Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Jakob Ohlhorst , who is a postdoc fellow on the Extreme Beliefs project at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This post is about his recent book, Trust Responsibly  (Routledge), which is available open access  as an e-book. Jakob Ohlhorst " Strange coincidence, that every man whose skull has been opened had a brain! " ' Trust responsibly ' opens with this joke from Ludwig Wittgenstein. In On Certainty, he argued that some things we can only trust to be the case because any evidence which speaks in favour of the things we trust must already presuppose the things we trust. That everyone has a brain was a better example in the 1950s than it is now. This goes beyond trust in people. It also involves trust that the world is older than 100 years, trust that you are not in a coma and dreaming, and so on. I argue in my book that – to trust responsibly – we need virtues. The problem with trust is, if you don’t need any evidence, then you could trust just about anyth...

In this post, Robin McKenna presents a new book, Non-Ideal Epistemology (Oxford University Press 2023). I started thinking about the ideas that became Non-Ideal Epistemology when I was teaching social epistemology for the first time. I wanted to cover more than just the epistemologies of testimony and disagreement. I also wanted to do more than simply finish with a unit on epistemic injustice.  I wanted to cover the bits of social epistemology that overlap with philosophy of science and political philosophy, the bits that engaged with social psychology, the bits that asked political questions about knowledge and knowledge production. I wanted to help students identify and question the assumptions underlying the kind of approach to social epistemology that is more interested in how things might work than in how they actually work. But I didn’t want to do too much. I didn’t want to lose the students. A grand narrative was needed. But what would this grand narrative look like? What ...

Today's post is by Rik Peels. Rik is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Religion & Theology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is currently leading a large research project funded by the European Research Council, on the epistemology and ethics of extreme beliefs . He aims to synthesize empirical work with conceptual and normative approaches to fundamentalism, extremism, and conspiracy thinking.   For almost its entire history, philosophy has studied knowledge and understanding rather than ignorance. I see why: we seek to know and understand reality rather than be ignorant of it, at least for most things (privacy issues and the like may be an exception). And perhaps the tacit idea was that if we get a grip on knowledge and understanding, we thereby also have insight into the nature of ignorance, as ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge, or at least so it was thought.  Even philosophical debates that appealed to ignorance, such as that about Socratic...

In today's post, Marion Godman  (Aarhus University) presents her new book, The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds (Routledge 2021). Marion Godman, photo by Tariq Mikkel Khan I have written a book about human kinds, such as kinds of gender, religion and ethnicity. In the book I try to answer questions both about how these kinds come about and what their role in science and in policy is. Here I will focus on summarizing some of what I say about the positive role that human kinds can play in science and policy. I have come to think that people (including myself) must often be convinced that there is a point to talk about human kinds before they can take an interest in what they are and how they come about.  If I were to write a book on natural kinds, I might not have needed to spend much time on this task. After all, few would deny that it is useful to gain knowledge about alleged natural kinds, like mineralogical kinds, chemical elements and different species of ma...

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 ...

This post is by Michela Massimi who tells us about a collection she co-edited with Ana-Maria Cretu , Knowledge from a Human Point of View (Springer Synthese Library), available fully open access, courtesy of the European Research Council OA policy. Knowledge from a Human Point of View is the second edited volume planned for the ERC Consolidator Grant " Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point " and in my original intentions it was meant to explore the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of the view known as ‘perspectivism’. Better known these days among philosophers of science working on scientific modelling and pluralism (albeit not exclusively), perspectivism is a view with a long history. What is at stake in the prima facie platitude that our knowledge is always from a human point of view? Whose else’s point of view if not ours, one might immediately retort? Historically, the shift from knowledge sub spe...

This post is written by Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm. Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published widely in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and medical ethics. Robyn Bluhm is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. She has published widely in philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. In this post,  Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm present their new edited volume "The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry". Although there has long been a close link between philosophy and psychiatry, it is only in the past few decades that philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a field in its own right, with its specific set of questions and themes generating interest from both traditional philosophers, and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, ps...

In this post, I report from our applied epistemology panel at the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference 2018, held in Utrecht from 29th June – 1st July. When you think about typically ‘applied’ sub-disciplines of philosophy, epistemology might not be the first area of study to cross your mind. But Boudewijn de Bruin and Lisa Warenski , two speakers from last year’s panel on Applied Epistemology in the Professions decided that an applied epistemology panel should be a fixture of the SAP annual conference, and together with Anneli Jefferson and myself, put together a proposal, looking at deepening understanding of the application of the concept of epistemic injustice to topics in both mental health and finance for this year. (Unfortunately Lisa couldn’t make it on the day, so I report on just the three talks, but do keep an eye out for her work in this area!) First Boudewijn explored epistemic injustice in consumer markets, starting from the observation that...

Today's post is written by Kenny Easwaran, who is an Associate Professor in the  Department of Philosophy  at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in 2008 from the  Group in Logic and Methodology of Science  at UC Berkeley, doing interdisciplinary work on the mathematics and philosophy of conditional probability. This post is about " The Tripartite Role of Belief " which appeared in Res Philosophica as part of a special issue on Bridging Formal and Traditional Epistemology . This paper and the others in the issue were presented at a workshop at St. Louis University. (The paper can be found  here .) This paper considers three broad accounts of the role belief and related notions play in our lives, and suggests connections between them, and the way that different philosophical literatures have privileged one or another. My focus has been on work in epistemology within the analytic tradition, though there is some interactions with psychology, econo...

Joëlle Proust is an Emeritus CNRS Director of Research at Institut Jean-Nicod , Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. She published The Philosophy of Metacognition in 2013, and co-edited in 2012 a collective volume entitled The Foundations of Metacognition . In this post, she presents a new collective book co-edited with Martin Fortier , Metacognitive Diversity: Interdisciplinary approaches. The control and monitoring of one's own cognitive actions is called "metacognition". For example, try to remember Mark Twain's original surname. If you fail to retrieve it immediately, you may have the feeling that you will soon do: you have a "feeling of knowing". Other metacognitive feelings include the feeling of familiarity (when seeing a face), of understanding (an utterance), of being right (in drawing a conclusion) – with their negative versions: unfamiliarity, puzzlement, feeling of error. Other feelings lead you to decide whether or not to perform a task a...

Catherine Z. Elgin is Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Considered Judgment, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, With Reference to Reference, and (with Nelson Goodman) Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. In this post, she talks about her book True Enough . Epistemology valorizes truth.  There may be practical or prudential reasons to accept a contention that is known to be false, but it is widely assumed that there can never be epistemically good reasons to do so.  Nor can there be epistemically good reasons to accept modes of justification that are not truth-conducive.  Although this seems plausible, it has a fatal defect.  It cannot accommodate the cognitive contributions of science.  For science unabashedly uses models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true.  Nor do practicing scientists think that such devices will ultimat...

Today's post is by Project PERFECT Research Fellow Katherine Puddifoot.   I am entering my third year as a Research Fellow on Project PERFECT. During my time on the project so far I have had the opportunity to develop my views on memory and stereotyping.  In the past year I have been developing my account of stereotyping, the multifactorial account. This account identifies multiple features of any act of stereotyping that can determine whether or not it will lead to the misperception of the people who are stereotyped. Two papers developing this view have been published (open access) in Philosophical Exploration s and Philosophical Topics . I have been working with the Principle Investigator on Project PERFECT , Lisa Bortolotti, to develop our view of memory errors. We argue that there is an important feature of distorted memories that has previously not been recognised: they are produced by cognitive mechanisms that bring epistemic benefits. It has ...

Today's post is by J. Adam Carter , lecturer in Philosophy, University of Glasgow. In this post, he introduces his new book Metaepistemology and Relativism. The question of whether knowledge and other epistemic standings like justification are (in some interesting way) relative, is one that gets strikingly different kinds of answers, depending on who you ask. In humanities departments outside philosophy, the idea of ‘absolute’ or ‘objective’ knowledge is widely taken to be, as Richard Rorty (e.g., 1980) had thought, a naïve fiction —one that a suitable appreciation of cultural diversity and historical and other contingencies should lead us to disavow. A similar kind of disdain for talk of knowledge as objective has been voiced—albeit for different reasons—by philosophers working in the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g., Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Steven Shapin). Adam Carter And yet, within contemporary mainstream epistemology —roughly, the branch of philoso...

Michael Brady is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is currently a principal investigator on the The Value of Suffering Project , alongside David Bain . His main research area is the philosophy of emotion. One area of his research focuses on the epistemic status of emotion. He is interested in the idea that emotions have value and can perform an epistemic role. In this post, he introduces his book on these themes, Emotional Insight, which was published by Oxford University Press. My book tries to reconcile two commonsense intuitions: that emotions have considerable epistemic value (we should sometimes ‘listen to our heart’), and that emotions often lead us astray epistemically (emotions lead to epistemic biases). I approach the issue by examining a theory of emotion that is relatively new on the scene but has increasing support: the perceptual model of emotion. On this account, emotional experience is a kind of, or is at least akin to, perceptual experience....

Duncan Pritchard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the Director of the Eidyn research centre . In this post, he introduces his new book. Philosophically speaking, the problem of radical scepticism—that is, the challenge to explain how knowledge is even possible—is both my first love and my true love. It was this puzzle that first drew me into philosophy, and it’s also this topic that I have returned to throughout my academic career. My thinking has finally been distilled into a book, entitled EpistemicAngst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015). In this work I offer a comprehensive—and completely novel—response to the (Cartesian) paradox of radical scepticism. The book falls into four parts. In part one, I argue that the reason why the radical sceptical paradox has been so hard to resolve is that it is in fact two logically distinct paradoxes in disguise—one formulation that turns on the ‘closure...

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:...

I am delighted to be joining Project PERFECT in its second year. My previous research focussed on issues at the intersection of philosophy of psychology and epistemology. I am extremely excited about joining a team of researchers who work in closely related areas. I am joining PERFECT at the beginning of the second strand of the project, which will focus on distorted memory. During the next year, I will begin working on two new projects relating to this topic. For the first project, I will be collaborating with Lisa on cases of memory distortion in the non-clinical population. In cases of memory distortion, individuals form false memories. They recollect things that did not happen. The recollections are false but can be strongly believed. We will consider potential epistemic benefits that might follow from false memories of this sort. This means that we will consider whether the possession of false memories can lead to the formation of other true beliefs, leading to an overall inc...

In this post I interview Richard Pettigrew  (in the picture above), who is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, and is leading a four year project entitled “ Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications ”, also featuring Jason Konek, Ben Levinstein, Chris Burr and Pavel Janda. Ben Levinstein left the project in February to join the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. Jason Konek left the project in August to take up a TT post at Kansas State University. They have been replaced by Patricia Rich (PhD, Carnegie Mellon) and Greg Gandenberger (PhD, Pitt; postdoc at LMU Munich). LB: When did you first become interested in the notion of epistemic utility ? What inspired you to explore its foundations and applications as part of an ERC-funded project? RP: It all started in my Masters year, when I read Jim Joyce's fantastic paper ' A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism ' (Philosophy of Science, 1998, 65 (4):575-603). In t...

This is the second of two posts reporting on the  Women in Philosophy workshop  which was held on the 22nd and 23rd June at the University of York. This post will summarise the talks given on the second day of the workshop, you can read about the talks given on the first in a previous  post . Jules Holroyd (Nottingham), pictured above, opened the second day with a talk on Applying for Grants. Jules is currently the Principle Investigator of the Bias and Blame Project , for which she and her team received funding from the Leverhulme Trust. In her talk she gave very helpful information and advice on the grant application process. Laura Frances Callahan (Oxford), pictured above, was the first mentee speaker of the day with her paper 'Evil: Only Sometimes Evidence against God'. Laura discussed a forthcoming paper by Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs which claimed that since the absence of evil would be evidence for the existence of God, the pr...

In today's post Quassim Cassam presents his recent book entitled Self-knowledge for humans (Oxford University Press, 2014) . Quassim is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK Quassim Cassam What is it about self-knowledge that makes it philosophically interesting? One familiar answer to this question is that the epistemological privileges and peculiarities of self-knowledge are what justify all the attention paid by philosophers to this topic. There is a presumption that our beliefs about our own thoughts aren’t mistaken, and knowledge of our own thoughts is neither inferential nor observational. A different answer sees the elusiveness and human importance of self-knowledge as the key. On this account, our aim as philosophers should be to understand why self-knowledge matters and explain why it is so hard to get. These motivations for being interested in self-knowledge point in different directions. The standard examples of epistemologically distinct...