Imperfect Cognitions

Will McNeill This post is by Will McNeill , currently a teaching fellow at King's College London. He researches the epistemology of perception and recognition. The main focus of  PERFECT  is on finding the epistemically valuable within mental pathologies of varying seriousness; of identifying pathological beliefs which are at least epistemically innocent. But in this post I want to bring our attention back to the cognitive processes of those with no serious cognitive impairments. It would not surprise me if many of our cognitive processes turn out to be epistemically innocent in a particularly  direct  way. They may turn out to be reliable, and to produce justified beliefs, while not being capable of  explaining  why the beliefs they produce are justified. Justified beliefs which are the direct products of such epistemically innocent processes are – I believe – foundational. Suppose that we had good reason to think that someone was good at spot...

I am posting this on behalf of Andrea Polonioli, PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Andrea Polonioli My PhD project analyzes some recent developments in the ‘rationality debate’, which originated as a reaction to the body of research that has followed Kahneman and Tversky’s work within the Heuristics-and-Biases project. Empirical evidence suggested that people are prone to widespread and systematic reasoning errors, and pessimistic views of human rationality have been quite popular in the psychological literature. However, this picture has also attracted fierce criticisms, and several researchers have recently questioned pessimistic assessments of human rationality by emphasizing the central importance of evolutionary considerations in our understanding of rationality.  In a paper I recently published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences I present some steps already taken in my project. In particular, I critically discuss some research that has come togeth...