Imperfect Cognitions

In this post Matilde Aliffi, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews  Aaron Ben-Ze'ev , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, and President of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of the Emotions. Aaron (pictured above) works in the philosophy of psychology and published extensively on emotions and love. MA: What are the objectives of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of the Emotions ? AB-Z: Emotions punctuate almost all the significant events in our lives, but the nature, causes, and consequences of the emotions are among the least well understood aspects of human experience. In recent decades there has arisen a significantly greater interest in the study of emotions by scholars in various fields. Such an interdisciplinary interest and interaction are crucial for the understanding of emotions. Nevertheless, I believe that there is room for more intensive discussions among scholars about specifically philosophical i...

This post is by Lucy Allais (pictured above). Lucy teaches philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of California in San Diego. She partly works in the history of philosophy, on the work of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (mostly on his metaphysics but she is increasingly interested in his moral and political philosophy), and partly on some topics in moral philosophy and moral psychology, such as forgiveness, resentment, and related moral emotions. In this post she writes about her research on forgiveness .  Augustine once said that he knows exactly what time is until anyone asks him, and it seems to me that something similar can be said about forgiveness. It is a concept we are pretty confident we understand, until one tries to give a philosophical account of it, at which point it seems to start dissolving, to the point that a lot of philosophers have thought it to be paradoxical and impossible to make sense of....

In today's post, Peter Kinderman introduces his new book ‘ A Prescription for Psychiatry: Why We Need a Whole New Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing ’, which is published by Palgrave Macmillan. I am professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool and President-Elect of the British Psychological Society . My research interests are in psychological processes underpinning wellbeing and mental health. I have published widely on the role of psychological factors as mediators between biological, social and circumstantial factors in mental health and wellbeing. I have been awarded (with colleagues) a total of over £6 million in research grant funding (from the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the NHS Forensic Mental Health Research and Development Programme, the European Commission and others). My most recent grant, awarded in 2015, was for a total of over £1m from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESR...

Emilian Mihailov  (pictured below) is the Executive Director of the Research Centre in Applied Ethics (CCEA) and a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. Currently he is working on the implications of experimental moral psychology and neuroscience for normative and applied ethics. I will present some ideas I developed in my paper “ Is deontology a moral confabulation? ”, recently published in Neuroethics . Here is a provoking thought. What if the effort of philosophical theorizing is an exercise in moral confabulation to polish off track emotional responses, admitingly hard to resist given their evolutionary roots? Joshua Greene speculates that if you mix the fact we are largely driven by strong emotional responses with the tendency to make up plausible sounding stories to justify or explain these responses, you get deontological moral philosophy. As a philosopher who has done some work in the Kantian tradition, was I confabulating? I the pap...

The Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Cardiff Business School (pictured below), on 7th and 8th July 2016. The conference featured four keynote lectures and several papers in parallel sessions. Here I am briefly reporting from the two keynote lectures delivered on the second day of the conference. Samir Okasha (University of Bristol), pictured below, discussed in his keynote lecture the use of intentional language in describing the work of evolution. For instance, sometimes we say that the gene “knows” that it was inherited, or that an organism has a preference for a certain outcome to be selected. How should we understand the use of intentional language in this context? Is the intentionality of the language of biology something we can dispense with if we choose to, is it just a shorthand? Samir argues that it is more than a shorthand and delivers insights into evolution. Darwinian evolution is described in ter...

This post is by Misia Temler , project coordinator of the recently launched Not Guilty Sydney Exoneration Project at the University of Sydney. She recently completed her PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . Her PhD dissertation was on how individual and social factors impact autobiographical memory variation across retellings.  In my last post , I discussed the general reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory. In this post I discuss the powerful effect of social influence on memory and summarise a study from my thesis.  Remembering with others can lead to the development of false memories. When individuals witness an event and then remember the event together they can change one another’s memory of what happened (Paterson & Kemp, 2006 ; Wright, Memon, Skagerberg & Gabbert, 2009 ). This has significant consequences in the forensic setting. Eyewitness memory distor...

In this post, Sam Wilkinson (below right) introduces a forthcoming Special Issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, that he co-edited with psychologist Ben Alderson-Day (below left), on “Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis”. If we experience thoughts in our head, how can they seem to not be our own? To understand this, we need to explore what thoughts are and how we know them in the first place. In his paper (“Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-awareness”) Johannes Roessler outlines two views about knowledge of our own thoughts, attributed to Gilbert Ryle. The first is that we are “alive to” our own thoughts in the “serial process” of thinking, and the second is that we can “eavesdrop” on our inner speech, and interpret our own utterances in much the same was as we interpret the utterances of others. Roessler suggests that the former account is the one that is relevant for understanding thought insertion. In her paper (“On Thought Insertion”) Rachel Gunn questions the o...

This post is by Kengo Miyazono  (pictured above), an Associate Professor at Hiroshima University. Here he summarises his recent paper ' Does Functionalism Entail Extended Mind? ', recently published in Synthese. [Penultimate draft available here ]. Andy Clark and David Chalmers ( 1998 ) present the following famous case. Otto Otto suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and like many Alzheimer's patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. […] Today, Otto hears about the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and decides to go see it. He consults the notebook, which says that the museum is on 53rd Street, so he walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum. Clark and Chalmers (hereafter C & C) argue that 'Otto believed the museum was on ...

Recently I have become interested in the effects of optimism on relationship satisfaction. Unrealistic optimism about romantic relationships is very widespread. Even people who are aware of divorce rates in the society in which they live tend to overestimate the longevity of their relationships. Unrealistically optimistic predictions about the future of our romantic relationships may be supported by other positive illusions, for instance, the superiority illusion and the love-is-blind illusion . According to the superiority illusion, which is a form of self-enhancement, we tend to perceive our relationship as better than most relationships. According to the love-is-blind illusion, we tend to be blind to our partner’s faults, and perceive the partner as better than average in a number of domains including intelligence and attractiveness.  But for  Murray and colleagues (1996)  such illusions are not obviously a bad thing, as people who have an optimistic ...