Imperfect Cognitions

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...