Imperfect Cognitions

This week's contribution is from Joe Pierre on his paper Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World? ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2023). Back in 2021, Ema Sullivan-Bissett invited me to participate in a multidisciplinary workshop at the University of Birmingham to tackle the question, “are conspiracy theory beliefs pathological?” While the workshop didn’t take place until the Spring of 2023, getting together to discuss the topic and hear lectures from philosophers and psychologists whose work I knew well, but had never met in person—like Lisa Bortolotti, Karen Douglas, Stephan Lewandowsky, Anna Ichino, and Kengo Miyazono—was well worth the wait. And in the meantime, Dr. Sullivan-Bissett also invited me to contribute to a special issue of the journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology on “Conspiratorial Ideation and Psychopathology.” Joseph Pierre For the article I wrote, I chose the title “Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World?...

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori (Hokkaido University) on his recent paper " Folk Intuitions About Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Evaluating the Combined Effects of Misunderstandings About Determinism and Motivated Cognition " ( Cognitive Science 2024), co-authored with Yusuke Haruki (The University of Tokyo) and Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University). Kiichi Inarimori Philosophers have long debated whether free will—a prerequisite for moral responsibility—is compatible with determinism. Central to these discussions are the intuitions people form when considering moral responsibility in hypothetical scenarios. Yusuke Haruki With the rise of experimental philosophy, numerous studies have explored folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Some experiments suggest that people tend toward “compatibilism,” the view that free will and determinism can coexist, especially in concrete cases of wrongdoing. Others suggest a lean toward “incompatibilism,” th...

Today's post is by Kristoffer Moody ( University of Edinburgh ) on his recent paper, " The Manipulationist Threat to moral responsibility " ( Synthese 2024). Kristoffer Moody We all have that one relative, let’s call him Antonio, who, at family gatherings, irritates us by expounding on how vaccines cause autism, that the election was stolen, or other strange, problematic, or offensive beliefs. While it’s tendentious whether or not we can hold Antonio responsible for holding those beliefs, it may seem clear that we can hold him responsible for acting on the basis of those beliefs. However, I claim using evidence from psychology that Antonio may have been manipulated in the formation of his belief. I claim, on the basis of evidence of our propensity towards choice-blindness, the ‘truth effect’, and confirmation bias, that we are far more susceptible to manipulation than we might pre-theoretically think, and that we appear to be particularly so susceptible via social medi...

This post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck (MA), academic, expert by experience and choreographer, who recently attended and talked at  Too Mad to Be True III: Paradoxes of Madness , held on October 30–31, 2024, at the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium. The conference was organised by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University), Bart Marius (Director of the Dr. Guislain Museum), and Wouter Kusters (Foundation for Psychiatry & Philosophy).  Opening speech by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University) This year’s theme explored the notion of contradiction and paradox in madness, philosophy, and related fields. With over 60 speakers, including five keynote presenters, the conference offered a remarkable diversity of perspectives that challenged conventional understandings of madness. Despite the breadth of content and the tight two-day schedule, the experience was intense, deeply enriching, and empowering.  Many speakers lived with or had personal experiences of madness, bringing an i...

Today's post is from Karl Landström on his paper ' On Epistemic Freedom and Epistemic Injustice ', recently published in  Inquiry . Karl Landström ‘Seek ye epistemic freedom first’ is how Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni begins his book  Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization  (2018, 1). Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book is a detailed study of the politics of knowing and knowledge production with emphasis on what he calls ‘the African struggle for epistemic freedom’. He locates the struggle for epistemic freedom in the continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within colonial, Euro- and North America-centric matrices of power.  The central contribution of the book is the development of a general account of epistemic freedom. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, epistemic freedom entails the right to think, theorise and develop one’s own methodologies to interpret the world, and write from where one is located unencumbered by Eurocentrism. Further, he argues tha...

Today's post is by Radu Bumbăcea on his recently published paper " Imagining Emotions " ( Erkenntnis ). Radu Bumbăcea We all want to understand other people, and a central part of this understanding involves imagining their emotions ‘from the inside’. A key idea in the philosophy of emotions is that an emotion modifies the emoter’s experience of its object, that the emotion  ‘colours’   the world : someone who is afraid of a dog experiences that dog as fearsome. In imagining an emotion E, therefore, the imaginer is supposed to gain some access into how the world is coloured by emotion E without having E oneself. So far, the main approach to imagining emotions has been the simulationist one. According to such an approach, imagining an emotion is essentially having that emotion offline. In further metaphorical terms, we can say that imagining an emotion would involve building in one’s mind a copy of that emotion that is somehow marked as not-the-real-thing.  This idea is o...