Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Vanessa Schipani  (University of Pennsylvania) who discusses a recent open access  paper on journalism and public trust in science published in Synthese . A version of this post has appeared on the LSE blog on 2 September 2024. Vanessa Schipani During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I was hired as a journalist to report on politicians’ claims about science for FactCheck.org . Coming off of finishing a master’s in the history and philosophy of science, my eye for stories was a bit more philosophical than most.  Starting with my first article on whether climate science was pseudoscience (spoiler: it’s not), I noticed a trend in how politicians misunderstood the scientific process, especially when arguing for policy inaction: They set the bar for action at certain results, and condemned researchers when they offered their opinions about policies. Now on the cusp of finishing a dissertation on trust in science, I see more clearly the trick these po...

This post is by Kevin Dorst and Matthew Mandelkern whose paper, " Good Guesses ", is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research . The authors have written another post on guessing and the conjunction fallacy which you can read here . Matthew Mandelkern Where do you think Latif will go to law school? He’s been accepted to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and NYU. We don’t know his preferences, but here’s the proportion of applicants with the same choices who’ve gone to each: Yale, 38%; Harvard, 30%; Stanford, 20%; NYU, 12%. So take a guess: Where do you think he’ll go? Some observations: One natural guess is ‘Yale’. Another is ‘Either Yale or Harvard’; meanwhile, it’s decidedly unnatural to guess ‘not Yale’, or ‘Yale, Stanford, or NYU’. Though robust, these judgments are puzzling. ‘Yale’ is a fine guess, but its probability is below 50%, meaning that its negation is strictly more probable (38% vs. 62%); nevertheless, ‘not Yale’ is a weird guess. Moreover, ‘Yale or H...

Today's post is by Sacha Altay, Emma de Araujo and Hugo Mercier. Sacha Altay is doing his PHD thesis at the Jean Nicod Institute on misinformation from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective. Emma de Araujo is a master student in Sociology doing an internship at the Jean Nicod Institute in the Evolution and Social Cognition Team . Hugo Mercier is a research scientist at the CNRS (Jean Nicod Institute) working on argumentation and how we evaluate communicated information.  Why do people share fake news? We believe others to be more easily swayed by fake news than us ( Corbu et al., 2020 ; Jang & Kim, 2018 ), thus an intuitive explanation is that people share fake news because they are gullible. It makes sense that if people can’t tell truths from falsehoods, they will inadvertently share falsehoods often enough. In fact, laypeople are quite good at detecting fake news ( Pennycook et al., 2019 , 2020 ; Pennycook & Rand, 2019 ) and, more generally, they don’t get fooled e...

Today's post is written by Kenny Easwaran, who is an Associate Professor in the  Department of Philosophy  at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in 2008 from the  Group in Logic and Methodology of Science  at UC Berkeley, doing interdisciplinary work on the mathematics and philosophy of conditional probability. This post is about " The Tripartite Role of Belief " which appeared in Res Philosophica as part of a special issue on Bridging Formal and Traditional Epistemology . This paper and the others in the issue were presented at a workshop at St. Louis University. (The paper can be found  here .) This paper considers three broad accounts of the role belief and related notions play in our lives, and suggests connections between them, and the way that different philosophical literatures have privileged one or another. My focus has been on work in epistemology within the analytic tradition, though there is some interactions with psychology, econo...

Hello, readers! I’m Patricia Rich , and I’m currently a philosophy postdoc on the new Knowledge and Decision project at the University of Hamburg . This post is about a paper stemming from my dissertation, entitled Axiomatic and Ecological Rationality: Choosing Costs and Benefits . It appeared in the Autumn issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics . My paper defends a specific method of evaluating rationality. The method is general and can be applied to choices, inferences, probabilistic estimates, argumentation, etc., but I’ll explain it here through one example. Suppose I’m worried about my friend Alex’s beliefs regarding current affairs. Her claims often seem far-fetched and poorly supported by evidence. As rationality experts who want to help, how should we evaluate Alex? I embrace several components of the “ ecological rationality ” research program, which many readers will know from other posts . First, it’s important to move beyond particular belief...

In this post I interview Richard Pettigrew  (in the picture above), who is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, and is leading a four year project entitled “ Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications ”, also featuring Jason Konek, Ben Levinstein, Chris Burr and Pavel Janda. Ben Levinstein left the project in February to join the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. Jason Konek left the project in August to take up a TT post at Kansas State University. They have been replaced by Patricia Rich (PhD, Carnegie Mellon) and Greg Gandenberger (PhD, Pitt; postdoc at LMU Munich). LB: When did you first become interested in the notion of epistemic utility ? What inspired you to explore its foundations and applications as part of an ERC-funded project? RP: It all started in my Masters year, when I read Jim Joyce's fantastic paper ' A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism ' (Philosophy of Science, 1998, 65 (4):575-603). In t...

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...