Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Kevin Dorst and Matthew Mandelkern whose paper, " Good Guesses ", is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research . The authors have written another post on guessing and the conjunction fallacy which you can read here . Matthew Mandelkern Where do you think Latif will go to law school? He’s been accepted to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and NYU. We don’t know his preferences, but here’s the proportion of applicants with the same choices who’ve gone to each: Yale, 38%; Harvard, 30%; Stanford, 20%; NYU, 12%. So take a guess: Where do you think he’ll go? Some observations: One natural guess is ‘Yale’. Another is ‘Either Yale or Harvard’; meanwhile, it’s decidedly unnatural to guess ‘not Yale’, or ‘Yale, Stanford, or NYU’. Though robust, these judgments are puzzling. ‘Yale’ is a fine guess, but its probability is below 50%, meaning that its negation is strictly more probable (38% vs. 62%); nevertheless, ‘not Yale’ is a weird guess. Moreover, ‘Yale or H

In this post Linda Gask presents Finding True North: The healing power of place, a book published in April 2021 by Sandstone Press.  What does it mean to ‘recover’ from depression? The answer you receive to this question will vary by the profession, training, experience, and ideological stance of the person you ask. Some will speak in terms of a reduction in the number of symptoms of depression you have ticked ‘yes’ to. Others will focus on regaining ability to function in the world, particularly in your relationships and ability to work. How do you ‘recover’? Is it simply about taking the tablets, going to therapy- or both? Or is there more to it?  What about mindfulness, and exercise, and all the other suggestions people helpfully provide? There will also be a few who will admonish you for your choice of words to describe a shade of normal human unhappiness and add to the guilt you were feeling for being depressed in the first place. Personally, I’ve found the writing of Damien Rid

Today's post is by Alessandra Tanesini (University of Cardiff) and it is a presentation of Tanesini's latest book, The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology (Oxford University Press 2021). The book is dedicated to the study of eight epistemic vices: four vices of superiority and four of inferiority. The vices of superiority are characteristic of people who feel superior, entitled, and have an inflated opinion of themselves. Those of inferiority are typical of individuals who feel inferior, undeserving and are full of self-doubt.  The book focuses on superbia, arrogance, vanity and narcissism as examples of vices of superiority, and on servility, self-abasement, timidity and fatalism as illustrations of those of inferiority. Each of these vices is shown to be rooted in faulty self-evaluations. People who suffer from these vices do not have the measure of their own strengths and limitations. Because their self-assessments are motivated by needs that are at varianc

Today's post is by Lu Teng at NYU Shanghai on her recent paper “ Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication? ” (2021, Australasian Journal of Philosophy ). Lu Teng The cognitive penetrability of perception brings some new problems to the discussion of perceptual justification in epistemology. In the above case, if the subjects were cognitively penetrated to see an entirely grey banana as yellowish-grey, did this experience give them the same amount of justification for believing that the banana was yellowish-grey as an ordinary, non-penetrated yellowish-grey experience would normally give? Many philosophers maintain that the penetrated experience has less justificatory power, although it remains hotly debated why cognitive penetration makes the experience epistemically downgraded.  In my article “ Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication? ” I critically examine a prominent approach to the epistemology of cognitive penetration, according to which some cognitively penetr