Today I report from a workshop organised by Anna Ichino and Bence Nanay at the University of Antwerp (pictured below) on 31st May, 2017. The themes included subdoxastic attitudes, imagination, and belief.
I (Lisa Bortolotti, Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it.
I (Lisa Bortolotti, Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it.
Next, I argued that confabulated explanations of attitudes and choices involve ignorance and ill-grounded causal explanations. Finally, I looked at potential psychological and epistemic benefits of confabulated explanations, and applied to them the framework of epistemic innocence developed at part of project PERFECT.
I concluded by saying that some confabulated explanations can be epistemically innocent, depending on whether they have benefits for epistemic agency and on whether there are better-grounded explanations available to the person. Another important consideration is whether the confabulation involves the adoption of other ill-grounded beliefs.
Lars Danzer
(Essen) talked about subdoxastic states, subpersonal states, and the
relationship between the two distinctions. Some subdoxastic states are
subpersonal, but not all of them are. Danzer focused on tacit knowledge of
linguistic rules as the principal case. What are subpersonal states? Following Zoe Drayson (2012), the distinction is between level of description or explanation, not between kinds of processes.
Personal-level is
the level of folk-psychology (e.g. beliefs). Subpersonal level is the level of
computational psychology and neuroscience (e.g. neural states). The
subpersonal level is supposed to provide vertical explanations of
personal-level facts. But drawn this way, the distinction is not exclusive. If
you hold an identity theory, there are no two different categories.
Are subdoxastic states (inaccessible to consciousness and inferentially
insulated) located only at the subpersonal level? No! Certain subdoxastic
states may be found only at the personal level (e.g. in rationalising
explanations).
Anna Ichino (Antwerp)
presented her thoughts on imagination and its relation to belief based. She
started with some examples of conspiracy theories and superstitions to show how
common they are, and referred to several robust results from psychological
studies. This magical way of thinking differs from the scientific view of the
world and sometimes it involves ontological confusion (it is scientifically
impossible, not just implausible).
What sort of attitudes/mental states are these, and how do
they affect behaviour? Ichino listed four options: (1) standard belief account (or in-between
believing and not-believing); (2) direct imagination account; (3) indirect
imagination account; (4) novel state account (aliefs or credences).
Ichino argued that for most cases the direct imagination account is the best,
and openly argued against the belief account. The standard belief account is
endorsed by psychologists (‘Believing in Magic’ by Vyse, ‘Supersense’ by Hood)
and based on the motivational power of superstition and magical thinking.
For Ichino this is not a sufficiently good reason to endorse
(1), because superstitions and magical thinking do not meet the other
constraints on belief: sensitivity to evidence and inferential integration. She
used the case of conspiracy theories on Lady Diana’s death and other examples
to make this point. Finally, she explains how the formation of magical and
superstitious thoughts proposed by Risen(2016) and her Psychology of Belief and Judgement Lab fits with her
interpretation of them being a form of imagination: system 2 detects the
intuition offered by system 1 but does not correct it (acquiescence).
Next speaker was Laurie Paul (UNC Chapel Hill) talking about transformative imagination, empathy,
and alienation. She argued that, when we assess, praise, and blame others we need to be able to
empathise with them. Paul did not just refer to affective
empathy, but a richer notion of empathy: in her sense, to empathise is to try and view the world
from the experience and perspective of another, to represent the
first-person perspective of another via one’s own first-person perspective. So, to empathise is a cognitive act but also an experience in itself,
and involves imagination. It is important to empathise with other people,
but it is also important to empathise with your future self, especially as your
current self makes decisions that will impact on your future self.
Could there
be circumstances where you cannot empathise with your future self? How would you make decisions about the future then?
Sometimes first-person knowledge is not enough and cannot be projected into the
future, for instance because some experiences are such that they would change
our perspective completely (transformative
experiences). Examples are having a first child, experiencing drug addiction,
becoming disabled, seeing for the first time: in such cases, an epistemic change causes a
personal change.
One problem is that by engaging in an imaginative act we may
change ourselves and our preferences (epistemic
corruption). One example would be this: how fully can you empathise with a
terrorist without coming to share some of their views that you now utterly reject?
It may be morally required to empathise with your ‘enemy’ but it is also
morally risky. So it may not be the rational thing to do.
Eric Schwitzgebel (UC
Riverside) concluded the workshop with a talk on the pragmatic metaphysics
of belief. Intellectualism about
belief says that intellectually endorsing something, with sincerity, is enough
to believe it. Pragmatism about
belief says something different: intellectual endorsement is not enough,
because belief is behaviourally demanding. Pragmatism is reflected in two
aspects: (1) there is an emphasis on practical behaviour in defining ‘belief’;
(2) there is a commitment to a metaphilosophical pragmatism.
The metaphilosophical commitment is about the recognition
that there are antecedently open cases: in some circumstances the world does
not force a categorisation on us, and it is possible to classify something as either an A or a B. Such decisions reflect our interests and values. An example is what a person is. A bottle of
water is not a person, a woman typing is a person. But what about a fetus? When
we answer this question, we express a value.
There may not be always a right or wrong way to classify
something independent of our values and interests. Metaphysical battles are
political battles for control over the use of terms we care about (e.g. ‘love’,
‘happiness’, ‘torture’). In the case of belief, the interesting cases are those
where someone intellectually endorses p
but does not act on p. Schwitzgebel
talked through a case of a person (Daniel) who professes to respect people who
have menial jobs but he behaves ackwardly towards them.
What does Daniel believe?
Schwitzgebel argues that a term as important for philosophy as ‘belief’ (central
to many subdisciplines) should be viewed pragmatically as what is reflected in
behaviour, because behaviour is what we should care about: “What you believe is
not what you say you believe, it’s how you live”.
The workshop was very informative and thoroughly enjoyable. The organisers fostered a friendly atmosphere which was conducive to excellent exchanges at discussion time.