Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. Here she reports on two recently published papers, co-written with  Kengo Miyazono .  Kengo and I have recently been interested in how the considerations raised in the philosophy of belief apply to delusions. In our review paper on Philosophy Compass  (open access) we argue that the delusions literature has helped us focus on some key issues concerning the nature and development of beliefs. What conditions does a report need to satisfy in order to qualify as the report of a belief? What is the interaction between experience and inference in the process by which beliefs are formed? Kengo and I also have a joint research paper that recently appeared in Erkenntnis   (open access), where we ask what the ethics of belief can tell us about delusions. In this post I shall sum up our arguments in the paper, hoping for some feedback from our blog readers. There are several ways we can think of an ethics for belief. For instance, ...

In this post I interview Richard Pettigrew  (in the picture above), who is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, and is leading a four year project entitled “ Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications ”, also featuring Jason Konek, Ben Levinstein, Chris Burr and Pavel Janda. Ben Levinstein left the project in February to join the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. Jason Konek left the project in August to take up a TT post at Kansas State University. They have been replaced by Patricia Rich (PhD, Carnegie Mellon) and Greg Gandenberger (PhD, Pitt; postdoc at LMU Munich). LB: When did you first become interested in the notion of epistemic utility ? What inspired you to explore its foundations and applications as part of an ERC-funded project? RP: It all started in my Masters year, when I read Jim Joyce's fantastic paper ' A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism ' (Philosophy of Science, 1998, 65 (4):575-603). In t...