Imperfect Cognitions

This weeks post is by Dr. Lena Wimmer, University of Würzburg. Presenting her recent paper Why Disinformation, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories are not Fiction: A View From Philosophical Aesthetics and Literary Studies   published in  Review of Philosophy and Psychology Lena Wimmer    Not just in everyday conversations, but also in academic discussions, unreliable information – like misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories – is often compared to fiction. I want to question whether that comparison really holds up. First, let us clarify what we mean by these different kinds of unreliable information. All of them operate at the level of individual claims or statements. Misinformation is the broadest category: it simply refers to false information, no matter whether the person sharing it means to mislead or not. Disinformation is more specific – it is false information shared deliberately to deceive. Fake news is a form of disinformation that ...

This post is by Peter Langland-Hassan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who is presenting his new book, Explaining Imagination (OUP 2020). The book is available as a free open access download , thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati. Peter Langland-Hassan  We won’t understand what imagination is—we won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination , is a compendium of such recipes. What ingredients do they feature? On my telling, they are other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts, they constitute cases of imagining. The idea that imagination can be reduced to other kinds of mental states in this way is at odds with what most (maybe all) other philosophers have had to say about imagination. According to the orthodox view, if we list a person’...

This post is by Anna Ichino, University of Milan. Have you ever visited a Philosophy Museum? I bet not. Apparently, indeed, there aren’t any Philosophy Museums in the world. Or better: there aren’t any yet… But together with my colleagues at the Philosophy Department of the University of Milan we have decided that it is time to build the first one. In this post, I’ll tell you about this exciting project. What we had in mind was not an historically-minded museum collecting relics about the lives and works of important philosophers; but something more dynamic and interactive – built on the model of the best science museums – where philosophical problems and theories become intuitively accessible through a variety of games, activities, experiments, aesthetic experiences, and other such things. Easier to say than to do, no doubt. It’s an ambitious project, and to put it into action we had to proceed gradually. We started with a temporary exhibition, which took place in ...

This post is by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, and previous Research Fellow on Project PERFECT . Together with Helen Bradley and Paul Noordhof , I have edited a collection Art and Belief , recently published with Oxford University Press. The volume consists of twelve new essays at the intersection of philosophy of mind and art. Our appreciation of artworks raises substantial challenges for our understanding of the cognitive attitudes involved, specifically, beliefs and related attitudes. Some of our beliefs concern the quality of the work in question. Others will derive from the content of the work, reflecting the commonly held view of art as a source of truth and knowledge. Both kinds of belief bring challenges for orthodox understandings of belief. The volume is divided into four sections which explore a variety of questions on art and the nature of belief. Section I: Author Testimony Can we form justified beliefs upo...

Kathleen Stock is a Philosopher at the University of Sussex, working on questions about imagination and fiction, including: What is the imagination? What is the relation between imagining and believing? What is fiction? Can we learn from fiction? Are there limits to what we can imagine? She has published widely on related topics, and her book Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination is now out with Oxford University Press. She blogs about fiction and imagination at thinkingaboutfiction.me. Philosophers and literary theorists argue about three things: what fiction is, how fiction should be interpreted, and what imagination is. In Only Imagine, I suggest that all three questions can be illuminated simultaneously.  I aim to build a theory of fiction that also tells us about the imagination, and vice versa. My focus is on texts. First, I defend a theory of fictional interpretation (or ‘fictional truth’ as it’s sometimes called). When we read a novel or story, ...

In this post, Matilde Aliffi (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) reports from the 7th International Summer School of Affective Science (ISSAS) held at Château de Bossey between the 7th and the 14th July 2016. This year ISSAS was entirely dedicated to investigating the role of emotions in fiction and virtual worlds. World leading experts in philosophy, psychology, educational science, neuroscience, affective computing and game design gave their lecture to an audience composed by an international and interdisciplinary community of about forty PhD students.   During the school, workshops were also held on thought experiments, data-analysis, programming and text-based emotion recognition. Participants were divided in eight teams and had the opportunity to design and present a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project tied to the topics of the school. Alongside the lectures, participants also enjoyed artistic events that complemented nicely the lectures wit...

In this post Matilde Aliffi, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews Derek Matravers (pictured below), who is professor of philosophy at the Open University, and has interests in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Derek is the author of  Fiction and Narrative (OUP, 2014) and has recently completed a book on empathy which will be published by Polity Press. MA: You are a leading expert in aesthetics and philosophy of art. How did you become interested in these areas? DM: There were three reasons for my interest. The first was that there were some really inspirational figures working in the area when I first went to University; in particular, Richard Wollheim who had been at UCL just before I arrived. Other greats, such as Bernard Williams, clearly had a keen interest in the topic even if they never wrote about (although Williams did write occasional pieces on opera, which have since been collected into a book).  Secondly, it was a natural extension ...

This post is by Nevia Dolcini (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macau. In this post Nevia talks about her research and announces two upcoming events. I am interested in how human reasoning works, and I take language and its underlying cognitive and semantic mechanisms to be the ideal starting point for the explanation of mental phenomena. I like to extend the methods of philosophy of language beyond its traditional domain of analysis, so as to include non-linguistic objects such as gestures, and perceptual contents. In my research activity, I often combine philosophy and psychology: scientific literature from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology is particularly relevant to my research activity, but I also enjoy reading fiction (which sometimes offers great cases for philosophical assessment). I have been doing extensive work on linguistic and non-linguistic index...

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...

F. Samaniego, M. Suarez and I. San Pedro I currently hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I recently finished my doctoral research at the Complutense University in Madrid on interventionist explanations of entropy raising, under the supervision of Mauricio Suárez. He is Associate Professor in Logic and Philosophy of Science at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. During 2013-2015 he is a Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy (School of Advanced Studies, London University). In this post I describe how the research interests of Mauricio Suárez partially overlap with the themes of the project on the epistemic innocence of imperfect cognitions. One of his main areas of research is the epistemology of science, more precisely, models, inference and scientific representation. Suárez defends that science is not as realistic and algorithmically objective as people commonly...

On 11th and 12th of October the Department of Philosophy at the University of York hosted an international conference on the topic of Art and the Nature of Belief, organised by Helen Bradley and Ema Sullivan-Bissett . The aim of the conference was to bring together philosophers of mind working on belief and its connection to truth with aestheticians working on beliefs gained from artworks. We thought that there was an opportunity for a significant philosophical interaction between belief theorists and aestheticians which would illuminate the nature of belief for both parties. The interaction was intended to present the belief theorist with pertinent questions regarding the status of beliefs formed as a result of engaging with art and, in turn, encourage aestheticians to further consider the relations between art, belief, and truth.

G reg is Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham (moving to York in September); Anna is doing her PhD with him.   Greg Currie We both work on the topics of fiction and imagination, and recently have become interested in the question of how our imaginative engagement with fictions influences our attitudes towards the real world – notably, our real-world beliefs. When we read Anna Karenina and become engrossed in the story of her life, what effects – if any – does this have on what we think, feel, desire about our own lives? Do we acquire new beliefs (or worries, or hopes...) about the real nature of love, or the evils of social conformity? To the extent to which we do that, how does it happen, and how rational is it?   Anna Ichino These are in important respects empirical questions. In order to answer them we are looking at the psychological work in this area. We have started by considering a growing body of studies that go under the heading of ‘Transporta...