Imperfect Cognitions

On January 27th 2016 delegates convened in Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford to discuss virtues and vices in evidence-based medicine. The delegates came from a variety of different fields, including nursing, medicine, sociology, policy-making and philosophy. The aim of the workshop was to discuss the gap between evidence-based research and clinical practice. A large body of research has been undertaken and developed into guidelines for medical practitioners. However, there are a number of limitations to these guidelines: e.g. they fail to reflect the complex social and moral nature of healthcare, and they fail to reflect the explanatory role of cognitive mechanisms and character traits in clinical practice. These limitations to evidence-based medicine were discussed in the workshop and the talks aimed to outline strategies that could be used to ameliorate the flaws.  Talks focussed on professional virtues, intellectual virtues and vices, psychological vir...

The Epistemic Vices Conference , held in Durham in September 2015, put epistemic vices in the spotlight, with a series of talks on both what makes something an epistemic vice and the nature of specific epistemic vices. On day one Heather Battaly argued that virtues and vices are traits that express who someone is as a person, even if the person is not responsible for the possession or exercise of the traits. She argued that this view—personalism—is better equipped than existing forms of virtue epistemology to tackle some examples where people display intellectual vice, e.g. where a person is prejudiced due to their upbringing in a racist society. Quassim Cassam argued that intellectual vices are traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. He described how intellectual vices perform a significant role in explaining poor epistemic conduct. Responding to the situationist challenge, he claimed that virtues are often local rather than global traits. I highlighted a fa...