Imperfect Cognitions

The blog post today is by Sophie Keeling on her recent paper " Responding to Second-Order Reasons " ( Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 2024). She is a 'Ramon y Cajal' fellow in philosophy at UNED, Madrid and a member of the Metis research group.   Sophie Keeling Philosophers love talking about reasons. Often this takes place at the first-order level: reasons for attending a party include the fact that it would be fun or that it would make your friends happy if you went. Reasons for believing that it will rain tomorrow include the weather forecast or the fact that it’s rainy season where you are. But arguably, some reasons are second-order . These are reasons to respond to a particular reason or not to respond to it.  For example, I might promise my therapist not to do things simply because it will please others and to only think about myself. And in the epistemic case, however good your reasoning in fact was, the fact that you carried it out under a shortne...

Today's post is by Maria Cristina Contrino. Maria Cristina Contrino What is the role of narratives for our personal identity, for who we are in everyday life? What kinds of narratives shape our actions, interactions and relations? What is the role of ‘wrong’, erroneous narratives?  In my paper  I review three narratives accounts that highlight the importance of narratives for personal identity and argue for the practical notion of personal identity ( Schechtman 1996 ); the variety of psychological and bodily characteristics that shape a person ( Schroeder 2022 ); and the role of affectivity and bodily interactions in supporting our narratives and maintaining our identity ( Lindemann 2014 ).  Yet, these approaches do not do justice to the roles of certain narratives that are not fully rational and involve errors: a narrative view needs to account for the practical significance in one’s life of erroneous narratives, such as impostor’s narratives, delusions and confabulati...

In this post, Constantine Sandis, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and Director of Lex Academic , presents his new book on Wittgenstein for Anthem Press, Wittgenstein on Other Minds . Book cover   ‘Even if someone were to express everything that is “within him”, we wouldn’t necessarily understand him’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology , § 191. The so-called ‘problem of other minds’ is typically understood as a problem in epistemology regarding whether we can ever really be sure of what anybody else is thinking or feeling. At its solipsistic extreme, philosophers have wondered whether we can ever know that other people exist at all. How can I be certain that those around me are not all automata or mere figments of my imagination? In his later work, Ludwig Wittgenstein was at pains to dismiss such worries, not because we can prove that sceptics are wrong, but because their objections can be shown to be nonsensical. G...

The blog post today is by Arthur Krieger (Temple University) on his recent paper " Torturous withdrawal: Emotional compulsion in addiction " ( European Journal of Philosophy , 2024). Arthur Krieger   We’ve all heard addiction described as a “compulsion.” People with addictions (here I’ll just say ‘addicts’) often act in ways that are so out of character, so self-destructive, and so contrary to their own stated aims, that we feel the need for a special explanation. Compulsion is the main concept used to explain addictive behavior, particularly in health sciences like medicine and psychology. What exactly is compulsion? That’s a surprisingly difficult question. It is sometimes glossed as continuing to do something despite being aware of its serious negative consequences. But that includes far too much, like using a chair instead of a standing desk at work, or eating an eclair every night despite a recent high cholesterol reading. One traditional view is that compulsion is a c...

Today's post is by Juan F. Álvarez (Université Grenoble Alpes) on his recent paper " Remembering and relearning: against exclusionism " ( Philosophical Studies , 2024). Juan F. Álvarez Distinguishing remembering from other related cognitive processes, such as imagining and relearning, occupies a central place in the philosophy of memory. While the remembering-imagining distinction is a topic of heated debate, philosophers tend to agree that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of remembering. In this paper, I argue that this view, which I call “exclusionism”, requires closer examination because it does not follow from leading naturalistic theories of remembering. The theories in question are simulationism ( Michaelian 2016 ), distributed causalism ( Sutton and O’Brien 2023 ), and trace minimalism ( Werning 2020 ).  Relearning occurs when a subject acquires information about an event through experience, forgets about the event, reacquires information about the sa...

This week's post is from Vladimir Krstic (a philosopher at the United Arab Emirates University) on his recently published paper  Lying by Asserting What You Believe is True: a Case of Transparent Delusion (Review of Philosophy and Psychology).  Imagine that I tell you that I believe that I am Hitler but that I am not Hitler since he is dead and I am not. You would probably think that you did not hear me correctly. But, if — upon your request for clarification — I tell you specifically that I believe that I am Hitler but that this is not possible and that, thus, my belief is obviously false, you might think that I am toying with you. Many people, following Moore, think that these claims are absurd. Vladimir Krstic However, this impression is misleading. One can confidently believe that p and ascribe this belief to oneself, while judging that not-p. This is what happens to transparently delusional people. They suffer from a delusional belief, they correctly ascribe this belief...

Today's post is from Aisha Qadoos (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) on her recently published paper Ambiguous Loss: a loved one's trauma (RHV) published in a special issue on memory and trauma . Research on interpersonal trauma predominantly looks at the effects of first personal trauma i.e., the experiences of those who directly undergo the experience. In this paper on ambiguous loss, I take the perspective of the friends and family of the one who has undergone the experience, a paradigmatic case being that of the partner of a veteran. Aisha Qadoos First, using L.A. Paul’s concept of transformative experience , I make the claim that traumatic experiences are transformative experiences . That is to say, they are experiences that result in some change in one’s sense of self (personally transformative) and/or epistemic standing (epistemically transformative). Personally transformative experiences are experiences that change what it is like to be you, resulting in cha...

Today's blogpost is from Jonathan Wilson, a Philosophy PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center, on his recent paper Rethinking Bullshit Receptivity (Review of Philosophy and Psychology). Jonathan Wilson Over the past decade, research on bullshit has become widespread thanks in large part to the development of the Bullshit Receptivity Scale. Here's how the scale works. Subjects read a series of syntactically correct, randomly generated statements with a new-agey ring (e.g., “The future will be an astral unveiling of inseparability”). Then subjects rate how profound they think the statements are on a scale from 1 (not at all profound) to 5 (very profound). Deployment of the scale has yielded some interesting results. People who rate bullshit as profound tend to be less reflective and lower in verbal intelligence. They are also more susceptible to fake news, more prone to conspiratorial ideation, and higher in religious and paranormal belief.  But what is bullshit anyway? I don’t h...

This week's blogpost comes from Regina Fabry , a philosopher of mind and cognition and works as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Discipline of Philosophy, School of Humanities at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research currently focusses on self-narration, grief, human-technology interactions, and their intersections. In working on these topics, she brings together philosophical theorising on situated cognition and affectivity with feminist scholarship and research in literary and cultural studies, the empirical cognitive sciences, and AI. Regina Fabry Self-narration is an important part of our mental lives. The configuration and re-configuration of our personal past experiences – and our anticipated futures – in narrative form, many philosophers argue, can be conducive to self-knowledge and self-understanding . Furthermore, self-narratives are an important part of human sociality by facilitating collaborative modes of meaning-making . While self-narratives can take vari...

Today's blogpost is by María Berta López Ríos, Chris McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez on their recently published paper Memory, Mourning, and the Chilean Constitution (RHV), published in a special issue of on memory and trauma . “I confess that I am in mourning”. So writes the novelist Ariel Dorfman. This is an interesting statement, however. For it is not the loss of a loved one that Dorfman grieves. The loss he is mourning is political. He is in mourning because of the result of a political referendum held in Chile in 2022. The grief Dorfman, and many others, experienced is a form of political grief. This may seem strange, but the phenomenon may be more common than we think. María Berta López Ríos We recently wrote a paper exploring this kind of experience of political grief, which arose out of our shared interest in the philosophy of emotions and the political situation in Chile. Our paper focuses on the expressions of mourning (like Dorfman’s) that followed the Chilean ref...

Today's blog post is by Katérine Aminot, Tara J. Ryan, and Alicia Nijdam-Jones who summarise their new paper, Delusion or conspiracy? , published in Criminal Justice and Behavior (2024). Katérine Aminot, Tara J. Ryan, and Alicia Nijdam-Jones It's critical to properly diagnose mental disorders, such as those that cause psychosis (e.g., schizophrenia; delusional disorder), in legal settings. In the United States and Canada, criminal defendants must not be experiencing symptoms of a mental health disorder that impacts their ability to understand and make rational decisions, otherwise they are likely to be found incompetent to proceed with their case. Incompetent defendants are typically court ordered to receive treatment (e.g., mental health medications) in order to be restored to competency before proceeding with their legal case. Delusional beliefs and conspiracy theories can look very similar. For instance, conspiracy theories and delusions both consist of odd beliefs that are...

This blogpost is by Miriam Solomon on her recently published paper, ' The Elusiveness of Hermeneutical Injustice in Psychiatric Categorizations ' ( Social Epistemology , 2024). Miriam Solomon Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of “hermeneutical injustice” is a helpful critical tool for thinking about how improved social identities become available to those who can benefit from them. Fricker argues that dominant conceptual frameworks are often inadequate and unjust in that, for reasons of social prejudice, they get in the way of understanding important aspects of one’s own social experience. For example, during the 1950s, dominant stereotypes about male homosexuals—stereotypes that were both negative and inaccurate—prevented men who preferred sex with men from understanding their societal roles.  Fricker writes about the “Aha!” moment when a more accurate and positive social identity becomes available, correcting the hermeneutic injustice. Her examples include 1960s gay male iden...

This week's contribution is from Joe Pierre on his paper Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World? ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2023). Back in 2021, Ema Sullivan-Bissett invited me to participate in a multidisciplinary workshop at the University of Birmingham to tackle the question, “are conspiracy theory beliefs pathological?” While the workshop didn’t take place until the Spring of 2023, getting together to discuss the topic and hear lectures from philosophers and psychologists whose work I knew well, but had never met in person—like Lisa Bortolotti, Karen Douglas, Stephan Lewandowsky, Anna Ichino, and Kengo Miyazono—was well worth the wait. And in the meantime, Dr. Sullivan-Bissett also invited me to contribute to a special issue of the journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology on “Conspiratorial Ideation and Psychopathology.” Joseph Pierre For the article I wrote, I chose the title “Conspiracy Theory Belief: A Sane Response to an Insane World?...

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori (Hokkaido University) on his recent paper " Folk Intuitions About Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Evaluating the Combined Effects of Misunderstandings About Determinism and Motivated Cognition " ( Cognitive Science 2024), co-authored with Yusuke Haruki (The University of Tokyo) and Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University). Kiichi Inarimori Philosophers have long debated whether free will—a prerequisite for moral responsibility—is compatible with determinism. Central to these discussions are the intuitions people form when considering moral responsibility in hypothetical scenarios. Yusuke Haruki With the rise of experimental philosophy, numerous studies have explored folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Some experiments suggest that people tend toward “compatibilism,” the view that free will and determinism can coexist, especially in concrete cases of wrongdoing. Others suggest a lean toward “incompatibilism,” th...

Today's post is by Kristoffer Moody ( University of Edinburgh ) on his recent paper, " The Manipulationist Threat to moral responsibility " ( Synthese 2024). Kristoffer Moody We all have that one relative, let’s call him Antonio, who, at family gatherings, irritates us by expounding on how vaccines cause autism, that the election was stolen, or other strange, problematic, or offensive beliefs. While it’s tendentious whether or not we can hold Antonio responsible for holding those beliefs, it may seem clear that we can hold him responsible for acting on the basis of those beliefs. However, I claim using evidence from psychology that Antonio may have been manipulated in the formation of his belief. I claim, on the basis of evidence of our propensity towards choice-blindness, the ‘truth effect’, and confirmation bias, that we are far more susceptible to manipulation than we might pre-theoretically think, and that we appear to be particularly so susceptible via social medi...

This post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck (MA), academic, expert by experience and choreographer, who recently attended and talked at  Too Mad to Be True III: Paradoxes of Madness , held on October 30–31, 2024, at the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium. The conference was organised by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University), Bart Marius (Director of the Dr. Guislain Museum), and Wouter Kusters (Foundation for Psychiatry & Philosophy).  Opening speech by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University) This year’s theme explored the notion of contradiction and paradox in madness, philosophy, and related fields. With over 60 speakers, including five keynote presenters, the conference offered a remarkable diversity of perspectives that challenged conventional understandings of madness. Despite the breadth of content and the tight two-day schedule, the experience was intense, deeply enriching, and empowering.  Many speakers lived with or had personal experiences of madness, bringing an i...

Today's post is from Karl Landström on his paper ' On Epistemic Freedom and Epistemic Injustice ', recently published in  Inquiry . Karl Landström ‘Seek ye epistemic freedom first’ is how Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni begins his book  Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization  (2018, 1). Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book is a detailed study of the politics of knowing and knowledge production with emphasis on what he calls ‘the African struggle for epistemic freedom’. He locates the struggle for epistemic freedom in the continued entrapment of knowledge production in Africa within colonial, Euro- and North America-centric matrices of power.  The central contribution of the book is the development of a general account of epistemic freedom. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, epistemic freedom entails the right to think, theorise and develop one’s own methodologies to interpret the world, and write from where one is located unencumbered by Eurocentrism. Further, he argues tha...