Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Rani Lill Anjum and Elena Rocca introduce their new book, Philosophy of Science (Palgrave 2024). Philosophy of Science What do practitioners, researchers, and students have in common? They are all expected to accept a number of philosophical assumptions that are rarely discussed, although they profoundly shape a discipline. Most of these will be introduced via their education and are likely to remain unnoticed as long as one stays comfortably within the disciplinary boundaries of like-minded experts. Awareness of underlying tensions will typically emerge when expert from different disciplines try to arrive at a common ground. They might then have to choose what is the most reliable evidence among a range of contradicting observations. Should one trust population data, when they contradict an established theory? Should the success of an intervention be measured at population level or at the level of individuals? How should results obtained with lab models be used to make ...

Today's post is by Vanessa Schipani  (University of Pennsylvania) who discusses a recent open access  paper on journalism and public trust in science published in Synthese . A version of this post has appeared on the LSE blog on 2 September 2024. Vanessa Schipani During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I was hired as a journalist to report on politicians’ claims about science for FactCheck.org . Coming off of finishing a master’s in the history and philosophy of science, my eye for stories was a bit more philosophical than most.  Starting with my first article on whether climate science was pseudoscience (spoiler: it’s not), I noticed a trend in how politicians misunderstood the scientific process, especially when arguing for policy inaction: They set the bar for action at certain results, and condemned researchers when they offered their opinions about policies. Now on the cusp of finishing a dissertation on trust in science, I see more clearly the trick these po...

Tiffany Morisseau is a researcher in Cognitive Psychology at the Laboratory of Applied Psychology and Ergonomics (LaPEA, University of Paris). Her current research projects mainly focus on the question of epistemic trust and vigilance, and the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying how people come to process scientific information. Tiffany is a member of the Horizon Europe KT4D consortium KT4D ( kt4democracy.eu ), on the risks and potential of knowledge technologies for democracy, and leads the Psychology part. Here, she talks about her paper in the Philosophy of Pseudoscience special issue , introduced last week by editor Stefaan Blancke. Tiffany Morisseau Improving science education and media literacy is an important aspect of dealing with online misinformation. By doing so, the level of accuracy at which information is considered false is raised, thereby ensuring that blatant errors that are no longer perceived as plausible, are eliminated from the public sphere. But merely being pl...

Stefaan Blancke is a philosopher of science at the department of Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and a member of the Tilburg Center for Moral Philosophy, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS).  His current research mainly focuses on the role of cooperation and reputation in science, pseudoscience, and morality. His website is www.stefaanblancke.com ; you can also find him on Twitter ( @stblancke ). This post is about a special issue on the Psychology of Pseudoscience , which Stefaan was an editor for.  Stefaan Blancke As a philosopher of science, I have since long been interested in pseudoscience. Not only because pseudoscience induces us to think about what science is – so that we can explain why pseudoscience is not science; but also, because I want to understand what makes our minds vulnerable to beliefs that plainly contradict our best scientific theories. Examples of pseudoscience abound, from creationism over homeopathy and anti-vaccination t...

This post is by Matteo Colombo . When we asked our readers to vote for their favourite post among the five most popular posts we ever published, Matteo's "Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science" (27 September 2016) won by a large margin. So, on the occasion of our 10th birthday, we invited him to write for us again and update us on his research. Matteo Colombo Seven years ago I wrote a piece for Imperfect Cognitions , where I described a study aimed at investigating the relationship between explanatory judgement, moral offense and the value-free ideal of science. Conducted in collaboration with psychologists Leandra Bucher and Yoel Inbar , our study showed that the more you perceive the conclusion of a scientific study as morally offensive, the more likely you are to reject it as bad science. For instance, to the extent you find the conclusion that males are naturally promiscuous while females are coy and choosy to be morally offensive, you’ll dismi...

This post is by Alejandro Cassini (University of Buenos Aires) and Juan Redmond (University of Valparaiso) who recently edited Models and Idealizations in Science: Artifactual and Fictional Approaches (Springer, 2021). Here they present the book. This book is intended both as an introduction to the philosophy of scientific modeling and as a contribution to the discussion and clarification of two recent philosophical conceptions of models: the artifactual and the fictional views.  The first chapter provides a rather elementary but fairly complete and extensive introduction to the present state of the philosophy of scientific models. It also offers a brief historical narrative of the rise and the early development of the philosophy of scientific models since the middle of the 20th century.  Juan Redmond The commented bibliography at end of the book complements this narrative by offering a classified list of the main relevant books on models and idealizations in science preced...

Today's post is by Melissa M. Shew and Kimberly K. Garchar . They present their new book, Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought  (OUP 2020). Despite social and institutional improvements, women and girls are routinely discouraged from full participation in intellectual and civic life. Kamala Harris’s recent refrain of “I’m speaking, I’m speaking” in a debate against Vice President Mike Pence evidences the ongoing challenge that women face in having their voices--and therefore their ideas--truly heard. This disrespect of women’s intellectual expertise occurs in nearly all aspects of our lives, so academic philosophy is no different. The chronic erasure of women’s voices in content, meager representation in philosophy syllabi, persistence of all-male panels in philosophy, and dominance in faculty meetings evidence the gender disparity in education. Melissa M. Shew This gap is harmful not just to women who are unable to fulfill their philosophical potential as a ...

This post is by Michela Massimi who tells us about a collection she co-edited with Ana-Maria Cretu , Knowledge from a Human Point of View (Springer Synthese Library), available fully open access, courtesy of the European Research Council OA policy. Knowledge from a Human Point of View is the second edited volume planned for the ERC Consolidator Grant " Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point " and in my original intentions it was meant to explore the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of the view known as ‘perspectivism’. Better known these days among philosophers of science working on scientific modelling and pluralism (albeit not exclusively), perspectivism is a view with a long history. What is at stake in the prima facie platitude that our knowledge is always from a human point of view? Whose else’s point of view if not ours, one might immediately retort? Historically, the shift from knowledge sub spe...

Today's post is by Francesca Ferrando. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU-Liberal Studies, New York University. A leading voice in the field of Posthuman Studies and founder of the NY Posthuman Research Group, she has been the recipient of the Sainati prize with the Acknowledgment of the President of Italy. She was the first speaker to give a TED talk on the topic of the posthuman. US magazine "Origins" named her among the 100 people making change in the world.  She is introducing here  her new book Philosophical Posthumanism  (Bloomsbury).  We are no longer “human”. We live in a time of radical bio-technological developments, where human enhancement, designer babies and sentient AI are the next frontiers. We live in the era of the Anthropocene and of the sixth mass extinction of species caused, directly and indirecly, by human action. In light of the political and environmental imperatives of our age, the term 'posthuman' provi...

In this post Andrea Polonioli interviews  Thomas Sturm (pictured below), ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) and member of the UAB's Center for History of Science (CEHIC). His research centers on the relation between philosophy and psychology, including their history. Here, we discuss his views on empirical research on human rationality. AP: The psychology of judgment and decision-making has been divided into what appear to be radically different perspectives on human rationality. Whilst research programs like heuristics and biases have been associated with a rather bleak picture of human rationality, Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues have argued that very simple heuristics can make us smart. Yet, some philosophers have also argued that, upon close scrutiny, these research programs do not share any real disagreement. What is your take on the so-called “rationality wars” in psychology? TS: Let me begin...