Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Jakob Ohlhorst , who is a postdoc fellow on the Extreme Beliefs project at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This post is about his recent book, Trust Responsibly  (Routledge), which is available open access  as an e-book. Jakob Ohlhorst " Strange coincidence, that every man whose skull has been opened had a brain! " ' Trust responsibly ' opens with this joke from Ludwig Wittgenstein. In On Certainty, he argued that some things we can only trust to be the case because any evidence which speaks in favour of the things we trust must already presuppose the things we trust. That everyone has a brain was a better example in the 1950s than it is now. This goes beyond trust in people. It also involves trust that the world is older than 100 years, trust that you are not in a coma and dreaming, and so on. I argue in my book that – to trust responsibly – we need virtues. The problem with trust is, if you don’t need any evidence, then you could trust just about anyth...

This post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies , on her recent paper 'The Know-How of Virtue', published open-access in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.  Kathleen Murphy-Hollies How can we be good people who do things for the right reason, when we very often confabulate a good reason for our behaviour after the fact? Imagine, for example, that I do not give money to a person in need on the street, and instead rush home. But then, later on, my friend mentions seeing the person who needed help and I express that I saw them too. Then they ask me, ‘why didn’t you help them?’. In these circumstances, we might confabulate. This means that, only upon being asked, do we start formulating an answer to that question. In that way, confabulation is post-hoc. We come up with reasons for our behaviour which protect our positive self-conceptions. So I might say to my friend, ‘Oh I was in a rush and the street was too busy for me to stop!’. This explanation protects my self-concept of still gen...

The blog post today is by  Patrick Brooks (Rutgers University) on his recent paper, " On the origin of conspiracy theories " ( Philosophical Studies , 2023). Patrick Brooks In the last, say, 20 years or so, a lot has been written about conspiracy theories. Much of this has focused on what conspiracy theories are, why people believe them, and so on. Very little has been said, however, about why people might posit a conspiracy theory in the first place. My recent paper, “On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories” (2023) attempts to do this for a significant subset of conspiracy theories—namely, those conspiracy theories that run counter to an official or standard account of some event of phenomenon. Here’s a very brief sketch of the argument. People in open, broadly democratic societies have a somewhat naïve view of how their societies and the institutions within them work. These are the kinds of things we learned about, e.g., the scientific method or governmental processes, in prim...

This post is by Jakob Ohlhorst (University of Cologne) on his recent paper " Dual processes, dual virtues " (2021,  Philosophical Studies ). Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow has been unabatedly popular in the last decade. It illustratively presents one of the dominant psychological theories of cognition, how we process information: dual process theory. The theory distinguishes two types of cognition:  Type 1 processes happen automatically, they requires little effort, they are specific to domains, and they use reliable heuristics. This roughly corresponds to the common notion of intuition. A nice example for it is the great amount of information that we gain from simply looking at faces: we can read a person’s mood, recognise the person, estimate their age, and so on.  Type 2 cognition on the other hand is executed with voluntary control, it requires cognitive effort, it can be applied to any topic, and it operates by explicit inference. For example, solving a ...

Anne Baril (pictured above) has research interests in ethics and epistemology, and is currently writing a book in which she argues for the moral and prudential importance of epistemic virtue. Starting in Fall 2017, she will be a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. In this post, she summarizes a paper she recently published in Episteme. Folk wisdom holds that ignorance can be bliss. We’re happier not knowing how many germs are on our toothbrushes or how many calories were in that cupcake. Likewise for personality traits, such as being disposed to be too curious or too strict about the truth. The kind of person who is disposed to press her spouse to say what he really thinks about his attractive colleague is in for some hurt feelings. And without a degree of self-deception – about others, and about ourselves – wouldn’t we just be too depressed? Sometimes the work of psychologists is put forward in support of the claim that se...