Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Jason Howard (in the picture below) presents his recent book Conscience in Moral Life (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014). My name is Jason Howard and I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the United States. I have long thought that one of the most fascinating things about human beings is the power that moral appeals and obligations have in shaping our identity. My specific interest in conscience —what it is, why it appears so pervasive, how it functions—is one with my larger curiosity about moral agency, especially what such agency might tell us about the ontological complexity of human beings. One of my principle motivations in writing Conscience in Moral Life was to capture the pivotal role that conscience continues to play, both positively and negatively, in contemporary society. In brief, my book explores where our widespread confidence in conscience stems from, examining the history of co...

I start the second year of my PhD on Project  PERFECT with curiosity and enthusiasm. My plans for this year are largely focused on the continuation of my on-going research on the epistemic and pragmatic benefits of affective disorders, including depression, dysthymia, and bipolar disorder. I spent my first year with PERFECT investigating the phenomenon of depressive realism. The question which I attempted to address relates to the ‘sadder but wiser’ dilemma: are those, who suffer from depression, ‘wiser’ in any way than healthy people? The answer appears to be more complex than I initially expected: certain symptoms associated with light depression (e.g. low mood) contribute to more accurate beliefs with regards to the self and self-related circumstances, but not in other contexts. My findings have been published in an  article which I co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti and were presented at The British Society for the Philosophy of Science 2015 annual conference an...

In this post we hear about a project on problems and prospects for epistemic consequentialism whose principal investigators are Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (University of Kent), in the picture above, and Jeff Dunn (DePauw University). The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and running from August 2014 to July 2016. So far, one paper has been published as part of the project—‘A Defence of Epistemic Consequentialism’, Philosophical Quarterly 64 (257), 2014. An edited volume entitled  Epistemic Consequentialism is   due to be published at the end of 2016 or early 2017 by Oxford University Press. It will feature papers by Clayton Littlejohn, Christopher Meacham, Michael Caie, Nancy Snow, Richard Pettigrew, Ralph Wedgewood, James Joyce, Hilary Kornblith, Julia Driver, Amanda MacAskill, Alejandro Perez Carballo, and Sophie Horowitz. The plan is to publish two other journal articles as part of the project. Kristoffer  has kindly agreed to answer a few questions. LB:...

I am delighted to be joining Project PERFECT in its second year. My previous research focussed on issues at the intersection of philosophy of psychology and epistemology. I am extremely excited about joining a team of researchers who work in closely related areas. I am joining PERFECT at the beginning of the second strand of the project, which will focus on distorted memory. During the next year, I will begin working on two new projects relating to this topic. For the first project, I will be collaborating with Lisa on cases of memory distortion in the non-clinical population. In cases of memory distortion, individuals form false memories. They recollect things that did not happen. The recollections are false but can be strongly believed. We will consider potential epistemic benefits that might follow from false memories of this sort. This means that we will consider whether the possession of false memories can lead to the formation of other true beliefs, leading to an overall inc...

The Epistemic Vices Conference , held in Durham in September 2015, put epistemic vices in the spotlight, with a series of talks on both what makes something an epistemic vice and the nature of specific epistemic vices. On day one Heather Battaly argued that virtues and vices are traits that express who someone is as a person, even if the person is not responsible for the possession or exercise of the traits. She argued that this view—personalism—is better equipped than existing forms of virtue epistemology to tackle some examples where people display intellectual vice, e.g. where a person is prejudiced due to their upbringing in a racist society. Quassim Cassam argued that intellectual vices are traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. He described how intellectual vices perform a significant role in explaining poor epistemic conduct. Responding to the situationist challenge, he claimed that virtues are often local rather than global traits. I highlighted a fa...

Ema Sullivan-Bissett In this post I give an overview of what I did as a Research Fellow in the first year of project PERFECT , as well as my plans for the coming year. My research for the duration of my time working on PERFECT will focus on belief. Last year, Lisa and I worked together on three papers. The first, together with Matthew Broome and Matteo Mameli , was on the moral and legal implications of the continuity between delusional and non-delusional beliefs. The second, together with Rachel Gunn , was on what makes a belief a delusional belief. The third paper was on the status of beliefs from fiction and the teleological account of belief. My main focus this year though was on defending the one-factor account of monothematic delusion formation. According to this view, the only abnormality we need to appeal to in order to explain why a subject comes to hold a delusional belief, is the anomalous experience she has. We do not need to appeal to any abnormal deficit or bi...

In this post we shall report on some of the initiatives promoted by mental health charities to celebrate this year's World Mental Health Day and we will point to some resources from the blog that could be of interest. One of the objectives of project PERFECT is to undermine the theoretical foundations for the current stigma associated with mental illness and argue for the continuity between so-called 'normal' and 'abnormal' cognition, so we feel we are making a small contribution to progress in this area. The Mind Charity has announced that on Mental Health Day the Duke and Duchess of Kent will participate in a special event, meeting young people who have faced mental health issues and now volunteer for Mind. The Mental Health Foundation focuses this year on children's mental health issues, and raising the problem that children may find it particularly difficult to gather information or ask for help due to stigma. See the campaign poster below:

In this post, Allan Hazlett , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico , presents his book, A Luxury of the Understanding (Oxford University Press, 2013). Allan (in the picture above)  works on the value of accurate representation, deference and disagreement, and political epistemology. Philosophers have for some time acknowledged the possibility of irrational and false beliefs that are nonetheless beneficial to the believer. A familiar case is that of the over-confident athlete: it is easy to imagine that Karen is better off over-estimating her tennis abilities, than she would be were her evaluation of her abilities accurate, given the boost to her confidence that this over-estimation provides. However, it is standard for philosophers to argue that, since Karen’s belief is irrational and false, although it may be all-things-considered best for her, it is nevertheless “epistemically” bad. In A Luxury of the Understanding (cover pictured below), I a...

The second year of ERC-funded  project PERFECT  (logo above) has just started and it is time to look back at what we have done so far and make plans for the future. What we have done so far Ema, Magdalena, Michael and I have had a very busy time, delivering talks, writing papers, and sponsoring a series of really interesting, interdisciplinary events, including a public engagement event on Sight, Sound and Mental Health for the Arts and Science Festival 2015, a Delusion lunchtime seminar with experts on delusion formation, and a session on the Function of Delusions as part of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Congress . We had three papers published open access: a review paper on costs and benefits of realism and optimism in Current Opinion in Psychiatry , a paper on the ethics of delusional belief in Erkenntnis , and a review paper on the nature and development of delusions in Philosophy Compass. Many more are in progress! We continued to dis...

In our everyday conception, an optimist is someone who looks at the bright side and expects good things to happen. The psychological literature distinguishes between different kinds of optimism: dispositional optimism and unrealistic optimism (also known as the optimism bias). Which of these types of optimism corresponds to our lay conception and how are they related to each other? Do these types of optimism differ in their effects?  Dispositional optimism is conceptualized as a general tendency to expect good outcomes and as a fairly stable personality trait. The optimism bias on the other hand is supposed to be a cognitive bias whereby people overestimate the likelihood of encountering specific positive events and underestimate the likelihood of encountering specific negative events. This unrealistic estimate can either be comparative or absolute. In the first case, we rate our own prospects as better than those of comparable others, in the second, we overestimate our...

In this post I interview Richard Pettigrew  (in the picture above), who is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, and is leading a four year project entitled “ Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications ”, also featuring Jason Konek, Ben Levinstein, Chris Burr and Pavel Janda. Ben Levinstein left the project in February to join the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. Jason Konek left the project in August to take up a TT post at Kansas State University. They have been replaced by Patricia Rich (PhD, Carnegie Mellon) and Greg Gandenberger (PhD, Pitt; postdoc at LMU Munich). LB: When did you first become interested in the notion of epistemic utility ? What inspired you to explore its foundations and applications as part of an ERC-funded project? RP: It all started in my Masters year, when I read Jim Joyce's fantastic paper ' A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism ' (Philosophy of Science, 1998, 65 (4):575-603). In t...