Imperfect Cognitions

My name is Kevin Lynch and I am currently a Research Fellow at University College Dublin, and gained my PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick in 2012. A lot of my current research activities relate to understanding self-deception and similar phenomena. I also have research interests in psychoanalysis, issues in metaphysics and epistemology, and the philosophy of information. One example of an ‘imperfect cognition’ which I investigated in a recent paper , is stubbornness. I outlined the similarities and differences between stubborn belief and self-deception. Both being stubborn in holding to a certain belief, and being self-deceived in believing something, seem to be examples of motivationally biased belief. Both can involve very similar behaviours, such as ignoring, dismissing, downplaying, or explaining away unwelcome evidence, and searching one-sidedly for welcome evidence or considerations. In fact, I argue that cases of stubborn belief satisfy the set of sufficien...

In this post Roberta Payne writes about the relationship between schizophrenia and art. Roberta earned a BA in classics from Stanford, an MA in Italian from UCLA, an MA in romance languages from Harvard, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Denver. She taught English, Latin, and Italian, and her published work includes literary translations from Italian, short stories, and articles on schizophrenia. In 2013 Roberta published a memoir,  Speaking to My Madness: How I Searched for Myself in Schizophrenia . Her article "My Outsider Art" has recently been published in the  Schizophrenia Bulletin , and is available open access. Although I’ve done art since I was a small child and studied art history formally in college, I didn’t find my artistic niche until I developed mental illness in my early 20s. Then I began a long love affair with what has been dubbed “outsider art,” the art of people variously marginalized in society, to distinguish it fro...

In this post, Ezio Di Nucci presents his book Mindlessness (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Di Nucci is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Universität Duisburg-Essen . His latest book is Ethics Without Intention . Philosophy is still hanging on to an over-intellectualistic picture of human judgement and agency – or Mindlessness by Ezio Di Nucci so I contend in my book. Our ability for thought is a useful resource, but one that we use less frequently than philosophers often assume – and that’s a good thing. Deliberation is not always the best way to deal with life’s challenges; on the contrary, we are often better off not thinking; other times we are just not worse off and it is therefore more efficient not to think. The book begins by looking at data which has been accumulating in behavioural and social psychology over the last few decades, especially with relation to habits, skilled performances and priming. Expert golfers, for example, perform better when under time pressur...

Jonathan Farrell My name is Jonathan Farrell , and I am a post-doc at the University of Manchester on Tim Bayne’s Architecture of Consciousness project. I am interested in providing a taxonomy of seemings —   the states we are in when things seem some way to us. In this post I will try to explain why a taxonomy would be useful. In brief: there are different kinds of seemings, and we have different, non-equivalent, ways of ascribing seemings to subjects. Thus philosophers need to be careful when and how they use ‘seem’ to make sure that their arguments do not equivocate and that they do not talk past each other. Providing a taxonomy of seemings can help us to avoid these problems. In everyday speech it is common to talk about some of our mental states by using ‘seem’: the stick half in water, for example, seems bent to me, and it seems that this winter will be colder than last winter. Philosophers also talk about seemings. Indrek Reiland ( 2014) appeals to seemings to reso...

Kenneth Kendler This is a report on the 2014 Oxford Loebel Lectures by Rebecca Roache , Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. The biopsychosocial model in psychiatry tells us that psychiatric disorders arise from a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. But how do causes at these three ‘levels’ interact, and how do we put this insight to use in treating mental illness? Professor Kenneth Kendler addressed these questions in Oxford’s inaugural Loebel Lectures . In his first lecture (which you can watch here or listen to here ), Kendler shared fascinating empirical data to demonstrate the aetiological complexity of psychiatric disorders. He showed that whilst one’s genes can make it more likely that one will suffer certain disorders, the causal pathway does not run directly from genes to the development of a disorder. Rather, causal pathways often—to use Kendler’s expression—‘loop out’ into the environment. For example, having a g...

Henry Taylor My name is Henry Taylor and I have recently submitted my PhD in philosophy at Durham University. In this post, I would like to discuss some issues that I address in my paper ‘Is Attention Necessary and Sufficient for Phenomenal Consciousness?’ With some notable exceptions, attention has until relatively recently been neglected as a topic in its own right in analytic philosophy. This has occurred despite its widespread use in fields as diverse as aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. However, in the last few years this attitude has radically and suddenly shifted, and attention is one of the most exciting topics in contemporary philosophy of psychology. One of the most striking questions within this domain is whether it is possible to use attention to explain consciousness. Amongst many psychologists, and philosophers, there is hope that by studying consciousness in terms of attention, the problem of consciousness may turn out to be empirically tractable. ...

Dear all As part of PERFECT we want to promote further investigation into whether false beliefs can be advantageous, due to their being biologically adaptive, enhancing wellbeing, being conducive to the satisfaction of epistemic goals, or promoting some other form of agential success. In the psychological literature, self-deception, positive illusions, delusions, confabulatory explanations, and other instances of false belief have been regarded as beneficial in some sense, but there has not yet been a systematic study of their role in supporting different aspects of human agency within philosophy.  The workshop we are planning for February 2016 aims at filling that gap. We welcome theoretical papers from researchers in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of biology, and psychology. Themes and research questions Some beliefs seem to have an important role in supporting human agency: they can make us feel better about ourselves and ev...

In this post I interview Duncan Pritchard , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Eidyn Research Centre . Duncan is currently leading two inter-related Eidyn projects on the topic of intellectual humility, both of which receive the majority of their funding from the Templeton Foundation. The first is an outreach project entitled ‘ Intellectual Humility MOOC ’. The other principal investigator on this project is Dr Ian Church. The aim of this project is to produce and run a Massive Open Online Course (or ‘MOOC’) on the topic of intellectual humility. The second project is a research project entitled ‘ Virtue Epistemology, Epistemic Dependence, and Intellectual Humility ’. The other principal investigator on this project is Prof Jesper Kallestrup. The aim of this project is to develop an anti-individualistic version of virtue epistemology and to explore the relationship between epistemic dependency and intellectual humility.

My name is Misia Temler and I am a forensic psychologist and a PhD candidate in Cognitive Science supervised by Professor Amanda Barnier , Professor John Sutton , and Associate Professor Doris McIlwain at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . My PhD research investigates how our memory of recent personal events changes over subsequent retellings. Misia Temler Take a moment to remember your 21st birthday or other milestone birthday, or first date with your current partner. These events are often remembered quite vividly in detail as they are typically emotional, salient, and have frequently been retold on numerous occasions. Would it surprise you that some of these seemingly vivid details can change in just a week when you retell your event? Perhaps on your first date your partner wore a red shirt and not a blue shirt, or maybe that first date actually took place at noon and not in the evening. Did you feel happy and excited or did you...

This week we feature a report on a conference on the dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis. The author, Marthe Kerkwijk , is a graduate student at Heythrop College, University of London. Senate House, London On Friday 17th and Saturday 18th of October, Heythrop College, London , the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Psychoanalysis co-organised a conference on the dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Philosophers' critical evaluations of the methodologies of psychoanalysis are well known, but in the last few decades philosophy and psychoanalysis have mutually influenced each other in more constructive ways. The conference brought together prominent scholars whose work navigates the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis in order to reinforce fruitful dialogue between both disciplines. Jonathan Lear , professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and psychoanalyst, delivered the keynote address. The conference took place in...

Avram Hiller My name is Avram Hiller , and I am Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Portland State University. I work in several different areas of philosophy in the analytic tradition. My work in epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge and, in particular, what the external environment must be like for an individual to have knowledge in it. According to some theories of knowledge, it is impossible for someone to know something if the person’s belief is based upon a false belief. But an appeal to social aspects of belief formation casts this criterion into doubt. For it is not uncommon for a helpful individual to convey a point to someone else using a falsehood. Consider the following case, which appears in a recent publication of mine: Natasha is a spy in the field. Messages to her from Headquarters often are detected by enemy intelligence, and Headquarters is aware of that. Today, Headquarters needs to communicate to Natasha that her contact will be ...

Epistemic Innocence logo Dear Readers Two of our posts had been shortlisted for the 3QD Philosophy Prize.  In the semi-finals went both  Epistemic Injustice and Illness  by Ian James Kidd and Havi Carel (19 Aug 2014) and  Sadder but Wiser? Interview with Jennifer Radden  by Magdalena Antrobus (6 Nov 2014). The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/vote-for-one-of-the-nominees-for-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2014.html#sthash.I74D2I9T.dpuf The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/vote-for-one-of-the-nominees-for-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2014.html#sthash.I74D2I9T.dpufThe The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/vote-for-one-of-the-nominees-for-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2014.html#sthash.I74D2I9 Unfor...

On August 25th and 26th, the Swiss Centre for the Affective Sciences held a workshop on epistemic emotions and epistemic feelings.  Epistemic emotions are a type of mental state that includes the feeling of understanding, the feeling of knowledge, and the feeling of interest.  The workshop was put on by the Phrontis research group on attention, interest, and epistemic emotions and organized by Anne Meylan and network member Richard Dub. The workshop opened with a presentation by Brian McLaughlin (Rutgers) entitled 'Delusions and Feelings'.  McLaughlin presented a model of the Capgras delusion (the delusion that a loved one has been replaced with an imposter).  McLaughlin argued that it is necessary to posit the "cognitive feeling" of unfamiliarity to explain how Capgras belief is acquired.  The experience of unfamiliarity has a strongly affective aspect that causes the sufferer to straightaway acquire the belief that the person in front of her is unfamiliar...

I am posting this on behalf of Andrea Polonioli, PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Andrea Polonioli My PhD project analyzes some recent developments in the ‘rationality debate’, which originated as a reaction to the body of research that has followed Kahneman and Tversky’s work within the Heuristics-and-Biases project. Empirical evidence suggested that people are prone to widespread and systematic reasoning errors, and pessimistic views of human rationality have been quite popular in the psychological literature. However, this picture has also attracted fierce criticisms, and several researchers have recently questioned pessimistic assessments of human rationality by emphasizing the central importance of evolutionary considerations in our understanding of rationality.  In a paper I recently published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences I present some steps already taken in my project. In particular, I critically discuss some research that has come togeth...

Dear Readers Three of our posts have been nominated for the 3QD Philosophy Prize: Epistemic Injustice and Illness by Ian James Kidd and Havi Carel, 19 Aug 2014 Sadder but Wiser? Interview with Jennifer Radden by Magdalena Antrobus, 6 Nov 2014 The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/vote-for-one-of-the-nominees-for-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2014.html#sthash.I74D2I9T.dpuf The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/vote-for-one-of-the-nominees-for-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2014.html#sthash.I74D2I9T.dpufThe The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/vote-for-one-of-the-nominees-for-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2014.html#sthash.I74D2I9 The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations by Sam Wilkinson, 9...

On Saturday 4th October, the 10th Meeting of the Mind Network was held at University of York, organised by Louise Richardson . The meeting was supported by the Department of Philosophy at the University of York, and the Mind Association. Dominic Gregory from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield opened the meeting with his paper ‘Perception and Imagery’. Gregory was interested in what he called ‘distinctively sensory representations’, which are imagistic representations standing in a special relationship to our sensory powers. Gregory tried to do two things in the paper. First, he gave an account of the contents possessed by distinctively sensory representations, so-called ‘distinctively sensory’ contents. Gregory offered an explanation of the way in which distinctively sensory contents depend upon sensory experience. Second, Gregory discussed the possibility that the dependency relations between distinctively sensory contents and sensory experience mi...

Bojana Kuzmanovic My name is Bojana Kuzmanovic, I am a postdoctoral researcher working in an interdisciplinary setting at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at the Jülich Research Centre  in Germany. I am a cognitive neuroscientist/psychologist by training and my work focuses on person perception and emotional influences on decision making. Here I am going to discuss recent work on the emotional value of self-related optimistic belief updates. Recently,  Anneli Jefferson reported a behavioral study investigating the optimism bias by using a belief update paradigm inspired by Sharot et al. ( 2011 ). The findings show that when confronted with new information, people adjusted their initial risk estimates for undesirable future events to a greater extent when this information supported more positive outlooks than when it suggested a higher risk for future hazards ( Kuzmanovic et al., under revision ). Moreover, this asymmetry in updating was greater for j...

Dear Imperfect Cognitions readers If you have read a post you really liked on our blog in the last year why don't you nominate it for the 3quarksdaily Philosophy Prize? A few hours left to nominate! Details here ! The Imperfect Cognitions Team

Logo of The Human Mind Project I'm Mattia Gallotti , Project Coordinator of The Human Mind Project . In this post, I report on a recent symposium entitled "Theory of Mind and the Social Mind". This was the third public event of The Human Mind Project and it took place on September 16th in the broader context of the 2014 annual meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) held in Noto, Sicily. Led by Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, The Human Mind Project highlights the contribution of the arts and humanities to the study of human nature, and the importance of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mind, integrating science and the humanities. In this spirit, the event - a symposium on “Theory of Mind and the Social Mind” - had presentations in social anthropology and neuroscience, by Rita Astuti (LSE) and Mina Cikara (Harvard) , about how recent advances in the research on shared cognition and group behaviour can ...

Anneli Jefferson I'm Anneli Jefferson , Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London, and I'm interested in philosophy of psychology and ethics, particularly in issues at the intersection of these two fields. People tend to systematically overestimate their own abilities and their likelihood of positive future outcomes and to underestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes. Most commonly, this optimism bias is measured at a group level. While it is clear that some people must be making overly optimistic judgments if, for example, 70% of people asked think that they are less likely than their peers to experience a car accident, it can be difficult to tell which individual person’s outlook is actually unrealistically optimistic. In a recent study , Sharot et al. used an update paradigm to measure the optimism bias at the individual level. Participants were asked to rate their likelihood of experiencing various negative events and were subsequently confronted wi...

Jennifer Radden This week we feature an interview with Jennifer Radden. Jennifer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of mental health and the ethics of psychiatry. She is the author of ‘Divided Minds and Successive Selves: Ethical Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality’, and ‘The Nature of Melancholy’. MA: In our project we investigate the idea that mental imperfections may carry some important epistemic benefits. Do you find it plausible to say that depression may carry some benefits of this kind, even if it is a harmful experience? JR: Answer: Harmful? Or painful? If it’s harmful also, then we’d need to do some weighing of relative harms and goods, I’d guess, for an overall assessment of the right kind, and my answer is: I don’t know… If you meant something more like painful, then yes, this is certainly the way people sometimes speak about these episodes, even using ‘no pain, ...

The Mental Health Foundation has made available on its website a literature review on truth-telling in dementia that I found really interesting to read. The review is part of an inquiry into distressing symptoms of dementia funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The reviewer is Yulia Kartalova-O'Doherty. The upshot of the inquiry is supposed to consist in practical recommendations for carers and healthcare professionals who find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, challenging the patient's beliefs when they are delusional (e.g., the belief that a loved one is still alive when she has been dead for some time, or the belief that the spouse is a deceitful impostor) causes considerable distress to the patient; on the other hand, not challenging the beliefs seems wrong as it involves lying or implies disrespect towards the patient. One of the findings of the literature review is that current guidelines to healthcare professionals do not justify lying, but in practice...

This is the second part of an interview with Professor Max Coltheart. You can read the first part of the interview here . ES-B: What you say about the generation of the alien abduction belief in 2011 is really interesting. You suggest that the generation of the belief might be due to abductive inference as applied to sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucination not due to specific neuropsychological impairments. But you point out that many people who have these experiences do not adopt the alien abduction belief, and so we need a second factor, which you suggest is the alien abduction belief being compatible with things one already believes (so people who have ‘New Age’ beliefs may well be more prone to forming the alien abduction belief if they experience sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucination). So this looks like the kind of thing a one-factor theorist might say about delusions more generally. What do you think the difference is between this kind of case, where the se...

This post is by Michael Larkin , co-investigator for project PERFECT . Michael Larkin I’m a psychologist, and I’m based in the clinical psychology training team at the University of Birmingham. I have a particular interest in phenomenological approaches to psychology, and most of my research involves asking phenomenological questions about various forms of anomalous or distressing experience (how do people make sense of these experiences?), or about the responses of various psychosocial and healthcare services to those experiences (what is it like to receive these interventions?). I’m particularly interested in the relational and cultural context of the answers to both of these questions, and this makes an interesting bridge to the work of PERFECT. From a psychological perspective, PERFECT is interesting because it invites us to see ‘delusions’ (strange beliefs, disproportionate commitments, or ‘factually-erroneous cognitions’) as having some functional value – some epistemic ...

Max Coltheart While visiting the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University , I interviewed Max Coltheart , Professor of Cognitive Science, on the topic of delusion formation. ES-B: According to the one-factor account of delusion formation, we need only appeal to an anomalous experience to explain why a subject comes to hold a delusional belief, it is only the kinds of experiences subjects with delusions have which sets them apart from the non-delusional population. What do you think is wrong with this account? MC: Whenever you identify an anomalous experience that you think is the cause of a delusion, you can always find patients who have that experience but are not deluded. We have done that systematically. We just go through a whole lot of different monothematic delusions—about eight or nine of them—proposing a first factor, showing that that’s a plausible source of the content of the belief and for each of those first factors showing th...

Magdalena Antrobus My research focuses on epistemic and pragmatic benefits of imperfect cognitions found in the clinical population. More specifically I am interested in acquiring answers related to the question of the possible positive sides of mental disorders. It is commonly known that mental illness constitutes a source of profound harm. It relates to individual suffering, distorts one’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes, and sometimes leads to severe impairment. However, the results of more recent psychological studies indicate that psychiatric disorders might be linked to particular benefits as well as causing pain. There has been a well-researched relationship between bipolar disorder and creativity. It is believed that certain clinical symptoms brought by the illness, for example thought speed or openness for new experiences, may contribute to enhanced creativity (see for instance Ghaemi, 2011 ; Andreasen, 2005 ; Jamison, 1996 ). (For more details see my ...

Martin Davies This is the third part of an interview with Professor Martin Davies on delusions. (Although this part can be read independently of the previous two, you may want to read also the first and second part of the interview if you haven't done so already!) LB: In the first stage of our project PERFECT we are going to ask whether delusions can have pragmatic and epistemic benefits. You and your collaborators have noticed how anosognosia (denial of illness), despite initially interfering with rehabilitation, can then lead to lower anxiety and protect from negative emotions ( Aimola Davies et al., 2009 ). Can you think of other examples of delusions having a positive psychological impact?  MKD: Let me begin by reviewing the findings that you mentioned in your question. Some researchers distinguish denial of illness from anosognosia and use the ‘denial’ terminology for cases with a ‘psychological’ rather than neurological aetiology. In our paper, we referred to a th...

Our project logo. My research so far has been on belief, and this is an area I will continue to focus on. I am interested in researching two main areas: first, how best to think about delusional beliefs when we look to the biological function of belief, and second, accounts of delusion formation. In my PhD I defended a biological account of belief according to which our mechanisms of belief-production have (at least) two biological functions proper to them. The first is the function to produce true beliefs, and the second is the function to produce useful beliefs. When I say ‘useful’, I do not mean useful an approximation to truth, but rather useful with respect to facilitating the effective functioning of the believer. I was mainly concerned with explaining the connection between belief and truth, and so much of the work was done by appeal to the function of producing true beliefs. However, towards the end of my thesis, I gestured towards the kind of explanatory work which m...

Mental Health Awareness Weeks logo Today, 10th October 2014, is World Mental Health Day. This year it is dedicated to living with schizophrenia. On this important occasion, Gareth Owen kindly agreed to discuss his fascinating work on schizophrenia and logic. Gareth is Clinical Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. People with schizophrenia do worse than others on many tasks. Indeed a global conclusion in the psychology of schizophrenia is that people with this disorder have somewhat lower IQ than those without – a conclusion that makes schizophrenia seem a disorder of cognition like dementia or learning disability. But this is an incomplete perspective. The phenomenology of schizophrenia also points in the direction of representational overactivity (1). Additionally, delusions, which people with schizophrenia often exhibit, are not explained by failures of formal inference such as inability to reason with modu...

Martin Davies This is the second part of an interview with Professor Martin Davies on delusions. You can read the first part of the interview here . LB: Presentations of the two-factor account of delusion formation usually begin with two questions. The first question is about where the content of the delusion came from and the second is about the adoption or persistence of the belief. The two factors are supposed to provide answers to these two questions. But it sounds as if you are distinguishing a question about adoption from a question about persistence (or maintenance). If there are more than two questions to be answered, will an explanation of a delusion have to appeal to more than two factors? MKD: Thank you for raising this issue of the relationship between questions and factors. It is quite important for understanding the two-factor framework. Questions about the aetiology of a delusion can be multiplied and, correspondingly, explanations of a delusion can be increasi...

In this post I would like to introduce our new project, PERFECT , which started a week ago and will last for five years. The next few weeks on the blog are dedicated to an initial exploration of the project themes, with posts by team members and interviews with people who have inspired us. (I interviewed Martin Davies, who was my PhD supervisor and introduced me to the psychological literature on delusions. The first part of the interview appeared here , and the second part will be published on Thursday). The project is funded by a European Research Council Consolidator grant awarded to me last December. The funding allows me to explore a novel idea and provides the resources for building a team. Currently, the PERFECT team includes Ema Sullivan-Bissett (post-doc) and Magdalena Antrobus (PhD student) who are based in the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham. Other two post-doctoral researchers and another PhD student will join the team at a later stage....

Martin Davies The Imperfect Cognitions blog is celebrating the launch of our new project, PERFECT . On Thursdays for the next month or so, we will publish a series of interviews with people who have inspired us to pursue the themes of the project. As part of this series,  Martin Davies (Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College) kindly agreed to answer some questions about delusions. The interview will be published in three parts. LB: Thank you for helping us launch PERFECT! When you started working on delusions, philosophical literature on the topic was scarce. Why did you find delusions interesting to start with? MKD: Congratulations, Lisa, on the launch of your new research project, supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant of nearly two million euros! Perfect, indeed. And thank you for the opportunity to answer some questions on your blog. I started to learn about delusions in the early 1990s from tal...

 Ken Pepper This post is by Ken Pepper , who recently submitted his PhD at the University of York. Amputees often feel 'phantom' sensations emanating from their missing limb (for a review, see Giummarra et al 2007 ). This entry discusses the role of action and perception in the constitution of these physically absent yet phenomenally present body parts. I urge the view that phantoms are to some extent enactive – they are constituted by active perceptual engagement with the world (see e.g. Noë 2004 ). Impressed by the way in which a blind man localised sensations at the tip of his cane, Head and Homes ( 1911 ) hypothesised that his brain must update its representation of bodily posture on the fly and treat the cane as part of his arm. It turns out that they were correct; neural representations of limb locations are highly adaptable and continually modified by vision, touch, and kinaesthesia. Experiments on macaques reveal that while using a rake to retrieve food, the recep...

In this post, Nils J. Nilsson presents his new book, Understanding Beliefs (MIT Press). Nilsson is Kumagai Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the author of The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements.  Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Some of our beliefs we call theories, and we are extraordinarily creative at constructing them. Theories of quantum mechanics, evolution, and relativity are examples. But so are theories about astrology, alien abduction, guardian angels, and reincarnation. All are products (with varying degrees of credibility) of fertile minds trying t...