Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori (Hokkaido University) on his recent paper " Folk Intuitions About Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Evaluating the Combined Effects of Misunderstandings About Determinism and Motivated Cognition " ( Cognitive Science 2024), co-authored with Yusuke Haruki (The University of Tokyo) and Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University). Kiichi Inarimori Philosophers have long debated whether free will—a prerequisite for moral responsibility—is compatible with determinism. Central to these discussions are the intuitions people form when considering moral responsibility in hypothetical scenarios. Yusuke Haruki With the rise of experimental philosophy, numerous studies have explored folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Some experiments suggest that people tend toward “compatibilism,” the view that free will and determinism can coexist, especially in concrete cases of wrongdoing. Others suggest a lean toward “incompatibilism,” th...

Today's post is by Jeroen de Ridder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Michael Hannon (University of Nottingham). Their post is based on their chapter ‘The Point of Political Belief’ to appear in the Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology (forthcoming in 2021), which they edited together. About a week after CNN and most other major news outlets had called the 2020 US election for Joe Biden, secretary of state Mike Pompeo stated in a press conference : “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” This is just one example of a political belief that seems, shall we say, slightly out of touch with reality. There are others: one out of seven survey respondents agree with the statement “Barack Obama is the antichrist” and one out of seven Trump supporters maintain that the half-empty photo of Trump’s 2017 inauguration has more people than a photo of Obama’s packed 2009 inauguration. Do people really believe these things, in the same way they believe, s...

In this post,  Daniel Williams , Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, responds to last week's  post  from  Ben Tappin  and  Stephen Gadsby  about their recent paper " Biased belief in the Bayesian brain: A deeper look at the evidence ".  Ben Tappin and Stephen Gadsby have written an annoyingly good response to my paper, ‘ Hierarchical Bayesian Models of Delusion ’. Among other things, my paper claimed that there is little reason to think that belief formation in the neurotypical population is Bayesian. Tappin and Gadsby—along with Phil Corlett , and, in fact, just about everyone else I’ve spoken to about this—point out that my arguments for this claim were no good. Specifically, I argued that phenomena such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and the so-called “backfire effect” are difficult to reconcile with Bayesian models of belief formation. Tappin and Gadsb...

This post is the final one in our series summarizing the contributions to the special issue on unrealistic optimism 'Unrealistic Optimism -Its nature, causes and effects' . The paper by Anneli Jefferson , Lisa Bortolotti and Bojana Kuzmanovic looks at the nature of unrealistically optimistic cognitions and the extent to which they are irrational. Anneli Jefferson We know that people have a tendency to expect that their future will be better than that of others or better than seems likely on an objective measure of probability. But are they really expressing a belief that the future will be good, or should we see these expressions of optimism as hopes or possibly even just expression of desires for the future? Maybe when I say ‘My marriage has an 85% likelihood of lasting ‘til death do us part’’, what I am actually saying is ‘I really, really want my marriage to last.’ If what is expressed is a desire rather than a belief, we do not need to worry that we are systemati...