Imperfect Cognitions

On International Women's Day we are delighted to host a research post by  María Caamaño-Alegre  (University of Valladolid). Today she is presenting her new paper, " On Glasses Half Full or Half Empty: Understanding Framing Effects in Terms of Default Implicatures ", published in Synthese in 2021. María Caamaño-Alegre Do we prefer our glasses half full to half empty? If so, is it rational that we have such preference? It's an empirically well-established fact that subjects’ preferences change depending on whether the described options are framed either positively or negatively. The variations in how subjects respond to positively or negatively framed descriptions of the same issue are called “framing effects”, and they have traditionally been understood as signs of irrationality. Framing effects seem to be in conflict with the normative principle usually known as the “principle of extensionality” or the “invariance principle”, which is a common assumption in rational ...

This post is by Josh May , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He presents his book, Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind  (OUP, 2018). May’s research lies primarily at the intersection of ethics and science. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011. Before taking a position at UAB, he spent 2 years teaching at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. My book is a scientifically-informed examination of moral judgment and moral motivation that ultimately argues for what I call optimistic rationalism, which contains empirical and normative theses. The empirical thesis is a form of (psychological) rationalism, which asserts that moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally driven by reasoning or inference. The normative thesis is cautiously optimistic, claiming that moral cognition and motivation are, in light of the science, in pretty good shape---at least, the empirical ev...

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...