Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Rik Peels. Rik is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Religion & Theology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is currently leading a large research project funded by the European Research Council, on the epistemology and ethics of extreme beliefs . He aims to synthesize empirical work with conceptual and normative approaches to fundamentalism, extremism, and conspiracy thinking.   For almost its entire history, philosophy has studied knowledge and understanding rather than ignorance. I see why: we seek to know and understand reality rather than be ignorant of it, at least for most things (privacy issues and the like may be an exception). And perhaps the tacit idea was that if we get a grip on knowledge and understanding, we thereby also have insight into the nature of ignorance, as ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge, or at least so it was thought.  Even philosophical debates that appealed to ignorance, such as that about Socratic...

This post is by Matteo Colombo . When we asked our readers to vote for their favourite post among the five most popular posts we ever published, Matteo's "Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science" (27 September 2016) won by a large margin. So, on the occasion of our 10th birthday, we invited him to write for us again and update us on his research. Matteo Colombo Seven years ago I wrote a piece for Imperfect Cognitions , where I described a study aimed at investigating the relationship between explanatory judgement, moral offense and the value-free ideal of science. Conducted in collaboration with psychologists Leandra Bucher and Yoel Inbar , our study showed that the more you perceive the conclusion of a scientific study as morally offensive, the more likely you are to reject it as bad science. For instance, to the extent you find the conclusion that males are naturally promiscuous while females are coy and choosy to be morally offensive, you’ll dismi...

Today's post is an interview with Paolo Costa, who is a researcher at the Center for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation and leads the Resilient Beliefs project, and Eugenia Lancellotta, who is a postdoctoral researcher on the project. We talked about the Resilient Beliefs project.  Paolo Costa KMH: What is the 'Resilient Beliefs' project all about? PC & EL: It is a collaborative program involving 9 researchers in philosophy and theology and three different institutions: the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, in Italy, and the Universities of Innsbruck and Brixen in Austria. It is about hyper-robust beliefs, so to speak. By “hyper-robust beliefs” I mean beliefs that are especially resistant to criticism and change induced by counterargument and counterevidence. Now, these beliefs are often seen as irrational, because we tend to link rationality with revisability, flexibility, adaptability, etc.  But, of course, people who change their mind too ea...

Today`s post is by Jake Wojtowicz on recent paper " Agent-Regret, Accidents, and Respect " ( The Journal of Ethics , 2023). Jake Wojtowicz earned his PhD from King's College London in 2019. He lives in Rochester, NY where he writes about the ethics and the philosophy of sport. Jake Wojtowicz Writing in The New Yorker , Alice Gregory talks about accidental killers and introduces a motorist, Patricia, who - temporarily blinded by the sunlight in her eyes - hit and killed a cyclist. It wasn’t her fault, but she spent time in the suicide unit and this has ruined her life. She even wrote to the state attorney asking to be criminally punished.  Bernard Williams suggested someone in Patricia’s situation should feel “agent-regret”. This isn’t the guilt of the intentional or reckless wrongdoer, and it isn’t the regret of the bystander. In “Agent-regret, accidents, and respect”, I reflect on Patricia’s case to shed light on how we should think about someone who accidentally harms ...

Today's post is by Shane Ryan at Singapore Management University, on his recent paper “ Fake News, Epistemic Coverage and Trust ”  ( The Political Quarterly . 2021). Shane Ryan Is there any relationship between low levels of trust in mainstream media and belief in fake news? I argue that there is such a link. Before we get to why I think so, it’s important to clarify some of the important terms in the question. What is fake news? There is lots of disagreement about how to analyse the term and even some, such as Habgood-Coote, who suggest we shouldn’t try to analyse the term in the first place. Mindful of the difficult discussion, I don’t propose a full analysis of fake news but instead I propose that fake news requires that Information is presented as news that falls short of the (procedural) standards for news. What do I mean by trust? I argue trust requires that the trusting agent believes that the trusted agent has the competence to do whatever the trusting agent trusts the trus...