Skip to main content

Cognitive Irrationality: Interview with Anne Meylan

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 normativity of belief and the reasons we have for them. Of course, irrationality is also an important theme because it is closely intertwined with problems pertaining to our responsibility as agents and to the nature of mental illness.

LB: What are the main research questions in your project? What do you hope to achieve by the end of it?

AM: The Cognitive Irrationality Project is structured around three subprojects. These three subprojects respectively concern:

1. The conceptual content of irrationality. Questions that are at the heart of this subproject are for instance: what distinguishes irrationality from similar but presumably distinct normative properties such as the property of being “un-justified” or the property of being “un-reasonable”?;

2. The intuitive “wrongness” characterizing the formation and the holding of irrational beliefs. What, after all, makes an irrational belief something wrong to hold?

3. The attribution of blame and responsibility for irrational beliefs. How is cognitive irrationality related to our being responsible for our beliefs? Does this relation substantially differ from the one at work in “normal” cases of doxastic responsibility, viz. cases in which we are responsible for beliefs that are perfectly rational?

LB: In what circumstances (if ever) do you think an agent is responsible and blameworthy for an irrational belief?

AM: We are working to accommodate certain intuitions that seem crucial to our understanding of irrationality and doxastic responsibility. Intuitively, there seems to be a difference, for instance, between our practices of blame in pathological and non-pathological cases of cognitive irrationality. Why do we ordinarily consider it to be legitimate to blame people for their self-deception but not for their delusions? Is this difference in treatment justified, and if so, why? The hypothesis we currently have in mind appeals to the subject’s capacity for self-narration and metacognition.

LB: Would you describe your research and your project as interdisciplinary? What do you regard as the main benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary research?

AM: Of course, we regard empirical data as crucial to our research especially insofar as our project aims at discussing normative but also descriptive aspects of irrationality. But we also intend to bring our contribution as philosophers with a strong epistemological background to the current discussions regarding cognitive irrationality. For instance, we aim at connecting the debate surrounding pathological forms of irrationality (e.g. delusions) with discussions regarding the normativity of belief and their justification, that is, discussions that mainly occupy meta-ethicists and contemporary epistemologists.

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

Models of Madness

In today's post John Read  (in the picture above) presents the recent book he co-authored with Jacqui Dillon , titled Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis. My name is John Read. After 20 years working as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, mostly with people experiencing psychosis, I joined the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994. There I published over 100 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (e.g., child abuse/neglect, poverty etc.) and psychosis. I also research the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health. In February I moved to Melbourne and I now work at Swinburne University of Technology.  I am on the on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis and am the Editor...
Read more