Imperfect Cognitions

Neil Levy (pictured above) is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University (Sydney) and Senior Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. Here, he replies to last week's post by  Neil Van Leeuwen .   Neil Levy's post draws on themes from his  paper   recently published  in Cognition. There are two central strands to Neil Van Leeuwen’s post (hereafter NVL). One is the claim that there is a class of representational state (in the post he focuses on religious belief, but in his paper in Cognition he suggests that ideological beliefs belong to this class too) which fail to be evidentially vulnerable in the same way as more mundane beliefs. The second strand is the one developed in his paper in Philosophical Explorations , arguing that we best understand the limited signs of evidence responsiveness exhibited by these beliefs in terms of a kind of imaginative play. People who respond to evidence with regard to thei...

This post is by Neil Van Leeuwen  (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Associate of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. What follows is a synopsis of his new paper , which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. One might argue that the answer to my title question is just blindingly obvious. Religious “beliefs” don’t respond to evidence, because no beliefs do! After all, human belief formation processes are a motley crew, including such ignobles as confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, the availability heuristic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the base rate fallacy, the genetic fallacy, ad hominems, prestige bias, framing effects, and many, many…many more. This cynical view, however, grows out of a diet of ...

In this post Allan Hazlett  (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, summarises his paper " On the Special Insult of Refusing Testimony ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. My paper is inspired by two remarks made by J.L. Austin and G.E.M. Anscombe. In “Other Minds” (1946), Austin writes that “[i]f I have said I know or I promise, you insult me in a special way by refusing to accept it,” and, in “What Is It to Believe Someone?” (1979), Anscombe writes that that “[i]t is an insult … not to be believed.” The goal of my paper is to give an account of why you can insult someone by refusing her testimony. I take my paradigm case of the special insult of refusing testimony from David Foster Wallace’s (2004) story entitled “Oblivion.”...

Duncan Pritchard  (pictured above) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the  Eidyn  research centre. In this post, he summarises his paper on epistemically useful false beliefs, which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. It seems relatively uncontroversial that false beliefs can often be useful. For example, if one’s life depends on being able to jump that ravine, then it may be practically useful to have a false belief about how far one can jump. In particular, that one overestimates one’s jumping ability may well give one the confidence needed to wholeheartedly attempt the jump. Having an accurate conception of one’s abilities in this regard, in contrast, might lead one to falter, thereby consigning oneself to certain death (rath...

Ema Sullivan-Bissett (pictured above) is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, having previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on project PERFECT. In this post she summarises her paper ‘ Biological Function and Epistemic Normativity ’, forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on False but Useful Beliefs. Alongside Lisa Bortolotti, Ema guest edited this special issue which is inspired by project PERFECT’s interests in belief. In my paper I give a biological account of epistemic normativity. I am interested in explaining two features: (EN1) Beliefs have truth as their standard of correctness. (EN2) There are sui generis categorical epistemic norms.

In this post Miriam McCormick (pictured above), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond, summarises her paper on " Rational Hope ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. History and literature are filled with examples of people in horrific, desperate situations where having hope seemed essential for their survival. And yet, holding on to “false hope” can be devastating and can also condone inaction, where hoping for a change replaces working for that change. It also can seem that finding hope in a hopeless situation must be irrational. Is the choice between rational despair and irrational hope? I don’t think so; there are times when hope is rational but it is not always so. My main aim in this p...

In this post Kathy Puddifoot  (pictured above), Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, summarises her paper on "Responding to Stereotyping", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. Women occupy only thirteen percent of jobs in scientific fields in the United Kingdom. Suppose that as a result of being exposed to accurate depictions of this situation, say, in the news media, you form a stereotype associating science with men. This association influences your automatic responses to individuals. For example, if you hear about a great feat of engineering you automatically assume that the person who achieved it is a man. Is it a good thing that your judgements are automatically influenced by this scientist stereotype? A natural thought is that if you want to be egalit...

In this post,  Lubomira Radoilska  (pictured above) summarises her paper "Aiming at the Truth and Aiming at Success" , which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. Lubomira has a new project on Reassessing Responsibility which underlies some of the themes in this post. Are the demands we face as believers compatible with the demands we face as agents? In other words, is our aiming at the truth consistent with our aiming at success? Since our lives as believers and agents are inexorably intertwined, it seems vital to find out whether and how the normative requirements that apply to us as believers relate to the normative requirements that apply to us as agents. Until very recently, theorists of normativity discussed the spheres of belief and action as though they were gover...

Jes se Summers (pictured above) is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Duke University, where he is also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and a Lecturing Fellow for the Thompson Writing Program. In this post he writes about rationalization and some of its benefits, summarising his paper " Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Some Benefits of Rationalisation ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. You really shouldn’t trust me. At the very least, you shouldn’t trust me when I tell you why I’ve acted. Part of the reason you shouldn’t trust me is that I often—much more often than I realize—don’t know why I’m doing something. The neuroscientist tells you that my brain predisposes me to act. Psychologists, too, assume that many factors and forces move me—my mood,...