Imperfect Cognitions

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...

Today's post is by Radu Bumbăcea on his recently published paper " Imagining Emotions " ( Erkenntnis ). Radu Bumbăcea We all want to understand other people, and a central part of this understanding involves imagining their emotions ‘from the inside’. A key idea in the philosophy of emotions is that an emotion modifies the emoter’s experience of its object, that the emotion  ‘colours’   the world : someone who is afraid of a dog experiences that dog as fearsome. In imagining an emotion E, therefore, the imaginer is supposed to gain some access into how the world is coloured by emotion E without having E oneself. So far, the main approach to imagining emotions has been the simulationist one. According to such an approach, imagining an emotion is essentially having that emotion offline. In further metaphorical terms, we can say that imagining an emotion would involve building in one’s mind a copy of that emotion that is somehow marked as not-the-real-thing.  This idea is o...

Today's post is part 2 of a two part series from Steven Bland on his paper " Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments ", published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.   Open science as a humbling environment In last week’s post , I argued that a lack of intellectual humility in individuals can have beneficial effects on individual learning and collective deliberation, but only in humbling environments. Designing, creating and sustaining such environments is one of the ways collectives can manifest intellectual humility. Humbling environments have the following five features: 1. They elicit evaluable behavior. 2. They produce actionable feedback. 3. They afford multiple opportunities to solve similar problems. 4. They incentivize the pursuit of intellectual goods. 5. They are forgiving without being overly permissive. Forecasting tournaments  and  open science  are two prime examples of humbling environments. In forecasting tournaments, participants make d...