Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Víctor Verdejo, one of the editors – together with José Luis Bermúdez and Matheus Valente – of the collection Sharing Thoughts: Philosophical Perspectives on Intersubjectivity and Communication , recently published with Oxford University Press. He is a philosopher of mind and language, Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and currently leads a number of research projects on communication, intersubjectivity and the self. More information can be found here . Cover of Sharing Thoughts Are you thinking what I am thinking? Well, it might be hard for you to know without further context, and in particular, without me telling you what that could be. But this way of talking certainly illustrates how natural and easy it is to consider the possibility of shared thoughts. We are all used to the idea that thoughts, ideas and experiences can be talked about, expressed and ultimately shared with our peers. And the force of this idea not only sits deeply with...

Today's post is by  Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.  We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...

The post today is by Evan Westra  (Purdue University) on his recent paper " Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition " ( Philosophical Perspectives , 2023).  Evan Westra If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020 . These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is.   If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: p ). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an...

Today's post is by Tillmann Vierkant (University of Edinburgh) who presents his recent book The Tinkering Mind (Oxford University Press, 2022). The Tinkering Mind has at its heart a puzzle about epistemic agency and cognitive control. I was always puzzled by the notion of cognitive control, because to me it seemed to combine features that are clearly incompatible. The puzzle in question is as follows: cognitive control is often said to be voluntary, and is a form of cognition.  But cognitive control is also supposed to lead to the acquisition of new beliefs. I have always found it strange that cognitive control is supposed to have all three of these features because if it does, then that seems to indicate that the acquisition of a belief can be a voluntary action when we acquire it by means of cognitive control. This would imply doxastic voluntarism which, like most philosophers nowadays, I find unpalatable. Very many people have pointed out to me that this initial worry is just...

This post is by Anja Berninger (University of Göttingen) and Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg). Today their post is on the edited volume Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination (Routledge 2022 ). Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Having been neglected for many years, the subjects of memory and imagination have started to gain more attention in recent philosophical debates. While there has been some interaction between philosophers working in these different fields (for publications that make significant headway towards establishing a more integrative perspective, see, for instance, Perrin and Michaelian 2017 ; MacPherson and Dorsch 2018 ; Michaelian, Debus, and Perrin 2018 , and Michaelian, Perrin, and Sant’Anna 2020 ), we still lack a properly integrative approach to these issues.  With this volume our aim is to fill this lacuna. Our objective is to both broaden and deepen current debates on memory and imagination within the philosophy of mind. This volume explor...

This post is written by Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm. Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published widely in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and medical ethics. Robyn Bluhm is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. She has published widely in philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. In this post,  Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm present their new edited volume "The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry". Although there has long been a close link between philosophy and psychiatry, it is only in the past few decades that philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a field in its own right, with its specific set of questions and themes generating interest from both traditional philosophers, and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, ps...

Does philosophy have a purpose outside academia? What does philosophy look like when it’s done beyond the walls of the lecture theatre and the seminar room? And who should get to do it? I got to think quite a bit about these questions recently. It was back at the start of 2017 that I travelled to London to meet some of the senior team from mental health charity Mind in Camden to discuss the possibility of developing a series of philosophy workshops, based on project PERFECT ’s research, and running them at Mind in Camden, for people with lived experience of unusual beliefs and experiences, and mental distress, as well as for service providers and mental health advocates. Mind in Camden runs training, support and capacity building services to benefit people who are struggling with mental distress, and I saw commonalities between its values and the sorts of conceptions of mental health and rationality that we’re arguing for through PERFECT. So, the organisation was a natural partn...

This post is by Ruth Millikan . Ruth Garrett Millikan is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut. She is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Winner of the 2017 Researcher Prize for Systematic Philosophy. I am a retired professor of philosophy from the University of Connecticut with special interests in thought and language, the ontological structures of the world that support thought and language and the kinds of selection ---- genetic, learning, cultural ---- responsible for their evolution and development. Beyond Concepts weaves together themes from natural ontology and from the philosophies of mind, language and information. The sprawling topic is Kant's how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we, along with the other animals, are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is, roughly, as natur...

The Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind is an annual event organized by the Center of Subjectivity Research . It aims to provide essential insights into central themes within the philosophy of mind, viewed from a phenomenological perspective. The general topics covered this year were intentionality, experience, reflection, perception, attention, self-awareness, rationality, normativity and methodology. Over a period of 5 days, the schedule included keynote lectures, PhD presentations, discussion groups and seminars. The late afternoons and evenings were dedicated to different social events (such as visits to the city, a harbour tour) which allowed for opportunities to exchange ideas amongst researchers. In this post, I give a detailed summary of the main points made by the keynote speakers. On the first day Søren Overgaard talked about Embodiment and Social Perception. The question he set up to answer was whether Social Perception Theory d...

The Early Career Mind Network (ECMN) is a new initiative with the aim to establish a strong network of early career researchers in the philosophy of mind who do not yet have permanent positions in academic philosophy. On 27th to 28th April 2016 the University of Warwick hosted the first ECMN research forum , organised by Alisa Mandrigin. This blog post provides an overview of the research ideas explored by the researchers at the event. Tom McClelland spoke first on the Grand Illusion Hypothesis (GIH). According to the GIH, we overestimate how rich visual experience is outside of focal attention. McClelland described empirical findings showing that our visual systems compensate for the limits of attention by encoding information about the average features of groups or crowds. McClelland outlined precisely how findings relating to this ‘ensemble perception’ should be viewed as important to the GIH. He denied that the findings show that there is no Grand Illusion, but a...