Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies , on her recent paper 'The Know-How of Virtue', published open-access in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.  Kathleen Murphy-Hollies How can we be good people who do things for the right reason, when we very often confabulate a good reason for our behaviour after the fact? Imagine, for example, that I do not give money to a person in need on the street, and instead rush home. But then, later on, my friend mentions seeing the person who needed help and I express that I saw them too. Then they ask me, ‘why didn’t you help them?’. In these circumstances, we might confabulate. This means that, only upon being asked, do we start formulating an answer to that question. In that way, confabulation is post-hoc. We come up with reasons for our behaviour which protect our positive self-conceptions. So I might say to my friend, ‘Oh I was in a rush and the street was too busy for me to stop!’. This explanation protects my self-concept of still gen...

The eighth meeting of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy (SEFA) took place in Oviedo, Spain, from 10 th –12 th November, 2016. Over 70 speakers presented their research during the three-day conference, and here I summarise just some of the papers given on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Juan Comesaña , of the University of Arizona, gave the first keynote talk, on rationality and falsity in belief and action. He proposed that some false beliefs can be rational. Consider, for instance, the pre-Einsteinian belief in the additivity of speed. There is a persuasive sense in which this belief was once rational, even though strictly speaking it is false. In defence of the notion that falsehoods can sometimes be rationally believed, Comesaña argued that rational action requires rational belief, and that we can sometimes act rationally on the basis of false beliefs. He demonstrated that this view survives translation into a traditional decision the...

Michael Brady is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is currently a principal investigator on the The Value of Suffering Project , alongside David Bain . His main research area is the philosophy of emotion. One area of his research focuses on the epistemic status of emotion. He is interested in the idea that emotions have value and can perform an epistemic role. In this post, he introduces his book on these themes, Emotional Insight, which was published by Oxford University Press. My book tries to reconcile two commonsense intuitions: that emotions have considerable epistemic value (we should sometimes ‘listen to our heart’), and that emotions often lead us astray epistemically (emotions lead to epistemic biases). I approach the issue by examining a theory of emotion that is relatively new on the scene but has increasing support: the perceptual model of emotion. On this account, emotional experience is a kind of, or is at least akin to, perceptual experience....

This post is by Mary Carman  (pictured above), who will be joining  Thumos , the Genevan Research Group on Emotions, Values and Norms as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in April. Mary works on emotions and action, and as part of her previous Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Witwatersrand , South Africa, she started working on topics in Bioethics. In this post, she writes about the rational role in action emotions can play. In my PhD thesis and a paper currently under review, I develop an account of emotional actions that gives emotion a rational role in action. In this brief post, I outline how such an account might look. Let’s start with an example of an impulsive emotional action from Elisabeth Pacherie ( 2002 ): I am fearfully running away from a bear, spot a crack in the rocks too narrow for the bear to fit, and climb through. In such cases, we act on the basis of an emotion without first forming beliefs and desires related to what to do. Thes...

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...

This post is by  Dominic McIver Lopes , who teaches at the University of British Columbia and has written books and papers on pictorial representation, photography, the aesthetic and epistemic values of images, computer art, and the nature of art and the ontology of art works. His current project derives an account of aesthetic value from accounts of reasons for aesthetic action. Know Thyself. Maybe the advice is that we should each acknowledge our most dearly held values and come to terms with our capacity to act upon them. Or maybe the tone is less Socratic, more practical. We plan. Planning requires a coordination of intentions with the outcomes of action. To reliably get good outcomes, we must act on reasons we know we have. My days go best when they begin with a dose of something bitter. I purchase Cooper's Original because it is bitter. Thus do I assure my well-being. Suppose I lacked access to my reasons for acting. Then my life would amount to a fishing expedition....