Imperfect Cognitions

In today's post,  François Kammerer and Keith Frankish  write about their recent special issue ' What Forms Could Introspective Systems Take?'. François is a philosopher of mind. He holds a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris (France) and currently works as a postdoc researcher at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany). His work focuses on consciousness and introspection.  Keith is Honorary Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University, UK, and Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete, Greece. He works mainly in the area of philosophy of mind and is well known for his 'illusionist' theory of consciousness.  François Kammerer Human beings can introspect. They can look inwards, as it were, at their own minds and tell what thoughts, experiences, and feelings they have. That is, they can form representations of their own current mental states....

This blog post is by Alexandre Billon who presents his argument in a paper recently published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . This paper is a commentary on Kammerer and Frankish's article on what forms introspection could take. Alexandre Billon A couple of authors have suggested that schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder (DD) involve an enhancement of introspective abilities regarding certain important features of our experiences --- call that the Superintrospectionitis Thesis. The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Schizophrenia In the phenomenological tradition, Blankenburg argued that reports of some people with schizophrenia ‘reveal, in a kind of immediacy the conditions of possibility of our existence that otherwise remain concealed’ ( Blankenburg, 2001 , p. 308). Likewise, Kimura (2001 , p. 335) suggested that schizophrenia might render manifest, through introspection, the ‘innate structure of all human beings that happens to be hidden in healthy people owin...

Today's post is by Elmar Unnsteinsson  (University College Dublin). Here Unnsteinsson asks why we talk to ourselves. The other day I saw someone enjoying a walk while deeply engaged in conversation but I couldn’t see the other person. The ledge between us was too high. When I turned the corner I saw that the person was alone and actually talking to no one. Well, no one else I should say. It’s unremarkable that I had assumed that there was a pair of people, dancing conversational tango, but, it does raise the question why we think of conversation as, essentially, a multi-player game? As a matter of fact, many of us thoroughly enjoy having conversations. We seek them out to achieve catharsis, form strong social bonds of trust and friendship, learn surprising new things, and obviously the list could be endless. So, it never even occurs to us to ask why we would spend our time talking to others. We couldn’t even list half of the good reasons to do so. Why is it then so surp...

This post is by Chiara Caporuscio (Berlin School of Mind and Brain). Here Chiara discussed some ideas from her paper Introspection and Belief , published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2021). Chiara Caporuscio Are beliefs about the external world psychologically and epistemically different from beliefs about what is going on in our own mind? The belief that it’s a rainy day outside is formed by weighing different sources of evidence, such as the view from my window or the weather forecast. It might be influenced by motivational factors, such as my desire to have a picnic later in the day. It is prone to error - for example, my upstairs neighbour watering the plants on their balcony might have caused me to jump to conclusions - and it can be revised and updated when new evidence comes in. My belief that I’m feeling happy, on the other hand, has been regarded by a long philosophical tradition as being fundamentally different: direct, incorrigible, and protected from error. In m...

Today's post is by Adam Andreotta . He earned his PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2018. His research and teaching interests include: epistemology, self-knowledge, the philosophy of David Hume and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.  Here, he introduces his article, " Confabulation does not undermine introspection for propositional attitudes ", that has recently appeared in the journal Synthese. For more of his work, see his PhilPapers profile . Most of us think there exists an asymmetry between the way we know our own minds, and the way we know the minds of others. For example, it seems that I can know that I intend to watch Back to the Future , or that I believe that Australia will win the Ashes, by introspection: a private and secure way of knowing my own mental states. If I want to know whether my friend intends to see Back to the Future or believes that Australia will win the Ashes, I need to ask them or observe their behaviour. This co...

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...

This post is by Léa Salje (pictured above), who recently started a lectureship at the University of Leeds, where she was previously a postdoc on the AHRC-funded project Persons as Animals . Léa works in the philosophy of mind on questions about what thought is like, and in particular on questions about self-conscious thought about ourselves. Here she asks, what can the schizophrenic delusion of thought insertion tell us about how we ordinarily find out about ourselves through introspection? *** A lot of my work revolves around the notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM), and so does this paper. For those with more of a nodding acquaintance with IEM, I have a dim suspicion that it can come across as a slightly fussy notion that threatens to plunge those working on it into ever deepening levels of obscurity, and that refuses to wear its interest on its sleeve. So let me first say something why it’s important. Roughly speaking, your judgment is IEM when yo...

Robert Davies This post is by Robert Davies , a PhD student at the University of York.  Robert is interested in self-knowledge and memory, and particularly how the study of memory can shed light on philosophical problems in self-knowledge.  Here is one variety of introspective failure: I make a choice but, when providing reasons, I offer reasons that could not be my reasons for that choice. Choice Blindness research by Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and their colleagues ( 2005 –) suggests it is surprisingly prevalent (see e.g. Johansson et al. 2008 ), showing a low rate of manipulation detection and a high degree of willingness, in non-clinical participants, to offer confabulatory explanations for manipulated choices across a range of modalities and environments (see e.g. Hall et al. 2006 ; Hall et al. 2010 ). We see ourselves as introspectively competent, rational decision-makers—capable of knowing our reasons, weighing them as reasons , and self-regulating when requir...

In this post, Naomi Kloosterboer (PhD student at VU University of Amsterdam and visiting research fellow at the University of Birmingham) discusses her paper ‘Transparent emotions? A critical analysis of Moran’s Transparency Claim’ that will appear in the special issue of Philosophical Explorations on ‘Self-knowledge and Folk Psychology: Perspectives from Philosophy and Psychiatry’. If I want to know what you believe or feel, the easiest and most prevailing way of finding out would be to just ask you. Moreover, if I don’t take your answer at face value, I should be able to provide good reasons to justify my mistrust. That is to say, when it comes to speaking our minds, the default mode is that we are granted the authority to do so. But what justifies this first-person authority? In Authority and Estrangement (2001), Richard Moran argues convincingly against the idea that our authority is grounded in epistemic features of self-knowledge because they do not explain its specific firs...