Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Adam Andreotta . He earned his PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2018. His research and teaching interests include: epistemology, self-knowledge, the philosophy of David Hume and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.  Here, he introduces his article, " Confabulation does not undermine introspection for propositional attitudes ", that has recently appeared in the journal Synthese. For more of his work, see his PhilPapers profile . Most of us think there exists an asymmetry between the way we know our own minds, and the way we know the minds of others. For example, it seems that I can know that I intend to watch Back to the Future , or that I believe that Australia will win the Ashes, by introspection: a private and secure way of knowing my own mental states. If I want to know whether my friend intends to see Back to the Future or believes that Australia will win the Ashes, I need to ask them or observe their behaviour. This co...

Luca Malatesti (left in the picture below) and Filip Čeč (right) collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are  based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia).  Luca  is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry.  Filip  is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter ‘Identification and self-knowledge’, that is contained in the collection edited by Patrizia Pedrini and Julie Kirsch,  Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpre...

This post is by Fleur Jongepier , a PhD Student at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on self-knowledge and first-person authority. Here Fleur (in the picture above) summarises a paper that she is currently working on with her colleague Derek Strijbos  (in the picture below), psychiatry resident (Dimence) and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in philosophy. Self-knowledge regarding one’s mental states comes in many forms. One can know about one’s mental states in a more or less ‘theoretical’ way, e.g. through reading about it in a psychology book or listening to the folk theories and advice of others, and on that basis make a conjecture about one’s own state of mind. For instance, one may become convinced that one has abandonment issues, and this piece of theoretical self-knowledge might motivate one to seek treatment. An alternative to ‘theoretical’ self-knowledge is deliberative or agential self-knowledge. To use one of Richard Moran’s e...

This is a report on the second day of the Deliberation, Interpretation, and Confabulation Workshop held at the Abraham Kuyper Centre for Science and Religion at the VU University in Amsterdam in June 2015 (for a report of the first day, please go here ). The first talk was by Christoph Michel (University of Stuttgart) on the transition from deliberation to evaluation. Michel is interested in developing a theory of self-ascription of attitudes. Knowing one's own attitudes does not imply a full or deep understanding of one's own behaviour and does not come with powerful predictive capacities. Self-knowledge can be gained by self-interpretation (without privilege) and deliberation (with privilege). Some also think that we can gain self-knowledge by introspection. A position on how to achieve self-knowledge depends on what we take attitudes to be: if they are conscious/neuronal states, then they can be scanned; if they are functional/dispositional states, then they can on...