Meghan Sullivan

speaker

520 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2017 last heard Jun 2017

Meghan Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 97: Meghan Sullivan discusses time biases · 11 Jun 2017 podcast

You're just a stage.

Uh so how can we make sense of this way that people engage in planning if we're thinking that the things that are doing the planning are all of these stages spread out at time?

I think that's one problem.

Another problem that's talked about even less, but I think is pretty acute.

is even if you think there's an easy way to translate from like the multiple stage talk back into the like endurantist like you talk, so we say the stage people want to say

Present Matt is saving for future Matt, and the endurantists want to say Matt's saving now, so he, Matt will have money in the future.

You might think like we can just translate between these two schemes pretty easily and it's not a big deal.

But actually we know from philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that

That we're motivated in different ways depending on how we describe different situations.

So if we describe something using a really strong indexical expression, we might be motivated to act in different ways than if we describe it in a more neutral descriptive way.

So really key example of this is John Perry's messy shopper example.

You got the guy who's like wheeling his grocery cart around Walmart, and he sees a trail of sugar, and he thinks like, you know,

Yeah.

that person who's leaving the trail of sugar really should be a little bit more conscientious and then he just keeps walking around.

And then eventually he realizes I am the person leaving the trail of sugar and he suddenly wants to change his behavior.

He's suddenly very motivated to like seal up things in his bag or pay attention to things that in his cart.

The fact that a situation is described using strong indexical expressions we know can affect how we're motivated to act on the information.

And I suspect a similar thing goes on when we're talking about planning for the distant future.

So if I'm your retirement advisor and I say like, how much do you think Matt of twenty forty would like to have in his account?

That's a kind of neutral, less like indexically strong way of describing the scenario.

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