Imperfect Cognitions

Rosa Ritunnano This post is by Rosa Ritunnano, consultant psychiatrist and doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, reporting from the 21st Annual Conference of the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP).  The event took place from 22nd-24th October 2019 at the University of Warsaw; it was organised by the Open Seminars in Philosophy and Psychiatry Foundation, with support of the Polish Phenomenological Association and the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network (Collaborating Centre for Values Based Practice, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford). A special thank you note goes to Marcin Moskalewicz (member of the organising committee) for sharing some of photos included in the post.   The INPP conference brought together researchers and professionals working at the interface between Philosophy and Mental Health from 32 countries and provided a lively forum to discuss developments and challenges for the next generation – particu...

Mount Fuji from the venue, Komaba campus On 14th and 15th December 2019 Kengo Miyazono and John O’Dea organised a workshop at the University of Tokyo on themes related to agency and rationality. In this post, I summarise some of the talks presented at the conference. On day 1, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (Veritas Research Centre, Underwood International College, Yonsei University) kicked off the workshop with a talk about social media, data analysis, psychological profiling and freedom. Although social media enables connectivity and has a number of other advantages, it represents a threat to privacy. That is because when we register for platforms like Facebook, we give consent to our data being shared, but that does not count as informed consent. People are often attributed five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Can people be profiled based on their “likes”? It is said that computer-based judgemen...

This post is by Michela Massimi who tells us about a collection she co-edited with Ana-Maria Cretu , Knowledge from a Human Point of View (Springer Synthese Library), available fully open access, courtesy of the European Research Council OA policy. Knowledge from a Human Point of View is the second edited volume planned for the ERC Consolidator Grant " Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point " and in my original intentions it was meant to explore the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of the view known as ‘perspectivism’. Better known these days among philosophers of science working on scientific modelling and pluralism (albeit not exclusively), perspectivism is a view with a long history. What is at stake in the prima facie platitude that our knowledge is always from a human point of view? Whose else’s point of view if not ours, one might immediately retort? Historically, the shift from knowledge sub spe...

In this post Alessandro Salice (UCC) and Kengo Miyazono (Hiroshima) summarise their new paper “ Being one of us. Group identification, joint actions, and collective intentionality ”, in which they defend a minimalistic account of joint actions that is based on a theory of group identification.  In the relevant literature it is generally assumed that, in order to explain joint actions (in contradistinction to actions in strategic equilibrium), one needs to appeal to shared intentions. To use Margaret Gilbert’s famous example, if Pam and Sam are walking together (rather than walking in parallel), then Pam and Sam’s collective action is explained by the fact that they share the intention of walking together ( Gilbert 1990 ). However, the question immediately arises as to what it means for several individuals to share intentions. One way of understanding shared intentions is by identifying the conditions under which standard individual intentions (intentions in the I-form: “...