Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Katherine Puddifoot , Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University, discusses her paper “ Re-evaluating the credibility of eyewitness testimony: the misinformation effect and the overcritical juror ,” recently published in Episteme. Should we trust eyewitnesses of crimes? Are jurors inclined to trust eyewitnesses more than they should? People tend to adopt a default position of trust towards eyewitness testimony, finding it highly convincing. However, as has now been widely acknowledged, eyewitnesses are subject to memory errors, which make them susceptible to error. These two observations have pointed many researchers towards the conclusion that jurors do trust eyewitnesses more than they should. However, in a recent paper, I argue that jurors are susceptible to being over critical, assigning too little credence to eyewitness testimony, due to the presence of memory errors. How can this be so? Jurors might adopt a default posit...

In September 2018, a team of Birmingham philosophers, comprising Kathy Puddifoot , Valeria Motta , Matilde Aliffi , EmaSullivan-Bissett and myself , were in sunny Rijeka, Croatia, to talk a whole lot of Epistemic Innocence at the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology . Epistemic innocence is the idea at the heart of our research at Project PERFECT . A cognition is epistemically innocent if it is irrational or inaccurate and operates in ways that could increase the chance of acquiring knowledge or understanding, where alternative, less costly cognitions that bring the same benefits are unavailable. Over the last few years, researchers on the project and beyond have investigated the implications of epistemic innocence in a range of domains (see a list of relevant work here ). Our epistemic innocence symposium at ESPP2018 was a mark of the relative maturity of the concept, and the opportunity for us to start expanding its applications. I went first, exploring the ...