Imperfect Cognitions

On 6th and 7th November, Ema Sullivan Bissett organised a conference on  Belief, Imagination, and Delusion  at the University of Birmingham. The PERFECT team attended the event and this report is the result of their collective effort! Anna Ichino on imagination Paul Noordhof on aim of belief Sophie Archer (Cardiff University) started the conference with a discussion of delusion and belief, inviting us to learn some lessons from the implicit bias literature. When the avowed anti-racist says all races are equal but does not behave in ways consistent to this belief, then we assume that there is an additional mental state (not open to consciousness) that is responsible for those behaviours. Is this additional mental state a belief? Archer argues that it is not. On the background, there is a thesis about belief. Even if a mental state responds directly to epistemic reasons, this is necessary but not sufficient for the mental state to be a belief (Epistemic Reasons). ...

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...

Together with Ema Sullivan-Bissett , Matteo Mameli and Matthew Broome , I have written a chapter on delusions for a new volume on gradualism in psychiatry: Vagueness in Psychiatry , edited by Geert Keil, Laura Keuck and Rico Hauswald for Oxford University Press. Matteo Mameli In the paper we argue that it is difficult to distinguish pathological and non-pathological beliefs on the basis of their epistemic features. Then we consider some of the moral and legal implications of our thesis, focusing in particular on the role of beliefs in the attribution of moral responsibility and legal accountability for criminal actions that are motivated by those beliefs. Ema Sullivan-Bissett Delusions fail to meet many epistemic standards. It might look like they are not beliefs which are aimed at truth or governed by a norm of truth, that they are not responsive to evidence in the ways which ordinary beliefs typically are. But non-delusional beliefs also share such features. For instan...