Imperfect Cognitions

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 live...

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 anyth...

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 c...

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 pl...

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 t...