Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Michelle Maiese , Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and moral psychology. There has been debate among philosophers about how to address issues of responsibility in cases where subjects suffer from dissociative identity disorder (DID). If one personality commits a wrongful act of which another was unaware, should we regard this individual as responsible for her actions? If we regard DID as a case in which multiple persons inhabit a single body, it may seem natural to conclude that each alter is a separate agent and that one alter is not responsible for the actions of another. However, in “Dissociative Identity Disorder, Ambivalence, and Responsibility", I argue that even once we acknowledge that a subject with DID is a single person, there are still serious reasons to question the extent to which she is responsible for her actio...

Mikkel Gerken is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. In this post he writes about his new book ‘On Folk Epistemology. How we think and talk about knowledge’ . A central claim of my book,  On Folk Epistemology. How we think and talk about knowledge,  is that some folk epistemological patterns of knowledge ascriptions are best explained by cognitive biases. I argue that this approach to folk epistemology yields diagnoses of some hard puzzles of contemporary epistemology. So, On Folk Epistemology seeks to contribute to some prominent debates in contemporary epistemology. For example, I criticize contextualism, pragmatic encroachment, knowledge-first epistemology etc. If you want to check it out, there is an introduction and overview here . In this blog post, however, I will emphasize why the study of folk epistemology is an important task. In a nutshell, it is because folk epistemology is extremely consequential. Consider, for example, the role...

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the second in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences, eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière, (Psychology Press, 2017) (part one can be found here ). Last week we argued that your intelligence, vigilance, and academic expertise very likely doesn't do much to protect you from the normal human tendency towards rationalization – that is, from the tendency to engage in biased patterns of reasoning aimed at justifying conclusions to which you are attracted for selfish or other epistemically irrelevant reasons – and that, in fact, you may be more susceptible to rationalization than the rest of the population. This week we’ll argue th...

On 14th November there was an interesting conference at the Royal Society of Medicine on the effects of social media on mental health. Mary Aiken (University of College Dublin) discussed the Cyber Effect , her book which addresses the risks of social media on young people (cover below). Cyber space is a space and we need to consider the impact of it on vulnerable populations such as teens. We need to factor in developmental aspects (at what age should parents let children have a smartphone?). We need to recognise the continuous evolution of behaviour and as experts we need to drive policy initiatives and develop guidelines for parents and educators. Jon Goldin (Great Ormond Street Hospital) talked about the risks and benefits of social media for young people. Children like using social media for different reasons: they use it for communication, to express themselves, to gain confidence, for popularity, for entertainment, to develop a sense of belonging, to receive informati...

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...

The workshop Challenges To Wellbeing: The Experience of Loneliness and Epistemic Injustice in the Clinical Encounter originated from a multi-disciplinary conversation about wellbeing and happiness. Exploring the theme of challenges to wellbeing, this conversation brought together academics from across the University, practitioners, and campaigners. The workshop was hosted by Lisa Bortolotti and Sophie Stammers  for project PERFECT , and co-organised and funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies  (IAS). It was held at the Centre for Professional Development (CPD) in the Medical School on the 22nd of November 2017. This is a detailed report on the talks given that day. The workshop was divided in three sessions. Session One was dedicated to Themes from Project PERFECT . Kathy Puddifoot started with an Introduction to Epistemic Injustice. She defined epistemic injustice and spoke about the different types that have been identified. Kathy explained that since th...

Today's post is by  Dr Pablo López-Silva , who is Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. He is the director of the 3-years FONDECYT Research Project titled 'The Agentive Architecture of Human Thought ' granted by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research of the Government of Chile.  Pablo López-Silva currently works on the philosophy of mind, clinical psychiatry, and psychopathology with a special focus on the way mental pathologies and empirical research inform our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Self-awareness i.e. the awareness we have of being the subject of our own experience is, perhaps, one of the most elusive elements of human mind. A common idea within current philosophy of mind is that the awareness we have of different external and internal experiences might necessarily involve a degree of self-awareness. In other words, every time you reach a cup, read a boo...

On Wednesday 23rd May, PERFECT will host its third annual workshop, at St Anne’s College, Oxford . This year, our topic is confabulation, and we’re excited to welcome leading researchers in the field for a stimulating programme of presentations. The talks explore a number of philosophical issues arising from confabulation, and will be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology and epistemologists. Papers to be presented also examine confabulation in relation to wider research programmes in cognitive science and psychiatry, and so we also welcome researchers from all disciplines of the mind who are interested in how we give accounts of our experiences, choices and actions. The speakers will address a range of issues, with some exploring an aspect of confabulation that is underdeveloped or has been overlooked in previous work, whilst others propose a new model of the phenomenon that helps to explain and bring clarity to existing observations. I...