June 8, 2015, by Jules Holroyd

The Implicit Mind

Myself, Tom and Robin recently had the opportunity to attend this event on The Implicit Mind, at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. It was a great forum for scholars working on a range of topics to do with implicit cognition to make progress in thinking about the structure of implicit cognition.

One of the take home messages for me was the different ways in which we might talk about cognition being implicit. Three candidate uses (helpfully summarized in Tim Bayne’s talk) emerged: implicit as ‘unconscious’ (the sense favoured by Eric Mandlebaum); implicit as ‘beyond direct deliberate control’ (and perhaps therefore difficult to detect, but not impossible) (this is the sense favoured by myself); and implicit as ‘contained in the computational role’ (a sense of implicit introduced by Susan Carey).

This sort of conceptual clarify seems really important not only for making progress in philosophy, but also in empirical psychology: might each sense of ‘implicit’ be picked upon by different implicit measures?

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