Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Paweł Gładziejewski  (Nicolaus Copernicus University) on his recent paper, " From Altered States to Metaphysics: The Epistemic Status of Psychedelic-induced Metaphysical Beliefs "  ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2023).  Paweł Gładziejewski  Psychedelic experiences sometimes lead people to revise their belief systems in far-reaching ways. My paper deals with the epistemic status of a particular class of beliefs that people sometimes acquire after a psychedelic session. These are the metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality itself. Imagine someone in a deep psychedelic state, where their usual sense of self dissolves into an all-encompassing unity lacking an subject-object distinction. Chances are that the experience will inspire this person to modify her beliefs about the existence of God or the relation between consciousness and the physical world. Is updating metaphysical beliefs in this manner epistemically irrational...

Benedetta Romano is a doctoral candidate in the department of neurophilosophy and ethics of neuroscience at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Her research centers on the philosophy of emotions, focusing on various topics, such as the epistemic relevance of political emotions, the capacity of emotions to establish a narrative connection, and their function in analogical reasoning. Moreover, she is interested in the emotional dimension of different issues in applied ethics, such as torture and immigration. Do the emotions that we experience towards political issues, characters and events, provide us with any valuable knowledge about them? My answer is a resounding yes, and in in my paper , I articulate it as follows. First, I address the epistemic part of the question. I argue that emotions can provide some knowledge about their objects, including political ones, by generating and modifying beliefs about them, and that such knowledge is evaluative in character. But is th...

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. Here she reports on two recently published papers, co-written with  Kengo Miyazono .  Kengo and I have recently been interested in how the considerations raised in the philosophy of belief apply to delusions. In our review paper on Philosophy Compass  (open access) we argue that the delusions literature has helped us focus on some key issues concerning the nature and development of beliefs. What conditions does a report need to satisfy in order to qualify as the report of a belief? What is the interaction between experience and inference in the process by which beliefs are formed? Kengo and I also have a joint research paper that recently appeared in Erkenntnis   (open access), where we ask what the ethics of belief can tell us about delusions. In this post I shall sum up our arguments in the paper, hoping for some feedback from our blog readers. There are several ways we can think of an ethics for belief. For instance, ...

In this post we hear about a project on problems and prospects for epistemic consequentialism whose principal investigators are Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (University of Kent), in the picture above, and Jeff Dunn (DePauw University). The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and running from August 2014 to July 2016. So far, one paper has been published as part of the project—‘A Defence of Epistemic Consequentialism’, Philosophical Quarterly 64 (257), 2014. An edited volume entitled  Epistemic Consequentialism is   due to be published at the end of 2016 or early 2017 by Oxford University Press. It will feature papers by Clayton Littlejohn, Christopher Meacham, Michael Caie, Nancy Snow, Richard Pettigrew, Ralph Wedgewood, James Joyce, Hilary Kornblith, Julia Driver, Amanda MacAskill, Alejandro Perez Carballo, and Sophie Horowitz. The plan is to publish two other journal articles as part of the project. Kristoffer  has kindly agreed to answer a few questions. LB:...