Imperfect Cognitions

On 17 June at the University of Birmingham, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies organised a workshop on conspiracy theories and storytelling with a stellar line-up. This post is a report of the event. The workshop is part of a project called "Film, Storytelling and Conspiracies" funded by a University of Birmingham Research Incubator Hub. Conspiracy theories online First talk was by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) and was entitled "Conspiratorial Beliefs and Conspiracy Fantasies: Engaging with Wu Ming 1". The premise for the talk was that many think that conspiracy beliefs are on the rise and affect our political choices ("vibes-based politics"). One idea by Napolitano (2021) is that attempts to debunk conspiratorial beliefs with facts, evidence, and rational arguments do not work. Catarina aimed to respond to Napolitano. Catarina Dutilh Novaes Wu Ming (in Mandarin, "No Name") is a collective originating in Bologna, a group of writers active in liter...

On 11th and 12th April in beautiful Trento, the Foundation Bruno Kessler hosted the final conference of the two-year research project on Resilient Beliefs , organised by Eugenia Lancellotta and featuring a number of international speakers interested in conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, delusions, and similar phenomena. Programme of the conference The first speaker was Scott Hill (University of Innsbruck), highlighting problems for a prominent study on the use of "conspiracy theory". Hill started discussing Miranda Fricker's account of testimonial injustice and then argued that conspiracy theorists do not suffer from a credibility deficit. That is because the credibility they are assigned matches the credibility they deserve. Scott Hill The second speaker was Anna-Maria Asunta Eder (University of Cologne), also working in social epistemology, who discussed the phenomenon of learning from others and resisting the evidence of others. Eder aims to bring some issues wid...

The second day of the workshop on Conspiratorial Ideation and Psychopathology (Birmingham, 25th April 2023) opened up with a talk by the organisers, Anna Ichino from the University of Milan and Ema Sullivan-Bissett from the University of Birmingham. The talk addressed heads-on the theme of the workshop: does the overlap between conspiracy beliefs and delusions mean that conspiracy beliefs are pathological? Anna Ichino and  Ema Sullivan-Bissett Why do we think that delusions are pathological? They flout epistemic norms, but many other (non delusional) beliefs do the same, so this is not a promising criterion for pathology. Another option is that delusions have strange content, but again other beliefs also have strange content such as paranormal beliefs or QAnon beliefs. A more promising criterion of pathology for beliefs is an etiological one: pathological beliefs involve a malfunction. Monothematic delusions can be considered as pathological because they may arise out of anomalo...

Here is the fifth post in our series on social approaches to delusions. Today, Phil Corlett raises some concerns about the arguments proposed in favour of a social turn in the previous posts, offering a different perspective. Phil Corlett Lots of people I like and respect who think about delusions have recently decided that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to delusions. I call this the social turn . The preceding blog posts in this fascinating series suggest: 1) That we give testimony about the quality of other individuals as sources of testimony, and as such, we should define delusions and (given their social contents) delusions arise within individuals, through inherently social processes. 2) That testimonial abnormalities might be domain specific and dissociable from general reasoning abnormalities, and further that the socially specific deficit is one of coalitional cognition – how we form and sustain alliances with conspecifics. 3) That...

Today's post is by Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University) and it is the first in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Here Kengo talks about his new paper with Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) “ Social Epistemological Conception of Delusion ” (open access in  Synthese ). Kengo Miyazono The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic ( Broome & Bortolotti 2009 ). Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of some epistemic notion, e.g., evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. For instance, DSM-5 characterizes delusions as “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence ” (italics added: p. 87), and they are said to be “based on incorrect inference about external reality” and “firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary” (italics added:...

Today's post is by Finlay Malcolm , a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. He is currently researching on the nature, value and epistemology of faith, the ethics of testimony, and non-realist approaches to religion. Imagine that you’re having lunch with a good friend. You’re discussing work and you tell her that you were recently given an award for excellent achievement – something you’re very proud of. She has no reason to disbelieve your testimony: she knows that you’re a good worker, and that you don’t make things up. Nevertheless, she doesn’t believe what you say. What’s more, she explicitly informs you that she doesn’t believe your testimony. Why won’t she believe what you’ve told her? Suppose that her reasons are that she thinks you’re making things up to make yourself sound better at your job than you actually are. That is, she thinks that you’re lying. But of course, she has no good reason to think that you’re lying. The fact that she doesn’t believe...

This post is by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, and previous Research Fellow on Project PERFECT . Together with Helen Bradley and Paul Noordhof , I have edited a collection Art and Belief , recently published with Oxford University Press. The volume consists of twelve new essays at the intersection of philosophy of mind and art. Our appreciation of artworks raises substantial challenges for our understanding of the cognitive attitudes involved, specifically, beliefs and related attitudes. Some of our beliefs concern the quality of the work in question. Others will derive from the content of the work, reflecting the commonly held view of art as a source of truth and knowledge. Both kinds of belief bring challenges for orthodox understandings of belief. The volume is divided into four sections which explore a variety of questions on art and the nature of belief. Section I: Author Testimony Can we form justified beliefs upo...

Each year, the University of Birmingham hosts the Arts &Science Festival , a week-long celebration of research, culture and collaboration across campus and beyond. During the festival, those involved in different aspects of university life deliver a programme of concerts, exhibitions, screenings, talks and workshops around a common theme. This year’s theme “Land and Water” had us at project PERFECT thinking about perceptions of climate change, and in the following, I report on a lunchtime event that we hosted on this topic, in which we were joined by Ulrike Hahn (Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Birkbeck, below) and Anna Bright (‎Chief Executive at Sustainability West Midlands). Why should those researching imperfect cognitions be interested in perceptions of climate change? Well, it turns out that the former frequently feature in, and shape, the latter. We see lots of things, beyond the consideration of climactic data, influence whether people beli...

In this post Allan Hazlett  (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, summarises his paper " On the Special Insult of Refusing Testimony ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. My paper is inspired by two remarks made by J.L. Austin and G.E.M. Anscombe. In “Other Minds” (1946), Austin writes that “[i]f I have said I know or I promise, you insult me in a special way by refusing to accept it,” and, in “What Is It to Believe Someone?” (1979), Anscombe writes that that “[i]t is an insult … not to be believed.” The goal of my paper is to give an account of why you can insult someone by refusing her testimony. I take my paradigm case of the special insult of refusing testimony from David Foster Wallace’s (2004) story entitled “Oblivion.”...

This post is by Aleea Devitt (pictured above), a recent PhD student in the School of Psychology at the University of Aukland. In this post Aleea summarises her paper ' Factors That Influence the Generation of Autobiographical Memory Conjunction Errors ',  co-written with Edwin Monk-Fromont, Daniel L. Schacter, and Donna Rose Addis,  published in Memory. When remembering a past event, we typically cannot pluck a whole memory neatly from our brains, as we would a folder from a filing cabinet. The individual features comprising a memory are distributed throughout our brains, so remembering a past experience is more similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle; all the pieces must be located and assembled correctly to construct a coherent memory. This constructive memory system provides a flexibility that is generally adaptive (Schacter, Guerin, and St Jacques 2011 ), in that we can update memories with new information (Lee 2009 ), and assemble memory fragments in ...

On Friday 27th November, project PERFECT (Department of Philosophy), together with the Aberrant Experience and Belief research theme (School of Psychology), held a mini-workshop on the topic of Belief and Emotion . In this post I summarise the three talks given by Allan Hazlett , Neil Levy , and Carolyn Price .  Allan Hazlett opened the workshop with his paper ‘On the Special Insult of Refusing Testimony’. He argued that refusing someone’s testimony (i.e. not believing what someone tells you) is insulting, and to express such refusal amounts to a special kind of insult. Understanding telling as an attempt to engage in information sharing, Hazlett suggested that in telling someone that p, I am asking that person to believe that p because I believe it. Refusing my testimony would be to insult me because it constitutes the person's not trusting me. Hazlett concluded by asking why it is that not trusting would be insulting? He canvassed four ideas to answer this question, la...