Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Joe Pierre, professor of psychology at UC San Francisco, discusses his recently published book, False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True (OUP, 2025) False As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs. In psychiatry, false beliefs like cognitive distortions or delusions are typically chalked up to psychopathology. People have cognitive distortions because they have major depressive disorderand people are delusional because they have schizophrenia. And although research might tell us that delusional thinking can be attributed to anomalous subjective experiences or a “jumping to conclus...

                 Today's post is written by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall . In this post, they present their new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread , published by Yale University Press. Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine.  James Owen Weatherall is a philosopher of physics and philosopher of science. He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science.    Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformatio...

Today's post is provided by Professor Nancy Snow. My name is Nancy Snow and I am a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma (see here for more information). My paper, “ Adaptive Misbeliefs, Value Trade-Offs, and Epistemic Consequentialism ,” was recently published in the volume Epistemic Consequentialism, edited by Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij and Jeffrey Dunn (Oxford University Press, 2018). As the book’s title suggests, the collection is about various aspects of epistemic consequentialism. This is a view in the theory of knowledge (epistemology), according to which the production of epistemic value is the end at which beliefs or belief-producing processes aim. Epistemic consequentialism parallels ethical consequentialism in structure. I.e., just as ethical consequentialism tells us we should maximize happiness or utility in our actions, so epistemic consequentialism tells us we should maximize...

This post is by Bart Streumer . Bart Streumer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. In this post he introduces his book Unbelievable Error s, which has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Widespread beliefs can be systematically mistaken. Take religious beliefs: if God does not exist, these beliefs are all mistaken. But you may think that some widespread beliefs cannot be mistaken in this way. For example, consider normative judgements: our beliefs about what is right or wrong, or about what there is reason to do or to believe. Could these beliefs be systematically mistaken? In my book Unbelievable Errors, I argue that they are. I argue that normative judgements ascribe normative properties, but that these properties do not exist. This means that all normative judgements are false. For example, the belief that stealing is wrong ascribes the property of being wrong to stealing, but this property does not exist, which means that this belief is...

This post is the final one in our series summarizing the contributions to the special issue on unrealistic optimism 'Unrealistic Optimism -Its nature, causes and effects' . The paper by Anneli Jefferson , Lisa Bortolotti and Bojana Kuzmanovic looks at the nature of unrealistically optimistic cognitions and the extent to which they are irrational. Anneli Jefferson We know that people have a tendency to expect that their future will be better than that of others or better than seems likely on an objective measure of probability. But are they really expressing a belief that the future will be good, or should we see these expressions of optimism as hopes or possibly even just expression of desires for the future? Maybe when I say ‘My marriage has an 85% likelihood of lasting ‘til death do us part’’, what I am actually saying is ‘I really, really want my marriage to last.’ If what is expressed is a desire rather than a belief, we do not need to worry that we are systemati...

Neil Levy (pictured above) is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University (Sydney) and Senior Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. Here, he replies to last week's post by  Neil Van Leeuwen .   Neil Levy's post draws on themes from his  paper   recently published  in Cognition. There are two central strands to Neil Van Leeuwen’s post (hereafter NVL). One is the claim that there is a class of representational state (in the post he focuses on religious belief, but in his paper in Cognition he suggests that ideological beliefs belong to this class too) which fail to be evidentially vulnerable in the same way as more mundane beliefs. The second strand is the one developed in his paper in Philosophical Explorations , arguing that we best understand the limited signs of evidence responsiveness exhibited by these beliefs in terms of a kind of imaginative play. People who respond to evidence with regard to thei...

This post is by Neil Van Leeuwen  (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Associate of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. What follows is a synopsis of his new paper , which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. One might argue that the answer to my title question is just blindingly obvious. Religious “beliefs” don’t respond to evidence, because no beliefs do! After all, human belief formation processes are a motley crew, including such ignobles as confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, the availability heuristic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the base rate fallacy, the genetic fallacy, ad hominems, prestige bias, framing effects, and many, many…many more. This cynical view, however, grows out of a diet of ...

In this post Miriam McCormick (pictured above), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond, summarises her paper on " Rational Hope ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. History and literature are filled with examples of people in horrific, desperate situations where having hope seemed essential for their survival. And yet, holding on to “false hope” can be devastating and can also condone inaction, where hoping for a change replaces working for that change. It also can seem that finding hope in a hopeless situation must be irrational. Is the choice between rational despair and irrational hope? I don’t think so; there are times when hope is rational but it is not always so. My main aim in this p...

Project PERFECT is very proud to announce its first workshop, on False but Useful Beliefs , to be held in London on 4th and 5th of February 2016. The workshop will take place at Regent's Conferences and Event in Regent's Park (see picture below). The idea of the workshop is to explore a variety of beliefs and belief-like states that are epistemically faulty (either false or badly supported by evidence) but that also play a useful function for the agent, either biologically, psychologically, pragmatically, epistemically, or in some other way. The workshop features three types of talks. 1. Talks by invited speakers who are leading experts in the area.  Anandi Hattiangadi from Stockholm University will talk about radical interpretation and implicit cognition,  Neil Van Leeuwen  from Georgia State University will discuss agent-like stimuli in religious practice, and  David Papineau  from King's College London and CUNY will ask whether functional falsity r...

In this post Maksymilian Del Mar  (in the picture above) presents the recent book Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice   (Springer 2015),  co-edited with William Twining . Treating Menorca as if it is a suburb of London, or a ship as if it was a person, or pretending that persons who form contracts are made by rational agents with knowledge of the commitments they are making, or that states who take over other states find a land empty of life (as in the doctrine of terra nullius) – or, positing the existence of consent, malice, notice, fraud, intention, or causation when evidence clearly points to the opposite conclusion (or to no conclusion at all)… All these are example of legal fictions. They fly in the face of reality. And, in the literature on theories of law and legal reasoning, they are not very popular. In this new collection – Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (Springer, 2015, co-edited by William Twining and Maks Del Mar) – 18 chapters explore anothe...

This post is by Maarten Boudry (picture above), Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University. Here Maarten writes about the inspiration for his recent paper, co-authored with Stefaan Blancke and Massimo Pigliucci , ' What Makes Weird Beliefs Thrive? The Epidemiology of Pseudoscience ', published in Philosophical Psychology.  Science does not just explain the way the universe is; it also explains why people continue to believe the universe is different than it is. in other words, science is now trying to explain its own failure in persuading the population at large of its truth claims. In Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not , philosopher Robert McCauley offers ample demonstrations of the truth of his book title. Many scientific theories run roughshod over our deepest intuitions. Lewis Wolpert even remarked that 'I would almost contend that if something fits with common sense it almost certainly isn't science.’ It ...

This post is by Anneli Jefferson, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project. On June 27th, Nils Kürbis and Dan Adams hosted a workshop on falsity entitled ' Falsity – Not just Truth’s Poor Relation ' at Birkbeck (see picture of venue above). The lively workshop approached falsity in a number of thought-provoking ways. Those of us who don’t work in metaphysics take the concept of falsity for granted. But once you start thinking about what falsity is, numerous puzzles arise. If you assert that something is false, in other words, it is not the case, what makes that claim true? When we speak truly, we say how things are. If we speak falsely, things aren’t how we say they are. But doesn’t that mean that what we say is there is not there at all? So what are we talking about? It seems as if we are talking about nothing at all, so how can what we said even make sense? One response to this problem is that there ...

This post is by Michele Tinnirello (pictured above), a PhD student in Philosophy at University of Messina. His research covers the pragmatics of acts of communication within philosophy of language and its relationship with philosophy of mind, neurolinguistics, and artificial intelligence.  My philosophical background concerns mainly the most famous debates within the philosophy of mind and language as well as the relationships with other branches of cognitive science. I am now focusing on the most recent accounts of the semantics/pragmatics debate, in order to achieve, or at least try to achieve, a stronger and global view of how our mind is able to shape and understand meaning.  This, of course, involves not just philosophical questions and speculation, as it requires contributions from a lot of different fields like, e.g., psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Actually, I believe that a multidisciplinary approach is absolutely preferable when it comes to underst...