The eighth meeting
of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy (SEFA) took place in Oviedo,
Spain, from 10th–12th 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
theoretic framework of credence ascription, and that when we update credences
based on false propositions, we can be considered to be doing so rationally.
Matilde Aliffi,
of the University of Birmingham, presented her research on the relation between the content of emotions and the
content of appraisals. She argued that (i) the content of the emotion is not
identical to the content of the appraisal which activated it, and (ii) the
content of the emotion supervenes on the value presented in the appraisal. In
defence of (i), Aliffi presented a range of situations in which the content of
the emotion and the content of the appraisal appear to come apart. In defence
of (ii), she demonstrated that which emotion is activated depends on the kind
of appraisal that takes place.
I presented a paper on implicit bias, awareness and moral responsibility.
Recent work in this area (e.g. Holroyd, 2015), shows that we do not necessarily
fail to meet the epistemic criteria for moral responsibility for implicitly
biased action. I raised some problems for translating the conclusions of this
work (which relies on laboratory-based studies) to the world beyond the lab,
including the puzzle of how to recognise bias amongst confounding variables in
real-world scenarios. I then offered some reasons for thinking the conclusions
of this work still stands, albeit with some restrictions. Firstly, patterns of
bias in our behaviour become easier to spot over time. Secondly, the ability of
subjects of bias to correctly
identify bias in others’ behaviour raises our expectations on biased actors to
recognise their own biases.
Raamy Majeed, of
the University of Cambridge, presented his research on recalcitrant emotions. (Raamy discusses his work in more detail on our blog here.) Recalcitrant emotions are those which conflict with an individual’s judgements,
such as fear of flying, whilst judging flying to be safe. Majeed pointed out a
gap in the literature in determining the precise nature of the recalcitrance in
question. He argued that the best way to account for the recalcitrant nature of
these emotions is to consider them as cognitively impenetrable. He presented
some empirical evidence to support this conclusion, including research that
shows that the neural processes governing particular emotional responses are not
amenable to cognitive control, and the finding that we are better at regulating
emotions generated by top-down rather than bottom-up processes.
A further keynote was given by Lucy O’Brien, of
University College London, who presented a theory of shame. She first demonstrated
the shortcomings of existing models. One on model, shame is failing to meet the
demands of one’s own personal ethics. O’Brien pointed out cases in which one
feels shame without violating one’s own ethics, which cannot be accounted for
by this first model. On another model, shame is merely exposing oneself to
another. O’Brien demonstrated the logical consequences of this view as somewhat
absurd: we lack control over a number of features that we expose to others, and
yet this does not immediately cause shame. O’Brien presented an alternative
view on which shame is a form of interpersonal
self-consciousness, involving the likelihood of degradation or expulsion from
the social group of which one is a part.
Casey Doyle,
from St. Hilda’s College of the University of Cambridge, gave a paper on
self-deception and reason-giving. Doyle argued that there are cases of being
self-deceived about ones reasons for action and belief that manifest a
distinctly non-epistemic failure. He distinguished reason-giving from an
agential perspective in which stating that one believes p because q is
constitutive of believing p for that
reason, from reason-giving from a ‘spectatorial’ perspective in which one is
simply trying to accurately represent a feature of the world. He then argued
that, in a particular class of cases, self-deception about reasons involves a
confusion of these two perspectives. A subject who is self-deceived about their
reasons or motives presents themselves as speaking from the agential
perspective. However, they are in fact speaking from the spectatorial
perspective, forming a belief about their reasons caused by their desires. For
Doyle, these subjects violate a constitutive norm of the practice of
reason-giving.