Skip to main content

Workshop - Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions

University of Birmingham
On May 8th and 9th there will be a two-day workshop at the University of Birmingham, discussing some of the key themes in the Epistemic Innocence project.

The workshop will be one of the means by which the project interim results are disseminated, and will promote an exchange between philosophers and psychologists on the potential pragmatic and epistemic benefits and costs of beliefs, memories, implicit biases, and explanations. It will also be a venue for Imperfect Cognitions network members to meet and talk about their research, and think about potential areas for future collaboration.

The workshop is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and has also received the support of the Analysis Trust. This made it possible to subsidise the registration fee, and award workshop bursaries to the graduate students attending. Abstracts for the talks can be found here. If you wish to participate, register by 15th March 2014 or follow live-tweeting by @epistinnocence.

If you want to know more about the project, articles featuring research on epistemic innocence have been published in the OUP Blog and the Philosophy@Birmingham blog in February and The Reasoner in March.


Workshop Programme

Thursday 8th May
10:00-10:30 - Arrival and registration with tea and coffee served

10:30-11:30 - Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway) and Maarten Boudry (University of Ghent): "In Defence of False Beliefs?"

11:30-11:40 - Comfort break

11:40-12:40 - Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham): "Epistemic Costs and Benefits of Delusional Beliefs".

12:40-14:00 - Lunch

14:00-15:00 - Katerina Fotopoulou (University College London): "Inferring the Self: Neurological Exaggerations of Normally Imperfect Inferences about the Body".

15:00-16:00 - Martin Conway (City University London): "Memory, Reality, and Consciousness in the Remembering-Imaging System".

16:00-16:30 - Tea and coffee

16:30-17:30 - Ema Sullivan-Bissett (University of Birmingham): "The Epistemic Status of Confabulatory Explanations".

Friday 9th May 

9:30-10:30 - Petter Johansson and Lars Hall (University of Lund): "Choice Blindness and the Flexibility of Attitude Formation: Why not Knowing why might be a Good Thing".

10:30-11:00 - Tea and coffee

11:00-12:00 - Jules Holroyd (University of Nottingham): "Implicit Bias, Awareness Conditions, and Epistemic Innocence".

12:00-13:00 - Miranda Fricker (University of Sheffield): "Fault and No-fault Epistemic Responsibility for Implicit Prejudice".

13:00-14:00 - Lunch

End of workshop


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.
Read more

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo
Read more

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by  Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.  We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph
Read more