Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Cherise Rosen . Cherise is a faculty member in the Departments of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a co-investigator in the Chicago Longitudinal Study (PI: Martin Harrow) and has conducted extensive research in the phenomenological construct of psychosis, with particular emphasis on auditory verbal hallucinations and delusions.    Cherise Rosen Cherise summarizes her recent paper (co-authored with Martin Harrow, Clara Humpston, Liping Tong, Thomas H. Jobe, and Helen Harrow) entitled  ‘An experience of meanings’: A 20-year prospective analysis of delusional realities in schizophrenia and affective psychoses , recently published in  Frontiers in Psychiatry . The authors would like to thank all the individuals who participated in the Chicago Longitudinal Study as their contributions over the 20 years of follow-up made this research possible. This work was supported in part by USPHS Grants MH-...

As part of the Knowledge Resistance project, a conference was organised in Stockholm from 23rd to 25th August 2022 to bring together philosophers, psychologists, media studies researchers, and journalists and discuss recent work on misinformation. This event was organised by Åsa Wikforss ( interviewed on knowledge resistance here ).  Stockholm University, Albano In this report, I will summarise some of the talks. DAY 1 In his talk entitled “Resistance to Knowledge and Vulnerability to Deception”, Christopher F. Chabris (Geisinger Health System) argued that we need to understand our vulnerabilities to deception in order to appreciate the social aspects of knowledge resistance. He illustrated with many interesting examples of famous deceptions and frauds how deceivers exploit blind spots in our attention and some of our cognitive habits.  Christopher Chabris For instance, we tend to judge something as accurate if it is predictable and consistent. We make predictions all t...

Today's post is by Cory Davia, who is a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and the Director of Summer Programming for the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. He works on metaethics, philosophy of action, social epistemology, and the philosophy of sports. Cory Davia When we are making up our minds about some issue, we look at the evidence. But we’re not just concerned with what evidence there is; we also need to think about whether this evidence is good enough. For example, suppose I want to know whether it will rain tomorrow. I haven’t checked the weather report, so my evidence is just what’s provided to me by my familiarity with the seasonal weather patterns in Southern California where I live. Is this evidence good enough to justify me in believing that it will be sunny? Or for that belief to count as knowledge?  Many philosophers have thought that the answer is: it depends on the practical stakes. If being wrong about this would ruin my plan...

Today's post is by Raphaël Millière and Albert Newen. Raphaël is the Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. His current work focuses mainly on the capacities of modern connectionist models, and the nature of self-representation. Albert is full professor of philosophy of mind at the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) and the director of the interdisciplinary Center for Mind and Cognition at RUB. His main research topics include selfhood and agency, understanding others, emotion, perception and cognition, and animal cognition. Raphaël Millière A number of authors across philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have argued that consciousness always involves self-consciousness: to be conscious at all, you have to be conscious of yourself in some way. However, many find this claim implausible. In particular, it is seemingly undermined by reports of "selfless" episodes – conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness – induced by psych...

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori, who is a PhD student at Hokkaido University, a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) research fellow, and a new editor of this blog, Imperfect Cognitions. His main research area is the free will debate and experimental philosophy of free will. He is now working on a project which is related to folk intuition about free will. The aim of this project is to identify what intuition people actually have and why they express such intuition, in order to obtain clues for resolving the conflict between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Kiichi Inarimori In the free will debate, some argue that the free will necessary for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, while others argue that it is incompatible. Theorists on both sides have often claimed that their position is intuitive. Meanwhile, since 2000’s, folk intuitions have been the subject of empirical inquiry. So far, some research supports the view that most people have compat...