Imperfect Cognitions

I am Tom Davies, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, and my own research broadly concerns the metaphysics of mental causation. I assisted in the Head-to-Head public-engagement event this year. Head-to-Head aimed to bring together philosophers and members of the public, for a series of accessible talks across three sessions. Primarily organised by Ema Sullivan-Bissett (University of Birmingham) and Alisa Mandrigin (University of Stirling), Head-to-Head was made possible by a British Academy grant, through the Early Career Mind Network. The sessions followed a standard format; three talks in each, structured around a specific theme, before opening up to questions from the audience. The theme of the first session was “Making Sense of Our Senses”. Louise Richardson (York) kicked things off with an introduction to the contemporary scientific work on the senses, and the thought that this work might suggest there are more than the five “traditional” senses. Louise offere...

Today's post is by Chenwei Nie who is a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick. His research focuses on philosophical issues related to beliefs and delusions. You can read his previous work here . Experiences and cognitive processes are two crucial elements in the formation and maintenance of delusions. Maher’s (1974) one-factor theory argues that delusions are reasonable responses to anomalous experiences. Motivated by the evidence that some people with anomalous experiences do not have delusions, the two-factor theory (e.g., Davies, Coltheart, Langdon, & Breen, 2001 ) argues that besides anomalous experiences, there is an impairment in the cognitive processes. In my understanding, delusions arise not because of either anomalous experiences or impaired cognitive processes alone, but due to a mismatch between them so that the impaired cognitive processes are not able to account for the anomalous experiences in a normal way. Since a mismatch...

This post is by Tomasz Kwarciński , reporting from the sixth conference of the European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (ENPOSS) which took place from 20th-22nd of September at Cracow University of Economics (CUE).  The event was co-organized by the Department of Philosophy CUE and the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies , with support of the Polish Philosophy of Economics Network . Three days of the conference were divided between keynote lectures, parallel sessions, and books symposia (a novelty in the ENPOSS conferences). The conference was preceded by the Polish Philosophy of Economics Network’s symposium. Two of the keynote talks were recorded and can be watched by clicking on the links in this post. The ENPOSS conference was officially inaugurated by Daniel Hausman ’s speech (University of Wisconsin-Madison) “Social Scientific Naturalism Revisited”, during which he posed the fundamental question of whether the social sciences differ fr...

In this post, Andrea Polonioli  (pictured below), MBA candidate at Strathclyde Business School, summarises his paper titled “ A Plea for Minimally Biased Naturalistic Philosophy ”,  forthcoming in Synthese. My paper argues that there would be benefits for naturalistic philosophers if they expanded their methodological toolkit. The tools discussed here are the systematic methodologies for literature search and review that are widely employed in the natural, life and health sciences.  More in detail, the paper presents and defends the following claims. First, naturalistic philosophers do not philosophise in a vacuum and, in fact, rely on literature search and review in a number of ways and for several purposes. A hot topic in metaphilosophy concerns how best to describe the methods used by philosophers and their practices. Many of the recent discussions on this topic have focused on whether, to what extent, and how analytic philosophy rests on the use of intuition...

Announcement: there will be a TOPOI Special Issue on Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation . Here is the Call For Papers. Introduction Numerous psychological studies establish that we are unaware of information that is relevant to the occurrence of an event, but we may nonetheless offer a sincere, often inaccurate, explanation for that event. This phenomenon is named confabulation, or broad/everyday confabulation to distinguish it from those cases of confabulation that are due to impaired memory or that emerge in clinical contexts. We confabulate about what one might think are trivial matters such as consumer choices, but we are also prone to confabulating in situations which, arguably, implicate our identity, such as when we explain our political beliefs and moral convictions. Confabulation raises a number of important philosophical questions. For instance, it is an open question how exactly we should characterize the phenomenon. Does a single characterization un...

In this post I present the main ideas in my recent paper on confabulation, "Stranger than Fiction", which appeared in Review of Philosophy and Psychology in October, open access . Confabulation has a bad press in philosophy, often identified with the main obstacle to attaining self-knowledge and described as an obvious instance of epistemic irrationality. In earlier work I thought about the current definitions of confabulation, which focus on the surface features of the phenomenon, and can be divided into two broad categories: those who define confabulations as false beliefs, and those who define confabulations as ill-grounded beliefs. In this paper though, after a brief introduction, I leave aside how confabulation should be defined, and focus instead on its costs and benefits. In particular, I ask what costs and benefits it has for the acquisition, retention, and use of information that is relevant to us. Are we epistemically worse or better off when we confabu...

In this post Alex Miller Tate (AMT) interviews John Sutton (JS), pictured below, about his views on a number of research topics, many of which were explored at  the Distributed Cognitive Ecologies of Collaborative Embodied Skill  workshop. AMT: Hello John, and thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed for the Imperfect Cognitions blog! Let’s start with quite a general question: could you please clarify for some of our readers the different research areas that came together at your workshop? JS: Sure! The workshop investigated the intersection of three broad research topics that have interested myself and others for some time. The first is the notion of Collaborative or Joint Action, the second is the Psychology and Philosophy of Skill, and the third is the Embodied and Distributed Cognition paradigm. Lab studies of Joint Action have tended to focus on various kinds of synchrony amongst actors – such as situations where two people who have just met up wil...

This post is by Christopher Mole , Chair of the programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia . He is the author of Attention is Cognitive Unison (OUP, 2010), and The Unexplained Intellect (Routledge, 2016). This post outlines the argument of his recent article, “ Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question ” (Philosophical Psychology, 8(3): 557-571). Discussions of autism are often euphemistic: We speak of ‘service users’ rather than patients; and ‘atypicality’ rather than illness. By avoiding the rhetoric of disease we avoid the implication that the autistic point of view is a defective one, which would be gone from a world in which everything was operating correctly. Those who do use the vocabulary of disease might reject such motivations, while congratulating themselves on their straight-talking, no-nonsense approach. This would, I think, be a mistake. According to one tradition, the mistake would be that of applying a ‘medical mod...

In this post, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Gettysburg College , Daniel DeNicola, introduces his just-released book, Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Do Not Know (MIT, August 2017). He writes on a range of ethical and epistemic issues, usually related to education. His new book grew from an earlier work, Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012). Ignorance, it seems, is trending. Political ignorance has become some so severe that the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry seems quaint. Willful ignorance is the social diagnosis of the moment: critics found to be implicated in prejudice, privilege, ideology, and information cocoons. Ignorance is used both as accusation and excuse. In the broadest sense, it is a ineluctable feature of the human condition. And yet, philosophers have ignored ignorance. While occupied with the sources and structure of knowledge, epistemologists for ce...

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He specializes in general issues in the philosophy of science (especially, natural kinds and reductionism) and philosophy of cognitive science (especially, innateness, concepts, and domain specificity). His book, Natural Categories and Human Kinds, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, and he has recently been working on cognitive and social ontology. If a sudden interest in taxonomy is indicative of a crisis in a scientific field, then the cognitive sciences may be in a current state of crisis. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and researchers in related disciplines have recently devoted increasing attention to the ways in which their respective disciplines classify and categorize their objects of study. Many of these researchers consider themselves--rightly in my opinion--engaged in the effort to uncover our “cognitive ontology”. Ever since ...

This post is by  Tim Crane . I am Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. I was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and he taught at UCL for almost twenty years. I founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London , and I am the philosophy editor of the TLS .  I have written five books on the nature of the mind, which is my principal area of interest in philosophy. But I also have a long-standing interest in the nature of religion and religious belief, and The Meaning of Belief is my first serious attempt to write on this subject. The Meaning of Belief attempts to give a description of the phenomenon of religion from an atheist’s point of view — that is, on the assumption that there is no god, supernatural or transcendent reality or being. The book’s aim is not to argue for this atheism, but to give a description of religious belief which makes sense to believers themselves. In t...

My name is Rami el Ali and I am an assistant professor at the Lebanese American University . I work in philosophy of mind, but also have research interests in Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology. Currently my focus is on the nature of misperception, and in particular hallucinations. In my paper ' Does Hallucinating Involve Perceiving? ', I argue for the tenability of a common-factor relationalist (alternatively, naive realist) view of perceptual experience. I do this by arguing that a view on which hallucinating involves perceiving can accommodate three central observations thought to recommend the widely accepted nonperceptual view of hallucinations, on which hallucinations do not involve perception. Philosophers usually agree, even when they do not accept the view, that relationalism provides the simplest characterization of perception. Correspondingly, the simplest view of experience merely extends the account of perception to illusions and hall...

Kathleen Stock is a Philosopher at the University of Sussex, working on questions about imagination and fiction, including: What is the imagination? What is the relation between imagining and believing? What is fiction? Can we learn from fiction? Are there limits to what we can imagine? She has published widely on related topics, and her book Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination is now out with Oxford University Press. She blogs about fiction and imagination at thinkingaboutfiction.me. Philosophers and literary theorists argue about three things: what fiction is, how fiction should be interpreted, and what imagination is. In Only Imagine, I suggest that all three questions can be illuminated simultaneously.  I aim to build a theory of fiction that also tells us about the imagination, and vice versa. My focus is on texts. First, I defend a theory of fictional interpretation (or ‘fictional truth’ as it’s sometimes called). When we read a novel or story, ...

This post is by Chris Letheby . In recent decades there has been a growing interdisciplinary attempt to understand self-awareness by integrating empirical results from neuroscience and psychiatry with philosophical theorizing. This is exemplified by the enterprise known as ‘philosophical psychopathology’, in which observations about unusual cognitive conditions are used to infer conclusions about the functioning of the healthy mind. But this line of research has been somewhat limited by the fact that pathological alterations to self-awareness are unpredictable and can only be studied retrospectively—until now. The recent resurgence of scientific interest in ‘classic’, serotonergic psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin has changed all this. Using more rigorous methods than some of their forebears, psychiatrists have shown that psychedelics can, after all, be given safely in clinical contexts, and may even cause lasting psychological benefits. Small studies have shown ...

The Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind is an annual event organized by the Center of Subjectivity Research . It aims to provide essential insights into central themes within the philosophy of mind, viewed from a phenomenological perspective. The general topics covered this year were intentionality, experience, reflection, perception, attention, self-awareness, rationality, normativity and methodology. Over a period of 5 days, the schedule included keynote lectures, PhD presentations, discussion groups and seminars. The late afternoons and evenings were dedicated to different social events (such as visits to the city, a harbour tour) which allowed for opportunities to exchange ideas amongst researchers. In this post, I give a detailed summary of the main points made by the keynote speakers. On the first day Søren Overgaard talked about Embodiment and Social Perception. The question he set up to answer was whether Social Perception Theory d...

This post is by Dan Weiskopf . He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University , and his research deals with classificatory practices in scientific taxonomy and everyday cognition. Autism is among the most mystifying of psychiatric disorders. For patients and their families, doctors, and caregivers, it presents an intractable and often painful clinical reality. For researchers, it presents a profound theoretical challenge. While it has a handful of fairly well agreed-upon characteristics (the so-called “core triad” ), it is also linked with an enormous range of inconsistent and heterogeneous symptoms . These include behavioral, cognitive, neurobiological, and genetic abnormalities, as well as somatic medical conditions. Given this messiness, it is hard to say what autism itself even is, let alone design effective interventions and treatments for it. There has been a call by some—psychologist Lynn Waterhouse most prominently—to eliminate the disorder from...

Elisabetta Lalumera is organising a Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence workshop at the University of Milano-Bicocca (image below), to be held in Milan (Italy) on May 28, 2018. Below you find a call for papers for the event. Summary of topic When people are unaware of information that accounts for some phenomenon, this does not necessarily prevent them from offering a sincere, but often inaccurate, explanation. Indeed, whilst confabulation has been shown to occur alongside psychiatric diagnoses featuring serious memory impairments, and in people undergoing symptoms of mental distress, it also occurs regularly in people with no such diagnoses or symptoms. Some cognitions which fail to accurately represent reality may nonetheless have redeeming features that promote good functioning in a variety of domains. Inaccurate cognitions may misrepresent the world, but can also bring psychological and practical benefits. More recently, philosophers have pointed out that epistemi...

In this post, Chris Weigel discusses her paper “Quotidian Confabulations: An Ethical Quandary Concerning Flashbulb Memories,” published in Theoretical and Applied Ethics in 2014. Chris is a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University. She works mainly on experimental philosophy of free will and on cognitive biases. How did you find out about the planes crashing on September 11, 2001? What do you remember about the first time you met your spouse? Wait, don’t answer those questions! Your memories about those events are flashbulb memories—memories of surprising, monumental, and emotionally-laden events—and my paper invites us to rethink asking people for their memories about these events, such as the Challenger explosion, assassinations of important public figures, and terrorist attacks. My conclusion isn’t that we should never ask people about their flashbulb memories, but rather that sometimes asking people about their flashbulb memories is problematic. It’s problematic ...

Catherine Z. Elgin is Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Considered Judgment, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, With Reference to Reference, and (with Nelson Goodman) Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. In this post, she talks about her book True Enough . Epistemology valorizes truth.  There may be practical or prudential reasons to accept a contention that is known to be false, but it is widely assumed that there can never be epistemically good reasons to do so.  Nor can there be epistemically good reasons to accept modes of justification that are not truth-conducive.  Although this seems plausible, it has a fatal defect.  It cannot accommodate the cognitive contributions of science.  For science unabashedly uses models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true.  Nor do practicing scientists think that such devices will ultimat...