Imperfect Cognitions

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...

Does philosophy have a purpose outside academia? What does philosophy look like when it’s done beyond the walls of the lecture theatre and the seminar room? And who should get to do it? I got to think quite a bit about these questions recently. It was back at the start of 2017 that I travelled to London to meet some of the senior team from mental health charity Mind in Camden to discuss the possibility of developing a series of philosophy workshops, based on project PERFECT ’s research, and running them at Mind in Camden, for people with lived experience of unusual beliefs and experiences, and mental distress, as well as for service providers and mental health advocates. Mind in Camden runs training, support and capacity building services to benefit people who are struggling with mental distress, and I saw commonalities between its values and the sorts of conceptions of mental health and rationality that we’re arguing for through PERFECT. So, the organisation was a natural partn...