Imperfect Cognitions

The Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp held a workshop on the 27th November 2018 on the topic of belief and belief formation. Here’s a brief summary of the excellent talks given at the workshop, kindly written by Dan Williams . Neil Levy (Oxford/Macquarie) gave the first talk, entitled ‘Not so hypocritical after all: how we change our minds without noticing’. Levy focused on a phenomenon that many people assume to be a form of hypocrisy—namely, cases in which individuals come to change their beliefs about, say, politics when popular opinion (or the popular opinion within their relevant tribe or coalition) changes. (Levy gave the example of many ‘Never Trumpers’ who then apparently changed their opinion of Trump when he came to power). Levy argued that at least some examples of this phenomenon are in fact not best understood as a form of hypocrisy; rather, they arise from people forming beliefs “rationally”. Specifically, he drew attention to...

In this post I summarise the four papers presented in the Irrationality session of the Open Sessions at the 89th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association , held at the University of Warwick (pictured above) on 10th-12th July this year. The session began with Cristina Borgoni  (Graz) with her paper ‘Pluralism about Dissonance Cases and the Contradictory-Belief View’. Cristina started by identifying the structural features of what she identified as dissonance cases , in brief: an individual sincerely assents to p , but her behavior suggests that she believes not- p . She considered unified views of dissonance cases which have it that all such cases exemplify the same psychological phenomenon. She offered three examples of dissonance cases and suggested that unified views would struggle to accommodate them. She proposed a pluralist interpretational principle according to which what underlies explicit dissonance is what identifies the psychology of the ...