Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam. They present their new book, Vice Epistemology , which was published by Routledge five days ago. Ian Kidd Study of the human epistemic failings has been a staple theme of philosophy since antiquity. Ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophers were all concerned with ignorance, stupidity, and prejudiced and biased ways of thinking – ones opposed to such high-fidelity philosophical goods as wisdom, certain knowledge, or rationality. Attempted amelioration of those epistemic failings has been an aim of ethics, logic, and the more overtly ‘therapeutic’ forms of philosophical practice, too. Obviously, our world remains populated by human beings with very many epistemic failings, a glum fact reiterated by contemporary research in empirical psychology, philosophy of mind and epistemology. Such work offers a whole range of conceptual tools for the study of those failings and one of the newest is that of an epistemic ...

On December 16th and 17th, the Cognitive Irrationality project hosted a workshop on beliefs that feel good, organized by Marie van Loon, Melanie Sarzano and Anne Meylan. This very interesting event dealt with beliefs that feel good but are epistemically problematic in some way, as well as with beliefs for which this is not the case. While the majority of talks and discussions focused on problematic cases, such as wayward believers, self-deceptive beliefs and unrealistically optimistic beliefs, there was also a discussion of epistemic virtues and the relation between scepticism and beliefs in the world. Below, I summarize the main points made in the talks. Quassim Cassam probed the question why people hold weird beliefs and theories. Some examples are the theory that the moon landings were faked, or that 9/11 was in reality an inside job. Quassim argued that more often not, these types of beliefs stem from epistemic vices. In as far as these vices are stealthy, i.e. not apparent t...

The Epistemic Vices Conference , held in Durham in September 2015, put epistemic vices in the spotlight, with a series of talks on both what makes something an epistemic vice and the nature of specific epistemic vices. On day one Heather Battaly argued that virtues and vices are traits that express who someone is as a person, even if the person is not responsible for the possession or exercise of the traits. She argued that this view—personalism—is better equipped than existing forms of virtue epistemology to tackle some examples where people display intellectual vice, e.g. where a person is prejudiced due to their upbringing in a racist society. Quassim Cassam argued that intellectual vices are traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. He described how intellectual vices perform a significant role in explaining poor epistemic conduct. Responding to the situationist challenge, he claimed that virtues are often local rather than global traits. I highlighted a fa...

This is a report from the first day of the Deliberation, Interpretation and Confabulation Workshop at the Abraham Kuyper Centre for Science and Religion, VU University in Amsterdam, organised by Naomi Kloosterboer, and held on 19 and 20 June 2015. Note about the workshop poster above: circles are confabulation, squares are deliberation, and triangles are interpretation (how amazingly clever is that! Thanks to Naomi for pointing this out to me). I ( Lisa Bortolotti ) was the first speaker. I talked about features of confabulatory explanations about our own attitudes and choices, and attempted to offer an account of what happens when we confabulate that makes sense of several results in experimental psychology (such as introspective effects, social intuitionism about moral judgements, choice blindness). I argued that people often ignore the factors causally responsible for the formation of their attitudes and the making of their choices; they produce an often ill-grounded claim abo...