Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is from Celia Harris , who works in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. In this post she summarises research from her paper " Social Contagion of Autobiographical Memories " recently published in Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. I’m interested in memory, and particularly the social and functional aspects. What do we use memory for in our day-to-day lives, and in our social relationships? And how does this inform our models and theories of memory, which have typically been developed by focusing on individuals learning word lists in a lab? One of the aims of my research has been to counter the negative emphasis on the power of social interaction to distort memory. My research suggests that social influence does indeed shape and alter memories in interesting ways, consistent with our goals of agreeing with others and being informed by them. However I argue that we shouldn’t necessaril...

On 15th October 2017, a team of volunteers headed by Immy Kaur hosted TEDxBrum 2017 at the Birmingham Hippodrome. The theme for the day was Perspectives: " we learn more about reality by sharing perspectives ". On stage speakers and performers powerfully addressed the theme by reference to their own experiences, art, work, or research. Some talks discussed the importance of new technological advances and their potential challenges. Catherine Allen talked about virtual reality (VR) and argued that this new technology has a lot of potential but we should develop some critical distance from it. VR is special because it is not a rectangular space that represents reality (which is what TV, mobile phones, or laptops do) but it is a simulation of reality that enables people to do things rather than just watch, and to empathise with other people. Ade Adewunmi addressed the contradictions of a software-mediated world. Personal data are gathered by manufacturers, b...

Today's post features Christopher Mole, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of the Programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia. In this post he outlines a recent debate concerning the causes of intrusive memory in post traumatic stress.  Christopher has published on this topic in his papers "A methodological flaw in 'The neural basis of flashback formation: the impact of viewing trauma'" (Psychological  Medicine, 46(8), p. 1785) and "Causes and correlates of intrusive memory: a response to Clark, MacKay, Holmes and Bourne." (Psychological Medicine, 46(15), p. 3255). People often witness events that cause post-traumatic stress in others, without suffering from such stress themselves. Because of that, it has been supposed that the explanation of PTSD should not be sought in the experience of the traumatizing event, but in disruptions to the processes that occur in the days and weeks after it: processes of grievi...

This post is by Ruth Millikan . Ruth Garrett Millikan is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut. She is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Winner of the 2017 Researcher Prize for Systematic Philosophy. I am a retired professor of philosophy from the University of Connecticut with special interests in thought and language, the ontological structures of the world that support thought and language and the kinds of selection ---- genetic, learning, cultural ---- responsible for their evolution and development. Beyond Concepts weaves together themes from natural ontology and from the philosophies of mind, language and information. The sprawling topic is Kant's how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we, along with the other animals, are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is, roughly, as natur...

Matthew Frise is a Lecturer at Santa Clara University . He writes on memory in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. In this post he discusses his paper " No Need to Know " published in Philosophical Studies in 2017. Knowing isn’t always best. It’s never best, actually. Something that’s not quite knowledge can be just as great. And folks think knowledge is great. In fact, some philosophers think it’s so great that we should focus on explaining other great things in terms of it. Some even think knowledge isn’t just valuable, but uniquely valuable. Nothing else has its value. Knowledge, after all, closes inquiry. Once we get it, our investigation wraps up. Also, we seem to prefer knowing over any kind of not knowing. Doesn’t that all show knowledge is special? Nope. Some knowledge shares its value with something that isn’t knowledge. If that’s right, knowledge isn’t so special. Its value isn’t unique to it. What shares the value of knowledge? Being in a position to...

Christian List  organised a two-day workshop on Reasons, Rationality, and Intentional Agency in the Lakatos Building (picture above) at the LSE on 29th and 30th September 2017. I was lucky enough to attend three talks on the 29th, and here is a brief report. The event was funded by the Leverhulme via a  Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship  awarded to List. Kate Vredenburgh from Harvard (picture above) opened the workshop with a paper entitled “Rational Choice Explanation”. She started with the observation that choice-frameworks have been criticised a lot recently. Especially, the revealed preferences approach, according to which statements about preferences are summaries of choice behaviour, has been criticised on the basis that it cannot provide causal explanations and action explanations. Vredenburgh's main thesis was that, if revealed preferences theorists adopt a unificationist theory of explanation, then they can avoid some of the problems. Reveale...

Today’s post is by Valerie Gray Hardcastle , Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinatti. I study the nature and structure of interdisciplinary theories in the cognitive sciences and have focused primarily on developing a philosophical framework for understanding consciousness that is responsive to neuroscientific, psychiatric and psychological data. Currently, I am investigating the neuroscience of violence and its implications for both our understanding of human nature and the criminal justice system. I am also trying to figure out whether notions of embodied cognition help or hinder theorizing about consciousness. (I think that the answer will be neither.) Most recently, I have received research fellowships from the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Texas-Medical Branch ; the Centre for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution at theUniversity of Bochum ; and the Institute for Philosophy/S...

This post is by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, and previous Research Fellow on Project PERFECT . Together with Helen Bradley and Paul Noordhof , I have edited a collection Art and Belief , recently published with Oxford University Press. The volume consists of twelve new essays at the intersection of philosophy of mind and art. Our appreciation of artworks raises substantial challenges for our understanding of the cognitive attitudes involved, specifically, beliefs and related attitudes. Some of our beliefs concern the quality of the work in question. Others will derive from the content of the work, reflecting the commonly held view of art as a source of truth and knowledge. Both kinds of belief bring challenges for orthodox understandings of belief. The volume is divided into four sections which explore a variety of questions on art and the nature of belief. Section I: Author Testimony Can we form justified beliefs upo...

I am Neil Levy, Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics . These days I work mainly in philosophy of psychology and mind and applied ethics. Find out more about my work here . This is a precis of " Am I Racist? Implicit Bias and the Ascription of Racism ," recently published in Philosophical Quarterly . Implicit bias has recently received a great deal of high quality attention from philosophers. Papers have probed their nature, how their effects can be countered and their implications for ethics and for epistemology. In moral philosophy, the question that has dominated has been whether agents are responsible for actions partially caused by them.  But little space has been given to the question of how we are to characterize agents who harbor them. The agent who is explicitly sexist is a misogynist. But what about the agent who is only implicitly sexist? I explore t...