Imperfect Cognitions

In this post I interview Anne Meylan  (pictured below) who is currently leading a project on Cognitive Irrationality at the University of Basel. Melanie Sarzano and Marie van Loon (pictured below) also work on the Cognitive Irrationality project as PhD students.                               LB: What interests you about irrationality? Why do you think it is an important theme? AM: When philosophers consider the rationality-irrationality pair, rationality is very often taken to be the primary concept: irrationality is simply the absence of rationality (the latter being the key component of the duo). Approaching this pair the other way round —as we intend to do— will shed new light not only on irrationality itself but also on certain existing debates in contemporary epistemology. We will be, for instance, looking at how this change of focus impacts on the on-going discussions regarding the ...

This post is by Alessandra Tanesini . Alessandra is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University working on epistemology and philosophy of language. In this post she summarises some of her recent work on collective amnesia and epistemic injustice. Thanks to Ema for inviting me to contribute this snapshot of my current research for the readers of the blog. Epistemologists, unlike psychologists, have in the past focused on notions such as knowledge, truth, justification, belief or virtue that have positive epistemic status. Instead, I want to develop accounts of those things whose epistemic status is negative. These include: vices, bias and ignorance. I have written a paper on intellectual arrogance which I shall deliver at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in July. A pre-proofs draft is already available here . I have also given talks on the epistemology of implicit bias. A podcast can be heard here . More recently I have written and given talks...

On 4th March the twelfth Mind Network Meeting was held at Peterhouse College (pictured above), at the University of Cambridge. The meeting was organized by Chris Meyns and Tim Crane , with sponsorship from the New Directions Project (funded by the John Templeton Foundation). In this post I give an overview of the three talks given at the meeting. Opening the meeting was  Raamy Majeed  (Cambridge) (pictured above, left) and  Alex Grzankowski  (Texas Tech/Cambridge) (pictured above, right) each giving a short paper under the heading ‘The Theory-ladenness of Recalcitrant Emotions’. Raamy was interested in what makes cases of recalcitrant emotions recalcitrant, and Alex was interested in what makes such cases normatively problematic.  Raamy wanted to give a theory-neutral explanation of what is recalcitrant about recalcitrant emotions. He started by introducing the following case (call it the case of Fido): a subject knows that Fido the dog is harml...

This post is by  Marijana Vujošević  (pictured above), who is working on a project on Immanuel Kant’s moral psychology at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). In this post Marijana summarises her approach in a new paper 'Conscience as the Rational Deficit of Psychopaths'.  While writing my paper on Kant’s theory of conscience (' Kant on Conscience: The Judge in the Mirror '), I had become very interested in issues regarding lack of conscience and immorality in psychopathy. Psychopaths are commonly described as individuals without conscience. Even if we weaken this claim by stating that they possess an underdeveloped conscience (which I propose we do), we still need to explain whether this impairment affects their competence in judging moral issues and in being motivated to act morally, and if so how. In spite of the usual portrayal of psychopaths, moral psychologists do not find the link between psychopaths’ impaired conscience and their moral dys...

In this post I summarise my talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Congress in July 2015, where with Richard Bentall and Phil Corlett I participated in a symposium on "the function of delusions" sponsored by project PERFECT. The main argument I defended in the symposium has now appeared in an open access paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . Can elaborated and systematized delusions emerging in the context of schizophrenia have a useful function? This is a provocative question, of course, as we know how disruptive delusions can be in the context of schizophrenia. But a serious consideration of the circumstances in which delusional beliefs are adopted can reveal that the delusion is playing a role, admittedly one that has beneficial effects only in a critical situation and whose beneficial effects are short-lived. As philosophers have long recognised, elaborated and systematized delusions in schizophrenia are typically false and ...

This post is by Oliver Sensen  (pictured above), Associate Professor in Philosophy at Tulane University in New Orleans. Oliver is interested in the question of how one should treat others, and, more particularly, in the notion of respect for persons. Much of his work is on Kant – since he is the one who thought most deeply about these issues – including his notions of dignity ,  autonomy , and respect. In this post Oliver summarises his recent article ' Respect Towards Elderly Demented Patients ', published in Diametros. As part of a more systematic project on respect, I have started to think about the regard that is owed to people with imperfect cognitions. The paper I summarise in this post focuses on respect for elderly demented patients. Imagine that you are a caregiver for a patient who does not remember what happened yesterday. If, for instance, her husband died years ago, she still might ask you when he will come back to see her. Telling her the trut...

On 18th January Beth Hannon at the Forum for European Philosophy organised a public event at the London School of Economics, " Emotions: Do they control us? ". The event featured Tali Sharot (University College London) as chair and Giovanna Colombetti, Benedetto De Martino and myself as speakers. I am reporting some of the discussion we had here. If you want to listen to the whole event, there is a podcast free to download as well. I was the first speaker, and I talked about how emotions did get a bad press among philosophers embracing rationalism. Starting with Plato, who thought that the soul could be in harmony only when reason was in charge of drives and appetites, through to Descartes who studied emotions in depth and concluded that it was easy for them to lead us astray. To challenge the idea that emotions only have a disruptive role to play, I relied on two milestones of the recent thought on emotions, Damasio's somatic marker theory according to which emot...

This post is by Chris McCarroll (pictured above), who has just finished his PhD under the supervision of John Sutton at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Macquarie University. Here he summarises a paper currently in progress entitled 'Constructing and Reconstructing Observer Perspectives in Personal Memory'. In a previous post I discussed a puzzling aspect of memory imagery: when remembering events from one’s life one often sees the remembered scene as one originally experienced it, from one’s original point of view (field perspective). Sometimes, however, one sees oneself in the memory, as if one were an observer of the remembered scene (observer perspective). Memory imagery often involves visual points of view. Here, I summarise a recent paper I gave on this topic at the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference , held at Macquarie University. My paper was entitled ‘Constructing and Reconstructing Observer Perspectives in Persona...

I’m Neil Garrett , a PhD student at the Affective Brain Lab, University College London. I investigate biases in human decision making using a combination of approaches from psychology, economics and neuroscience. The term “depressive realism” was born out of a study conducted by the psychologists Alloy and Abramson in 1979. In this study they examined how people judged contingency between their actions (pressing a button, in this instance) and outcomes that subsequently materialized (a light flickering on). The crucial aspect was that there was often little or no contingency between actions and outcome; a light would flicker on sporadically and independently of any button pressing by the participant. Their results revealed however that whilst depressed patients were wise to this fact, non-depressed individuals displayed a tendency to overestimate how instrumental they were in causing the light to illuminate. Hence depressed individuals were seemingly more “realistic” than their ...

On 4 th  and 5 th  February project  PERFECT  hosted their first major event, PERFECT 2016, a two day workshop on  False but Useful Beliefs . The workshop was held in the Herringham Hall at Regent’s Conferences and Events (pictured above) in London. In this post I give a brief overview of the ten papers presented at the workshop.  Anandi Hattiangadi  (Stockholm), pictured above, opened the workshop with a paper entitled: ‘Radical Interpretation and Implicit Cognition’. Anandi considered the prospects for the possibility of Lewisian radical interpretation which requires an entailment from the physical truths about some subject to intentional truths about her. In light of recent work in experimental psychology, in particular, work on heuristics which lead to irrational actions from the point of view of decision theory, she concluded that radical interpretation is impossible.  In discussion time, there was an opportunity for Anandi to clari...

This post is by Aleea Devitt (pictured above), a recent PhD student in the School of Psychology at the University of Aukland. In this post Aleea summarises her paper ' Factors That Influence the Generation of Autobiographical Memory Conjunction Errors ',  co-written with Edwin Monk-Fromont, Daniel L. Schacter, and Donna Rose Addis,  published in Memory. When remembering a past event, we typically cannot pluck a whole memory neatly from our brains, as we would a folder from a filing cabinet. The individual features comprising a memory are distributed throughout our brains, so remembering a past experience is more similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle; all the pieces must be located and assembled correctly to construct a coherent memory. This constructive memory system provides a flexibility that is generally adaptive (Schacter, Guerin, and St Jacques 2011 ), in that we can update memories with new information (Lee 2009 ), and assemble memory fragments in ...