Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is part 2 of a two part series from Steven Bland on his paper " Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments ", published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.   Open science as a humbling environment In last week’s post , I argued that a lack of intellectual humility in individuals can have beneficial effects on individual learning and collective deliberation, but only in humbling environments. Designing, creating and sustaining such environments is one of the ways collectives can manifest intellectual humility. Humbling environments have the following five features: 1. They elicit evaluable behavior. 2. They produce actionable feedback. 3. They afford multiple opportunities to solve similar problems. 4. They incentivize the pursuit of intellectual goods. 5. They are forgiving without being overly permissive. Forecasting tournaments  and  open science  are two prime examples of humbling environments. In forecasting tournaments, participants make d...

Today's post is part 1 of a two part series from Steven Bland on his paper " Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments " Steven Bland Calls for intellectual humility are pretty common these days. A bit too common, perhaps. At least, that’s what  I’ve recently argued . To be clear, I don’t think that intellectual humility is a bad thing. The tendency to  recognize and own one’s intellectual limitations  can be both virtuous and valuable. It has, after all, been associated with  better information processing , lower acceptance of  misinformation  and  conspiracy theories , and lower levels of  outgroup bias . For these reasons, researchers have been anxious to design interventions to boost peoples’ intellectual humility. This work on the nature, causes, and effects of intellectual humility is not wrong, but it is incomplete. It focuses too narrowly on the positive aspects of intellectual humility as a disposition of individuals. In doing so, ...

Today's post is by Annalisa Coliva on her new paper Hysteria, Hermeneutical Injustice and Conceptual Engineering  ( Social Epistemology , 2024). Annalisa Coliva In this paper, I dive into what Miranda Fricker calls "hermeneutical injustice" in her work  Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing  (2007), exploring how it plays out in the medical field. Using the long and problematic history of hysteria as a case study, I argue that this concept was misused as a diagnostic tool for centuries, until it was dropped in 1980 with the DSM-III. The reason for this lies in deep-rooted power structures shaped by prejudice against women. I propose that hysteria perfectly fits Fricker's idea of hermeneutical injustice, but it also reveals the need to broaden the concept itself. This approach is crucial for two key reasons. First, rather than treating the medical field as a passive arena for testing philosophical ideas, I show how medical history can actively refine ou...

This post is by Marta Jorba and Pablo Lopez Silva, who have recently guest edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology entitled Mind in Action: Expanding the concept of affordance. Marta Jorba Organisms relate to their environment through action. Human behavior is guided by the perception of certain opportunities for action that specific objects invite. For example, when playing football, one does not only perceive the ball as round, moving, having certain shades of color, etc. One also perceives the ball as kickable . The perception of the ball as kickable is constitutive of our visual experience of the ball. J.J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, captures this phenomenon with the notion of affordances.  Perceiving a ball as kickable is, then, the perception of an opportunity for a certain action, namely, to kick the ball. For Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), perceptual affordances directly relate organisms to their environments through oppor...

Today’s post is contributed by Víctor Verdejo. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has recently published the article “ On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments ”, now featuring in a special collection on delusions in Philosophical Psychology . Víctor Verdejo is currently a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a member of Logos Research Group. Víctor Verdejo We often think of delusional experience as not particularly revealing with respect to a subject’s rationality. In this paper, I explore a different—some might say daring—approach: what if delusional experience were to illuminate the rational grounds associated with our judgments and concepts? In this work, I focus on the experience of thought-insertion and the first-person concept. Consider what I term the “rationality hypothesis”: this hypothesis holds that when subjects with schizophrenia report thought insertion, they may be expressing fully rational judgments about the ownership ...

Today's post is by Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg) and Christiana Werner (University of Duisburg-Essen) about their recently edited book, Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge 2024). Recent approaches in philosophy of mind and epistemology have shown a growing interest in examining the nature of phenomenal knowledge and the epistemic value of having an experience. The basic idea in these debates has been that having an experience has a unique character and provides the experiencer with a kind of knowledge which otherwise cannot be achieved. As expressed by an ancient proverb: “Experience is the best teacher.” That there is a specific type of knowledge we can only gain by means of experience is a claim defended in the debate about the mind–body problem and consciousness (e.g., Nagel 1974; Jackson 1982), and in the debate on the so-called “knowledge argument” in particular.  Christiana Werner Simultaneously, the philosophy of imagination...