The Imperfect Cognitions blog was founded by Lisa Bortolotti in May 2013, after she received the happy news that she had been awarded an AHRC Fellowship for a project entitled "The Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions". The core idea of the project was to see whether a variety of cognitions (beliefs primarily, but also memories, narratives and explanations) could enhance knowledge even when they were inaccurate or ill-grounded. That's where the phrase "Imperfect Cognitions" comes from!
The main audience for the blog was then (and still is) people interested in themes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health, and contributors have ranged from masters students to distinguished professors, from all over the world, who have expert that is relevant to the investigation of the epistemic benefits of inaccurate cognitions. Lisa's expertise at the time was mainly in delusions, and the first posts reflect this, being often contributions to the philosophical debates concerning delusions (the very first post was by Kengo Miyazono, talking about delusions as malfunctioning beliefs).
Starting in October 2013, Ema Sullivan-Bissett (now faculty at Birmingham) came on board to commission, edit and contribute posts to the blog. Initially, it was quite a struggle to find a post a week to keep the blog active, but soon the readership of the blog increased and Lisa and Ema were in a position to schedule posts weeks in advance, not only highlighting new relevant research, but also offering reports on recent events (conferences and workshops) and asking authors to introduce their recent books to the broad, interdisciplinary audience of the blog.
The adventure continues...
The main audience for the blog was then (and still is) people interested in themes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health, and contributors have ranged from masters students to distinguished professors, from all over the world, who have expert that is relevant to the investigation of the epistemic benefits of inaccurate cognitions. Lisa's expertise at the time was mainly in delusions, and the first posts reflect this, being often contributions to the philosophical debates concerning delusions (the very first post was by Kengo Miyazono, talking about delusions as malfunctioning beliefs).
Starting in October 2013, Ema Sullivan-Bissett (now faculty at Birmingham) came on board to commission, edit and contribute posts to the blog. Initially, it was quite a struggle to find a post a week to keep the blog active, but soon the readership of the blog increased and Lisa and Ema were in a position to schedule posts weeks in advance, not only highlighting new relevant research, but also offering reports on recent events (conferences and workshops) and asking authors to introduce their recent books to the broad, interdisciplinary audience of the blog.
In October 2014 Lisa and Ema started a new adventure, respectively as PI and Post-doc on a major five-year project funded by the European Research Council, Project PERFECT. Although the project was building upon Lisa and Ema's previous research, it had a much wider scope, openly addressing not just the epistemic benefits of inaccurate cognitions, but also their pragmatic and psychological benefits, and aiming to impact on mental health policy by challenging the stigma often associated with having a psychiatric diagnosis. Magdalena Antrobus, PhD student on Project PERFECT, also joined the blog editorial team and she oversaw a new blog feature, interviews with experts, which quickly proved very popular (Magdalena successfully defended her PhD thesis in November 2017 and is now Dr Antrobus).
With increased capacity, the blog became more structured and the scheduling of the posts far more reliable. We started publishing research posts on Tuesdays and conference reports, book presentations, or interviews on Thursdays. On mental health awareness days or weeks we may feature additional posts highlighting an issue or a question, and we also host accounts by experts-by-experience, people with lived experience of mental health difficulties.
In October 2015 a new research fellow, Kathy Puddifoot (now faculty at Durham University), started overseeing the Thursday posts and Lisa embarked on a new project on Costs and Benefits of Optimism (with another new research fellow, Anneli Jefferson, now faculty at Cardiff University). This meant a further expansion for the blog and a wider coverage, including literature on memory, implicit cognitions, and optimism, all themes that were already routinely discussed as part of the Tuesday research posts but that became more prominently featured.
From October 2016 the blog saw a further development, with Andrea Polonioli overseeing the Tuesday research posts and the new PERFECT post-doctoral fellow, Sophie Stammers, and the new PERFECT PhD student, Valeria Motta, taking over the Thursday features. Reflecting Andrea's interests in cognitive biases and rationality, the range of original research posts increased and under Sophie's management interviews with experts were given greater visibility and attracted many new viewers.
From October 2017 to September 2018 Kathy Puddifoot took over the commissioning and editing of Tuesday posts and Valeria of the Thursday features. Reflecting their respective interests, more space was offered on the blog to scholars exploring memory and confabulation, affective and emotional states as well as cognition, and phenomenological and existential approaches to health and wellbeing. In 2018/2019 Sophie managed the Tuesday posts and a team of research assistants (Alex Miller Tate, Matilde Aliffi, and Eugenia Lancellotta) supported Lisa with the commissioning, scheduling, and promoting of the Thursday posts.
From October 2019, after the end of project PERFECT, to February 2021 Lisa managed the blog on her own, scheduling one new post a week. To the topics dearest to the blog, she added a new one: the power of stories in public debates, an issue that she has been actively researching and that belongs to the fast expanding field of political epistemology. In February 2021 Kengo Miyazono (now faculty at Hokkaido University in Japan) joined Lisa as an editor of Imperfect Cognitions, and he definitely instilled new life in our beloved blog by giving it a truly global dimension.
With increased capacity, the blog became more structured and the scheduling of the posts far more reliable. We started publishing research posts on Tuesdays and conference reports, book presentations, or interviews on Thursdays. On mental health awareness days or weeks we may feature additional posts highlighting an issue or a question, and we also host accounts by experts-by-experience, people with lived experience of mental health difficulties.
In October 2015 a new research fellow, Kathy Puddifoot (now faculty at Durham University), started overseeing the Thursday posts and Lisa embarked on a new project on Costs and Benefits of Optimism (with another new research fellow, Anneli Jefferson, now faculty at Cardiff University). This meant a further expansion for the blog and a wider coverage, including literature on memory, implicit cognitions, and optimism, all themes that were already routinely discussed as part of the Tuesday research posts but that became more prominently featured.
From October 2016 the blog saw a further development, with Andrea Polonioli overseeing the Tuesday research posts and the new PERFECT post-doctoral fellow, Sophie Stammers, and the new PERFECT PhD student, Valeria Motta, taking over the Thursday features. Reflecting Andrea's interests in cognitive biases and rationality, the range of original research posts increased and under Sophie's management interviews with experts were given greater visibility and attracted many new viewers.
From October 2017 to September 2018 Kathy Puddifoot took over the commissioning and editing of Tuesday posts and Valeria of the Thursday features. Reflecting their respective interests, more space was offered on the blog to scholars exploring memory and confabulation, affective and emotional states as well as cognition, and phenomenological and existential approaches to health and wellbeing. In 2018/2019 Sophie managed the Tuesday posts and a team of research assistants (Alex Miller Tate, Matilde Aliffi, and Eugenia Lancellotta) supported Lisa with the commissioning, scheduling, and promoting of the Thursday posts.
From October 2019, after the end of project PERFECT, to February 2021 Lisa managed the blog on her own, scheduling one new post a week. To the topics dearest to the blog, she added a new one: the power of stories in public debates, an issue that she has been actively researching and that belongs to the fast expanding field of political epistemology. In February 2021 Kengo Miyazono (now faculty at Hokkaido University in Japan) joined Lisa as an editor of Imperfect Cognitions, and he definitely instilled new life in our beloved blog by giving it a truly global dimension.
Since the beginning of 2022, Imperfect Cognitions welcomed two new editors: Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (Birmingham) and Kiichi Inarimori (Hokkaido): their contributions meant a further expansion of the blog to cover themes surrounding self-knowledge and self-regulation, issues in virtue epistemology, and methodological issues in empirically informed philosophy of mind.
For the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the blog, we launched a competition to discover people's favourite blog post among our most popular ones (the posts with the greatest number of unique views) and Matteo Colombo's 2016 post won! Here is the celebratory post by Matteo to update the blog readers on the latest developments of the research.
The adventure continues...