Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Annalisa Coliva on her new book The Varieties of Self-Knowledge . I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. My main interests lie in epistemology, philosophy of mind and the history of analytic philosophy. The Varieties of Self-Knowledge (Palgrave 2016) is a sustained defence of pluralism about self-knowledge. I argue that, contrary to what behaviourists, several cognitive scientists, theory-theorists and inferential theorists have maintained in the last seventy years or so, there is an asymmetry between first- and third-personal self-knowledge. Hence, empirical studies that tend to show that we can be mistaken about, or ignorant of several mental states of ours do not in fact impugn the existence of first-personal self-knowledge. Rather, they show that the scope of first-personal self-knowledge is more limited than philosophers have thought. Hence, in many cases, we do know our own mental states in a third-personal wa

In this post,  Lubomira Radoilska  (pictured above) summarises her paper "Aiming at the Truth and Aiming at Success" , which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. Lubomira has a new project on Reassessing Responsibility which underlies some of the themes in this post. Are the demands we face as believers compatible with the demands we face as agents? In other words, is our aiming at the truth consistent with our aiming at success? Since our lives as believers and agents are inexorably intertwined, it seems vital to find out whether and how the normative requirements that apply to us as believers relate to the normative requirements that apply to us as agents. Until very recently, theorists of normativity discussed the spheres of belief and action as though they were governed b

On 12th September 2016, Zoë Boden and Michael Larkin organised a workshop on Relatedness and Relationship in Mental Health at Park House, University of Birmingham. Experts came from psychology, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, mental healthcare professions, and there were also several experts by experience, that is, people with lived experience of mental distress and carers. The workshop was the output of a project funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation . The workshop started with a brief introduction by Zoë and Michael who talked about the themes emerging from a previous series of workshop they had run on relatedness. They listed three: Relationships can be either good or bad for mental health Distributed recovery, where recovery is seen as a feature of a system and not of an individual The contract between independence and dependance, and how the latter gets a bad press. Further overlapping themes were pictured in the diagram below, delegates discussed

Jes se Summers (pictured above) is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Duke University, where he is also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and a Lecturing Fellow for the Thompson Writing Program. In this post he writes about rationalization and some of its benefits, summarising his paper " Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Some Benefits of Rationalisation ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. You really shouldn’t trust me. At the very least, you shouldn’t trust me when I tell you why I’ve acted. Part of the reason you shouldn’t trust me is that I often—much more often than I realize—don’t know why I’m doing something. The neuroscientist tells you that my brain predisposes me to act. Psychologists, too, assume that many factors and forces move me—my mood,

The eighth meeting of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy (SEFA) took place in Oviedo, Spain, from 10 th –12 th November, 2016. Over 70 speakers presented their research during the three-day conference, and here I summarise just some of the papers given on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Juan Comesaña , of the University of Arizona, gave the first keynote talk, on rationality and falsity in belief and action. He proposed that some false beliefs can be rational. Consider, for instance, the pre-Einsteinian belief in the additivity of speed. There is a persuasive sense in which this belief was once rational, even though strictly speaking it is false. In defence of the notion that falsehoods can sometimes be rationally believed, Comesaña argued that rational action requires rational belief, and that we can sometimes act rationally on the basis of false beliefs. He demonstrated that this view survives translation into a traditional decision the

Raamy Majeed  (pictured above) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and a member of the John Templeton Foundation Project ‘ New Directions in the Study of Mind ’. He is also a By-Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.  In this post he writes about emotional recalcitrance.  ‘Irrational’ or ‘recalcitrant’ emotions are those emotions that are in tension with our evaluative judgements. For example, you fear flying despite judging it to be safe, you are angry at your colleague even though you know her remarks weren't offensive, and so on. Much of the present philosophical work concerning these emotions involves spelling out the precise nature of the conflict. Some argue that such emotions involve rational conflict, where subjects undergoing such emotions are endorsing two conflicting judgements, e.g. that flying is both safe and unsafe. By contrast, others argue that subjects are undergoing some other form of conf

In this post Kourken Michaelian and Chloe Wall report from the workshop New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory. Funded by a generous grant from the University of Otago 's Division of Humanities, researchers from Australasia and Europe gathered in Dunedin, New Zealand on 25-26 October 2016 for a workshop on New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory . The workshop, organized by Kourken Michaelian, was the second of two events linked to a planned book—edited by Michaelian, Dorothea Debus , and Denis Perrin —featuring papers describing new lines of research in this burgeoning field; the first was held at the University of Grenoble earlier in 2016 as part of a broader interdisciplinary event. The two days of the workshop included eight talks. On the first day, Kourken Michaelian’s “Confabulating, misremembering, relearning: The simulation theory of memory and unsuccessful remembering” argued against taxonomies of memory errors that are based on the causal theory of m

This post is by Eisuke Sakakibara (pictured above), psychiatrist working at The University of Tokyo Hospital and a graduate student of Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan. In this post he writes about recently published paper entitled “irrationality and pathology of beliefs” published online in Neuroethics, and its significance for his long-term project in philosophy of psychiatry. Delusions are an oft discussed theme in philosophy of psychiatry. The most cited work on delusions is Lisa Bortolotti’s Delusions and other irrational beliefs , in which she discussed whether delusions are appropriately construed as a kind of belief. I assume delusions are beliefs in order to concentrate on another problems about delusions: psychiatrists ponder on whether delusions indicate underlying grave illness, because irrational beliefs (or belief-like mental states) are not always symptoms of illness. Those with pathological delusions do not recognize their delusions a

This post is by Fernando Blanco  (pictured below) who recently wrote a paper entitled,  Positive and Negative Implications of the Causal Illusion . The paper is to appear in a  special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism , guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. Imagine you are one of the participants in the classic experiment conducted by famous researchers Lauren Alloy and Lynn Abramson in 1979. You sit in front of a device with one button and one lightbulb. Your task is to determine whether you can control the light onset. What would you do? If you are like most people, you would try pressing the button to see if the light comes on. Then, you would realize that pressing the button is very often followed by the light onset. After a series of trials, you would likely feel sure that you are effectively controlling the light with your button-pressings. In fact, the researchers set up the experiment so that the light

In this post, Valeria Motta reports from the workshop Cognitive Decline: Presentations and Representations . The event took place at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum , and was jointly organized by students from Biomedical and Natural Sciences and students from Liberal Arts of the University of Birmingham. The event was offered under the initiative called Café Culturel . This initiative proposes multidisciplinary discussions on topics of current interest from the arts and the sciences which emerge from the cultural offerings in and around the area of Birmingham. Expert panellists are invited to give 10 minute presentations after which there is room for questions and discussion with the audience. The events are open not only for students but also for the general public; and the talks are meant to reach such wide audience. In October, the Royal Shakespeare Company presented King Lear on Stratford-upon-Avon. On the occasion of this visit, the event Cognitive Decline: Pre

This post is by Léa Salje (pictured above), who recently started a lectureship at the University of Leeds, where she was previously a postdoc on the AHRC-funded project Persons as Animals . Léa works in the philosophy of mind on questions about what thought is like, and in particular on questions about self-conscious thought about ourselves. Here she asks, what can the schizophrenic delusion of thought insertion tell us about how we ordinarily find out about ourselves through introspection? *** A lot of my work revolves around the notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM), and so does this paper. For those with more of a nodding acquaintance with IEM, I have a dim suspicion that it can come across as a slightly fussy notion that threatens to plunge those working on it into ever deepening levels of obscurity, and that refuses to wear its interest on its sleeve. So let me first say something why it’s important. Roughly speaking, your judgment is IEM when yo

On Friday 21st October, a meeting of the  Mind Network  was held at the University of Sheffield on the topic of “Action: Knowledge, Emotion, and Commitment”. The meeting was organised by  Luca Barlassina  and was sponsored by the  Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies . In this post I give a brief overview of the three talks given at the meeting. John Michael , Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and Affiliated Researcher at the Central European University, gave the first talk, on “The Sense of Commitment”. Whilst the phenomenon of commitment is a cornerstone of human social life, it is not well understood how people identify and assess the level of their own and others’ commitments, nor what motivates them to honor commitments. The aim of his talk was to try and fill in this gap. 

Today's post is by Elliot Aronson (pictured below), Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz, and author of The Social Animal and Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) , with Carol Tavris. Social psychologists define hypocrisy as behaving contrary to one’s values or beliefs; in common vernacular, it can be defined as the failure to practice what one preaches. I think that just about everybody wants to see themselves as a person of integrity. It is a very powerful desire that transcends individual differences due to age, gender, race, socio-economic status, and nationality. This quest to maintain a self-image of integrity is quite touching; at the same time, it often distorts our memory or causes us to stretch to find justifications for actions that might appear hypocritical. Thus, it is far easier to see hypocrisy in others than it is to see it in oneself. If there are individual differences they lie not in the ability to behave hypo

In this post I interview Zoë Boden  (pictured below) on the project she led on ‘Relatedness & Relationships in Mental Health’ which ran from July 2015 to September 2016, funded by the Independent Social Research Fund Flexible Grants for Small Groups. LB: What were you hoping to achieve with the Relatedness and Relationship in Mental Health project? Do you think the project was successful?  ZB: This project drew together a range of different disciplinary perspectives to reconsider the role of relationships in the mental health context. We started from the premise that this topic was deceptively simple, and had been overlooked, ignored or denied in much mental health practice, policy and research. Therefore we felt it was ripe for revisiting with an emphasis on both complexity and lived experience. The project led by myself (Psychology, London South Bank University) and Dr Michael Larkin (Psychology, University of Birmingham) brought together a fantastic group of interdi

I’m really looking forward to this next phase of PERFECT. Lots of things are now developing which tie in really well with work that I have been doing with some of our network members, with our PhD students, and with my wider research. One important theme for me is ‘relatedness’, and I’ll focus on that aspect here, because it connects several areas. This Thursday, network member Dr Zoë Boden will say more in her post about the ISRF ‘Relationships and Mental Health’ project which we have been developing. Zoë and I are involved in a number of research projects exploring people’s experiences of relationships and mental health. Some of these are exploring individuals’ perspectives on their own relational networks (asking, ‘who talks to whom about what?’ and ‘who does what with whom?’) and others are focused on understanding a shared difficulty (such as psychosis) from the perspectives of several members of the same family or system. Through the ISRF network events, we’ve been s

In this post I interview Steve Cole Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine . VM: Loneliness has been characterized in reference to feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a mismatch between a person’s desired and achieved levels of social relations. In some of your latest papers you suggest that the experience of loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon but that, as any other adaptive predispositions, it can be found across phylogeny. In what sense can we say that animals desire social relations and experience loneliness?  SC: We begin by assuming that certain experiences are privileged to human beings but the more we understand about how human experience arises from the way the brain works, the more we find that there are small or vestigial versions of even the most esoteric human experiences in other animals. Most animals, for example monkeys and mammals, broadly speaking, are to some extent, soci

I am excited to join project PERFECT group of brilliant researchers and the stimulating research community at the Philosophy department of the University of Birmingham. My contribution to project PERFECT will come from my research on the experience of loneliness. I am also interested in crowd emotions and in exploring up to what extent we can talk about shared emotions. This year I will focus on investigating the possibility of talking about ‘inaccurate emotions’ and whether these could carry any epistemic value. Emotions may be the result of an embodied engagement with others and the world and cognition may play a fundamental role in this interaction. A preliminary hypothesis is that just as cognitions, emotions can be erroneous or 'inaccurate'. The experience of loneliness is especially relevant because it has been defined as depending on a particular individual’s perception of the social environment and the world. Researchers have argued that it would not make a differe

Today's blog is by Ben Tappin  (pictured below), a PhD student at the Morality and Beliefs Lab, Royal Holloway, University of London. Part of his research focuses on moral cognition as it relates to the self and others; in particular, how our moral beliefs affect social perception, attitudes, and behaviour. Suppose you asked a group of people to judge how much they, and how much the average person, possessed certain desirable and undesirable traits. A large majority would likely respond that they possess desirable traits to a greater extent, and undesirable traits to a lesser extent, than the average person. This self-other difference is widely reported, and constitutes the basis of an extensive field of research into the phenomenon of “self-enhancement”—the tendency for individuals to positively inflate their own characteristics relative to their evaluation of others’ characteristics. A large amount of this evidence indicates that self-enhancement is strongest and most wid

In this post, Magdalena Antrobus, PhD student on Project PERFECT, interviews Michelle Maiese (pictured above), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emmanuel College , whose recent work centres on dissociative identity disorder. MA: How would you describe Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)? MM: It formerly was known as multiple personality disorder. Although theorists sometimes describe DID as a case in which two or more subjects inhabit a single body, I find it more plausible to suppose that it involves a single individual who suffers from delusions surrounding identity. Young children who develop DID experience extreme conflict that seems incapable of resolution and which concerns emotional needs to which they feel deeply attached. Suppose that Sue endures some sort of abuse at the hands of her mother. She develops strong feelings of anger or hatred toward her mother, but also loves her mother and wants to have a close relationship with her. Consistency demands that s

My research focuses on epistemic and pragmatic benefits of depression. More specifically I investigate whether experiences related to depressive illness such as low mood, negativity bias or delusions might have implicit or explicit beneficial outcomes for the subject. It is widespread news that depression constitutes a modern epidemic. It relates to individual suffering, distorts one’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural processes, and sometimes leads to suicide. However, the results of more recent psychological studies indicate that the experience of depression might be linked to particular benefits for the subject as well as to pain and despair. I spent my first two years on PERFECT researching epistemic and psychological benefits of low mood and depressive delusions. Low mood occurring in mild and moderate forms of depression is linked to more accurate judgements about the self and self-related circumstances. In the view of trade-off accounts this means that the epistemic b

In this post, I interview Imperfect Cognitions network member Jules Holroyd, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the department of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust funded Bias and Blame project . The project runs from 2014-2017 and the team includes senior lecturer Tom Stafford and postdoctoral researcher Robin Scaife in the department of psychology, and PhD student Andreas Bunge in the department of philosophy. SS: The Bias and Blame project investigates the relationship between moral interactions, such as blame, and the manifestation of implicit bias. How did you become interested in this topic, and has there been much previous research in this area? JH: The project looks principally at whether moral interactions, such as blaming, impact on the expression of implicit racial bias. The interest in this   question arose out of the philosophical debates about responsibility for bias, in which two claims seemed

I’m delighted to join the philosophy department of the University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow working on Project PERFECT as it enters its third year. In recent research I’ve been investigating the nature of the implicit/explicit distinction, and considering whether there is a role for agency when implicit cognition drives behaviour. I was awarded my PhD earlier this year, with a thesis on implicit social bias. It’s previously been argued that implicit cognitions do not express our evaluative agency, and that we cannot be held responsible for their manifestation. I’ve argued that just because some cognition bears some or all of the putative features of the implicit, this is not a reliable heuristic for its exclusion from being considered agential. Agency may involve an interplay between implicit and explicit processes, and whether implicit features count as agential might only be illuminated by zooming out and viewing agency as extended over time, against the back

Today's blog post is an interview by Project PERFECT research fellow Kathy Puddifoot with Sarah K. Robins (pictured below), an expert on false memories and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. KP: You are an expert on memory. How did you become interested in this topic? SR: I became interested in memory as I was starting to put together a dissertation back in graduate school. Originally, my interest was in the personal/subpersonal distinction but I was spinning my wheels a bit. My advisor, Carl Craver, posed a question to help get me going: are memory traces personal or subpersonal? In pursuit of that question (still a difficult one to answer), my interest shifted to memory itself. There were so many interesting philosophical questions about memory—and so little connection with the vast amount of research on memory in both psychology and neuroscience. I was excited about how little work had yet been done on these intersections and tha

During my first year on Project PERFECT I have had the opportunity to explore a number of avenues of research relating to the epistemic benefits of imperfect cognitions. Falsity-Dependent Truths in Memory and Social Cognition I have been collaborating with Lisa on a project on memory distortions; cases in which people appear to remember things from the past but the memories are inaccurate. The memories often have a kernel of truth but at least some of the details are false. Many previous discussions of the phenomenon have focused on evolutionary advantages and psychological gains associated with having false memories. For example, it has been emphasised that having false beliefs about the quality of one’s own performance on a task could have psychological benefits by increasing our wellbeing. Our focus has instead been on identifying epistemic gains associated with having false memories. For example, it has been argued that many false memories are the result o

In this post Andrea Polonioli interviews Ralph Hertwig (pictured below), director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality  at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. AP: According to popular accounts offered in the field of judgment and decision-making, people are prone to cognitive biases, and such biases are conducive to maladaptive behaviour. Based on your research, to what extent the claim that cognitive biases are costly is warranted by available evidence? If you had to identify one particular bias that is especially worrisome, because it typically results in negative real life outcomes, which one would this be? RH: This is a hotly debated topic in research on behavioral decision making and beyond. Many cognitive biases have been defined as such because they violate coherence norms, under the assumption that a single syntactical rule such as consistency, transitivity, the conjunction rule, or Bayes’ rule suffices to evaluate behavior. I believe that such