Transformative Shared Experiences & the Self

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Hannah Bondurant of Duke University, United States Abstract: One receives feedback from outside sources to confirm or discover one’s own beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, and often what group (and its features) to which one belongs. Yet cognitive biases and the source’s social status can influence our evaluations of feedback from outside sources. Since evidence suggests introspection is not an entirely reliable epistemic practice, I present what I call “transformative shared experiences” (TSEs) as way to understand how feedback from others shapes the way a person see themselves as a moral agent. I argue that TSEs take place on cognitive, personal, and cultural levels by drawing from developmental neuroscience, moral psychology, and Confucianism. To conceptualize TSEs, I use research on shared intentionality that occurs when we engage in cooperative activities as individuals or as a society. Shared intentionality or agency involves individuals not just sharing goals but also cognitive representations of multiple actions, roles, and perspectives. Successful shared intentionality has both joint cooperative attention and activity as well as similar representations of how things are going and should go. Research on the nature of “cultural cognition” shows that, at a young age, children are able to create a “shared fictional reality” with others through games which consist in rules, norms, representations, and narratives about what the world is and what it should be like. This construction of social reality is ongoing as this natural tendency is what leads us to create institutions, policies, and other structures to maintain our cultural traditions and values. Feedback about oneself, such as how one should identify as a person, is found within this shared reality. By exploring TSEs, we can better understand how transformation, good and bad, emerges from exchanges of feedback and experiences that shape not just perspective but one’s ability to relate to oneself and others. While we need to seriously consider the ways they can go wrong, I argue that TSEs with a diversity of sources is one way to help combat self-ignorance and the epistemic injustice we commit towards others when discrediting their feedback due to identity prejudice. Biography: Dr. H. Bondurant (they/them) recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Duke University in May 2021. They specialize in social epistemology with particular attention to issues at the intersection of self-knowledge and epistemic injustice. Their work often draws from moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and bioethics. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/