Imperfect Cognitions

In today's post Paul Noordhof presents his book, A Variety of Causes (OUP 2020). A Variety of Causes began life as an attempt to defend a counterfactual theory of causation that covered cases of indeterminism. Its basic tools were counterfactuals like ‘if e1 were not to occur, e2 would not occur’ (where e1 and e2 are token events) and appeals to probability in the consequent of the counterfactual (so p(e2) rather than e2) to characterise a notion of chance-raising. A successful defence requires a treatment of counterfactuals, identifying the conditions under which they are true and, for the enthusiast, that means I developed further Lewis’s similarity weighting for counterfactuals placing restrictions on the requirement for perfect match and clarifying the approximate match condition.  More complex counterfactuals were needed to deal with cases of ‘redundant’ causation, like the situation in which one cause pre-empts another candidate cause. The book defends a particular way of ...

This post is by Carolina Flores  on evidence responsiveness in delusions. A paper on the same topic has been published open access in  Synthese . Carolina  Flores Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the evidence-responsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I argue that (for the most part) delusions are evidence-responsive—in the sense that subjects have the capacity to rationally respond to evidence on their de...

Today's post is by Stephen Gadsby , from the Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University, Melbourne. Stephen Gadsby It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, ‘Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved’ — Emma Watson Emma Watson’s confession represents a characteristic feature of imposter syndrome, a condition suffered by many intelligent, driven, and successful individuals—Maya Angelou, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, to name a few. People with imposter syndrome feel like frauds because they believe themselves to be less able (e.g., talented, knowledgeable, intelligent) than their peers. The truth of the matter is just the opposite: they are just as, if not more, able. They also have ample evidence in support of this, in the form of achievements, accolades, awards, and the like. A puzzling feature of the phenomenon is the way in which ...

In today's post, Marion Godman  (Aarhus University) presents her new book, The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds (Routledge 2021). Marion Godman, photo by Tariq Mikkel Khan I have written a book about human kinds, such as kinds of gender, religion and ethnicity. In the book I try to answer questions both about how these kinds come about and what their role in science and in policy is. Here I will focus on summarizing some of what I say about the positive role that human kinds can play in science and policy. I have come to think that people (including myself) must often be convinced that there is a point to talk about human kinds before they can take an interest in what they are and how they come about.  If I were to write a book on natural kinds, I might not have needed to spend much time on this task. After all, few would deny that it is useful to gain knowledge about alleged natural kinds, like mineralogical kinds, chemical elements and different species of ma...