Imperfect Cognitions

In this post I report on a recently launched brief, prepared by  Sophie Stammers  for policy makers and mental health and social care professionals, entitled "Mitigating the risk of assumptions and biases in assessments of mental capacity". The work on the brief was funded by the University of Birmingham and the actual brief was launched with a Webinar hosted by the Mental Elf on 26th March 2020. Mark Brown introduced the presentations and moderated the discussion. I summarised the main findings of project PERFECT relevant to the brief, and Sophie explained our recommendations, based on her research but also on extensive consultations conducted in January to March 2020. Sophie Stammers The conversation continued on Twitter where people made comments and asked questions using the #MentalCapacity2020 hashtag. Alex Ruck Keene wrote a post on the brief which appeared on the Mental Elf blog. Alex is a barrister specialising in mental capacity and mental health...

Today's post is by Katrina Sifferd  (pictured below). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from King’s College London, and is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. After leaving King’s, Katrina held a post-doctoral position as Rockefeller Fellow in Law and Public Policy and Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. Before becoming a philosopher, Katrina earned a Juris Doctorate and worked as a senior research analyst on criminal justice projects for the National Institute of Justice. Many thanks to Lisa for her kind invitation to introduce our recently published book, Responsible Brains: Neuroscience, Law, and Human Culpability . Bill Hirstein , Tyler Fagan , and I , who are philosophers at Elmhurst College, researched and wrote the book with the support of a Templeton sub-grant from the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project  managed by Al Mele at Florida State University. Responsible Brains joins a larger discussion about the ways evidence ge...

This post is by Sophie Stammers , PhD student in Philosophy at King’s College London. Here she writes about two policy papers, Unintentional Bias in Court and Unintentional Bias in Forensic Investigation , written as part of a recent research fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) provides accessible overviews of research from the sciences, prepared for general parliamentary use, many of which are also freely available . My papers are part of a recent research stream exploring how advances in science and technology interact with issues in crime and justice: it would seem that if there is one place where unbiased reasoning and fair judgement really matter, then it is in the justice system. My research focuses on implicit cognition, and in particular, implicit social bias. I am interested in the extent to which implicit biases differ from...

In this post Maksymilian Del Mar  (in the picture above) presents the recent book Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice   (Springer 2015),  co-edited with William Twining . Treating Menorca as if it is a suburb of London, or a ship as if it was a person, or pretending that persons who form contracts are made by rational agents with knowledge of the commitments they are making, or that states who take over other states find a land empty of life (as in the doctrine of terra nullius) – or, positing the existence of consent, malice, notice, fraud, intention, or causation when evidence clearly points to the opposite conclusion (or to no conclusion at all)… All these are example of legal fictions. They fly in the face of reality. And, in the literature on theories of law and legal reasoning, they are not very popular. In this new collection – Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (Springer, 2015, co-edited by William Twining and Maks Del Mar) – 18 chapters explore anothe...