Imperfect Cognitions

The blog post today is by Joel Krueger (University of Exeter) on his recent paper " Home as Mind: AI Extenders and Affective Ecologies in Dementia Care " ( Synthese 2025).   Joel Krueger AI is everywhere. Admittedly, much of the hype is overblown (AI fatigue is real; I feel it, too). Still, AI can do impressive things—and it’s already impacting our lives in many ways. Discussions in philosophy and beyond often focus on big issues like the looming possibility of artificial consciousness (very unlikely) and artificial general intelligence (also unlikely, despite what Sam Altman and other techbros keep insisting), or more immediate practical and ethical worries about job displacement, bias, privacy, environmental costs, and the potential for misuse. Critical discussions like these are important. They help tamp down relentless hype cycles that get in the way of clear-eyed discussions about how AI-powered technology should fit into our lives. But while scepticism is warranted, i...

The blog post today is by Sophie Keeling on her recent paper " Responding to Second-Order Reasons " ( Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 2024). She is a 'Ramon y Cajal' fellow in philosophy at UNED, Madrid and a member of the Metis research group.   Sophie Keeling Philosophers love talking about reasons. Often this takes place at the first-order level: reasons for attending a party include the fact that it would be fun or that it would make your friends happy if you went. Reasons for believing that it will rain tomorrow include the weather forecast or the fact that it’s rainy season where you are. But arguably, some reasons are second-order . These are reasons to respond to a particular reason or not to respond to it.  For example, I might promise my therapist not to do things simply because it will please others and to only think about myself. And in the epistemic case, however good your reasoning in fact was, the fact that you carried it out under a shortne...

Today's post is by Maria Cristina Contrino. Maria Cristina Contrino What is the role of narratives for our personal identity, for who we are in everyday life? What kinds of narratives shape our actions, interactions and relations? What is the role of ‘wrong’, erroneous narratives?  In my paper  I review three narratives accounts that highlight the importance of narratives for personal identity and argue for the practical notion of personal identity ( Schechtman 1996 ); the variety of psychological and bodily characteristics that shape a person ( Schroeder 2022 ); and the role of affectivity and bodily interactions in supporting our narratives and maintaining our identity ( Lindemann 2014 ).  Yet, these approaches do not do justice to the roles of certain narratives that are not fully rational and involve errors: a narrative view needs to account for the practical significance in one’s life of erroneous narratives, such as impostor’s narratives, delusions and confabulati...

In this post, Constantine Sandis, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and Director of Lex Academic , presents his new book on Wittgenstein for Anthem Press, Wittgenstein on Other Minds . Book cover   ‘Even if someone were to express everything that is “within him”, we wouldn’t necessarily understand him’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology , § 191. The so-called ‘problem of other minds’ is typically understood as a problem in epistemology regarding whether we can ever really be sure of what anybody else is thinking or feeling. At its solipsistic extreme, philosophers have wondered whether we can ever know that other people exist at all. How can I be certain that those around me are not all automata or mere figments of my imagination? In his later work, Ludwig Wittgenstein was at pains to dismiss such worries, not because we can prove that sceptics are wrong, but because their objections can be shown to be nonsensical. G...

The blog post today is by Arthur Krieger (Temple University) on his recent paper " Torturous withdrawal: Emotional compulsion in addiction " ( European Journal of Philosophy , 2024). Arthur Krieger   We’ve all heard addiction described as a “compulsion.” People with addictions (here I’ll just say ‘addicts’) often act in ways that are so out of character, so self-destructive, and so contrary to their own stated aims, that we feel the need for a special explanation. Compulsion is the main concept used to explain addictive behavior, particularly in health sciences like medicine and psychology. What exactly is compulsion? That’s a surprisingly difficult question. It is sometimes glossed as continuing to do something despite being aware of its serious negative consequences. But that includes far too much, like using a chair instead of a standing desk at work, or eating an eclair every night despite a recent high cholesterol reading. One traditional view is that compulsion is a c...

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...