Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post on conspiracy theories is by Colin Klein, Peter Clutton and Vince Polito. Colin Klein works on the philosophy of neuroscience at The Australian National University, and is interested in delusions and related phenomena. Colin Klein Peter Clutton is a graduate student in philosophy at The Australian National University, working on delusions and beliefs. is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, interested in belief formation, self representation, and altered states of consciousness.  Peter Clutton Vince Polito  is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, interested in belief formation, self representation, and altered states of consciousness. Vince Polito Conspiracy theorists are often thought to be distinctively irrational. When you picture a conspiracy theorist, you might imagine someone scouring the internet and joi...

This post is by Ji-Young Lee. This year’s Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) @ Bristol conference theme was ‘Public Philosophy’. We hosted a number of talks exploring the conceptual and practical issues related to the idea of philosophy as a ‘public’ endeavour. Four current Philosophy PhD students are responsible for organizing the event: Chengxiao Dang, Chia-Hung Huang, Ji-Young Lee, and Denise Vargiu. We would also like to acknowledge Minorities and Philosophy, The Marc Sanders Foundation, and the University of Bristol Philosophy Department for kindly supporting this event. We commenced our morning session with a talk from Jane Gatley, on justifying philosophy in secondary schools. She discussed how justifying teaching philosophy through the positive benefits associated with the P4C movement risked ‘conflating claims about philosophy with claims about the distinctive P4C pedagogy’. The benefits attached to P4C might have more to do with dialogue and child-centered learning, rat...

Today's post is provided by Robin Zheng. In this post she introduces her paper " Bias, Structure and Injustice: A reply to Haslangar ", published in Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. Robin Zheng is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. Her research focuses on issues of moral responsibility and structural injustice, along with other topics in ethics, moral psychology, feminist and social philosophy, and philosophy of race.  Some of her other works on topics related to this post include “ Attributability, Accountability, and Implicit Bias ” in Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Volume 2 (eds. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul), “ A Job for Philosophers: Causality, Responsibility, and Explaining Social Inequality ” in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, and “ What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice ” (forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice). For more information, ...

Mind Reading is the yearly conference of the collaboration between UCD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry , researchers at the University ofBirmingham , and the Diseases of Modern Life and Constructing Scientific Communities Projects at St Anne's College, Oxford. Organised by Elizabeth Barrett (Consultant in Liaison Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children’s University Hospital) and Melissa Dickson (Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham) the conference, and project more generally, focuses on two simple questions: Do doctors and patients speak the same language, and how can we use literature to bridge the evident gaps? In what follows, I summarise just some of the talks and workshop sessions. How do cultural norms and expectations shape diagnosis and the experience of illness?  Melissa Dickson  showed us that, in 19th Century Britain, there were multiple literary and medical accounts of a psychosis-like state brought about by…green ...

Sophie Keeling is currently a philosophy PhD student at the University of Southampton. She primarily works on self-knowledge which has allowed her to research a range of topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. Sophie’s thesis argues that we have a distinctive way of knowing why we have our attitudes and perform actions that observers lack. She gives a brief overview here . This post summarises my paper ‘ Confabulation and Rational Requirements for Self-Knowledge ’ (forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology ). The paper argues for a novel explanation of confabulation: Confabulation is motivated by the desire to have fulfilled a rational obligation to knowledgeably explain our attitudes by reference to motivating reasons. (Following others in the epistemological literature, I term the reason for which we hold an attitude our ‘motivating reason’ for it). I shan’t seek to define confabulation here (a task in its own right) but instead note the ...

On 10th and 11th May in Senate House London Michael Hannon and Robin McKenna hosted a two-day conference on Political Epistemology , supported by the Mind Association, the Institute of Philosophy, and the Aristotelian Society. In this report I focus on two talks that addressed themes relevant to project PERFECT. Robert Talisse On day 1,  Robert Talisse  explained what is troubling with polarisation. In the past Talisse developed an account of the epistemic value of democracy in terms of epistemic aspirations (rather than democratic outcomes). In a slogan, "the ethics of belief lends support to the ethos of democracy". We can see this when we think about polarisation. There are two senses of polarisation: (1) political polarisation and (2) belief (or group) polarisation. Political polarisation is the dropping out of the middle ground between opposed ideological stances. That means that opposed stances have fewer opportunities to engage in productive conversations. Bel...

Benjamin Elzinga recently completed his PhD at Georgetown University with a dissertation on epistemic agency. His research interests include epistemology, the problems of free will, and the philosophy of mind. In this post, he presents work he recently published under the title " Hermeneutical Injustice and Liberatory Education ". In the 50s and 60s, women joining the U.S. workforce and members of the broader society in some sense lacked the conceptual skills for making sense of sexual harassment. Through the practices of the U.S. women’s liberation movement, especially through the organization of consciousness raising groups and speak-outs in the early 70s, feminists developed these resources and encoded them into the legal system. According to Miranda Fricker this is an instance of recognizing and to some extent addressing a problem of hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when members of a certain group are unjustly prevented from developing and distributing import...

On 28th May, Elisabetta Lalumera organised a workshop on Confabulation and Epistemic Innocence  at the Department of Psychology, University of Milan Bicocca. First speakers of the day were Lisa Bortolotti and Sophie Stammers from project PERFECT  who presented a picture of confabulation where clinical and non-clinical cases are continuous and have a similar structure. Bortolotti talked about epistemic costs and benefits of confabulation. She argued that we should distinguish between innocent and guilty instances of confabulation depending on whether the person confabulating has access to the information that ground an epistemically less problematic explanation and on whether the ill-groundedness of the explanation spreads to the person's further beliefs. Stammers focused on the question why we confabulate . Do we aim to provide a causal theory about what is going on—as recently was argued by Max Coltheart ? Or are we imposing meaning and attempt to develop a...

Today’s post is written by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham . Here she overviews her paper ‘ Monothematic Delusion: A case of innocence from experience '. Before taking up my current post as Lecturer in Philosophy, I was a Postdoc on Lisa Bortolotti’s AHRC project on the Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions (2013-14). In that year we worked together in developing the notion of epistemic innocence, which we thought could be of use in thinking about the epistemic status of faulty cognitions. We understood a cognition as epistemically innocent when it (1) endows some significant epistemic benefit onto the subject (Epistemic Benefit Condition), which could not otherwise be had, because (2) alternative, less epistemically faulty cognitions are in some sense unavailable to her at that time (No Alternatives Condition). As part of that project, we wrote two papers in which we put that notion to use in discussion of exp...