Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Katya Lukianova and Tim Steffenmeier who have recently co-authored a paper entitled: "Well, in the case of my mom… Personal stories as negotiable arguments in public forums" , appeared in the Journal of Argumentation in Context . Ekaterina (Katya) Lukianova is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation in the United States, with an interest in developing linguistic tools for analyzing public deliberation. Prior to this, she taught in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Studies at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. Tim Steffensmeier is Professor of communication & leadership at Kansas State University. He is the founding director of Third Floor Research at the Kansas Leadership Center. Katya Lukianova The other day my husband and I (Katya) were having a late night chat about everything and anything after having put our two kids in bed. He was telling me a story about a friend from his student days, and how that friend, who m...

On 10th and 11th May in Senate House London Michael Hannon and Robin McKenna hosted a two-day conference on Political Epistemology , supported by the Mind Association, the Institute of Philosophy, and the Aristotelian Society. In this report I focus on two talks that addressed themes relevant to project PERFECT. Robert Talisse On day 1,  Robert Talisse  explained what is troubling with polarisation. In the past Talisse developed an account of the epistemic value of democracy in terms of epistemic aspirations (rather than democratic outcomes). In a slogan, "the ethics of belief lends support to the ethos of democracy". We can see this when we think about polarisation. There are two senses of polarisation: (1) political polarisation and (2) belief (or group) polarisation. Political polarisation is the dropping out of the middle ground between opposed ideological stances. That means that opposed stances have fewer opportunities to engage in productive conversations. Bel...

This post is by Tillmann Vierkant (pictured above), who is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He works on mental actions, conscious will, self control, mindreading, and lots of other stuff in the philosophy of cognitive science. Here, he summarises a paper written with Rosa Hardt  (pictured below), who also works in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and recently completed her PhD on the role of emotions in moral agency.  Intuitively, we might want to say that what is special about our conscious beliefs is that they are conscious, because we can only use our rationality to deliberate about them if we are conscious of them. But this can’t be quite right by itself. We can obviously be conscious of other attitudes like gut feelings, phobias and implicit biases as well. However, as Levy argues, there is an important difference near by. While it is true that we can be aware e.g. of our spider phobia or our stereotypes about wom...

Janet Geipel (pictured above) is currently a Postdoc at the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam. In this post, she summarises a paper she recently published in the journal Cognition, which is based on her doctoral studies at the University of Trento. Imagine yourself in the following situation. You are standing on a footbridge next to a large man. Underneath the footbridge, a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks and will soon kill 5 unsuspected workmen. But there is a way out. You could push the large man off the footbridge and onto the path of the runaway trolley. The person would die but the five workmen would be saved. Is it morally permissible to do so? Now consider what seems to be an insignificant variation. Instead of reading the story in your native language you read it in a non-native language that you understand well. Would this affect your moral evaluation? Studies conducted by our research group and others suggest that it might. Overall, foreign language ...

Today's post is by Barbara Gail Montero. I’m a philosophy professor at the City University of New York (with a rather unusual background since prior to studying philosophy I worked as a professional ballet dancer for a number of years). Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press) is a book I’ve written that challenges the widely held view that, once you are good at something, thinking about your action, as you’re doing it, hampers your skill. In it, I argue that experts think in action—consciously, not merely unconsciously—and, when thinking about the right things, this is in no way diminishes their prowess. One of my goals in the book is to dispel various mythical accounts of experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their actions. Those chicken sexers that philosophers are fond of citing who can’t explain why they makes their judgments—they don’t exist. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which supposedly came t...

This post is by Mary Carman  (pictured above), who will be joining  Thumos , the Genevan Research Group on Emotions, Values and Norms as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in April. Mary works on emotions and action, and as part of her previous Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Witwatersrand , South Africa, she started working on topics in Bioethics. In this post, she writes about the rational role in action emotions can play. In my PhD thesis and a paper currently under review, I develop an account of emotional actions that gives emotion a rational role in action. In this brief post, I outline how such an account might look. Let’s start with an example of an impulsive emotional action from Elisabeth Pacherie ( 2002 ): I am fearfully running away from a bear, spot a crack in the rocks too narrow for the bear to fit, and climb through. In such cases, we act on the basis of an emotion without first forming beliefs and desires related to what to do. Thes...

This post is by Fleur Jongepier , a PhD Student at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on self-knowledge and first-person authority. Here Fleur (in the picture above) summarises a paper that she is currently working on with her colleague Derek Strijbos  (in the picture below), psychiatry resident (Dimence) and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in philosophy. Self-knowledge regarding one’s mental states comes in many forms. One can know about one’s mental states in a more or less ‘theoretical’ way, e.g. through reading about it in a psychology book or listening to the folk theories and advice of others, and on that basis make a conjecture about one’s own state of mind. For instance, one may become convinced that one has abandonment issues, and this piece of theoretical self-knowledge might motivate one to seek treatment. An alternative to ‘theoretical’ self-knowledge is deliberative or agential self-knowledge. To use one of Richard Moran’s e...

This is a report on the second day of the Deliberation, Interpretation, and Confabulation Workshop held at the Abraham Kuyper Centre for Science and Religion at the VU University in Amsterdam in June 2015 (for a report of the first day, please go here ). The first talk was by Christoph Michel (University of Stuttgart) on the transition from deliberation to evaluation. Michel is interested in developing a theory of self-ascription of attitudes. Knowing one's own attitudes does not imply a full or deep understanding of one's own behaviour and does not come with powerful predictive capacities. Self-knowledge can be gained by self-interpretation (without privilege) and deliberation (with privilege). Some also think that we can gain self-knowledge by introspection. A position on how to achieve self-knowledge depends on what we take attitudes to be: if they are conscious/neuronal states, then they can be scanned; if they are functional/dispositional states, then they can on...

This is a report from the first day of the Deliberation, Interpretation and Confabulation Workshop at the Abraham Kuyper Centre for Science and Religion, VU University in Amsterdam, organised by Naomi Kloosterboer, and held on 19 and 20 June 2015. Note about the workshop poster above: circles are confabulation, squares are deliberation, and triangles are interpretation (how amazingly clever is that! Thanks to Naomi for pointing this out to me). I ( Lisa Bortolotti ) was the first speaker. I talked about features of confabulatory explanations about our own attitudes and choices, and attempted to offer an account of what happens when we confabulate that makes sense of several results in experimental psychology (such as introspective effects, social intuitionism about moral judgements, choice blindness). I argued that people often ignore the factors causally responsible for the formation of their attitudes and the making of their choices; they produce an often ill-grounded claim abo...

The Forum (BBC World Service) We all recall situations where our choice did not bring about the outcome we expected. This can happen to a couple planning a family, scientists predicting the result of a new experiment, politicians implementing a new policy to overcome a problem. For each of these individual situations there may be specific reasons that explain why the outcome was unexpected, but I am interested in the general question, Why is it that our actions have unintended consequences? We can think about the issue of unintended consequences in terms of the capacities that would make it more likely for us as human agents to reliably predict the events our actions give rise to when we make decisions, reflecting on the wealth of empirical data coming from the psychological literature. Being able to predict the outcomes of our actions would require good memory, sound reasoning, and effective deliberation. So, we could remember what consequences our previous actions have had, i...

In this post, Ezio Di Nucci presents his book Mindlessness (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Di Nucci is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Universität Duisburg-Essen . His latest book is Ethics Without Intention . Philosophy is still hanging on to an over-intellectualistic picture of human judgement and agency – or Mindlessness by Ezio Di Nucci so I contend in my book. Our ability for thought is a useful resource, but one that we use less frequently than philosophers often assume – and that’s a good thing. Deliberation is not always the best way to deal with life’s challenges; on the contrary, we are often better off not thinking; other times we are just not worse off and it is therefore more efficient not to think. The book begins by looking at data which has been accumulating in behavioural and social psychology over the last few decades, especially with relation to habits, skilled performances and priming. Expert golfers, for example, perform better when under time pressur...