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for psychiatric patients. During this investigation, a number of methodological, ethical and societal difficulties were identified. We consider...