Imperfect Cognitions

The blog post today is by Joel Krueger (University of Exeter) on his recent paper " Home as Mind: AI Extenders and Affective Ecologies in Dementia Care " ( Synthese 2025).   Joel Krueger AI is everywhere. Admittedly, much of the hype is overblown (AI fatigue is real; I feel it, too). Still, AI can do impressive things—and it’s already impacting our lives in many ways. Discussions in philosophy and beyond often focus on big issues like the looming possibility of artificial consciousness (very unlikely) and artificial general intelligence (also unlikely, despite what Sam Altman and other techbros keep insisting), or more immediate practical and ethical worries about job displacement, bias, privacy, environmental costs, and the potential for misuse. Critical discussions like these are important. They help tamp down relentless hype cycles that get in the way of clear-eyed discussions about how AI-powered technology should fit into our lives. But while scepticism is warranted, i...

Today's post is by Tillmann Vierkant (University of Edinburgh) who presents his recent book The Tinkering Mind (Oxford University Press, 2022). The Tinkering Mind has at its heart a puzzle about epistemic agency and cognitive control. I was always puzzled by the notion of cognitive control, because to me it seemed to combine features that are clearly incompatible. The puzzle in question is as follows: cognitive control is often said to be voluntary, and is a form of cognition.  But cognitive control is also supposed to lead to the acquisition of new beliefs. I have always found it strange that cognitive control is supposed to have all three of these features because if it does, then that seems to indicate that the acquisition of a belief can be a voluntary action when we acquire it by means of cognitive control. This would imply doxastic voluntarism which, like most philosophers nowadays, I find unpalatable. Very many people have pointed out to me that this initial worry is just...

This is the first in a mini series of posts exploring issues regarding technological enhancement in learning and education, featuring two papers that have appeared in the “ Cheating Education ” special issue of Educational Theory.  This post is provided by Kathy Puddifoot , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham and Cian O’Donnell , Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bristol. They introduce their paper " Human Memory and the Limits of Technology in Education ". Have you ever had the intuition that there are risks associated with students or teachers supplanting traditional methods of learning with the use of technologies that store and provide easy access to information, such as cloud storage, note-taking applications, open access sources like Wikipedia, or social media resources? It can be difficult to articulate exactly what is problematic about the use of such technologies. They provide a way of storing accurate represent...

Today's post is by Daniel D. Hutto and Anco Peeters. Daniel D. Hutto  (above right) is Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology and Associate Dean of Law, Humanities and the Arts, at the  University of Wollongong.  and member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. His recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. He is best known for promoting enactive and embodied cognition that is non-representational at root, and for his narrative practice hypothesis about folk psychology. Anco Peeters  (above left) is a doctoral student and tutor at the University of Wollongong. His doctoral project investigates the compatibility of functionalism and enactivism and compares these frameworks in terms of their explanatory power with respect to mind-technology interaction. Attempts to accommodate a range of empirical findings about memory have provoked daring new thinking about what lies at the roots ...

The Helsinki Network for Philosophy of Psychiatry organized the symposium ”Culture, Extended and Embodied Cognition and Mental Disorders” on June 30-July 1, 2016, in Helsinki. The symposium was dedicated to cultural issues related to diagnostics, definitions and classifications of mental disorders, as well as phenomenological questions of experience, affectivity and embodiment. The symposium took place in Lapinlahti Hospital that was one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in Northern Europe when it first opened its doors 175 years ago (on 1st of July 1841) - and now is a cultural venue. Culture-Bound Syndromes and Mechanisms Several talks focused on the ways culture affects disorders and their classification. In his introduction, Tuomas Vesterinen argued that definitions of mental disorders are inalienably value-laden, and that socio-cultural forces should be taken into account in explanations and classifications in order not to spread the diagnostic categori...