Imperfect Cognitions

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 gen

 Today's post is by Alexandre Billon (Université de Lille) on his recent paper, " The Sense of Existence " ( Ergo 2023). Alexandre Billon Things we perceive typically seem to be real to us. Unlike Bigfoot or Pegasus, this sparrow flying above the building for example seems to be real to me and I indeed judge that it is real. The sense of reality is the kind of awareness or seeming that underlies such judgments of reality.  There has been a lot of work on the sense of reality lately in the philosophy of mind, in psychology, and even in aesthetics (think about the difference between an apple on a trompe l'oeil and a regular painting). The terminology is not quite settled, however: some talk of the sense of reality, others of the sense of presence, yet others of "real presence". Nor is the conceptual landscape: it is sometimes unclear whether all authors who talk about the sense of reality talk about the same thing. Although it is usually ignored, there is al

Today's post is by Joshua Habgood-Coote  and Nadja El Kassar on their recent paper,  Receptive Publics ( Ergo , forthcoming). Joshua Habgood-Coote is a research fellow at the school of philosophy, religion, and history of science at the university of Leeds. Natalie Ashton is a research associate at VU Amsterdam, Nadja El Kassar is Professor of Philosophy at University of Lucerne. Joshua Habgood-Coote It is common to hear the following kind of complaint: You can’t say anything these days! You never know who might get offended, or whether you’re going to get cancelled for saying something totally innocuous. Back in my day we just said it like it was, we were all a lot more thick-skinned, and we just came out and said uncomfortable truths. This complaint makes a historical comparison: things used to be better because you could say what you thought. Both better psychologically—we weren’t spending our whole time in a defensive crouch—and epistemically—we could get to the truth, even

Today's post is by Orli Dahan (Tel-Hai College) on her recent paper, " The case of poor postpartum mental health: a consequence of an evolutionary mismatch–not of an evolutionary trade-off " ( Biology & Philosophy , 2023). Orli Dahan In my paper I criticize an evolutionary explanation to the phenomena of postpartum mood disorders and offer a different evolutionary explanation. These disorders develop shortly after childbirth in a significant proportion of women and have severe effects. I suggest that poor postpartum mental health is a classical mismatch situation: Namely, that a trait or function adaptive in a previous human environment becomes maladaptive in the modern environment. This is an argument used to explain many human health problems, such as diabetes and allergies.  The evolutionary explanation that I reject is the ‘evolutionary trade-off’ explanation. According to it, poor postpartum mental health is a consequence of an evolutionary trade-off – a comprom

The blog post today is by  Patrick Brooks (Rutgers University) on his recent paper, " On the origin of conspiracy theories " ( Philosophical Studies , 2023). Patrick Brooks In the last, say, 20 years or so, a lot has been written about conspiracy theories. Much of this has focused on what conspiracy theories are, why people believe them, and so on. Very little has been said, however, about why people might posit a conspiracy theory in the first place. My recent paper, “On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories” (2023) attempts to do this for a significant subset of conspiracy theories—namely, those conspiracy theories that run counter to an official or standard account of some event of phenomenon. Here’s a very brief sketch of the argument. People in open, broadly democratic societies have a somewhat naïve view of how their societies and the institutions within them work. These are the kinds of things we learned about, e.g., the scientific method or governmental processes, in prim