Imperfect Cognitions

On Wednesday 23rd May, PERFECT will host its third annual workshop, at St Anne’s College, Oxford . This year, our topic is confabulation, and we’re excited to welcome leading researchers in the field for a stimulating programme of presentations. The talks explore a number of philosophical issues arising from confabulation, and will be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology and epistemologists. Papers to be presented also examine confabulation in relation to wider research programmes in cognitive science and psychiatry, and so we also welcome researchers from all disciplines of the mind who are interested in how we give accounts of our experiences, choices and actions. The speakers will address a range of issues, with some exploring an aspect of confabulation that is underdeveloped or has been overlooked in previous work, whilst others propose a new model of the phenomenon that helps to explain and bring clarity to existing observations. I...

Elisabetta Lalumera is organising a Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence workshop at the University of Milano-Bicocca (image below), to be held in Milan (Italy) on May 28, 2018. Below you find a call for papers for the event. Summary of topic When people are unaware of information that accounts for some phenomenon, this does not necessarily prevent them from offering a sincere, but often inaccurate, explanation. Indeed, whilst confabulation has been shown to occur alongside psychiatric diagnoses featuring serious memory impairments, and in people undergoing symptoms of mental distress, it also occurs regularly in people with no such diagnoses or symptoms. Some cognitions which fail to accurately represent reality may nonetheless have redeeming features that promote good functioning in a variety of domains. Inaccurate cognitions may misrepresent the world, but can also bring psychological and practical benefits. More recently, philosophers have pointed out that epistemi...

Project PERFECT is very proud to announce its first workshop, on False but Useful Beliefs , to be held in London on 4th and 5th of February 2016. The workshop will take place at Regent's Conferences and Event in Regent's Park (see picture below). The idea of the workshop is to explore a variety of beliefs and belief-like states that are epistemically faulty (either false or badly supported by evidence) but that also play a useful function for the agent, either biologically, psychologically, pragmatically, epistemically, or in some other way. The workshop features three types of talks. 1. Talks by invited speakers who are leading experts in the area.  Anandi Hattiangadi from Stockholm University will talk about radical interpretation and implicit cognition,  Neil Van Leeuwen  from Georgia State University will discuss agent-like stimuli in religious practice, and  David Papineau  from King's College London and CUNY will ask whether functional falsity r...

On February 25th and 26th we will be hosting an interdisciplinary workshop on optimism at Senate House, London. The first day will be dedicated to the question what unrealistic optimism is and how it is caused. Why is it that we see such a wide-spread tendency to be unrealistically optimistic abour our own future? Are the primary factors motivational or cognitive? What processes allow us to think ‘it won’t happen to me’? We will be hearing about the brain processes underlying optimistic belief formation patterns and from Tali Sharot; and Bojana Kuzmanovic will be speaking about evidence that optimistically biased belief updating recruits brain areas associated with motivational processes. I will be considering the question whether the wide-spread tendency to be unrealistically optimistic about one’s own future can be explained by the fact that these belief patterns were adaptive in the past. Constantine Sedikides will be discussing unrealistically optimistic beliefs as one type...

This post is by Nevia Dolcini (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macau. In this post Nevia talks about her research and announces two upcoming events. I am interested in how human reasoning works, and I take language and its underlying cognitive and semantic mechanisms to be the ideal starting point for the explanation of mental phenomena. I like to extend the methods of philosophy of language beyond its traditional domain of analysis, so as to include non-linguistic objects such as gestures, and perceptual contents. In my research activity, I often combine philosophy and psychology: scientific literature from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology is particularly relevant to my research activity, but I also enjoy reading fiction (which sometimes offers great cases for philosophical assessment). I have been doing extensive work on linguistic and non-linguistic index...

Dear all As part of PERFECT we want to promote further investigation into whether false beliefs can be advantageous, due to their being biologically adaptive, enhancing wellbeing, being conducive to the satisfaction of epistemic goals, or promoting some other form of agential success. In the psychological literature, self-deception, positive illusions, delusions, confabulatory explanations, and other instances of false belief have been regarded as beneficial in some sense, but there has not yet been a systematic study of their role in supporting different aspects of human agency within philosophy.  The workshop we are planning for February 2016 aims at filling that gap. We welcome theoretical papers from researchers in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of biology, and psychology. Themes and research questions Some beliefs seem to have an important role in supporting human agency: they can make us feel better about ourselves and ev...

University of Birmingham On May 8th and 9th there will be a two-day workshop at the University of Birmingham, discussing some of the key themes in the Epistemic Innocence project. The workshop will be one of the means by which the project interim results are disseminated, and will promote an exchange between philosophers and psychologists on the potential pragmatic and epistemic benefits and costs of beliefs, memories, implicit biases, and explanations. It will also be a venue for Imperfect Cognitions network members to meet and talk about their research, and think about potential areas for future collaboration. The workshop is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council , and has also received the support of the Analysis Trust . This made it possible to subsidise the registration fee, and award workshop bursaries to the graduate students attending. Abstracts for the talks can be found here . If you wish to participate, register by 15th March 2014 or follow live-tweetin...