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Workshop - Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions

University of Birmingham
On May 8th and 9th there will be a two-day workshop at the University of Birmingham, discussing some of the key themes in the Epistemic Innocence project.

The workshop will be one of the means by which the project interim results are disseminated, and will promote an exchange between philosophers and psychologists on the potential pragmatic and epistemic benefits and costs of beliefs, memories, implicit biases, and explanations. It will also be a venue for Imperfect Cognitions network members to meet and talk about their research, and think about potential areas for future collaboration.

The workshop is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and has also received the support of the Analysis Trust. This made it possible to subsidise the registration fee, and award workshop bursaries to the graduate students attending. Abstracts for the talks can be found here. If you wish to participate, register by 15th March 2014 or follow live-tweeting by @epistinnocence.

If you want to know more about the project, articles featuring research on epistemic innocence have been published in the OUP Blog and the Philosophy@Birmingham blog in February and The Reasoner in March.


Workshop Programme

Thursday 8th May
10:00-10:30 - Arrival and registration with tea and coffee served

10:30-11:30 - Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway) and Maarten Boudry (University of Ghent): "In Defence of False Beliefs?"

11:30-11:40 - Comfort break

11:40-12:40 - Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham): "Epistemic Costs and Benefits of Delusional Beliefs".

12:40-14:00 - Lunch

14:00-15:00 - Katerina Fotopoulou (University College London): "Inferring the Self: Neurological Exaggerations of Normally Imperfect Inferences about the Body".

15:00-16:00 - Martin Conway (City University London): "Memory, Reality, and Consciousness in the Remembering-Imaging System".

16:00-16:30 - Tea and coffee

16:30-17:30 - Ema Sullivan-Bissett (University of Birmingham): "The Epistemic Status of Confabulatory Explanations".

Friday 9th May 

9:30-10:30 - Petter Johansson and Lars Hall (University of Lund): "Choice Blindness and the Flexibility of Attitude Formation: Why not Knowing why might be a Good Thing".

10:30-11:00 - Tea and coffee

11:00-12:00 - Jules Holroyd (University of Nottingham): "Implicit Bias, Awareness Conditions, and Epistemic Innocence".

12:00-13:00 - Miranda Fricker (University of Sheffield): "Fault and No-fault Epistemic Responsibility for Implicit Prejudice".

13:00-14:00 - Lunch

End of workshop


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