Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Martina Orlandi who is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trent University Durham, Canada. Her research focuses on moral psychology, philosophy of mind (including philosophy of artificial intelligence), and philosophy of action. She has a specific interest in practical irrationality and particularly self-deception, self-control, and resilience. Martina Orlandi Suppose you’re having a conversation with your old friend Sasha. She casually tells you how her husband has been behaving lately: he’s getting calls at weird times of the day, he’s getting home later than usual, and last week Sasha saw a flirty text message show up on his phone. In spite of all this, Sasha insists that things are good between them and that her husband is faithful. You know that Sasha is self-deceived about this. Her self-deceit lasts for a few months until one day Sasha tells you that she left her husband after he admitted to having an affair. While this news doesn’t surprise you, what comes ...

This post is Marina Trakas , a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past. Marina Trakas In a recent empirical study published in the American Psychologist , researchers from the University of Texas at Austin  (Yan et al. 2024) investigated a novel and relatively unexplored factor possibly contributing to the gender gap in science, particularly in citation practices: memory mechanisms. They found that during a free recall task, wherein professors were asked to remember the names of experts and rising stars in their field, male professors (but not their female counterparts) underrepresented women researchers compared to a set of baselines.  One possible explanation for this finding could be that male professors either did not remember female names or recalled fewer of them due to a lack of memory traces of these names. If they never encoded this information, they cannot remember it, given that ...

Today's post is by Anneli Jefferson and Katrina Sifferd. Anneli is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and the intersection of the two. Katrina is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. In this post they discuss their recent paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice . Anneli Jefferson Accounts of responsibility often underestimate the importance of the social environment. Other people are vital to the development and maintenance of moral agency: As social beings, we calibrate our moral compass to our moral audience. When deciding whether it is acceptable to eat the last piece of cake, not to disclose extra earnings on a tax return or spank our children as a form of punishment, we do this with an eye to what’s considered acceptable by our social environment. The reactions of others highlight the existence and importance of moral norms by providing us with feedback, directly and indirectly. Katrina Sifferd On...

In this post, Pablo López–Silva and Tom McClelland present their new edited book, Intruders in the Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion (OUP 2023). Thought insertion is a rare delusion most often found among those suffering from schizophrenia. It is characterised by subjects reporting that entities have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. Although the structure of these reports shows similarities, the external agents that subjects identify are highly variable: some identify individuals such as celebrities or relatives; some identify groups such as aliens or the government; others identify objects like radios, houses or trees. In an oft-cited case, one patient reports ‘…thoughts are put into my mind like “Kill God”, it’s just like my mind working, but it isn’t. They come from this chap, Chris. They are his thoughts’ (Frith, 1992, p. 66).  This delusion raises a host of philosophical questions about the phenomenology of thought, our sense of ownership...