Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a philosopher, author, and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. In this post, Lorraine addresses the topic of boredom. Lorraine Besser   Boredom. We’ve all experienced it and we all want to avoid it. But wait: isn’t it sometimes good to be bored? My answer is no , and that the very asking of this question reveals the ambiguous nature of the concept as it is used in ordinary discourse. This ambiguity is dangerous: because boredom is inherently bad, yet also quite natural for us to experience, it’s important to know how to alleviate it. Yet, we can’t begin to understand how to alleviate it unless we are clearer on what boredom is. Most often, when someone claims that boredom is sometimes good, what they mean is that it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest, and for us to experience the peaceful, calming nature of a mind at rest. Without question, it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest. A restful mind, however,...

Today's post is by Federico Burdman , based in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who summarises his paper entitled "Recalcitrant Desires in Addiction", forthcoming in volume 8 of the Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility . Federico Burdman This piece of research is on the psychology of addiction. Being addicted to something —say, psychoactive drugs, including alcohol— is not just about enjoying drugs and using them frequently. It is also more than just wanting to use drugs very much. Plainly, not all forms of wanting something very much and doing it a lot amount to addiction. Consider the analogy: a student may be determined and highly motivated to graduate from school, spend long hours studying and training for that purpose, even neglect other activities on that account, and still not be ‘addicted’ to studying in any sensible sense. One key difference between addiction and other forms of behavior issuing from powerful motiva...

Today's post is by Umut Baysan. Umut teaches philosophy at the University of Oxford and works in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Most of his published work is available on his website . Umut Baysan I am grateful to the Imperfect Cognitions blog for inviting me to write a post on my recent publication “Are propositional attitudes mental states?” , forthcoming in Minds and Machines . In the paper, I explore some implications of the view that some group entities (e.g., clubs, governments, companies) can have beliefs and desires. I argue that if group entities can have beliefs and desires, this would show that beliefs and desires are not mental states. I am not entirely convinced that group entities can really have beliefs and desires---though I think there are some reasons to take this possibility seriously, as I discuss in the paper. What I really want to achieve in the paper is to show that if you are prepared to accept this position, you should be prepared to accept the somewh...

Today's post is by Alex Gregory , University of Southampton. In this post, Gregory presents his new book, Desire-as-Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality , published by OUP in July 2021. You can read some chapter summaries here . And here is a link to chapter 1, which the publisher has kindly agreed to make available for free as a sample.  What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? I endorse desire-as-belief, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs. More specifically, I say that to desire P is to believe you have normative reason to bring about P. This view is in one respect highly unorthodox, since many – e.g. Plato, Hume – hold that our desires are really quite different from our beliefs. The view is also unorthodox for suggesting that all our desires can be evaluated for whether they are correct or not. But despite being unorthodox in these ways, I argue that the view is nonetheless attractive. Some ort...

Today's post is by Uku Tooming (Hokkaido University) on his new paper “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ” (2020, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly ). Uku Tooming In my paper, “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ”, I argue that there are two kinds of self-ascription of desire. First, there are easy cases where a sincere self-ascription seems to be immediately expressive of self-knowledge. For example, if I believe that I want to eat ice cream then, given the person I am, my self-ascription is true and there is no room for doubt. Second, there are hard cases which lack this kind of immediacy and where one could have easily been wrong about one’s self-ascription. For example, when I believe that I want to have a child then, given the person I am, this self-ascription is not immediately expressive of self-knowledge and can be put under question. How to explain the difference between easy and hard cases? In particular, what makes a self-ascription of a desire an easy case? Since in t...

This post is by Peter Langland-Hassan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who is presenting his new book, Explaining Imagination (OUP 2020). The book is available as a free open access download , thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati. Peter Langland-Hassan  We won’t understand what imagination is—we won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination , is a compendium of such recipes. What ingredients do they feature? On my telling, they are other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts, they constitute cases of imagining. The idea that imagination can be reduced to other kinds of mental states in this way is at odds with what most (maybe all) other philosophers have had to say about imagination. According to the orthodox view, if we list a person’...

Stephen Gadsby  is a PhD candidate in the  Cognition and Philosophy lab , Monash University. His research spans a number of topics, including anorexia nervosa, body representation, delusions, psychiatric taxonomy, mental representation and predictive processing. In this post, he summarises his  new paper  "Self-Deception and the Second Factor: How Desire Causes Delusion in Anorexia Nervosa" recently published in Erkenntnis. Research shows that anorexia patients don’t hold extreme body ideals, despite common misconception. Indeed, most patients are thinner than what they judge their ideal size to be. In this paper , I advance a two-factor explanation for why patients believe they haven’t yet reached their ideal size. This account attempts to answer two questions: how the content of this belief arises and why the belief is maintained in the face of contradictory evidence. Following from previous work (Gadsby 2017a ; 2017b ), I answer the first of these question ...

Today's post is by Eivind Balsvik (pictured above), who is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway. His principal research interests concern questions related to rationality, interpretation, and research ethics. He has also worked on the philosophy of Donald Davidson and theories of self-knowledge. In this post, he presents a recent article published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences entitled “ Interpretivism, First-Person Authority, and Confabulation .” My article, “ Interpretivism, First-Person Authority, and Confabulation ” is a first step in developing a weakly naturalistic interpretation theory for the social sciences, which is consistent with interpretivism. I have been interested in figuring out how a Davidson-inspired interpretation theory can incorporate psychological theories about the imperfections of cognition, which seems to fly in the face of his principles of holism, charity and the presumption of first-person authori...

My name is Alexandre Billon . I am an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Lille III . My research specialty is philosophical psychopathology, that is, the use of psychopathology to solve perennial philosophical riddles . In a  paper  recently published in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, I argue that in order to be happier, people with desires like us must behave irrationally. This might seem plainly paradoxical: being happier is, other things being equal, being better off. Behaving irrationally is not doing what is best for me. How can I be made better off by not doing what is better for me? Before debunking this paradox let me briefly present my argument. Many philosophers, thinkers and even religions have claimed that unfulfilled desires diminish our level of happiness. This, I believe is not quite right. There are two kinds of interesting counterexamples.