Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Michał Klincewicz, Paris Mavromoustakos Blom and Pieter Spronck who recently published a paper entitled: " The Blind Gamer: Examining Ethical Agency Through Choice Blindness in Game Design " in Entertainment Computing . Kamyab Ghorbanpour When you ask someone why they chose to read a particular book, they will usually give you a story. It might be about how they came across it in a bookstore, how it was highly recommended by their friends, or how it resembled a book they had previously enjoyed. Regardless, they will provide a story, a story believed both by you and by themselves. But what if that story is untrue? What if they weren’t actually aware of why they chose that book? What if they were confabulating without even realizing it? Choice blindness shows that this is not an unlikely scenario. Research has demonstrated that people can make decisions without being fully aware of them—or, for lack of a better term, they think they know why ...

Today's post is by Paolo Bodini. Paolo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genoa, having completed his PhD in Philosophy of Law between Milan and Cologne. His research interests include democratic theory, constitutionalism, separation of powers and political epistemology. He is the author of " Political representation and lay expertise ", recently published in Ethics and Politics . Paolo Bodini The name of this blog prompted me to consider a set of problems I addressed in my recent book Democrazia e conoscenza (Democracy and Knowledge). The debate on democratic legitimacy—that is, on democracy’s capacity to produce decisions worthy of obedience—has indeed intersected with the concept of knowledge, giving rise to a vibrant discourse across political philosophy, legal philosophy and epistemology. As I have argued in my book, democracy’s legitimacy is inextricably linked to a rigorous idea of knowledge, albeit fallible and amenable to correction. We might say,...