Imperfect Cognitions

In this post Allan Hazlett  (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, summarises his paper " On the Special Insult of Refusing Testimony ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. My paper is inspired by two remarks made by J.L. Austin and G.E.M. Anscombe. In “Other Minds” (1946), Austin writes that “[i]f I have said I know or I promise, you insult me in a special way by refusing to accept it,” and, in “What Is It to Believe Someone?” (1979), Anscombe writes that that “[i]t is an insult … not to be believed.” The goal of my paper is to give an account of why you can insult someone by refusing her testimony. I take my paradigm case of the special insult of refusing testimony from David Foster Wallace’s (2004) story entitled “Oblivion.”...

Today's post is by Michael Tye on his book Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are animals conscious ? . I’m a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. I encountered philosophy at Oxford and I’ve taught at Temple University, London University, and the University of St Andrews as well as at Texas. I’ve published widely on consciousness and I am associated with a view that has come to be known as representationalism .   The book described below, published by OUP in November 2016, remains neutral on the question as to the right view on the nature of consciousness. Do birds have feelings? What about fish – can fish feel pain? Do insects have experiences? Can a honeybee feel anxious? If trees aren't conscious but fish are, what's the objective difference that makes a difference? How do we decide which living creatures have experiences and which are zombies? Can there be a conscious robot? This book advances philosophically rigorous, empirically informed ans...

Duncan Pritchard  (pictured above) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the  Eidyn  research centre. In this post, he summarises his paper on epistemically useful false beliefs, which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. It seems relatively uncontroversial that false beliefs can often be useful. For example, if one’s life depends on being able to jump that ravine, then it may be practically useful to have a false belief about how far one can jump. In particular, that one overestimates one’s jumping ability may well give one the confidence needed to wholeheartedly attempt the jump. Having an accurate conception of one’s abilities in this regard, in contrast, might lead one to falter, thereby consigning oneself to certain death (rath...

Today's post is by J. Adam Carter , lecturer in Philosophy, University of Glasgow. In this post, he introduces his new book Metaepistemology and Relativism. The question of whether knowledge and other epistemic standings like justification are (in some interesting way) relative, is one that gets strikingly different kinds of answers, depending on who you ask. In humanities departments outside philosophy, the idea of ‘absolute’ or ‘objective’ knowledge is widely taken to be, as Richard Rorty (e.g., 1980) had thought, a naïve fiction —one that a suitable appreciation of cultural diversity and historical and other contingencies should lead us to disavow. A similar kind of disdain for talk of knowledge as objective has been voiced—albeit for different reasons—by philosophers working in the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g., Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Steven Shapin). Adam Carter And yet, within contemporary mainstream epistemology —roughly, the branch of philoso...

Ema Sullivan-Bissett (pictured above) is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, having previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on project PERFECT. In this post she summarises her paper ‘ Biological Function and Epistemic Normativity ’, forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on False but Useful Beliefs. Alongside Lisa Bortolotti, Ema guest edited this special issue which is inspired by project PERFECT’s interests in belief. In my paper I give a biological account of epistemic normativity. I am interested in explaining two features: (EN1) Beliefs have truth as their standard of correctness. (EN2) There are sui generis categorical epistemic norms.

In this post, Sophie Stammers reports from the Chandaria Lectures , hosted by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. Professor Andy Clark , of the University of Edinburgh, gave the annual lecture, where he introduced the notion of ‘predictive processing’. Over the course of the three lectures, he put forward the case for understanding many of the core information processing strategies that underlie perception, thought and action as integrated through the predictive processing framework. On a model of perception popular with Cartesians, and undoubtedly dominant in areas of the cannon that I was acquainted with as an undergraduate, perception is something of a passive business. Perceivers employ malleable receptor systems that (aim to) faithfully imprint the world as it is, delivering a raw stream of information that is made sense of downstream in later processing. Clark dubs this the “cognitive couch potato view”. Despite its past popularity, this view see...

In this post Miriam McCormick (pictured above), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond, summarises her paper on " Rational Hope ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. History and literature are filled with examples of people in horrific, desperate situations where having hope seemed essential for their survival. And yet, holding on to “false hope” can be devastating and can also condone inaction, where hoping for a change replaces working for that change. It also can seem that finding hope in a hopeless situation must be irrational. Is the choice between rational despair and irrational hope? I don’t think so; there are times when hope is rational but it is not always so. My main aim in this p...

From 15 September 2016 to 15 January 2017 the Wellcome Collection is hosting an exhibition entitled: Bedlam, the Asylum and Beyond , exploring the recent history of psychiatry via the evolution of one asylum, the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, often just called 'Bedlam' (see image of the Hospital below, Wellcome Images). The exhibition is very rich and what is most striking about it is that it offers the perspective of those facing mental health issues on the asylum, and on psychiatry in general, through beautiful artworks and photography, and in the stunning audio companion. One of the premises of the exhibition is that asylums are regarded today 'hell on earth', places where cruel practices were tolerated and the main aim was not to treat people so that they could recover and go back to their lives, but control them and limit their freedom (see 'Scene at Bedlam' below, Wellcome Images).   I was really impressed by a series of vignettes by ...

In this post Kathy Puddifoot  (pictured above), Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, summarises her paper on "Responding to Stereotyping", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. Women occupy only thirteen percent of jobs in scientific fields in the United Kingdom. Suppose that as a result of being exposed to accurate depictions of this situation, say, in the news media, you form a stereotype associating science with men. This association influences your automatic responses to individuals. For example, if you hear about a great feat of engineering you automatically assume that the person who achieved it is a man. Is it a good thing that your judgements are automatically influenced by this scientist stereotype? A natural thought is that if you want to be egalit...

This post is by Leslie van der Leer  (Regent's University London) who recently wrote a paper entitled, "The Optimist Within", together with Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway). The paper is to appear in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism, guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. “Let me think it over”, you say as the travel agent advises you to buy insurance. But is this wise? Can we get a more accurate representation of our risks by ‘thinking them over’? Studies by Vul and Pashler (2008) and Herzog and Hertwig (2009) suggest the answer is “Yes”, provided that we combine our considered risk estimate with our initial estimate. These authors found that the well-known “wisdom-of-the-crowd” effect also applies within a single mind. The wisdom-of-the-crowd effect appears when the average of several judges’ estimates (e.g., estimates of the weight of an Ox; Galton, 1907) is more accurate than each indi...