The Planning Process

Finished my MSc yesterday, and since I currently have no job or firm PhD position, I have a little bit of free time. This post is just me clarifying my own thoughts on what I want to be writing about over the next few months. I'll be aiming to get at least some of these papers published, but who knows whether that will actually happen*.

Dissociative Identity Disorder and psychological moral status: Following on from my MA dissertation and as a response to an argument by Tim Bayne, I want to claim that if we accept Derek Parfit's view of personal identity than integrative treatment of DID does not necessitate the destruction of a full moral agent - which Bayne suggests might be the case if we accept a psychological theory of moral status. A very, very condensed version of this paper was presented at the INPP's 13th annual conference, and is available on my Academia.edu page.

Theoretical unification of psychology; is it feasible, and is it desirable?: Something that's pretty explicit in psychology as a whole is the lack of conversation that researchers in the various sub-fields have with each other. Cognitive psychologists don't talk to social psychologists don't talk to developmental psychologists don't talk to behavior analysts don't talk to... There are exceptions to this, of course, but for the most part the sub-fields are rather distinct and can sometimes feel like entirely different subjects. The question, then, is this; should psychology attempt to close the gap between its sub-fields, as some have suggested, or should it embrace this distinction for providing different perspectives on a single phenomenon? I genuinely think this is an important question about psychology as a field, and that there's not nearly enough discussion about it.

Conscious awareness of advantageous strategies in the IGT: My MSc project. Despite submitting it for my course, I'm still not entirely happy with it, and thus feel the need to give it a bit more polish over the next few weeks.

Wagering methods as a measurement of conscious states; how reliable are they?: Kind of a theoretical addendum to my MSc project. There's been a bit of discussion by writers such as Anil Seth about what wagering methods of confidence are actually measuring, and I'm not entirely sure that I agree with previous interpretations - or at least, I think that the topic deserves a bit more discussion.

Now I just need to start writing, I suppose.

*Pessimism; that very British virtue.