Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is an interview with Paolo Costa, who is a researcher at the Center for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation and leads the Resilient Beliefs project, and Eugenia Lancellotta, who is a postdoctoral researcher on the project. We talked about the Resilient Beliefs project.  Paolo Costa KMH: What is the 'Resilient Beliefs' project all about? PC & EL: It is a collaborative program involving 9 researchers in philosophy and theology and three different institutions: the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, in Italy, and the Universities of Innsbruck and Brixen in Austria. It is about hyper-robust beliefs, so to speak. By “hyper-robust beliefs” I mean beliefs that are especially resistant to criticism and change induced by counterargument and counterevidence. Now, these beliefs are often seen as irrational, because we tend to link rationality with revisability, flexibility, adaptability, etc.  But, of course, people who change their mind too ea...

This week we feature the project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. The project will last 30 months (January 2021–June 2023) and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with Ema as PI and  Paul Noordhof  as Co-I. You can follow the Project on twitter  @del_by_ex .  In today's blog, I ask Ema about the project. LB: What is  Deluded by Experience  about?  ESB:  Deluded by Experience  is focused on three main areas. The first is monothematic delusion formation. Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists have argued that subjects with monothematic delusions have anomalous experiences in which delusions are rooted. However, few take anomalous experience to be the only clinically relevant factor. This is the one-factor approach. The current orthodoxy has it that a second clinical factor (cognitive deficit, bias...

Today's post is by Joseph Lao (Columbia University and CUNY) and Jason Young (CUNY) who introduce their new book, Resistance to Belief Change (Routledge 2019). The general perspective of our book may best be described as doxastic psychology. We share with the doxastic philosophers and Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology an interest in the genesis and transformation of our beliefs. We differ from both however, in our particular focus on issues of embeddedness and entrenchment, and in our careful examination of a broad range of psychological factors, including emotional, cognitive, social, and physical factors, that cause us to resist changing our beliefs and impede our achievement of epistemic sainthood. We avoid the assumption that resistance to belief change in response to evidence that contradicts our beliefs is necessarily irrational. We note several examples of how such resistance may be “illogical” yet rational, such as when we lack a superior alternative to o...