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 backdrop of the agent’s other commitments, as I’ve
argued here.
This year, I’ll be building on some of the ideas that have
come out of this project, as I join Andrea in turning my attention to confabulation.
Confabulation is a feature of a number of mental illnesses, but it’s
significant that people in the non-clinical population also often fail to
identify the implicit origins of their choices or actions, and confabulate
about why they think or act as they do. Much of this research focuses on cases
where implicit and explicit attitudes diverge, and in this context, one might
think that it’s both surprising and epistemically problematic that we more
readily tell an inaccurate story that fits with our personal narrative, than
recognise a gap.
Part of my research this year will be to investigate how significant
a role this narrative-preserving mechanism might play in all cases of
cognition: evidence suggests that implicit cognitions which are concordant with
explicit attitudes regularly guide behaviour without our awareness. I’m
interested in how we interpret and explain what we’re doing in these cases, how
they compare with the divergent-attitude cases, and whether there are epistemic
benefits and costs common to both cases.
A new direction for me this year will be to start to explore
whether the distributed cognition literature, as well as research into how
communication shapes cognition, illuminate any benefits of confabulation. If
there are benefits to offloading cognitive labour onto our surrounding
environment, and in particular, sharing such labour with epistemic peers, then
perhaps there are sometimes benefits to confabulating, rather than
acknowledging ignorance. It might be that confabulation allows us to preserve a
relationship with the people on whom current and future shared epistemic endeavours
depend. Of course, there will also be costs to confabulation in these contexts,
but if it’s discovered that these relationships yield significant epistemic
benefits that could not be easily replicated by other means, then perhaps these
cognitions will turn out to be epistemically innocent.
Lastly, I’ll be thinking a bit more about philosophy and
policy (I wrote about my previous work in this area here, and you can find the
relevant papers here and here) and exploring ways in which the implications of
our findings on Project PERFECT as regards the costs and benefits of imperfect
cognitions can inform policy makers, services providers and service users.
For more information about my research plans, see this video!
For more information about my research plans, see this video!