Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Francesco Guala (pictured above), Professor of Economics at the University of Milan. In this post, he presents a paper  he wrote with Luigi Mittone , Professor of Economics at the University of Trento, and which was published in the journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology. A reply to their article by Cass Sunstein is also available in the same journal. ‘Behavioural economics’ is a research programme that aims at making economic models psychologically more realistic. After many years ‘in the wild’, behavioural economists are now part of the mainstream and have succeeded at bringing microeconomics in line with the developments of cognitive psychology. Up until recently, however, behavioural economists had been rather shy regarding the normative (i.e. policy) implications of their research. All of this has changed in 2008 with the publication of Nudge, the best-selling book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Nudge is not only an impressive showcase fo...

Today's post is by Carrie Jenkins , Canada Research Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where she is heading up a multi-year interdisciplinary research project on the Metaphysics of Romantic Love . She lives in Vancouver, and she is @carriejenkins on Twitter. Her new book is What Love Is And What It Could Be (2017, Basic Books). The book takes off from a dilemma facing anyone who wants to know what romantic love is. One promising approach treats love as a biological phenomenon: a bundle, perhaps, of evolved neurochemical responses (chapter 1). Another promising approach locates it as a social construct: a creature of norms, institutions, and practices (chapter 2). These approaches appear inconsistent—evolved neurochemistry is not a social construct—yet choosing one to the exclusion of the other feels like discarding half our hard-won wisdom. After a brief detour through some “canonical” (and often deeply problematic) philosophers ...

Hyemin Han  (pictured above) is Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology and Educational Neuroscience at The University of Alabama. In this post, he summarises his paper  "Attainable and relevant moral exemplars are more effective than extraordinary exemplars in promoting voluntary service engagement", recently published in Frontiers in Psychology . Did your parent or teacher tell you the stories of morally great people, moral exemplars, e.g., Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr., when you were young? Your parents and teachers perhaps told you such stories at least once, and you were asked to learn how to live a good life from them. Do you think that the stories have made you a morally better person, who is trying his/her best to emulate such exemplars’ moral behavior? Let’s make this question more general. Can such (seemingly) morally perfect people’s stories really promote motivation to engage in moral behavior? On the one hand, prior social and developme...

Today's post is by Nick Heather and Gabriel Segal on their new edited collection Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the Relationship . Nick Heather (pictured below) is a clinical psychologist by training and is now Emeritus Professor of Alcohol and Other Drug Studies at Northumbria University. He has over 500 publications, mostly in the area of addictions, with an emphasis on treatment and brief intervention for alcohol problems. Gabriel Segal (pictured below) is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at King’s College, London. He has published extensively in philosophy of psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of language. In 1997, Nick Heather, together with Ian Robertson, published the 3rd edition of a book called ‘Problem Drinking’. It argued that there is no such thing as ‘alcoholism’ in the sense of a discontinuous form of drinking problem and that it was not helpful to see problem drinking as a disease. Rather, people drink in problematic ways for a ...

Neil Levy (pictured above) is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University (Sydney) and Senior Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. Here, he replies to last week's post by  Neil Van Leeuwen .   Neil Levy's post draws on themes from his  paper   recently published  in Cognition. There are two central strands to Neil Van Leeuwen’s post (hereafter NVL). One is the claim that there is a class of representational state (in the post he focuses on religious belief, but in his paper in Cognition he suggests that ideological beliefs belong to this class too) which fail to be evidentially vulnerable in the same way as more mundane beliefs. The second strand is the one developed in his paper in Philosophical Explorations , arguing that we best understand the limited signs of evidence responsiveness exhibited by these beliefs in terms of a kind of imaginative play. People who respond to evidence with regard to thei...

In this post, Nancy Nyquist Potter introduces her new book, The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement . I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville, an Associate with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and a core faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Bioethics and Medical Humanities. My main area of focus is in the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry, where I’ve published on topics on Borderline Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, self-injury, trauma, and related nosological, epistemic, and ethical issues. Because I have spent over 10 years working in the university’s Emergency Psychiatric Services and the Mood Disorders Clinic, I also write on therapeutic issues that are implicated in diagnosis and treatment. I always examine issues through a feminist lens and am increasingly including critical race theory in my work. I am a board member of the Association for the Advancement of Philosop...

This post is by Neil Van Leeuwen  (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Associate of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. What follows is a synopsis of his new paper , 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. One might argue that the answer to my title question is just blindingly obvious. Religious “beliefs” don’t respond to evidence, because no beliefs do! After all, human belief formation processes are a motley crew, including such ignobles as confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, the availability heuristic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the base rate fallacy, the genetic fallacy, ad hominems, prestige bias, framing effects, and many, many…many more. This cynical view, however, grows out of a diet of ...

Neil Garrett This post is by  Neil Garrett  who recently wrote a paper with  Tali Sharot , entitled  Optimistic Update Bias Holds Firm: Three Tests of Robustness Following Shah et al. . 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. Much of the recent research on optimism has centred around the phenomenon of optimistic belief updating. A well established finding is that healthy individuals are reluctant to revise beliefs when in receipt of “bad news” compared to “good news”. One of the tasks that has been devised to show this in the lab, examines how beliefs about life events (such as being burgled or involved in a car accident) change when individuals find out the events are more or less likely to occur than they initially thought. For example, how much does someone alter their beliefs when provided with evidence that they are more li...

This post is by Mark Rowlands (pictured below) who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. He has written eighteen books, and a hundred or so journal papers, book chapters and reviews. His most recent book is Memory and the Self: Phenomenology,Science, and Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press). Intuitively, it is not unreasonable to suppose that our episodic memories play a significant – but not necessarily exhaustive – role in making us who we are. After all, what could make us the people we are if not the episodes we have encountered on these tracks through space and time that we call lives? And how could these things we have encountered be retained, and so play a role in shaping us, if not through episodic memory? As an intuition this is amenable to several quite different theoretical articulations. Perhaps the most familiar to analytic philosophers is what I refer to as the metaphysical project . This project is made up of several, related,...