Imperfect Cognitions

 This post is by Sally Latham. Fantastic Philosophy Teaching philosophy to children has been shown to have a positive impact not only on critical thinking and creativity, but also on emotional development, such as independence, self-assurance and self-assertion ( Rahar et al 2018 ).  Yet philosophy is not explicitly part of the National Curriculum for England, with the closest reference being that in English: "Pupils] must be assisted in making their thinking clear to themselves as well as to others and teachers should ensure that pupils build secure foundations by using discussion to probe and remedy their misconceptions. Pupils should also be taught to understand and use the conventions for discussion and debate." However, teachers are not always confident in bringing critical thinking into the classroom without formal training.  Labour have also now identified ‘improving communication skills (oracy)’ as one of their  targets in their mission statement  Breaki...

This post is by Sara Dellantonio and Luigi Pastore. They discuss the theme of a recent paper, " Ignorance, misconception and critical thinking ", appeared in Synthese . Sara Dellantonio Beliefs such as “Tiny specks of matter don’t weigh anything”, “Most people only use 10% of their brains”, “People with severe mental illness are prone to violence” or “Autism has become an epidemic” are usually defined as misconceptions , i.e., as beliefs that are considered to be false in the light of current accepted scientific knowledge. Most studies on misconceptions aim to identify and create lists of the most common misconceptions across scientific fields such as physics, psychology, medicine, etc. In our article “Ignorance, misconceptions and critical thinking” we instead investigate the reasons that such misconceptions are endorsed in the first place. It turns out that many of our misconceptions are not isolated errors that occur against the background of a correct explanatory framewor...

Vasco Correia (pictured above) is currently a Research Fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy ( Universidade Nova de Lisboa ), where he is developing a project on cognitive biases in argumentation and decision-making. In this post, he summarises a paper he recently published in Topoi. This paper is an attempt to show that there are reasons to remain optimistic—albeit cautiously—regarding our ability to counteract cognitive biases. Although most authors agree that biases should be mitigated, there is controversy about which debiasing methods are the most effective. Until recently, the notion that critical thinking is effective in preventing biases appealed to many philosophers and argumentation theorists. It was assumed that raising awareness of biases and teaching critical thinking to students would suffice to enhance open-mindedness and impartiality. Yet the benefits of such programs are difficult to demonstrate empirically, and some authors now claim that critical th...