 |
Epistemic Innocence logo |
Yesterday, on September 1st, 2014 our project,
Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions, funded by an AHRC fellowship awarded to myself, came to an end. As my work on the project has been the main reason for starting this blog, I thought I would offer some thoughts on how things have gone, and invite your comments.
Fellowships are forms of funding awarded to an individual, but this project has been from the very beginning a
collective effort. The researcher working on the project,
Ema Sullivan-Bissett, has contributed to its development and its success in several ways: writing one new paper after the other, giving talks to very demanding audiences and taking excellent care of the blog by commissioning and authoring posts, editing material, all while preparing her (very successful) viva and honouring her teaching commitments.
Ema and I were supported by a wider group of Birmingham-based people who greatly helped us by contributing to the blog, running public engagement events and promoting the project far and wide:
Kengo Miyazono (the author of the
first post on this blog), Magdalena Antrobus (
working on cognitive benefits of bipolar disorder), Gregory Yates (
working on schizophrenia and its complexities), Ben Costello (
writing about agent responsibility and psychiatric diagnosis) and Rachel Gunn (
researching delusions) all deserve a special mention.
We were all inspired by the members of the Imperfect Cognitions research network, a fantastic
international group of researchers who were happy to share their results and offer feedback on our preliminary ideas. Some debates on this blog have also helped make progress on some thorny issues outside the scope of the project narrowly conceived, such as the nature of
beliefs and
delusions,
delusion formation theories, and how to understand human
memory and what its limitations are.
What was new about Epistemic Innocence? The thought that "imperfect cognitions" (e.g., false beliefs) can be good for a variety of purposes had been explored before. But what we wanted to do was highlight their potential contribution
to the advancement of knowledge. That false beliefs can be epistemically beneficial was a counter-intuitive thesis but it sounded promising to us and to those who followed and supported the project from the beginning, via social media (
Facebook and
Twitter) or by participating in our
May workshop. At the core of our research efforts was the sense that there need not be a simple trade-off between epistemic and pragmatic benefits. Here is an example of the trade-off. Take Sarah's false belief that she is more generous than the average person. Of course having that belief may be beneficial to Sarah in a number of ways. She can feel better about herself if she thinks she is very generous, for instance. But if her belief is false, it is not likely to promote her epistemic standing. It is a form of deception.