Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Juan F. Álvarez (Université Grenoble Alpes) on his recent paper " Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism " ( Philosophical Studies , 2024). Juan F. Álvarez Distinguishing remembering from other related cognitive processes, such as imagining and relearning, occupies a central place in the philosophy of memory. While the remembering-imagining distinction is a topic of heated debate, philosophers tend to agree that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of remembering. In this paper, I argue that this view, which I call “exclusionism”, requires closer examination because it does not follow from leading naturalistic theories of remembering. The theories in question are simulationism ( Michaelian 2016 ), distributed causalism ( Sutton and O’Brien 2023 ), and trace minimalism ( Werning 2020 ).  Relearning occurs when a subject acquires information about an event through experience, forgets about the event, reacquires information about the sa...

This week's post is from Vladimir Krstic (a philosopher at the United Arab Emirates University) on his recently published paper  Lying by Asserting What You Believe is True: a Case of Transparent Delusion (Review of Philosophy and Psychology).  Imagine that I tell you that I believe that I am Hitler but that I am not Hitler since he is dead and I am not. You would probably think that you did not hear me correctly. But, if — upon your request for clarification — I tell you specifically that I believe that I am Hitler but that this is not possible and that, thus, my belief is obviously false, you might think that I am toying with you. Many people, following Moore, think that these claims are absurd. Vladimir Krstic However, this impression is misleading. One can confidently believe that p and ascribe this belief to oneself, while judging that not-p. This is what happens to transparently delusional people. They suffer from a delusional belief, they correctly ascribe this belief...

Today's post is from Aisha Qadoos (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) on her recently published paper Ambiguous Loss: a loved one's trauma (RHV) published in a special issue on memory and trauma . Research on interpersonal trauma predominantly looks at the effects of first personal trauma i.e., the experiences of those who directly undergo the experience. In this paper on ambiguous loss, I take the perspective of the friends and family of the one who has undergone the experience, a paradigmatic case being that of the partner of a veteran. Aisha Qadoos First, using L.A. Paul’s concept of transformative experience , I make the claim that traumatic experiences are transformative experiences . That is to say, they are experiences that result in some change in one’s sense of self (personally transformative) and/or epistemic standing (epistemically transformative). Personally transformative experiences are experiences that change what it is like to be you, resulting in cha...

Today's blogpost is from Jonathan Wilson, a Philosophy PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center, on his recent paper Rethinking Bullshit Receptivity (Review of Philosophy and Psychology). Jonathan Wilson Over the past decade, research on bullshit has become widespread thanks in large part to the development of the Bullshit Receptivity Scale. Here's how the scale works. Subjects read a series of syntactically correct, randomly generated statements with a new-agey ring (e.g., “The future will be an astral unveiling of inseparability”). Then subjects rate how profound they think the statements are on a scale from 1 (not at all profound) to 5 (very profound). Deployment of the scale has yielded some interesting results. People who rate bullshit as profound tend to be less reflective and lower in verbal intelligence. They are also more susceptible to fake news, more prone to conspiratorial ideation, and higher in religious and paranormal belief.  But what is bullshit anyway? I don’t h...

This week's blogpost comes from Regina Fabry , a philosopher of mind and cognition and works as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Discipline of Philosophy, School of Humanities at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research currently focusses on self-narration, grief, human-technology interactions, and their intersections. In working on these topics, she brings together philosophical theorising on situated cognition and affectivity with feminist scholarship and research in literary and cultural studies, the empirical cognitive sciences, and AI. Regina Fabry Self-narration is an important part of our mental lives. The configuration and re-configuration of our personal past experiences – and our anticipated futures – in narrative form, many philosophers argue, can be conducive to self-knowledge and self-understanding . Furthermore, self-narratives are an important part of human sociality by facilitating collaborative modes of meaning-making . While self-narratives can take vari...

Today's blogpost is by María Berta López Ríos, Chris McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez on their recently published paper Memory, Mourning, and the Chilean Constitution (RHV), published in a special issue of on memory and trauma . “I confess that I am in mourning”. So writes the novelist Ariel Dorfman. This is an interesting statement, however. For it is not the loss of a loved one that Dorfman grieves. The loss he is mourning is political. He is in mourning because of the result of a political referendum held in Chile in 2022. The grief Dorfman, and many others, experienced is a form of political grief. This may seem strange, but the phenomenon may be more common than we think. María Berta López Ríos We recently wrote a paper exploring this kind of experience of political grief, which arose out of our shared interest in the philosophy of emotions and the political situation in Chile. Our paper focuses on the expressions of mourning (like Dorfman’s) that followed the Chilean ref...