Imperfect Cognitions

On 17 June at the University of Birmingham, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies organised a workshop on conspiracy theories and storytelling with a stellar line-up. This post is a report of the event. The workshop is part of a project called "Film, Storytelling and Conspiracies" funded by a University of Birmingham Research Incubator Hub. Conspiracy theories online First talk was by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) and was entitled "Conspiratorial Beliefs and Conspiracy Fantasies: Engaging with Wu Ming 1". The premise for the talk was that many think that conspiracy beliefs are on the rise and affect our political choices ("vibes-based politics"). One idea by Napolitano (2021) is that attempts to debunk conspiratorial beliefs with facts, evidence, and rational arguments do not work. Catarina aimed to respond to Napolitano. Catarina Dutilh Novaes Wu Ming (in Mandarin, "No Name") is a collective originating in Bologna, a group of writers active in liter...

Today's post is by Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg) and Christiana Werner (University of Duisburg-Essen) about their recently edited book, Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge 2024). Recent approaches in philosophy of mind and epistemology have shown a growing interest in examining the nature of phenomenal knowledge and the epistemic value of having an experience. The basic idea in these debates has been that having an experience has a unique character and provides the experiencer with a kind of knowledge which otherwise cannot be achieved. As expressed by an ancient proverb: “Experience is the best teacher.” That there is a specific type of knowledge we can only gain by means of experience is a claim defended in the debate about the mind–body problem and consciousness (e.g., Nagel 1974; Jackson 1982), and in the debate on the so-called “knowledge argument” in particular.  Christiana Werner Simultaneously, the philosophy of imagination...

Today's post is by Tom McClelland and Monika Dunin-Kozicka on their recent paper, " Affording Imagination " ( Philosophical Psychology , 2024). Tom McClelland Our perception of our environment includes possibilities for action known as ‘affordances’. You might, for instance, perceive a ladder as affording climbing, an apple as affording eating or a teapot as affording pouring. In these examples the actions afforded are actions you do with your body, but affordance perception might also encompass opportunities to do things with your mind. In particular, you might perceive affordances to imagine . Do you perceive a wrapped present as affording imagining what’s inside? Does an obstacle course afford imagining how to traverse it? Does a precariously placed object afford imagining what would happen if it fell? Our paper answers ‘yes’ to these questions. Monika Dunin-Kozicka To make our case, we start by clarifying the very concept of imaginative affordances. With ordinary af...

On 26th and 27th September in Berlin, the Human Abilities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities organised a workshop on conspiracy beliefs and delusions. This is a report of the workshop. Logo of the Human Abilities centre The first speaker was Romy Jaster (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) presented a talk on self-immunization in conspiracy theories. Romy thinks about conspiracy theories from an epistemological and philosophy of science perspective and she started her presentation with the conceptual distinction between "conspiracy theories" as a neutral term (an explanation that involves a conspiracy) and "conspiracy theories" as a negatively-valued term (an explanation that is epistemically deficient). What the epistemic deficit is is open to debate and controversy.  Romy focused on the idea that conspiracy theories and delusions are both deficient because they are not responsive to counter-evidence. The idea is that conspiracy theories are built in such a...

This post is by Anja Berninger (University of Göttingen) and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg). Today their post is on the edited volume Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination (Routledge 2022 ). Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Having been neglected for many years, the subjects of memory and imagination have started to gain more attention in recent philosophical debates. While there has been some interaction between philosophers working in these different fields (for publications that make significant headway towards establishing a more integrative perspective, see, for instance, Perrin and Michaelian 2017 ; MacPherson and Dorsch 2018 ; Michaelian, Debus, and Perrin 2018 , and Michaelian, Perrin, and Sant’Anna 2020 ), we still lack a properly integrative approach to these issues.  With this volume our aim is to fill this lacuna. Our objective is to both broaden and deepen current debates on memory and imagination within the philosophy of mind. This volume explor...

Today's post is by Grace Hibshman at University of Notre Dame on her recent paper “ Narrative, Second-Person Experience, and Self-Perception: A Reason it is Good to Conceive of One’s Life Narratively ” ( The Philosophical Quarterly 2022). Grace Hibshman In the  Lord of the Rings  trilogy, when Frodo and Sam are struggling to persevere on their quest, they turn to remembering the tales of old and wondering whether their journey will one day be put into songs and tales and told by the firesides of their people. Conceiving of their life narratively in this way as part of a great web of stories helps the hobbits find meaning and courage, and it seems that it can be similarly helpful for people in general as well. But why might this be? Why might conceiving of one’s life narratively be conducive to one’s flourishing? In my paper, I argue that conceiving of one’s life narratively as a part of the songs and tales of old can prompt one to imagine how an audience might experience hear...

In today's post Paul Noordhof discusses the possibility of imagining pain, summarising a paper, Explaining impossible and possible imaginings of pain , that appears open access in a forum dedicated to responses to Jennifer Radden's article, Imagined and Delusional Pain , in Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia. Noordhof's paper is an output of the AHRC Project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett  at the University of Birmingham.  Paul Noordhof One form of imagining has a content that is like our sensory experiences and bodily sensations. For example, if I’m asked how many windows the front of my mother’s house has, I might answer by imagining the house as if I am looking at it. Equally, we can imagine our hand being warmed by a close-by fire. In a recent paper, inspired and responding to a paper by Jennifer Radden entitled ‘Imagined and Delusional Pain’, I considered the question of whether it is possible to imagine a pain in the same wa...

Today's post is by Christopher Badura (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College) on the new collection on the epistemic role of imagination  Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge, 2021).  In recent years, philosophical interest in the epistemic role of imagination has blossomed.  Although there are a number of philosophers who remain skeptical, there is now considerable agreement that imagination has an important role to play in the epistemic domain.  But when it comes to the question of how best to articulate that role, or to the related question of what explains the ability of imagination to play that role, there is considerably less agreement.  These are the kinds of issues explored in the 15 contributions to our recently released volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge). The idea for the volume was born in Bochum during summer 2019 when we co-organized a conference on Fiction, Imagination, and Epistemology at Ruhr Un...

Today's post is by Kourken Michaelian (Centre for Philosophy of Memory, Université Grenoble Alpes). Kourken Michaelian With her 2016 article on misremembering, Sarah Robins drew the attention of philosophers of memory to the need to provide an account not only of successful remembering but also of unsuccessful remembering—an account of memory errors such as confabulation, to which William Hirstein had previously devoted a book but which had been neglected in subsequent discussions in the field. The debate triggered by Robins’ article continues to unfold, with Robins herself defending an approach to memory errors inspired by the causal theory of memory in articles in 2019 and 2020 , Sven Bernecker defending a similar causalist approach in an article in 2017 , and myself defending an approach based on the simulation theory of memory in articles in 2016 and 2020 . There are other approaches that merit discussion; André Sant’Anna, for example, argues in a forthcoming article that...

This post is by Peter Langland-Hassan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who is presenting his new book, Explaining Imagination (OUP 2020). The book is available as a free open access download , thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati. Peter Langland-Hassan  We won’t understand what imagination is—we won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination , is a compendium of such recipes. What ingredients do they feature? On my telling, they are other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts, they constitute cases of imagining. The idea that imagination can be reduced to other kinds of mental states in this way is at odds with what most (maybe all) other philosophers have had to say about imagination. According to the orthodox view, if we list a person’...

Today's post is by  Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini who talks about a recently published article in Philosophical Studies . In this paper, I defend the claim that a mental attitude is a belief if it shows at least a minimal degree of doxastic rationality. More specifically, beliefs are minimally rational in the sense that they respond to perceived irrationality by re-establishing internal coherence (or at least by clearly attempting to do so). A traditional view in philosophy is that it is a necessary condition for being a belief that an attitude behaves largely in a rational way (I call this view “Traditionalism”). That it, belief is typically (i) an attitude sensitive to the relevant evidence. It is also (ii) inferentially connected with other beliefs and other mental attitudes (e.g. emotions), and (iii) it typically causes actions when linked to a relevant desire. Contrary to this view, there is now strong empirical evidence that that some of the attitudes that we comfortably ca...