Imperfect Cognitions

In this post Miriam McCormick (pictured above), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond, summarises her paper on " Rational Hope ", 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. History and literature are filled with examples of people in horrific, desperate situations where having hope seemed essential for their survival. And yet, holding on to “false hope” can be devastating and can also condone inaction, where hoping for a change replaces working for that change. It also can seem that finding hope in a hopeless situation must be irrational. Is the choice between rational despair and irrational hope? I don’t think so; there are times when hope is rational but it is not always so. My main aim in this p...

This post is by Miriam McCormick , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond. Miriam presents her new book, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief (Routledge, 2015), pictured above. When I first had a student tell me that she doesn’t believe in evolution I was at a loss of how to respond. To me, that sounded like someone telling me that she didn’t believe in gravity. It seemed both irrational and wrong. Experiences like this are common; we think that one’s actual belief can deviate from how one ought to believe. The dominant view among contemporary philosophers is that any belief formed against the evidence is impermissible. On such a view, which I call “evidentialism,” it is easy to diagnosis what is wrong with my student’s belief. I use the term “pragmatism” to refer to the view that some non-evidentially based beliefs are permissible. A central aim of this book is to defend pragmatism. One challenge to the pragmatist view I ...

This post is by Carolina Flores  on evidence responsiveness in delusions. A paper on the same topic has been published open access in  Synthese . Carolina  Flores Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the evidence-responsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I argue that (for the most part) delusions are evidence-responsive—in the sense that subjects have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence on their de...

Today's post is by Cory Davia, who is a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and the Director of Summer Programming for the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. He works on metaethics, philosophy of action, social epistemology, and the philosophy of sports. Cory Davia When we are making up our minds about some issue, we look at the evidence. But we’re not just concerned with what evidence there is; we also need to think about whether this evidence is good enough. For example, suppose I want to know whether it will rain tomorrow. I haven’t checked the weather report, so my evidence is just what’s provided to me by my familiarity with the seasonal weather patterns in Southern California where I live. Is this evidence good enough to justify me in believing that it will be sunny? Or for that belief to count as knowledge?  Many philosophers have thought that the answer is: it depends on the practical stakes. If being wrong about this would ruin my plan...

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...

On 6th and 7th November, Ema Sullivan Bissett organised a conference on  Belief, Imagination, and Delusion  at the University of Birmingham. The PERFECT team attended the event and this report is the result of their collective effort! Anna Ichino on imagination Paul Noordhof on aim of belief Sophie Archer (Cardiff University) started the conference with a discussion of delusion and belief, inviting us to learn some lessons from the implicit bias literature. When the avowed anti-racist says all races are equal but does not behave in ways consistent to this belief, then we assume that there is an additional mental state (not open to consciousness) that is responsible for those behaviours. Is this additional mental state a belief? Archer argues that it is not. On the background, there is a thesis about belief. Even if a mental state responds directly to epistemic reasons, this is necessary but not sufficient for the mental state to be a belief (Epistemic Reasons). ...

This post is by Robert Noggle (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. Robert is interested in psychological conditions that appear to undermine or threaten personal autonomy. His other main interests are in normative and applied ethics. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Belief, Quasi-Belief, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ’, published in Philosophical Psychology.  Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is fascinating because it can lead to a radical disconnect between professed belief on the one hand, and affect, motivation, and behaviour on the other. Someone with OCD might sincerely profess her disbelief in the idea, say, that flipping a light switch poses a significant fire hazard if you do not do it just right. Yet such a person might also feel anxiety when flipping a switch, and a strong urge to flip it repeatedly to get it just right. Of course, psychologists face the puzzle of how people get into such a state, a...

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...

Anna Ichino Thanks Joshua for your great post . I find your question about the rationality of religious beliefs* really interesting, and I’m sympathetic with your way of approaching it. I’ve just got a few doubts on some aspects of your answer on which I’d like to know more. (* To be clear: by ‘religious beliefs’ here I refer, roughly, to the attitudes that religious people commonly avow, calling them ‘religious beliefs’ .) I think I agree with most of your claims; notably, with the negative ones. I surely agree that typical instances of religious beliefs are NOT beliefs-that: I argued along these lines in my last post . And I agree that, insofar as it is true that they’re not beliefs-that, religious beliefs are NOT irrational: it’s precisely because I take religious people to be as rational and sensible as anyone else that I don’t think they really believe that God exists (indeed, my position on this developed also as a reaction against positions – such as those of so-called...

This post is by Manuel Almagro  (University of Valencia). Here he presents his new book, The Rise of Polarization (Routledge 2025). Book cover When I was young, I used to think that doing things you don’t like or that don’t represent you was always wrong. I also believed that all politicians were cut from the same cloth. If asked, I could give reasons for those beliefs. But I hadn’t arrived at them by carefully considering arguments or evidence; they just felt perfectly natural and obviously true, given my experiences and environment at the time. Today, I wouldn’t hold such beliefs. Is that because I’ve been exposed to arguments against them? Not really. I’ve changed through living, talking, and sharing experiences with people who see things differently. Friction with others, especially those who care about us, is essential for reflecting on what’s right, how we should live, and what we should believe. The experiences I’ve gone through have made me more receptive to the pull of ce...

On 17-18th March, The New Insights and Directions for Religious Epistemology project at the University of Oxford hosted a workshop on defeat and religious epistemology. Papers were given by Charity Anderson (Oxford), J. Adam Carter (Edinburgh), Maria Lasonon-Aarnio (Michigan), John Pittard (Yale Divinity School), Edward Wierenga (Rochester) and Michael Bergmann (Purdue). The workshop began with a discussion of Anderson’s paper on Defeat, Testimony and Miracles. Anderson considered the rationality of believing in a miracle report in Hume’s infamous essay of Miracles. Anderson discussed the role epistemic defeat plays in Hume’s argument and she claimed that Hume’s central claim is not, as is often thought, that testimony is a weak source of knowledge, but rather, that some kinds of testimony, namely testimony to the miraculous, are unreliable.

This week's blogpost is from Browyn Finnigan, associate professor at Australian National University, on her recent publication  Self-related processing removal or revision? The Buddhist theory of no-self and the mechanisms of mindfulness  in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.  Browyn Finnigan There is strong evidence that mindfulness helps reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. But scientists are less certain about the mechanisms behind these effects. Inspired by the Buddhist idea of anattā, or no-self, some suggest that mindfulness works by attenuating or reducing all senses of self. Proponents argue that mindfulness fosters disidentification from one’s experience and reduces rumination, which plays a significant role in anxiety and depression. They infer that the benefits of mindfulness arise from decreasing rumination through a reduction in all kinds of ‘self-related processing’ (SRP). Drawing on the research of Britton and Lindahl, I argue that there is little...

The eighth meeting of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy (SEFA) took place in Oviedo, Spain, from 10 th –12 th November, 2016. Over 70 speakers presented their research during the three-day conference, and here I summarise just some of the papers given on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Juan Comesaña , of the University of Arizona, gave the first keynote talk, on rationality and falsity in belief and action. He proposed that some false beliefs can be rational. Consider, for instance, the pre-Einsteinian belief in the additivity of speed. There is a persuasive sense in which this belief was once rational, even though strictly speaking it is false. In defence of the notion that falsehoods can sometimes be rationally believed, Comesaña argued that rational action requires rational belief, and that we can sometimes act rationally on the basis of false beliefs. He demonstrated that this view survives translation into a traditional decision the...

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...

Today's post is by Jeroen de Ridder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Michael Hannon (University of Nottingham). Their post is based on their chapter ‘The Point of Political Belief’ to appear in the Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology (forthcoming in 2021), which they edited together. About a week after CNN and most other major news outlets had called the 2020 US election for Joe Biden, secretary of state Mike Pompeo stated in a press conference : “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” This is just one example of a political belief that seems, shall we say, slightly out of touch with reality. There are others: one out of seven survey respondents agree with the statement “Barack Obama is the antichrist” and one out of seven Trump supporters maintain that the half-empty photo of Trump’s 2017 inauguration has more people than a photo of Obama’s packed 2009 inauguration. Do people really believe these things, in the same way they believe, s...

Joshua Cockayne Firstly, I’d like thank Anna , Jon and Gary for their insightful comments and for raising some interesting areas to follow up. I will try to respond to these as best as possible. First, I will respond to the question concerning religious diversity: the worry raised was that my defence of theistic belief would allow us to defend the rationality of incompatible beliefs such as beliefs in Hinduism and Christianity.  I should clarify that the kinds of experience I had in mind, which provide immediate justification for theistic belief would be experiences of God as a person but not necessarily of the God of Christianity or Islam, for example.  The kinds of experience I am interested in are much more basic in nature, such as ‘I am having an experience of a loving God’. This issue should be kept separate from the issue of which religion is closer to the truth, but it is interesting to note that my account will only apply to religions that rely on a persona...

As part of a British Academy project on Conspiratorial Ideation and Pathological Beliefs, Ema Sullivan-Bissett (University of Birmingham) and Anna Ichino (University of Milan) organised a workshop in Birmingham with speakers from philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. In this post, I summarise the workshop talks on day one, 24th April 2023. Workshop poster Psychologist  Karen Douglas kicked off the workshop talking about the psychology of conspiracy theories, asking why people believe in conspiracy theories and what the consequences are of believing conspiracy beliefs. Douglas started with a psychologist's definition of a conspiracy theory: "A belief that two or more actors have coordinated in secret to achieve an outcome. It is a conspiracy that the public should know about." For Douglas, conspiracy beliefs respond to three types of needs: Epistemic needs: finding meaning and explanation, addressing uncertainty, seeing patterns, wanting closure. People more likely to ...