Imperfect Cognitions

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...

In this post, Katherine Puddifoot , Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University, discusses her paper “ Re-evaluating the credibility of eyewitness testimony: the misinformation effect and the overcritical juror ,” recently published in Episteme. Should we trust eyewitnesses of crimes? Are jurors inclined to trust eyewitnesses more than they should? People tend to adopt a default position of trust towards eyewitness testimony, finding it highly convincing. However, as has now been widely acknowledged, eyewitnesses are subject to memory errors, which make them susceptible to error. These two observations have pointed many researchers towards the conclusion that jurors do trust eyewitnesses more than they should. However, in a recent paper, I argue that jurors are susceptible to being over critical, assigning too little credence to eyewitness testimony, due to the presence of memory errors. How can this be so? Jurors might adopt a default posit...

Today’s post is provided by Project PERFECT Research Fellow Katherine Puddifoot. It introduces the argument of the paper “ Epistemic innocence and the production of false memory beliefs ” co-authored with Project P.I. Lisa Bortolotti and available open access in Philosophical Studies. Suppose that your friend tells you an anecdote at a dinner party. She honestly claims to be describing her personal experience but includes details that you told to her after the event. Imagine that your colleague tells you that Tim was at a meeting when he was not but all of the other members of his team were there. Suppose that your brother tells you that he overheard a really good joke on the train the other day, but you are confident that what he is describing is a scene from a recently released film that he has watched. You conclude that he must have imagined being in the scene while watching the film and falsely recalled experiencing the imagined event. In each of these cas...

Today’s post is by Valerie Gray Hardcastle , Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinatti. I study the nature and structure of interdisciplinary theories in the cognitive sciences and have focused primarily on developing a philosophical framework for understanding consciousness that is responsive to neuroscientific, psychiatric and psychological data. Currently, I am investigating the neuroscience of violence and its implications for both our understanding of human nature and the criminal justice system. I am also trying to figure out whether notions of embodied cognition help or hinder theorizing about consciousness. (I think that the answer will be neither.) Most recently, I have received research fellowships from the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Texas-Medical Branch ; the Centre for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution at theUniversity of Bochum ; and the Institute for Philosophy/S...

Today's blog post is an interview by Project PERFECT research fellow Kathy Puddifoot with Sarah K. Robins (pictured below), an expert on false memories and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. KP: You are an expert on memory. How did you become interested in this topic? SR: I became interested in memory as I was starting to put together a dissertation back in graduate school. Originally, my interest was in the personal/subpersonal distinction but I was spinning my wheels a bit. My advisor, Carl Craver, posed a question to help get me going: are memory traces personal or subpersonal? In pursuit of that question (still a difficult one to answer), my interest shifted to memory itself. There were so many interesting philosophical questions about memory—and so little connection with the vast amount of research on memory in both psychology and neuroscience. I was excited about how little work had yet been done on these intersections and tha...