This week's contribution is from Joe Pierre on his paper Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World? ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2023). Back in 2021, Ema Sullivan-Bissett invited me to participate in a multidisciplinary workshop at the University of Birmingham to tackle the question, “are conspiracy theory beliefs pathological?” While the workshop didn’t take place until the Spring of 2023, getting together to discuss the topic and hear lectures from philosophers and psychologists whose work I knew well, but had never met in person—like Lisa Bortolotti, Karen Douglas, Stephan Lewandowsky, Anna Ichino, and Kengo Miyazono—was well worth the wait. And in the meantime, Dr. Sullivan-Bissett also invited me to contribute to a special issue of the journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology on “Conspiratorial Ideation and Psychopathology.” Joseph Pierre For the article I wrote, I chose the title “Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World?...
Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori (Hokkaido University) on his recent paper " Folk Intuitions About Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Evaluating the Combined Effects of Misunderstandings About Determinism and Motivated Cognition " ( Cognitive Science 2024), co-authored with Yusuke Haruki (The University of Tokyo) and Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University). Kiichi Inarimori Philosophers have long debated whether free will—a prerequisite for moral responsibility—is compatible with determinism. Central to these discussions are the intuitions people form when considering moral responsibility in hypothetical scenarios. Yusuke Haruki With the rise of experimental philosophy, numerous studies have explored folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Some experiments suggest that people tend toward “compatibilism,” the view that free will and determinism can coexist, especially in concrete cases of wrongdoing. Others suggest a lean toward “incompatibilism,” th...