Thomas Murray, President of the Hastings Center: Psychology should be in dialogue with bioethics. “Too often, the interactions between social scientists and philosophers were futile and frustrating exercises in mutual unintelligibility. Philosophers were trained to map the intellectual landscape, parse whatever interesting concepts they found there, and articulate and critically evaluate ethical arguments. Philosophers were, with rare exceptions, not trained to create, interpret, or critique empirical studies. Social scientists, on the other hand, understood how to frame and answer certain kinds of empirical questions – those within the purview of their field and methodologies – but they were often mystified by the forms of reasoning and argument employed by philosophers. What does a Kantian distinction between heteronomy and autonomy have to do with whether physicians should tell patients they have cancer? (In 1979, whether to tell the truth about a grave diagnosis such as cancer was still a contentious issue within medicine.)” APS Observer

Review: Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Scienceby Sunny Y. Auyang: “If you want to know how the human mind works, the one thing you shouldn’t do is ask a cognitive scientist. So says science writer and Ph.D. physicist Sunny Auyang, whose latest polemic suggests that the psychologists, computer scientists, linguists, philosophers and neuroscientists whose mission is to investigate our mental functioning are less purveyors of scientific truth than nutty zealots with a pathetically overdeveloped sense of their own importance.” American Scientist