Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Anna Mameli, who attends secondary school and volunteers for The Philosophy Garden as part of her Duke of Edinburgh silver award. Anna reports on a paper recently published in a special issue of Revue Internationale de Philosophie on philosophy in the public sphere. Conceptual plumbing, an installation at the Philosophy Museum What are employers looking for? What do you need to successfully pass an interview? What helps you to win debates? Good epistemic skills. Epistemic skills allow you to gain, develop and use knowledge so that you can achieve your goals. This can be applied anywhere, from expressing your view in passionate debates in comment sections and discussing political issues with friends to deciding whether or not you should trust a source (e.g., when looking for medical advice) and convincingly presenting your point at work. These skills can be used for anything in your life! Learning good epistemic habits is essential for surviving in our society. So, ho...

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...