Imperfect Cognitions

This week's post is by Shao-Pu Kang, a n assistant professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Graduate Institute of Philosophy,  his recent publication Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness in Review of Philosophy and Psychology .    Shao-Pu Kang  Suppose you see a sunrise. You are thrilled, feel a chill in the air, hear your inner voice saying “that’s magnificent,” imagine enjoying the view with your best friend, and think about your loved one. As you undergo these mental states, do you experience them as yours, even be fore you turn your attention to and reflect on them? This question lies at the heart of live debates about whether experiences come with a built-in sense of ownership, often called mineness: a pre-reflective awareness of one’s experiences as one’s own. In “Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness,” I critically examine Marie Guillot’s novel attempt to defend typicalism, the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness.  Guillot star...

Today's post is by Grace Hibshman at University of Notre Dame on her recent paper “ Narrative, Second-Person Experience, and Self-Perception: A Reason it is Good to Conceive of One’s Life Narratively ” ( The Philosophical Quarterly 2022). Grace Hibshman In the  Lord of the Rings  trilogy, when Frodo and Sam are struggling to persevere on their quest, they turn to remembering the tales of old and wondering whether their journey will one day be put into songs and tales and told by the firesides of their people. Conceiving of their life narratively in this way as part of a great web of stories helps the hobbits find meaning and courage, and it seems that it can be similarly helpful for people in general as well. But why might this be? Why might conceiving of one’s life narratively be conducive to one’s flourishing? In my paper, I argue that conceiving of one’s life narratively as a part of the songs and tales of old can prompt one to imagine how an audience might experience hear...

Today's post is by Uku Tooming (Hokkaido University) on his new paper “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ” (2020, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly ). Uku Tooming In my paper, “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ”, I argue that there are two kinds of self-ascription of desire. First, there are easy cases where a sincere self-ascription seems to be immediately expressive of self-knowledge. For example, if I believe that I want to eat ice cream then, given the person I am, my self-ascription is true and there is no room for doubt. Second, there are hard cases which lack this kind of immediacy and where one could have easily been wrong about one’s self-ascription. For example, when I believe that I want to have a child then, given the person I am, this self-ascription is not immediately expressive of self-knowledge and can be put under question. How to explain the difference between easy and hard cases? In particular, what makes a self-ascription of a desire an easy case? Since in t...

Our ( Kengo Miyazono and Lisa Bortolotti 's) new Philosophy of Psychology textbook is out! Today it is the worldwide publication date for the book but in the UK it has been available since 14th May.  If you want to participate in the book launch, please visit this page and enjoy two conversations on the themes of the book, one with Nevia Dolcini and Jules Holroyd on rationality, self-knowledge, and implicit bias; and one with Katrina Sifferd and Pablo López-Silva on autism, psychopathy, delusion, and confabulation. In the book, we defend a particular view of human cognition and agency as imperfect . In this post, we say a little more about the sense in which human agents fail to meet ideal standards of cognition and agency, such as criteria for rationality and self-knowledge.    Rosa wants to pass her ballet exam tomorrow and she knows that she needs to rehearse the opening routine to make sure she remembers all the steps. Passing the exam is important to her, and she ...

In this post, I discuss the relationship among confabulation, choice blindness, and self knowledge. That is the theme in a new open access paper by Ema Sullivan-Bissett and myself, published in Synthese, as part of a special issue entitled: " Knowing the Unknown: Philosophical Perspectives on Ignorance ". Ema and Lisa When subject to the choice-blindness effect, an agent gives reasons for making choice B, moments after making the alternative choice A. Choice blindness has been studied by the Choice Blindness Lab in Lund in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes. Below you see an image of the set up of one of the studies where people were shown photos of strangers and asked to choose the most attractive face. Which face is most attractive? Choice blindness is often described as a form of confabulation. When people confabulate they tell a story that they believe to be correct, but the story is n...

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...

Today's post is written by Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing, editors of the new ' Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’ Richard Gipps is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Oxford, UK. He’s also a philosopher and an associate of the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Oxford. He has co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (OUP 2015), and is currently writing a book on the intelligibility of psychotic thought. His blog can be found at clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com . Michael Lacewing is a former Vice-Principal Academic and Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, London, an Honorary Reader in Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College, London, and a teacher of philosophy and theology at Christ's Hospital School, Sussex. He edited, with Louise Braddock, The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2007), and has published widely in philosophy of psychoanalysis, metaethics ...

  Today's post is written by Peter Langland-Hassan and Agustin Vicente.  Peter Langland-Hassan  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the  University of Cincinnati .  Agustin Vicente  is  Ikerbasque Research Professor  at the  University of the Basque Country , Linguistics Department. In this post, they present their new edited volume" Inner Speech: New Voices ".  Our new anthology, Inner Speech: New Voices (OUP, 2018), is the first in philosophy to focus on inner speech—a phenomenon known, colloquially, as “talking to yourself silently” or “the little voice in the head.” The book is interdisciplinary in spirit and practice, bringing together philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to discuss the multiple controversies surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Readers of this blog may be most familiar with theoretical work on inner speech as it occurs in the context of explaining Auditory Verba...

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 Tyler Flanagan, and in this post he briefly introduces and outlines his recent publication in Res Cogitans entitled “ Emotions, Practical Rationality, and the Self .” He is a first year Master’s student in Philosophy at Virginia Tech. What I am attempting to do in my paper is defend the view that our emotions are quite amenable to the view of ourselves as rational beings. Rather than throw out the picture of the emotional human, I argue that we should embrace the view instead. Our emotions do not in any way stop us from reasoning properly, and in fact provide us with reasons for action that seem to outweigh even our most thoughtful contemplation ( Arpaly, 2002 ; Jones 2004 ) With this view in tow, I suggest that the emotions we have about ourselves, such as regret or shame, act as a guide to how well or how poorly we are attending to our goals and what we care about, and in some instances can show us when we are valuing what we should not. In these ways our em...

Sophie Keeling is currently a philosophy PhD student at the University of Southampton. She primarily works on self-knowledge which has allowed her to research a range of topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. Sophie’s thesis argues that we have a distinctive way of knowing why we have our attitudes and perform actions that observers lack. She gives a brief overview here . This post summarises my paper ‘ Confabulation and Rational Requirements for Self-Knowledge ’ (forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology ). The paper argues for a novel explanation of confabulation: Confabulation is motivated by the desire to have fulfilled a rational obligation to knowledgeably explain our attitudes by reference to motivating reasons. (Following others in the epistemological literature, I term the reason for which we hold an attitude our ‘motivating reason’ for it). I shan’t seek to define confabulation here (a task in its own right) but instead note the ...

In this post I present the main ideas in my recent paper on confabulation, "Stranger than Fiction", which appeared in Review of Philosophy and Psychology in October, open access . Confabulation has a bad press in philosophy, often identified with the main obstacle to attaining self-knowledge and described as an obvious instance of epistemic irrationality. In earlier work I thought about the current definitions of confabulation, which focus on the surface features of the phenomenon, and can be divided into two broad categories: those who define confabulations as false beliefs, and those who define confabulations as ill-grounded beliefs. In this paper though, after a brief introduction, I leave aside how confabulation should be defined, and focus instead on its costs and benefits. In particular, I ask what costs and benefits it has for the acquisition, retention, and use of information that is relevant to us. Are we epistemically worse or better off when we confabu...

This post is by  Fleur Jongepier  (picture below). Starting Autumn 2017 she will be based in Cambridge (UK), working on the role and value of self-knowledge in contemporary liberalism. In the previous blogpost , I introduced some examples that I suggested provide a challenge to what I referred to as the ‘traditional’ approach to the notion of first-person authority, namely, the view according to which first-person authority and self-knowledge always come and go together. I ended the post by mentioning the following three views about the relation between first-person authority and self-knowledge: The Decoupling View. They have first-person authority despite not having self-knowledge. The Negative Traditional ViewThey do not have self-knowledge, therefore do not have first-person authority. The Positive Traditional View. They have self-knowledge and therefore have first-person authority. One reason for thinking the second, Negative Traditional view (‘no self-knowled...

This post is by Fleur Jongepier (picture below). Starting Autumn 2017 she will be based in Cambridge (UK), working on the role and value of self-knowledge in contemporary liberalism. Normally, our sincere self-ascriptions, like “I want some coffee” or “I hope the meeting will be cancelled”, are not open to correction or challenge, for instance by asking me “Are you sure?”. Indeed, we would normally consider it inappropriate to do so (as expressivists like Dorit Bar-On have argued, see e.g. Bar-On and Long 2001; Bar-On 2004). Now most traditional theories of self-knowledge think of the special sort of authority that subjects have when speaking about their own mental states is to be explained epistemically. In other words, what is referred to as ‘first-person authority’ is typically explained in terms of self-knowledge: it’s because you know your own mental states particularly well that you are particularly well-placed to say something about them. First-personal authorit...

Today's post is by Eivind Balsvik (pictured above), who is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway. His principal research interests concern questions related to rationality, interpretation, and research ethics. He has also worked on the philosophy of Donald Davidson and theories of self-knowledge. In this post, he presents a recent article published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences entitled “ Interpretivism, First-Person Authority, and Confabulation .” My article, “ Interpretivism, First-Person Authority, and Confabulation ” is a first step in developing a weakly naturalistic interpretation theory for the social sciences, which is consistent with interpretivism. I have been interested in figuring out how a Davidson-inspired interpretation theory can incorporate psychological theories about the imperfections of cognition, which seems to fly in the face of his principles of holism, charity and the presumption of first-person authori...

Today I report from a workshop organised by Anna Ichino and Bence Nanay at the University of Antwerp (pictured below) on 31st May, 2017. The themes included subdoxastic attitudes, imagination, and belief. I ( Lisa Bortolotti , Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it. Next, I argued that confabulated explanations of attitudes and choices involve ignorance and ill-grounded causal explanations. Finally, I looked at potential psychological and epistemic benefits of confabulated explanations, and applied to them the framework of epistemic innocence developed at part of project PERFECT .  I concluded by saying that some confabulated exp...

Today's post is by Annalisa Coliva on her new book The Varieties of Self-Knowledge . I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. My main interests lie in epistemology, philosophy of mind and the history of analytic philosophy. The Varieties of Self-Knowledge (Palgrave 2016) is a sustained defence of pluralism about self-knowledge. I argue that, contrary to what behaviourists, several cognitive scientists, theory-theorists and inferential theorists have maintained in the last seventy years or so, there is an asymmetry between first- and third-personal self-knowledge. Hence, empirical studies that tend to show that we can be mistaken about, or ignorant of several mental states of ours do not in fact impugn the existence of first-personal self-knowledge. Rather, they show that the scope of first-personal self-knowledge is more limited than philosophers have thought. Hence, in many cases, we do know our own mental states in a third-personal wa...

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...

This post is by Cristina Borgoni (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Graz. Here she summarises her recent paper ' On Knowing One's Own Resistant Beliefs ', published in Philosophical Explorations.  I have two lines of research in philosophy: one is on self-knowledge and the other is on beliefs. In self-knowledge, I am part of a research trend that tries to expand the philosophical agenda in order to incorporate human concerns on the topic. Everybody knows that knowing oneself (e.g., one’s values or one’s deep desires) can be very difficult. However, philosophy has not been concerned with such difficulties. Philosophy has rather traditionally focused on a different issue, namely, on explaining how we know some of our thoughts in an apparently immediate and almost infallible way (e.g., if someone asks whether you believe it is raining now, you will have no problems in knowing immediately what you believe). Howev...

Here I am reporting from "Optimism – Its Nature, Causes, and Effects" (#optimismbias2016), an interdisciplinary workshop organised by Anneli Jefferson and myself as part of the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project . It took place in Senate House, London, on 25-26th February 2016, and featured both philosophers and psychologists as speakers and participants. We wanted to investigate whether the notion of unrealistic optimism is coherent and how its different manifestations relate to one another. For instance, does the disposition to discount evidence against the success of one’s performance lead to the acquisition of positive illusions about the self? In addition, we wanted experts to comment on the empirical evidence suggesting that unrealistic optimism has both costs and benefits. On day 1, Tali Sharot (UCL) kicked off the workshop. Tali (pictured above) asked how the human brain forms optimistic beliefs and reported recent findings from her lab. She focused o...