First-person perspectives and scientific inquiry of autism

Today’s post is by Sarah Arnaud (Clemson University) on her recent paper, "First-person perspectives and scientific inquiry of autism: towards an integrative approach" (Synthese 2023).

Sarah Arnaud

In my paper, "First-person perspectives and scientific inquiry of autism: towards an integrative approach," published in Synthese, I analyse the essential role of first-person perspectives in enriching our comprehension of autism. This paper explores the interplay between scientific inquiry, activism, and the personal experiences of autistics, advocating for an approach that integrates insights from these varied sources.

The paper begins by confronting widespread misconceptions about autism, focusing particularly on the debate concerning the impact of science and activism in shaping our collective understanding of autism. I analyze the perspectives of Ian Hacking and Kenneth Kendler, two influential figures in this discourse. Hacking argues for the predominance of activism in influencing public perception and understanding of autism, while Kendler highlights the indispensable role of scientific research.

Moving beyond this debate, I critically evaluate the perceived dichotomy between scientific methodologies and activism in autism studies. I underline the significant contributions of the Neurodiversity movement and Critical Autism Studies, arguing that these perspectives have brought crucial comprehension to the autism discourse by effectively combining scientific research with activism. These approaches have not only enhanced our understanding but also fostered a more inclusive view of autism.

Central to my paper is the argument for incorporating autistic people’s perspectives in autism research. I claim that integrating these firsthand experiences is crucial for the validity of the autism category. This integration is examined through three distinct dimensions: content validity, criterion-related validity, and construct validity. Content validity deals with how comprehensively the autism category covers the diverse manifestations of autism. Criterion-related validity assesses the empirical correlations between the autism category and external standards, such as treatment responses. In the case of autism, the lack of response to alleged treatments is informative. Construct validity concerns the accuracy with which autism is differentiated from other categories and the effectiveness in identifying actual instances of autism.

A key aspect of my argument is the valuable and unique contributions that the perspectives of autistics bring. These perspectives not only challenge existing preconceptions and stereotypes about autism but also pave the way for more nuanced and accurate research. They offer a perspective through which we can understand the complexities of autism, leading to advancements in both theoretical and practical aspects of autism research.

In conclusion, I strongly advocate for an integrative approach to understanding autism, one that combines scientific research, activism, and the knowledge or experiences of autistic people. This approach, I argue, is indispensable for gaining a comprehensive and empathetic understanding of autism. Overall, my paper strongly supports the integration of autistics’ perspectives into the broader scientific research on autism. By challenging the traditional boundaries between science and activism, it highlights the need for an inclusive, multifaceted approach. This approach not only enriches our understanding of autism but also fosters a more inclusive society, where the voices of autistic people are heard and valued. 

What does it mean for a robot to be cultured?

This post is by Henry Taylor, who is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham. He is interested in in the philosophy of mind. His main areas of research in the area are attention, consciousness, peripheral vision and robotics.

Henry Taylor

You wake up and listen for the familiar sound of your household robot making you your morning porridge. On the way to work, you pop into a supermarket, and a robot helps you to find the products you need. You’re a mental health professional, and you spend the day working alongside the robots that support people with post-traumatic stress disorder. On your way home, you call into the care home where your parents are being looked after by both humans and robots.

The use of robots in all of the above contexts is currently being investigated. In healthcare, for example, researchers are exploring how robots can support humans with autism, cancer, dementia, diabetes social anxiety, and more.

These applications raise questions that straddle robotics and philosophy. One of them concerns how robots should respond to differing cultural norms and expectations. For example, different cultures seem to have different norms about personal space. This is important for understanding how far from a human the robot should stand. Different human cultures also have different expectations about facial expressions, hand gestures, physical greetings, and so on. How should we take these on board when we’re designing the robot?

Cultural robotics is the study of how robots can fit into this world of varying (and constantly shifting) cultural expectations and practices. The most fundamental question in cultural robotics is: what do we mean by ‘culture’? One popular approach in robotics is to equate culture with nationality. On this approach, ‘culture’ just means things like British, Canadian, Indian, Iranian, Italian, Japanese, Nigerian, etc. However, this approach has raised concerns in the robotics community. Equating culture with nationality runs the risk of propagating an over-simplistic approach, where whole cultures are reduced to a few stereotyped patterns of behaviour associated with particular countries. It also marginalises those who do not fit into the dominant patterns of behaviour in a particular country, such as refugees, immigrants, religious minorities, or members of subcultures.

In our recent work, myself and my co-author, Masoumeh Mansouri, have addressed this issue by arguing for a more nuanced definition of culture in robotics. Rather than looking for ‘the correct’ definition of culture, we argue for a conceptually fragmented approach. This involves accepting that there are many different ways of approaching culture in sociology and the humanities, and recognising that different approaches to culture might be appropriate for different areas of robotics. For example, a robot designed only to give directions to humans in a shopping centre may only require norms of politeness and helpfulness. Conversely, a robot designed for long-term use by the same group of people in a factory or hospital may need to grow and change its behaviour over time, in response to changes in the social dynamics of that environment.

It is inevitable that robots will come to occupy a more prominent role in our everyday lives. This raises fundamental questions about how these robots can behave appropriately, and also which social interactions should be kept human.

Experiences of Loss conference report

In this post, Kathleen reports from the 'Experiences of Loss' Conference which took place on the 26th and 27th October 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The conference was organised and ran by Sabrina Coninx (VU Amsterdam). The selection of talks over two days all spoke to the theme of loss in different contexts, addressing self, illness, and memory. 

Day 1

Regina Fabry

Regina Fabry (Macquarie University): Sharing experiences of loss through self-narration: possibilities and limitations. (online)

Regina first clarified the concept of a self-narrative. Individuals might also draw on master narratives, which are widely shared in a socio-cultural community or society. These are value-laden, usually reflecting systems of power and oppression in play. Individuals might push back against these master narratives with alternative narratives, as a form of resistance. In cases of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), there is a sense of loss or absence which is very much felt by the individual. This is a loss of possibility of change, of interactions with one’s environment, and of interpersonal connection. This affects one’s capacities for crafting one’s own self-narrative, but the practice of writing a memoir of one’s experience can help regain these capacities. However, given that there are master narratives and literary genre expectations in play when writing a memoir, this sets limits on how these experiences can be shared in this form.

Eleanor Byrne

Eleanor Byrne (University of Birmingham): Narrative Deference

Eleanor talked about how distributed memory can affect one’s self-narratives. Group memory enables greater recall than individual memory, this might happen amongst married couples, for instance. Sometimes, an individual has no memory of an event at all, and in these cases, they might defer to another who can remember. This means that their self-narrative is also significantly deferred to another. This narrative deference demonstrates how intimate others not only can play this role for us, but this affects our experience of them. We experience them as people who have the possibility of ‘taking hold’ of our self-narratives when it comes to matters we cannot directly remember ourselves. One way of understanding this is to see these people as affective scaffolds. They are trusted over time to reliably make possible an understanding (through narrative) of phenomena which could be otherwise missed or overlooked. They can help make sense of quite difficult and unarticulated phenomena.

 

Lilith Lee (VU Amsterdam): Love and Friendship: Daoist Partnership and Zhuangzi’s two losses

Lilith talked about various possible losses in cases of death. One is the loss of a life partnership, and the second is the loss of intellectual partnership. In the Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi grieves the loss of his wife and Huizi, despite death being seen otherwise as simply one of the many transformations that take place in the world. There are couple of ways that scholars try to make sense of this, but Lilith emphasised the depth of loss of an intellectual partner or foil. Given the loss of a fundamentally discursive skill here which may be integral to one’s life and livelihood, one arguably loses a part of oneself as well. These friendships and partnerships themselves also help individuals make sense of loss.

Peter Stilwell

Peter Stilwell (McGill University): The Self and Suffering: From Theory to Pain Practice. (online)

Peter discussed the difference between pain and suffering, and explored a newer concept of ‘pain-related suffering’, and this draws on experiences of loss. One difference seems to be that people can coherently say that their pain doesn’t bother them too much, but cannot say that their suffering doesn’t bother them too much. From qualitative interviews on pain-related suffering, it was found that people experienced disruption to the minimal self insofar as they experienced alteration or loss of perceived agency and ownership over their actions and experiences, and disruption to the narrative self insofar as they experienced loss or threat to valued life roles, relationships and aspirations.

Leon DeBruin

Leon DeBruin (Radboud University): Neurodiversity and Identity Formation.

Leon discussed the possible sources of harm when it comes to mental health conditions, which are teased apart in Wakefield’s hybrid account of disorder. One source of harm is the dysfunction itself, within some underlying psychological, biological or developmental process. But another source of harm is still deviating from socio-cultural norms, and the reactions which come from that. Many struggle with self-illness ambiguity; distinguishing between oneself and between what is often referred to as one’s mental illness. There may be spectrum, wherein some identify fully with their illness, whereas others do not identify at all. Individuals may ask themselves whether their own desires, actions and emotions can be attributed to themselves or to their illness. But many proponents of neurodiversity see their mental illness as actually a manifestation of natural variation and integral to their selfhood.

Day 2

Gerrit Glas

Gerrit Glas (Amsterdam UMC): Experiences of Loss in Mental Illness

Gerrit discussed the many links and interrelations to pay attention to between the patient as a person, the patient with an illness, and the patient in a context, whether that be individual, institutional, or societal. Senses of loss could appear in any of these dimensions. In particular, individuals also have a fundamental I-Self relation - one’s ‘self-referential pole’ in relating to the world. This relation is not explicitly felt by people but it is not an illusion either, and senses of loss here are very deeply felt and sometimes referred to as ‘disorders of ipseity’.

Lucy Osler

Lucy Osler (Cardiff University): Losses and Loneliness in Anorexia Nervosa

In Lucy’s talk, she emphasised the experiences of social loss, particularly of recognition and understanding, which can underlie cases of anorexia nervosa. There can be a somewhat cyclical relationship between experiences of social loss and anorexia nervosa, where each can contribute to the continuation of the other. In particular, feelings of loneliness can bring individuals to enter and remain embedded in communities based around the condition, such as pro-anorexia forums online. Lucy described these place as ‘affectively sticky’, in that they are very difficult to leave even when they cannot offer any new information or insights. These communities can give a sense of control, connection, purpose, emotional regulation and so on, but they also provide affective scaffolding for the condition itself.

 

Lieke Schrijvers

Lieke Schrijvers (VU Amsterdam): ‘Loss’ and ‘Gain’ Amongst Women Becoming Jewish, Christian or Muslim.

Lieke discussed her PhD study which looked at women who converted to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam in the Netherlands. The traditional conception of these conversions are strongly characterised by associated ‘losses’– loss in autonomy, in freedom, and of the emancipation that the women would otherwise have. Lieke emphasised that the real picture of conversation is more complicated, and involves transformation of their identity, daily lives, emotions, agency, and social circumstances. These processes of transformation mean that convert women themselves were less likely to have a clear sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’ their conversion, with their sense-making of the process contributing to the process itself. All of this means that using a framework of losses and gains is inadequate.

 

Marta Carava

Marta Carava (Purdue University): Norm-Induced Forgetting

Marta suggested that there are some cases of forgetting which take place despite agents having the cognitive resources required to retrieve the information, and so cognitive explanations of this forgetting are not adequate. She suggests that norm-induced forgetting helps explain these cases instead. In these cases, forgetting is caused and underpinned by some relevant social norms. This captures that there are normative elements to the mechanism of forgetting, which we can see in cases such as the tendency for women’s contributions to conversations to be forgotten. Culturally shared biases about the social group, ‘women’, can be triggered by the content of the memory (i.e., what the woman said) when the agent tries to access it.

Philosophy of Mental Disorder: An Ability-Based Approach

This post is by Sanja Dembić. Sanja is a research associate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a member of the “Human Abilities” Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Here, she discusses her recent book 'Philosophy of Mental Disorder: An Ability-Based Approach'. 

What is it to have a mental disorder? There are many different answers to this question in the literature, the most prominent being those that refer to the concept of biological dysfunction. These views are usually developed with reference to clear cases of bodily disorders (or: diseases). The idea behind them is that if we have an adequate analysis of the concept of bodily disorder, we will also have an adequate analysis of the concept of mental disorder. In contrast, my aim was to develop a concept of mental disorder that is developed with reference to clear cases of mental disorder.

In this book, I offer an ability-based view of mental disorders. I argue that an individual has a mental disorder if and only if they are—in the relevant sense—unable to respond adequately to their available reasons in some of their thinking, feeling or acting and they are harmed by the condition underlying or resulting from this inability. I call this the “Rehability View”. I develop a detailed analysis of the concept of inability that is relevant in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic context by drawing on the most recent literature on the concepts of ability, reasons and harm. The Rehability View does not imply that an individual with a mental disorder cannot learn to respond adequately to their available reasons. It suggests that therapy aimed at “cure” should, at its core, empower the affected individual.

Sanja Dembić

The Rehability View is developed by the method of explication. The goal of an explication is to formulate a concept that is fruitful to us for certain purposes. I argue that we need the concept of mental disorder for (a) the theoretical purpose of scientific classification and (b) to help us settle certain practical or normative questions concerning treatment and responsibility. In light of these purposes, I propose the following set of adequacy conditions for an explication of the concept of mental disorder: to capture the distinction between (1) mental health and disorder, (2) mental and bodily disorder, (3) mental disorder and deviances from social, legal or moral norms, as well as to clarify (4) what about having a mental disorder it is that may justify certain normative consequences (such as eligibility for treatment or excuse from moral responsibility).

The Rehability View has various normative aspects. Normative considerations are relevant to determine (1) what class of abilities is relevant to mental disorders; (2) at what threshold an inability can be attributed; (3) what constitutes psychiatrically relevant harms; and (4) whether an individual’s actions or mental states are adequate responses to their available reasons. I see this as an advantage of this approach because I believe that it is better to make clear (and discuss) the normative aspects of the attribution of mental disorders than to deny them.

In sum, my aim was not to offer just another conception of mental disorder, but to develop a systematic approach that incorporates insights from philosophy of psychiatry and adjacent philosophical disciplines.

Addressing Epistemic Injustice: Perspectives from Health Law and Bioethics

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti who reports on a symposium was organised by Mark Flear to explore interdisciplinary perspectives (law, philosophy of psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, and more) on epistemic injustice, hosted by City University on 15th September 2023. 

This is a report of some of the talks presented at the symposium. The other talks were given by Anna Drożdżowicz (on epistemic injustice and linguistic exclusion); Miranda Mourby (on reasonable expectations of privacy in healthcare); and Neil Maddox and Mark Flear (on epistemic injustice and separated human biomaterials). 

The City Law School, venue of the symposium

The first presentation was by David Archard (Queen’s University, Belfast) on lived experience and testimonial injustice. Lived experience is being increasingly used in debates on a number of controversial areas—as a source of special authority on a given subject. The appeal to lived experience often works in resisting claims that contradict lived experience. Is refusal to listen to lived experience a form of testimonial injustice? For Fricker, testimonial injustice when the speaker receives less credibility than they deserve. The credibility deficit is due to an identity prejudice in the hearer. Testimonial injustice can manifest in different forms (disbelief, ignoring, rejecting). 

Are statements of lived experience reliable? How do we establish that? What if the people with lived experience are deluded or mistaken about what has been experienced? Lived experience can be source of advice (consultative) or authority (authoritative). Reasons to consult are not necessarily reasons to consider lived experience authoritative. Also, there is an important difference between what lived experience is and what can be inferred from lived experience. Injustice is in not listening and not giving weight.

The second talk by Lisa Bortolotti focused on research with Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (both at the University of Birmingham) on curiosity as an antidote to epistemic injustice. Lisa and Kathleen talked about the complex history of curiosity in the philosophical literature from a sin to a virtue, and argued that curiosity can be both an epistemic virtue when people disposed to attain knowledge have some basic skills for pursuing curiosity, use their judgement, are well motivated, and find pleasure in the pursuit of curiosity. 

Lisa and Kathleen also suggested that curiosity can be a moral virtue when directed at other people as it can support enhanced mutual understanding. To argue their case, they discussed cases in which people’s experiences are contested and people’s views are marginalised and pathologized. In those cases, an interpreter being curious helps them better understand the speaker’s perspective. 

The third speaker was Jonathan Montgomery (University College London) discussed public reason and religious voices in judicial reasoning. Jonathan focused on cases where courts and parents disagree on whether life support should be stopped for children. Often parents are motivated by religious views in arguing that life support should continue. Other cases are where a medical treatment or intervention is not wanted by the family due to religious convictions (e.g., refusing a blood transfusion that may be life saving). 

Are the courts dismissive of parents’ perspectives? Is there a shared reality that is misunderstood by one party and not the other? How are credibility markers distributed? Jonathan reviewed a number of interesting and controversial cases where there are several epistemic issues at play, including risk assessment and disability discrimination. How to address these problems? 

One suggestion is to avoid the court and try mediation first, on the assumption that less epistemic injustice occurs in a mediation effort. Another suggestion is to think clearly about epistemic authority: is it medical competence or lived experience? Whose voice is going to be powerful in the given context? The presentation finished with a super interesting table detailing different ways of thinking about events as instances of epistemic injustice.

Next, Priscilla Alderson (University College London) focused on epistemic injustice in the context of children having major surgery. She reviewed how we moved from children themselves and parents too from being removed from care to important questions being raised about the role of parents and children in making healthcare decisions. Priscilla’s research with patients and surgeons suggests that it is key to obtain consent from children for surgery, even very young children. They can be explained what is happening to them—we can inform and involve them in the procedures and the reasons for them.

A famous case of conjoined twins was examined in some detail: a Senegalese father was pressurised into agreeing to surgery to separate his daughters after being told that one of them would not survive due to her weaker heart. In the BBC programme on this case there was a clear emphasis on medical expertise and undermining the parent’s view and there was absolutely no reference to what the twins thought or wanted. Even the ethics committee’s intervention was not helpful as it did not include the concern about how the surviving child would have felt after surgery, realising that she was alive because of her sister’s sacrifice.  Priscilla talked about the need for a more engaged and embodied bioethics.

After lunch, Magda Furgalska (York Law School) contextualised epistemic injustice within mental health law research. In Magda’s research with people who experience credibility deficits in legal context, she found that many participants were surprised that she did not require to see medical records or other evidence to corroborate what they were saying. And also, when she presented her work at conferences, audiences often questioned whether research participants did tell her the truth. 

This emerges clearly in the context of issues about insight. Mental health patients are often experiencing a catch-22. For patients, it is not just a question to recognise that they are ill but to comply with the clinicians’ view of their condition. So, if patients realise that they are ill and they should be going to hospital, then for the clinician they are not seriously ill and they shouldn’t be hospitalised. If they do not realise that they are ill and they don’t think they should go to hospital, then for the clinician they are seriously ill, and they should be hospitalised—and their report is not to be relied on anyway. 

Insight and capacity are often used interchangeably, and compliance is used to determine both insight and capacity. Deciding whether someone has capacity on the basis of whether they have insight, is a clear misapplication of the law, and also a case of silencing and testimonial harm as capacity is denied pre-emptively without being tested.

Magdalena Eitenberger (University of Vienna) discussed epistemic injustice in the area of chronic illness. Magdalena introduced the concept of “patho-curative epistemic injustice” to apply to diabetes and hepatitis C. This concept is drawn from the concept of patho-centric epistemic injustice developed by Havi Carel and Ian Kidd. 

The idea is that some people experience a credibility deficit due to their illness and hard facts are prioritised over lived experience reports. The new concept is supposed to concentrate on “curedness” and how in some cases of chronic illness an understanding in terms of being cured or fixed is not available. Biomedical models offer a reduced and simplistic conception of disease and health where problem-fixing is central. But more holistic therapeutic solutions are ignored.

This also results in patients not being able to talk about their experiences over and beyond the idea that a person’s body can be either fixed or damaged. What “cured” means is not how the person feels (whether they feel healthy) but what their glucose levels are. Lived experience is not considered relevant and this impacts healthcare policy and welfare too. The role of the person as someone who manages their health trajectory is also undermined if the person is given the (technological) resources to monitor their health.

Next, Swati Gola (University of Exeter) addressed epistemic injustice in the India’s traditional healthcare system. Indian system of medicine is very heterogeneous system, some indigenous and some introduced from abroad. There are a lot of folk traditions at the margins (such as healers) which have been sidelined as unscientific after the British occupation. How should we understand indigenous health traditions in the light of colonialism? Is there any epistemic injustice against those traditions?

Swati analysed the current situation in India, suggesting that knowledge colonialism is still a big problem, due to the dominance of the biomedical models and the power of the medical professions as seen through the lens of Western medicine. A case was made for epistemic justice to be essential to the decolonisation of knowledge and the decolonisation of the self via issues of hermeneutical injustice.

Trust Responsibly

This post is by Jakob Ohlhorst, who is a postdoc fellow on the Extreme Beliefs project at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This post is about his recent book, Trust Responsibly (Routledge), which is available open access as an e-book.

Jakob Ohlhorst

"Strange coincidence, that every man whose skull has been opened had a brain!"

'Trust responsibly' opens with this joke from Ludwig Wittgenstein. In On Certainty, he argued that some things we can only trust to be the case because any evidence which speaks in favour of the things we trust must already presuppose the things we trust. That everyone has a brain was a better example in the 1950s than it is now. This goes beyond trust in people. It also involves trust that the world is older than 100 years, trust that you are not in a coma and dreaming, and so on. I argue in my book that – to trust responsibly – we need virtues.

The problem with trust is, if you don’t need any evidence, then you could trust just about anything to be the case. You might trust that astrology is a good way to learn about people or that aliens are causing catastrophes with lasers from Mars. How do we tell good cases of trust from bad cases of trust? Giving completely up on trust is not an option; we would end up in total scepticism and cognitive paralysis. We could not do anything cognitive, not doubt, not believe, nor investigate. So we must at least be somewhat warranted to trust in our fundamental presuppositions.

I argue that we are warranted to trust in presuppositions that enable us to exercise our epistemic virtues. I explain my view of epistemic virtues in more detail here on Imperfect Cognitions, but essentially, they are the psychological resources that enable us to discover and gain knowledge, communicate it, and solve problems. Our virtues would not work if we did not trust them to work. We are therefore warranted to trust our virtues.

You might think: but wait, how can we know which of our psychological resources we can actually trust? How do we recognise virtues? If we possess certain reflective virtues like conscientiousness that allow us to evaluate our own thinking, then we can recognise which virtues are trustworthy. I argue that we are warranted to trust virtues on two conditions. First, we must be aware of the operation of the psychological processes that support the virtue – but we do not need to know that they are virtuous. Second, if we had these reflective virtues that allow us to evaluate our own thinking, then we would recognise them as virtues. When these two conditions are satisfied, our trust in a virtue is responsible and warranted.

To illustrate this, consider a rabbit’s flight response. It is hyper-sensitive, it will detect danger where there is none, thus the flight response is no epistemic virtue. If – through some miracle – the rabbit acquired reflective virtues and started thinking about the response, it would realise that it is unreliable and hence stop trusting it. Therefore, the rabbit is not warranted to trust the response. Still, the rabbit has other simple virtues that it is warranted to trust, say its ability to recognise food.

Disentangling the relationship between conspiratorial beliefs and cognitive styles

This post is by Biljana Gjoneska, who is is a national representative and research associate from the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Here, she discusses her paper in the Psychology of Pseudoscience special issue introduced last week, and is the second post this week in this series on papers in this special issue. 

Biljana investigates the behavioural aspects (conspiracy beliefs) and mental health aspects (internet addiction) of problematic internet use. She has served in a capacity as a national representative for the EU COST Action on “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories” and has authored, reviewed and edited numerous scientific outputs on the topic. The most recent topical issue can be seen here.

Biljana Gjoneska

In my article for this special issue in Frontiers, I offer an integrated view on the relationship between conspiratorial beliefs (that secret and malevolent plots are forged by scheming groups or individuals) and three distinct cognitive styles (analytic thinking, critical thinking and scientific reasoning). To best illustrate my reasoning and the theoretical conceptualizations, I will draw from personal experience and contemplate one (seemingly) unrelated situation:

Prior to writing this post, I received another invitation to summarize my study for a popular outlet. The invitation was sent by email from an unknown address. The sender claimed to be a freelancer journalist, who is writing a piece for the New York Times Magazine, and is interested to learn more about the reasons why some people seem more prone to endorse conspiracy theories.

As scientists, we receive various sorts of daily invitations that are related to our work (to review articles, contribute to special issues, join editorial boards among others), many of which prove to be false, or seven predatory. So, I first aimed to to understand whether the person and the invitation are real, realistic and reliable. Hence, I employed my analytic thinking (which is slow, deliberate and effortful) to conduct a comprehensive search and gather information from verifiable sources. In essence, analytic thinking helped me to discern fact from fiction in my everyday processing of information.

Once I realized that the invitation seems credible, I needed to make decision whether to accept it. For this, I had to remain open and willing to (re)consider, (re)appraise, review and interpret facts, as a way to update my prior beliefs associated with similar experiences (e.g., with seemingly exaggerated claims and invitations received by email), In short: I employed critical thinking, as a way to decide whether to believe or not certain information. Critical thinking is essential when making judgments and daily decisions. It is only then, that I proceeded to accept the invitation.

Once I made the decision to accept the invitation, I started to anticipate the topics of discussion, as a way to improve the overall quality of the planned conversation. In doing so, I employed my scientific reasoning competencies (relying on induction, deduction, analogy, causal reasoning), for the purposes of scientific inquiry (hypothesizing on the cause for the invitation, and the possible outcomes of the conversation). In short, I relied on my scientific reasoning in an attempt to gain wholesome understanding of the observed subject matter by solving problems and finding solutions.

With this, I conclude my presentation on the three cognitive styles that are covered in my perspective article. Analytic thinking, critical thinking and scientific reasoning, are all guided by rationality and goals for reliable information processing, decision making, and problem solving. All three rely to a different extent, on our thinking dispositions, metacognitive strategies, and advanced cognitive skills. As such they comprise a tripartite model of the reflective mind (that builds on the tripartite model of mind by Stanovich & Stanovich. 2010).

Importantly, a failure in any of these domains might be associated with an increased tendency to endorse conspiratorial beliefs or other pseudoscientific claims. This explains why, in certain instances, people with high cognitive abilities, or even advanced analytic thinking capacities, remain ‘susceptible’ toward conspiratorial beliefs. At the moment, there is ample evidence to support the link between the analytic thinking and the (resistance to) conspiratorial beliefs, while the literature on the latter two categories remains scarce.

In closing of this post, I will refer back to the original story that served to illustrate my key points. Namely, a poignant piece of writing stemmed from the conversations with the scientists who contributed to this special issue, and was published in the New York Times Magazine. It tells a story of verified scientists who became proponents of a disputed theory, using scientific means (arguments but also publishing venues) to advance their claims. This piece contemplates on the possibilities for a failed scientific reasoning, and highlights the associated risks. Needless to say, they are quite dangerous, because they might heavily blur the lines between fact and fiction, leaving a sense of shattered reality in so many people.

Stakes of knowing the truth: the case of a “miracle” treatment against Covid-19

Tiffany Morisseau is a researcher in Cognitive Psychology at the Laboratory of Applied Psychology and Ergonomics (LaPEA, University of Paris). Her current research projects mainly focus on the question of epistemic trust and vigilance, and the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying how people come to process scientific information.

Tiffany is a member of the Horizon Europe KT4D consortium KT4D (kt4democracy.eu), on the risks and potential of knowledge technologies for democracy, and leads the Psychology part. Here, she talks about her paper in the Philosophy of Pseudoscience special issue, introduced last week by editor Stefaan Blancke.

Tiffany Morisseau

Improving science education and media literacy is an important aspect of dealing with online misinformation. By doing so, the level of accuracy at which information is considered false is raised, thereby ensuring that blatant errors that are no longer perceived as plausible, are eliminated from the public sphere. But merely being plausible is not a sufficient condition for information to be valid! Information can be both plausible and false, and the likelihood of it being true must be critically assessed. 

This requires some cognitive effort, especially when it comes to complex scientific information that is not easily accessible to the public at large. From an individual point of view, engaging in such an investigation is only worthwhile if the stakes of knowing the truth are high enough. Significant efforts in media and science education may therefore not be enough: one can consume and share false facts while being highly educated, for reasons other than the search for truth.

In our paper (Morisseau, Branch & Origgi, 2021) published in this special issue in Frontiers, we illustrated this with the example of hydroxychloroquine, which has been considered as a potential treatment for Covid-19 and has been the focus of much media and popular interest, particularly in France. 

Professor Didier Raoult and his team at the IHU Méditerranée Infection (Marseille) had reported positive results from a study on the effect of HCQ against Covid-19, in March 2020 (Gautret et al., 2020). Although relatively unknown to the general public a few months earlier, Raoult was becoming increasingly popular. But in the weeks and months that followed, many questioned the assumption that HCQ was actually useful against Covid-19, with scientific consensus soon emerging that it was not effective. 

However, HCQ remained very popular with the public. What was the reason? Let us try to answer this question. To begin with, the hypothesis was certainly plausible, so it was cognitively and socially acceptable to hold it as true.

Secondly, holding the efficacy of HCQ to be true had many benefits, allowing for the satisfaction of a number of social and psychological motivations - from understanding the world (Lantian et al., 2021) to protecting one's identity (Nera et al, 2021; Nyhan and Reifler, 2019), as well as social integration and reputation management (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Dunbar, 2012; Graeupner and Coman, 2017; Mercier, 2020). 

In particular, the promotion of HCQ has been strongly associated with an attitude of distrust towards French elites, perceived as arrogant and disrespectful of popular practices and lifestyles (Sayare, 2020). The appeal to popular common sense and pragmatism, as opposed to experts suspected of being disconnected from the field with their complicated methodologies, has also been used by politicians to justify pro-HCQ positions (Risch, 2020). 

But when its objective (in this case, the promotion of a political stance) moves away from the transmission of information per se, communication ceases to be associated with a strong presumption of truthfulness (Lynch, 2004; Cassam, 2018).

Of course, it is important to use accurate information when making decisions that rely on it. But in this particular case, neither the efficacy of the drug nor its actual adverse effects were paramount. First, the virus was initially perceived as posing little threat to healthy adults and children (Baud et al., 2020), and the question of whether HCQ was actually effective was ultimately of minor importance to most people. 

Secondly, the risks associated with taking HCQ were perceived as very low anyway. Many Covid-19 patients testified to the innocuous nature of the treatment, and the question of its dangerousness at the population level was not so relevant at the individual level.

More generally, we live with many false or approximate beliefs anyway (Boyer, 2018; Oliver and Wood, 2018). This is not necessarily a problem as such, if these beliefs do not lead individuals to make choices against their own interests, or against the interests of society at large. But precisely, the building of a science-based consensus shared by all members of a society is essential to create the conditions for translating this knowledge into effective policies. 

When “superficial” opinions – i.e., opinions that do not have a strong epistemic basis – enter the public sphere (in April 2020, a poll published in the newspaper Le Parisien claimed that “59% of the French population believed HCQ was effective against the new coronavirus”), they influence the way societal issues are conceived. 

This can negatively affect the quality of policy decisions that are made, with concrete consequences for people's well-being. Public opinions on scientific issues must therefore be interpreted at the right level, especially as they will determine major political and societal choices.

The Psychology of Pseudoscience

Stefaan Blancke is a philosopher of science at the department of Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and a member of the Tilburg Center for Moral Philosophy, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). 

His current research mainly focuses on the role of cooperation and reputation in science, pseudoscience, and morality. His website is www.stefaanblancke.com; you can also find him on Twitter (@stblancke). This post is about a special issue on the Psychology of Pseudoscience, which Stefaan was an editor for. 

Stefaan Blancke

As a philosopher of science, I have since long been interested in pseudoscience. Not only because pseudoscience induces us to think about what science is – so that we can explain why pseudoscience is not science; but also, because I want to understand what makes our minds vulnerable to beliefs that plainly contradict our best scientific theories. Examples of pseudoscience abound, from creationism over homeopathy and anti-vaccination to telepathy. Given that we should expect the mind to reliably represent the world this is surprising. Why do so many people cherish weird beliefs?

To answer this question, we must first understand the human mind, which inevitably brings us to the domain of psychology. Building on research in evolutionary and cognitive psychology and anthropology we can assume that pseudoscientific beliefs tend to become widespread because they tap into our evolved intuitive expectations about the world. These intuitions are in place because they allow us to effectively navigate our surroundings. 

However, they also create biases by which we are disposed to adopt beliefs that conflict with a scientific understanding of the world. Creationism, for instance, taps into our psychological essentialism and teleological intuitions, whereas mechanisms for pathogen detection and aversion make us suspicious of and even oppose modern technologies such as genetic modification. Their intuitive appeal makes these beliefs contagious. Furthermore, pseudoscientific beliefs also adopt the trappings of science to piggyback on the epistemic and cultural authority of science. This study of the spread of pseudoscientific beliefs has resulted in an epidemiology of pseudoscience.

In line with this research on the frailness of the human mind I, together with a team of fellow philosophers and psychologists, edited a special collection on the psychology of pseudoscience for Frontiers in Psychology. The collection consists of four contributions each of which sheds a new light on a different aspect relating to the central theme. As three out of the four articles will be presented in more detail by the authors, I will just briefly introduce them here. Tiffany Morisseau, T.Y. Branch, and Gloria Origgi discuss how people often use scientific information for social purposes which makes them less concerned about the accuracy than the plausibility of the information. 

This allows controversial scientific theories to spread. Joffrey Fuhrer, Florian Cava, Nicolas Gauvrit, and Sebastian Dieguez provide a conceptual analysis of pseudo-expertise, a phenomenon notoriously common in pseudoscience. The authors also develop a framework for further research. Biljana Gjoneska investigates how the cognitive styles of analytic thinking, critical thinking and scientific reasoning relate to (dis)trust in conspiratorial beliefs. And, finally, in an article not presented here, Spencer Mermelstein and Tamsin C. German argue that counterintuitive pseudoscientific beliefs spread because they play into our communication evolution mechanisms.

I heartily recommend reading next week's post from Tiffany Morisseau on her paper in the issue, and consulting the articles of our collection. I hope you enjoy the read!

Loneliness as a closure of the affordance space: The case of COVID-19 pandemic

This post is by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She works in embodied cognitive science, the enactive approach, phenomenology, and habits. This post is about her recent paper on loneliness and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya

When social distancing measures were implemented to reduce the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many specialists were concerned about a potential dramatic upsurge in loneliness, which was particularly worrying given the wide range of physical and mental health problems associated with it (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use, cognitive decline, cardiovascular diseases, and suicide risk). However, the few longitudinal studies comparing loneliness levels before and during the social contact restrictions present inconsistent results, with many factors influencing whether the levels of loneliness increased, decreased, or remained constant.

These inconsistent findings underscore the fact that loneliness is not the same as social isolation, so one may feel lonely even among many other people or, conversely, may not experience loneliness even if socially isolated. Thus, the reduction in the number of face-to-face interactions during pandemic-related social restrictions is not a reliable indicator of people’s level of loneliness. In this regard, I propose that loneliness, unlike social isolation, arises not from a lack of social contacts but from a lack of connections, in the sense that, while experiencing loneliness, one lacks meaningful relationships not only with other living beings but also with oneself and aspects of the environment.

I explore this idea by conceiving of loneliness as resulting from a closure in one’s affordance space, i.e., a closure in the range of relevant possibilities for action and interaction that are open to a concrete individual with a particular repertoire of habits. Given a relational reading of the notion of affordances, this closure pertains to both individuals and the materiality of their environment, so the same aspects of the environment could show up as meaningful and solicit action for one person but not for another. Importantly, the relevant affordances missing in loneliness are those that a person would find enjoyable or attractive to engage with if they were present and she had the adequate skills to do so. Moreover, I argue that the lack of those affordances that are most central to our habitual identities, and therefore more meaningful to us, will have a greater impact on our experience of loneliness.

To support this proposal, I consider three possible ways in which the COVID-19 lockdown may have increased levels of loneliness in some people by suddenly contracting their affordance spaces, thus disrupting their habitual possibilities for (1) joint action, (2) affective regulation, and (3) embodied social interaction. I also present some examples from qualitative studies that suggest that some people managed to overcome this contraction ––and even expand their affordance spaces–– by engaging with new affordances or increasing the affective allure of existing ones. This reconfiguration of their affordance spaces may have prevented some people from experiencing the high levels of loneliness that were expected at the beginning of the pandemic. For them, this experience could have been an opportunity to connect or reconnect with others, themselves, and the wider community. However, this opportunity was not equally open to everyone, as is the case for older adults, whose levels of loneliness increased during the pandemic.

Anorexia Nervosa and Delusions – What Can We Learn?

Today’s post is from Kyle De Young and Lindsay Rettler on their recent paper, “Causal Connections between Anorexia Nervosa and Delusional Beliefs” (published in Review of Psychology and Philosophy in 2023). 

Kyle is a clinical psychologist specializing in eating and related behaviors, who oversees the Eating Behaviors Research Lab at the University of Wyoming. Lindsay is a philosopher at UW teaching ethics and philosophy of mental health, who oversees the ethics curriculum for Wyoming’s med school (Wyoming WWAMI Medical Education Program).

Lindsay and Kyle

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe mental disorder associated with mortality and functional impairment. It is complex, multi-systemic (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, endocrine, gastrointestinal), and requires multidisciplinary evidence-based treatment at various levels (e.g., outpatient, inpatient). Despite the availability and use of intense treatments, outcomes are poor, with only 1 in 3 individuals recovering within 9 years. 

Complicating matters is that although 10-30% of individuals with AN experience delusions, AN is not understood as a psychotic disorder nor conceptualized in terms of how delusions relate to its development or maintenance. Focusing on the connections between delusions and AN is a promising way to shed light on this complicated condition, possibly pointing researchers and clinicians in fruitful directions to improve outcomes for this terrible disorder.

Believing that eating a piece of chocolate will cause me to gain 5 lbs might not seem very similar to a psychotic delusion of persecution. But I may hold the belief in a way that floats free of evidence. Is the belief then delusional? The DSM-5 characterizes delusions in varied and sometimes inconsistent ways. These definitions focus on the content of delusions (are they false, unshared, bizarre, etc.?), the degree of conviction with which the delusional belief is held, whether a person has insight to the origins of their belief, whether the belief is irrational, and whether the belief is fixed. 

In our paper we sort through these characterizations and argue that fixedness is the core feature of delusions. When a belief is maintained in a way that’s insensitive to evidence or unresponsive to reasons, the belief is fixed. 

How are these delusions related to AN? We consider several possibilities and conclude that most likely the psychopathology of AN causes delusions, and delusions are likely reciprocally causal with AN. The content of delusions in AN is typically limited to eating, digestion, and body shape/weight, and the delusions function as explanations for behaviors that are otherwise hard to justify. 

Starving oneself to the point of emaciation, medical complications, and interpersonal and occupational impairment when food is readily available are hard to understand without the accompanying delusional belief that one’s body cannot process food, for instance. Delusions may help explain this extreme behavior and in so doing help subdue the fear brought about by AN. As the seriousness of the condition amplifies, the need to hold firmly to the delusion grows.

If delusions and AN are reciprocally causal, intervening on one should improve the other. Most promising is to add treatment components known for their efficacy in ameliorating delusions to existing evidence-based approaches for AN to test whether such additions improve outcomes. Antipsychotic medications that might increase cognitive flexibility could be tried. Some have been tested in AN, generally with underwhelming results, but no trials investigated whether individuals with delusions specifically benefit.

Other approaches include acceptance-based psychotherapies that help individuals change behavior despite their cognitions or specific variants of cognitive therapy developed for delusions. Although we can't estimate the impact on AN of intervening on delusions, even if it helps in only 10-30% of cases, the potential for improving outcomes is great. So, we hope that research will move in this direction!

Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition

The post today is by Evan Westra (Purdue University) on his recent paper "Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition" (Philosophical Perspectives, 2023).

 Evan Westra

If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020. These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is.  

If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: p). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an accurate representation of the world, are generally coherent, responsive to evidence, and that the pursuit of our goals and desires.  

This doesn’t seem to be what the non-philosopher is doing when they’re telling you about their beliefs. Instead, they’re telling you about attitudes that matter to them, that express what they stand for. These are not the kind of attitudes that one readily updates in response to evidence; indeed, if we were presented with counterevidence to these beliefs, we’d probably do our best to explain it away. Unlike the philosopher’s mundane “beliefs,” these “beliefs” are the kind of attitude one might express to signal one’s identity and affirm one’s status as a member one’s community. They’re also the kind of attitude that we might look for when deciding whether or not a person belongs to one’s ingroup or outgroup, and perhaps even enforce as a criterion for group-membership.

The non-philosopher also has attitudes about whether today is Wednesday, or whether the cat is on the mat, of course. And they’d probably find the philosopher’s way of using the word belief perfectly sensible (albeit somewhat formalistic and weird – much like philosophers in general). Nevertheless, they’re much more likely to express such mundane attitudes using more common attitude verbs like think or know. But for some pragmatic or semantic reason, the term belief is much more likely to be used to express religious, moral, and ideological attitudes.  

Here's my question: in cases like these, are the philosopher and non-philosopher talking about the same type of mental state? That is, are they both employing the same basic folk psychological concept of belief?  

In my recent paper in Philosophical Perspectives, “Symbolic belief and social cognition,” I suggest that the answer to this question is no. Drawing on several different lines of evidence, I argue that in our day-to-day lives, we regularly employ two distinct concepts of belief, each with a distinct folk psychological profile and socio-cognitive function. The epistemic concept of belief corresponds roughly to what the philosopher means by “belief,” though it is more commonly expressed by the verb to think. This concept is used primarily for mindreading – that is, to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief is more commonly expressed by the verb to believe. It describes a very different kind of mental state, with a strong affective and volitional dimension, and well as preference-like characteristics and limited sensitivity to evidence or updating. I argue that the primary function of this concept is mindshaping: we express symbolic beliefs in order to signal our identities and thereby regulate how others behave towards us, and we also monitor and normatively enforce certain symbolic beliefs in others. Along the way, I touch on the ways that questions about the folk psychology of belief intersect with questions about the ontology of belief, and how each debate might inform the other.
 

Why Human Nature Matters

We celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) with a post by Matteo Mameli (King’s College London) on his new monograph, Why Human Nature Matters: Between Biology and Politics (Bloomsbury 2024). In the book, Mameli discusses Darwin’s views on mental faculties, human differences, and the transformative agency of organisms. 

My monograph addresses classic and contemporary perspectives on human nature and makes a novel proposal, one that stresses the biological and political significance of human diversity and mutability. Darwin’s ideas on variation and niche construction play an important role in my argument, which also draws on insights from Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Sylvia Wynter, and others. The cover image is a plate from one of Darwin’s books on barnacles. To discover why Darwin was so interested in barnacles, you will have to read the book!

Below are some excerpts from the introductory chapter:

Organisms inherit genetic material from their parents, but they also inherit the outcomes of the choices and activities of their conspecifics and non-conspecifics. […] In relation to changes in their conditions of life, both internal and external, corporeal and extracorporeal, organisms are both subjects and objects, agents and patients, sources as well as recipients of change. […] Human niche construction has profoundly transformed both humans and the rest of nature, with the pace of transformation continually accelerating. Finding the right way to grasp the similarities and differences between human niche construction and the niche-constructing processes of other species is of utmost importance. 

In the current epoch of genetic and molecular engineering, anthropogenic climate change, and ecological collapse, the human planetary footprint is becoming every day more evident. Will we destroy our conditions of life and cause our own extinction? Will we bio-engineer our bodies and those of other living organisms? Will we geo-engineer Planet Earth? Will we be able to remove the barriers that separate us and other terrestrial beings from better modes of life? Will we revolutionize our praxis? If so, in what ways? 

The elaboration, modification, and spread of ideas about human nature is a part of human praxis that shapes other parts of human praxis and that, by doing so, conditions the ways we live, including the ways we organize and reorganize our social systems and our interactions with the rest of nature. Symbols can be causally powerful, including those symbols with which we humans think about ourselves as members of a species. […] A view that draws attention to the ways in which human nature can mutate is better than an eliminativist approach. However, for a view of human nature as mutable through praxis to work, one needs to acknowledge not just the transformative impact of human praxis but also its concrete materiality. We need to avoid seeing human nature as something rigid and unchangeable; at the same time, we need to reject any “attenuation of materialism.” 

In Part One of this book, I explore various classic perspectives on human nature, featuring ideas from Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, and others. The discussion shows how debates about human nature are often debates concerning the ways humans can or cannot cooperate and the ways our nature enables or constrains the social production (and reproduction) of valuable human goods and relations. Ideas about human nature often have a profound influence on how we continuously recreate and govern our modes of life. 

In Part Two, I make an intervention in contemporary discussions on the concept (or notion, or conception) of human nature. This part of the book criticizes various proposals concerning how we should think about human nature in abstract terms, and it makes an alternative proposal—one that focuses on plasticity, diversity, and transformative processes. In today’s context, ideas about human nature cannot be isolated from evolutionary biology and the sciences of human biocultural differences, as long as these sciences are understood in fully niche-constructionist terms. At the same time, a good way of thinking about human nature needs to consider the role played by ideas about human nature in social conflict and in structuring our modes of life. 

In the Conclusions, I revisit Timpanaro’s critique of Gramsci’s attenuated materialism and the general issues concerning human nature, human modes of life, and the embeddedness of human praxis.

Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases

Today's post is by Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw) on his recent paper, Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases (Episteme, 2022).

Krzysztof Sękowski

According to the standard view, in thought experiments (or more specifically in the method of cases) the conclusion is justified by intuitions about the applicability of a given concept. For instance, in Gettier Cases our intuition that we can not say that the protagonist in a story KNOWS something justifies our conclusion that JTB theory of knowledge is false. According to this view, the method of cases enables us to establish some truths about that concept. Therefore, it is considered a descriptive method, as it helps discover truths about a given concept without revising, regulating or explicating its meaning.

The paper presents a different view on this method. According to it this method can be interpreted as a normative method, within which arguments for revising the meaning of a scrutinized concept are provided. Thus, the method of cases might be understood not only as a method used within conceptual analysis but also as part of the conceptual engineering enterprise.

The paper discusses two crucial distinctions. The first one distinguishes between intuitions of intension (intuitions about general properties that an object falling under a given concept has), and intuitions of extension (intuitions about the applicability of a given concept in particular situations). The second distinction distinguishes between concept-application arguments and concept-revision arguments. Concept-application arguments aim to provide reasons for a claim that a particular concept applies in a given case, while concept-revision arguments aim to provide reasons for why we should think about a given concept in a particular way. The paper argues that the method of cases might be interpreted as providing one of both of these kinds of arguments. The crucial difference between them is that concept-application arguments rely on the content of intuitions of extension, while concept-revision arguments rely on the content of intuitions of intension. The paper shows, on the example of Gettier Cases, that the crucial feature of the normative interpretation of the method of cases in which its conclusion is justified by concept-revision arguments, is that it provides reasons based on general expectations towards the concept for abandoning intuitions on whether it applies to a certain case or not. Thereby, this interpretation of the method of cases makes it a useful tool for conceptual engineering purposes.

In the last parts of the paper, it shows that the normative interpretation of the method of cases provides a defense from the critique of that method provided by the negative program of experimental philosophy. This critique aims to show that this method is unreliable as it relies on intuitions, which are, according to empirical findings, sensitive to philosophically irrelevant factors such as culture, gender, personality, etc.. However, the paper argues that the conceptual-engineering-friendly interpretation, according to which the method of cases is justified by concept-revision arguments and the content of intuitions of intension, can be defended with the help of some particular form of expertise defense. The paper argues that experts' intuitions, that is, intuitions of speakers who are immersed in philosophical discourse and who express their expectations about a target concept, can form a reliable source of evidence for revisionary arguments. This is because they do not serve as evidence for the method of cases' conclusions but they provide reasons for a particular conceptual change.

The Know-How of Virtue

This post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, on her recent paper 'The Know-How of Virtue', published open-access in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. 

Kathleen Murphy-Hollies

How can we be good people who do things for the right reason, when we very often confabulate a good reason for our behaviour after the fact?

Imagine, for example, that I do not give money to a person in need on the street, and instead rush home. But then, later on, my friend mentions seeing the person who needed help and I express that I saw them too. Then they ask me, ‘why didn’t you help them?’.

In these circumstances, we might confabulate. This means that, only upon being asked, do we start formulating an answer to that question. In that way, confabulation is post-hoc. We come up with reasons for our behaviour which protect our positive self-conceptions. So I might say to my friend, ‘Oh I was in a rush and the street was too busy for me to stop!’. This explanation protects my self-concept of still generally being kind and helpful. I explain away this instance with an ill-grounded claim, because in fact the street was not busy at all. This is a core feature of confabulations; they are not appropriately based on the relevant evidence, so they usually make false statements about the world (it is not impossible for them to be true by accident/mere luck).

Importantly, people confabulate with no intention to deceive. So, we believe our confabulations to be an authentic account of why we behaved in the way we did. In a way, this is surely what makes confabulation so worrying. When we are prompted to look more closely at our behaviour, confabulation seems to hide our shortcomings from us, because we immediately come up with a self-protecting story. We don’t notice that we’re doing this, and we don’t notice that we don’t actually have a good understanding of why we acted in some way.

So it would seem that confabulation is surely a worry for virtuous behaviour, which ought to be ‘for the right reason’. Virtuous behaviour should be a response to the values inherent in a situation, and the agent should have this right reason at the forefront of her mind when acting. But, in confabulation, we reverse this story and posit those ‘right reasons’ after the fact, believing that we were responding to those reasons at the time.

In my recent paper, I argue that confabulation is not necessarily such a barrier for virtuous behaviour, and is actually probably involved in the development of virtue a lot of the time. This is because confabulation actually has some benefits, which can be applied in the development of virtue. In seeking to protect our positive visions of ourselves, we can give them a more explicit space in our ongoing self-narratives. These self-conceptions are not passive, but also guide and influence future behaviour. So, engaging in the construction of good self-image, even at the expense of getting all the facts of the matter right, can be efficacious in making that image a reality. And therefore, in a sense, making it true. Maybe next time, you’ll actually respond to the reasons which you had previously only posited post-hoc in a confabulation.

This is quite an optimistic outlook for confabulation, though. Surely for some people, confabulation will mean that they just continue masking their bad behaviour to themselves, indefinitely. I agree that gaining these benefits from confabulation is far from guaranteed. I argue that what makes the difference, is having certain self-related skills and attitudes. These include attitudes such as being open-minded to what other people say to you in response to your confabulations, being curious about other explanations of your behaviour to the one you’ve given, and being attentive to your thoughts, feelings, and desires for your idealised self.

I use a mindshaping framework to flesh out how these attitudes, which require a skilful know-how rather than propositional knowledge about the self, play an extremely valuable role in the fundamentally social enterprise of sharing reasons for behaviour. Not only does this bring self-knowledge, but the process shapes and thus constitutes it. Due to our cognitive limitations and desires to have an understanding of our actions, the reasons that we share may well often be confabulatory. However, that doesn’t mean that this process of social shaping can’t take place and be valuable, particularly for the formation of consistent virtuous behaviour.

Finally, I posit that this know-how is a meta-virtue because the skills encompassed by it could be applied to the development of any other particular virtue. Patience, generosity, compassion, will all require the development of capacities to see specific values and needs in a situation, and we will need the help and input of others in the development of these capacities. Then, we can come to respond to them appropriately, as reasons for action. In essence, if you’re interested in being a virtuous person who acts for the right reasons, you should work on having these pro-social attitudes, rather than on trying to somehow never confabulate.