Imperfect Cognitions

My name is Marina Trakas and I am finishing a PhD on philosophy of memory. I am affiliated with the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University (Sydney) and the Institut Jean Nicod (Paris), working under the supervision of John Sutton and Jérôme Dokic .   My project aims to develop a general framework for understanding the content of autobiographical and episodic memory experiences as they are lived by human beings in everyday situations. In my thesis, first, I defend the idea that our memories can change through time and so their content can be “enriched” as well as the thesis that our episodic and autobiographical memories cannot be always reduced to a simple verbal description of what happened in our past but they are often charged with evaluative and emotional components. Second, I explore the implications of this conceptualization of our autobiographical and personal memories for judging when our memory experience is faithful to our past. For these purposes, ...

Aleea Devitt In our first blog post we discussed how a consequence of the constructive nature of memory is that we are susceptible to memory distortions. In this post I hope to bring together theories of how changes in the brain can increase susceptibility to false beliefs and memories as we age. Healthy aging is associated with reduced memory accuracy, as well as increased susceptibility to memory distortions, which can have serious consequences on the quality of life for older adults. For example, an individual might be confused about whether they had taken their medication or just imagined taking it. Older adults also tend to be more confident in their memory errors , which can have implications for everyday social interactions as well as more formal situations such as eye witness testimony.

Helen Beebee I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester. My research is mostly in the area of metaphysics, but I am also co-chair of the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) committee for women in philosophy, and I have recently been spending quite a lot of time thinking about unconscious bias and the role it might play in the underrepresentation of women in philosophy. Women are unquestionably underrepresented in philosophy. In the UK, women make up about half of all philosophy undergraduates, but only about 30% of PhD candidates and 20% of professors – a figure nearly as low as in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The numbers are similar in the USA, Australia and elsewhere. There are doubtless many and varied reasons for this, but – in a discipline in which, like STEM disciplines, the dominant stereotype is male – implicit bias surely plays a major role.

Rachel Cooper I’m a philosopher working mainly on conceptual problems surrounding the DSM (the main classification of mental disorders used by psychiatrists). This post looks at how a certain type of epistemic imperfection – ambiguity – can be the strategically useful, by considering the definition of mental disorder in the most recent edition of the DSM (DSM-5, published 2013).    During its development, two distinct definitions of “mental disorder” were drafted for the DSM-5. The first was an iteration of the previous DSM definition and took mental disorder to be a value-laden concept, i.e. it claimed that disorders are necessarily harmful. The second definition characterized mental disorder as mental dysfunction, and aimed to offer a value-free account. The working groups said that a decision between these two definitions would be made at a later date. Note that philosophers of medicine generally hold that value-laden and value-free accounts of disorder are competing...

Anna Ichino My PhD focuses on the relationships between belief and imagination. After having posted, together with Greg , on beliefs from fiction , now I’d like to talk of religious beliefs. How this is related to imagination, hopefully will become clearer in what follows. Though we all commonly talk of superstitious and religious beliefs, I see reasons to doubt that, in many cases, they really are beliefs; and even to doubt that, in spite of appearances, we really take them to be beliefs. My doubts may look more plausible for superstitions: perhaps you already agree with me that few normally educated adults in our society really believe that walking under ladders brings bad luck. Religious ideas, however, seem to be different – far more serious things: why to deny that people really believe them?  

This is the last in a series of posts on epistemic innocence, and it is about memory. In the context of dementia and other psychiatric disorders featuring serious memory impairments, some distorted memories seem to present us with a trade-off between accuracy and wellbeing. Autobiographical memories are often distorted to fill gaps in knowledge about the past, or are distorted in a self-enhancing way, and thus such memory reports may increase one's self-confidence and ultimately one's wellbeing if they go unchallenged. However, the price to pay is that memory reports lack correspondence with reality, and this compromises the person’s knowledge of her past. In the project, we argue that it is too simplistic to embrace the trade-off view, because distorted memories can carry significant epistemic benefits that would be unattainable without such memories. To characterise the status of cognitions that are inaccurate, but also epistemically beneficial, we are developing the no...

This is the fourth in a series of posts  Lisa  and I are writing on Epistemic Innocence. So far Lisa has introduced the two conditions we think characterize epistemic innocence , I have written about the Availability Condition , and Lisa has written about the Epistemic Benefit condition . In this post I want to outline some reasons for thinking that delusional beliefs, at least sometimes, meet these two conditions. In her next post, Lisa will apply the notion of epistemic innocence to memory.