Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Charlotte Gauvry and Uwe Peters. Introducing themes of their recent paper "Epistemic Challenges Faced by Non-native English Speakers in Philosophy: Evidence from an International Survey"   published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Charlotte is a teaching and research associate at Univerity of Bonn and Uwe is an assistant professor at Utrecht University.    Charlotte Gauvry The English language now dominates analytic philosophy. This has extensive benefits for international collaboration and communication. But does it also create unfair inequalities for non-native English speakers in the field? Things could be relatively fair if non-native English speakers with university-level English proficiency needed roughly the same amount of time to read, write, and prepare talks in English as native English speakers do. After all, in student essay grading, hiring decisions, journal reviewing, and so on, it is widely implicitly assumed that both groups face c...

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 ...