Imperfect Cognitions

Helen De Cruz In today's post Helen De Cruz reports from The Philosophy and Psychology of Afterlife Beliefs workshop which took place on 10 March 2015 at the VU University Amsterdam. Most religions affirm an explicit belief in an afterlife, that is to say, that biological death is not the end of a human being’s existence. Recent research in the cognitive science of religion indicates that the cross-culturally widespread belief in a life after death is cognitively natural for humans: it arises spontaneously, without explicit instruction, and sometimes even in the absence of any cultural input. By contrast, the belief that everything (including a person’s beliefs and desires) ends at death is cognitively effortful and emerges later in development than the belief that at least some processes, such as psychological processes, continue.

Boudewijn de Bruin My name is Boudewijn de Bruin and I am Professor of Financial Ethics in the faculties of Economics and Business, and Philosophy, at the University of Groningen.  In this post I will summarize a paper I wrote for a symposium organized at the occasion of the publication of Herman Philipse ’s book God in the Age of Science in which he takes issue with Richard Swinburne ’s attempts to provide evidence showing that the existence of God is highly probable. Most evidence Swinburne marshals is publicly available. But some is only private: evidence gained through religious experience. Ideally Swinburne would not need private evidence, but, as he admits, all publicly available evidence is not by itself sufficiently strong for the unbeliever to be moved to adopt the belief that God exists. The unbeliever needs religious experience, then, but it cannot be his or her own lest Swinburne only persuades those that have had an experience of God themselves. Swinburne...

This post is part of our series of monthly posts by experts-by-experience. This month, Bipolar Whispers tells us about the importance of writing. This is how she introduces herself: "33 year old Mental Health blogger who is married to the love of her life and together they have 3 wonderful children and 2 fur babies. She has Bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, and Anxiety. Lover of butterflies. Survivor." They say that many people with Bipolar Disorder are creative. I always wondered if this were true. Within myself I could never see my creativity. I could not play music, I was not crafty. In retrospect I can see my creative outlet has always been writing. My love and knack for writing began around the time I experienced my first true mania, although I never knew it was mania at the time. Retrospect is a very powerful thing. I never knew I could write, or rather, I never knew I wrote well. I went to appointment after appointment with my psychiatrist or my psychologist for...

Giovanni Stanghellini A course entitled The Phenomenological Bases of the Therapy of Severe Mental Disorders took place on April 9-11 in Florence. Organized by the  EPA (European Psychiatric Association) Section of Philosophy and Psychiatry, the course accommodated 30 practitioners and philosophers from all over Europe to offer an advanced practical workshop on Phenomenological Psychotherapy. The participants learned therapeutic skills from such professionals as Giovanni Stanghellini, Thomas Fuchs, Andrea Fiorillo, Andrea Raballo and Borut Skodlar. The first day started with an intensive but fascinating introduction by the course’s director Giovanni Stanghellini , who took his audience through the theoretical underpinnings of the phenomenological model, with philosophical references to Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas. Stanghellini argued that a human being ought to be seen and understood as a dialogue with Alterity. It is exactly in a dialogue, where the true essence of l...

My name is Andrea Polonioli and I am a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. My primary research interests concern the philosophy of biological and cognitive sciences. The unifying theme of my research is the investigation of rational behavior and cognition. Andrea Polonioli Scholars in the field of judgement and decision-making have described a variety of heuristics that reasoners seem to deploy. Yet little attention had been paid to individual differences in the use of these heuristics, until Stanovich and his co-workers conducted a stream of individual differences studies involving reasoning and decision-making (e.g. Stanovich and West  1998 ; Stanovich  1999 ; and Stanovich and West,  2011 ). They found a remarkable heterogeneity in the use of reasoning strategies and that a sizeable number of people do not deploy heuristics. But they also discovered important correlations between the use of heuristics and measures of cognitive ability....

Robbie Williams In this post I interview Robert Williams , Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Robert is currently leading a project on the Nature of Representation (NatRep) , funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (2012-2017). The aim is to explore the metaphysics and epistemology of mental and linguistic representation. The team includes Jennifer Carr and Rachel Goodman as post-doctoral research fellows, and Nick Tasker and Will Gamester as PhD students. LB: What was your main motivation in choosing to investigate the nature of representation? How did you become interested in the topic? RW: I’ve been fascinated since days in graduate school with underdetermination/indeterminacy arguments in the theory of representation. To illustrate with one I’m thinking about right now. Start from the following picture of the metaphysical grounds of belief and desire content: the content of an agent’s mental states is whatever it has to be, to r...

In this post, Naomi Kloosterboer (PhD student at VU University of Amsterdam and visiting research fellow at the University of Birmingham) discusses her paper ‘Transparent emotions? A critical analysis of Moran’s Transparency Claim’ that will appear in the special issue of Philosophical Explorations on ‘Self-knowledge and Folk Psychology: Perspectives from Philosophy and Psychiatry’. If I want to know what you believe or feel, the easiest and most prevailing way of finding out would be to just ask you. Moreover, if I don’t take your answer at face value, I should be able to provide good reasons to justify my mistrust. That is to say, when it comes to speaking our minds, the default mode is that we are granted the authority to do so. But what justifies this first-person authority? In Authority and Estrangement (2001), Richard Moran argues convincingly against the idea that our authority is grounded in epistemic features of self-knowledge because they do not explain its specific firs...

On 16th March I chaired a session entitled " Sight, Sound, and Mental Health " for the Arts & Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. Thanks to project PERFECT sponsoring the event, we could have three exciting talks, one by Sam Wilkinson on verbal hallucinations, one by Amy Hardy on imagery, and one by Ema Sullivan-Bissett on alien abduction belief, followed by a Q&A session with the audience. Sam talked about the difficulties in defining verbal hallucinations, as some have an auditory quality to them, but others appear to be more like thoughts. The wide variety of verbal hallucinations makes it harder to arrive at a unifying theory of what causes them. Drawing from his work with the Hearing the Voice project, Sam illustrated with examples and case studies how hallucinations can play a significant role in either hindering or supporting the wellbeing of voice hearers.  Amy Hardy Amy explained the importance of imagery in everyday life and ...

This post is by Jon Robson, teaching associate at the University of Nottingham. He works on the epistemology of aesthetic, ethical, and religious judgements. There is a prominent doctrine in philosophical aesthetics according to which aesthetic judgements are only legitimate if based on first-hand experience of their objects. In order to properly judge that a painting is beautiful or a work of music graceful, we need to have seen or heard the relevant items for ourselves. Much of my recent work has focused on arguing that this doctrine is mistaken. In particular, I have aimed to show that there is nothing illegitimate about forming aesthetic judgements on the basis of testimony (see Robson forthcoming ). Here, though, I want to focus on a different source of aesthetic judgement: memory. Memory may initially seem to present no problems for the orthodox view. Those who accept the ‘first person requirement’ (FPR) will doubtless, like the rest of us, accept that we can (in t...

Uwe Peters In honour of World Autism Awareness Day, we publish a post by Uwe Peters on his recent paper ' Self-Knowledge and Consciousness of Attitudes '.   Uwe is currently writing up his  dissertation   on the accessibility and self-knowledge of beliefs at King's College London. He develops an account of self-knowledge on which our privileged, non-inferential self-knowledge of beliefs is grounded in and dependent on our inferential knowledge of other people’s mental states. In my research, I often appeal to cases of atypical cognition. In a recent paper , I argue that findings on autism pose a challenge to the following view of conscious thinking. On the basis of empirical studies and theoretical considerations, it has been argued that conscious thinking, i.e., thinking that involves the deployment of the components of working memory, involves only sensory-imagistic events such as episodes of inner speech or visual image...