Imperfect Cognitions

This week's blogpost is from Stefaan Blancke (Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Science at Tilburg University) on his recent publication Objectify and Commit: How Reasons Bring About Cultural Change and Progress  (Topoi, 2025) Deinze, the town where I live, was destroyed three times in the Middle Ages. Each time, it was attacked by Ghent, a city barely twenty kilometers away. The reason? Deinze consistently sided with Bruges in its conflict with Ghent. When at one point Bruges decided to dig a canal to Deinze, Ghent sent out a militia to kill the diggers. No more diggers, no more canal. Stefaan Blancke Today it is unimaginable that cities in Flanders or elsewhere would settle their conflicts (if any) in such a violent manner. Our planet is far from peaceful, but humans seem to have made some moral progress. The same can be said of our understanding of the world. We have replaced religion, magic, and superstition with a profound scientific understanding of the world and ourselves...

On the occasion of  #PhiloFortnight2025 , a period of two weeks in the UK dedicated to promoting philosophy, a webinar took place to address multiple ways in which philosophy can be brought to the general public. Poster of the event Panelists included: Paul Knights has a background in philosophy where he researched the relationship between philosophy and nature. Currently, he organises guides walks in the Pennine landscape, has interests in photography and environmental education, and participates in community projects. You can learn more about Paul's activities at the Landscape Story website . Bonny Astor has a background in psychology and a long-standing interest in philosophy as a means to connect deeply with people from different backgrounds and with different views. Currently, she leads the initiatives of Thought Experiments in Pubs and you can find more information about the events at the All Together One website . Helen Beebee is professor of philosophy of science at the ...

Today's post is by Paolo Bodini. Paolo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genoa, having completed his PhD in Philosophy of Law between Milan and Cologne. His research interests include democratic theory, constitutionalism, separation of powers and political epistemology. He is the author of " Political representation and lay expertise ", recently published in Ethics and Politics . Paolo Bodini The name of this blog prompted me to consider a set of problems I addressed in my recent book Democrazia e conoscenza (Democracy and Knowledge). The debate on democratic legitimacy—that is, on democracy’s capacity to produce decisions worthy of obedience—has indeed intersected with the concept of knowledge, giving rise to a vibrant discourse across political philosophy, legal philosophy and epistemology. As I have argued in my book, democracy’s legitimacy is inextricably linked to a rigorous idea of knowledge, albeit fallible and amenable to correction. We might say,...

On the occasion of #PhiloFortnight2025 , a period of two weeks in the UK dedicated to promoting philosophy, a webinar took place to address the role of philosophy in our understanding of conspiracy theories. Poster of the event Panelists included: U-Wen Low , an Assistant Professor of Public Religion at the University of Birmingham, interested in ways of applying religious studies to daily life in practical, meaningful ways. U-Wen is an expert on the Book of Revelations and on the interplay between postcolonial thinking and Pentecostalism. Joseph Pierre , a Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) with clinical experience working with people diagnosed with psychotic disorders, substance use disorders. His research interests include schizophrenia, delusions and delusion-like beliefs, auditory hallucinations and voice-hearing. Joe recently published a book,  False . Kathleen Murphy...

 This post is by Sally Latham. Fantastic Philosophy Teaching philosophy to children has been shown to have a positive impact not only on critical thinking and creativity, but also on emotional development, such as independence, self-assurance and self-assertion ( Rahar et al 2018 ).  Yet philosophy is not explicitly part of the National Curriculum for England, with the closest reference being that in English: "Pupils] must be assisted in making their thinking clear to themselves as well as to others and teachers should ensure that pupils build secure foundations by using discussion to probe and remedy their misconceptions. Pupils should also be taught to understand and use the conventions for discussion and debate." However, teachers are not always confident in bringing critical thinking into the classroom without formal training.  Labour have also now identified ‘improving communication skills (oracy)’ as one of their  targets in their mission statement  Breaki...

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...

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...