Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is written by Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing, editors of the new ' Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’ Richard Gipps is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Oxford, UK. He’s also a philosopher and an associate of the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Oxford. He has co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (OUP 2015), and is currently writing a book on the intelligibility of psychotic thought. His blog can be found at clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com . Michael Lacewing is a former Vice-Principal Academic and Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, London, an Honorary Reader in Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College, London, and a teacher of philosophy and theology at Christ's Hospital School, Sussex. He edited, with Louise Braddock, The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2007), and has published widely in philosophy of psychoanalysis, metaethics ...

This post is by James Andow  (pictured above), a Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading . James’s main research interests are in philosophical methodology, in particular, on intuitions and experimental philosophy. In this post, he talks about some recent work in epistemology. On the basis of no evidence at all, Jo comes to the private belief that aliens from another planet are helping her navigate the social world. Without that belief, Jo would experience profound social anxiety, develop paranoid tendencies, and come to suffer worse delusions that would severely impact her ability to maintain her physical wellbeing, personal relationships, employment, and so on. With her belief, Jo does pretty well for herself. Overall it is probably good Jo has this belief about aliens. There are certainly comparative benefits to having this belief. The overall quality of Jo's cognitions is improved by having this belief. She is closer to the truth, has fewer false co...

Hyemin Han  (pictured above) is Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology and Educational Neuroscience at The University of Alabama. In this post, he summarises his paper  "Attainable and relevant moral exemplars are more effective than extraordinary exemplars in promoting voluntary service engagement", recently published in Frontiers in Psychology . Did your parent or teacher tell you the stories of morally great people, moral exemplars, e.g., Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr., when you were young? Your parents and teachers perhaps told you such stories at least once, and you were asked to learn how to live a good life from them. Do you think that the stories have made you a morally better person, who is trying his/her best to emulate such exemplars’ moral behavior? Let’s make this question more general. Can such (seemingly) morally perfect people’s stories really promote motivation to engage in moral behavior? On the one hand, prior social and developme...

In this post PhD student Magdalena Antrobus (pictured above) summarises her recent research for Project PERFECT concerning the phenomenon known in the empirical literature as ‘depressive realism’. Depressive realism is the thesis that people with depression make more realistic inferences than ‘healthy’ individuals (Alloy and Abramson 1988).  The term refers to the phenomenon discovered in 1979 in a series of experiments designed around assessing the judgement of contingency tasks (Alloy and Abramson 1979) . The assessments of control made by participants with symptoms of depression were more accurate than those made by ‘healthy’ individuals. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant, making the results conclusive. People with depressive symptoms judged their control over uncontrollable events correctly, whilst the judgements made by individuals without depressive symptoms have been shown to exhibit a positive cognitive bias. Could people who ...

I interviewed John Sutton , Professor of Cognitive Science at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University, Sydney. John is interested in memory, skill, and distributed cognition, and in his work he seeks to integrate philosophical, psychological, and historical ideas and methods. This is the second in a series of three posts, you can read the first here . ES-B: What is observer memory?  JS: When I think about some experience I had, maybe a mundane event like having lunch yesterday with a lot of people, I can sometimes see myself in the remembered scene. So instead of being behind my own eyes when I remember that lunch yesterday, seeing my knife and fork coming up to my face as I eat, instead I can be looking at myself in the memory from an external perspective, and that is why we use the phrase ‘observer perspective’. It is as if I am above the group: I see them all and I see myself there in some way as part of that group. We contrast...

This is the fourth in our series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here  Catherine Loveday  summarises her paper, co-written with  Martin Conway , ' Remembering, Imagining, False Memories and Personal Memories '.  Ogwo David Emenike once wrote, 'Our imagination goes ahead of us, bringing our yesterday's imaginings into present realities'. This beautifully encapsulates the extraordinary capacity and need that humans have for mental time travel but, more than that, it illustrates the inextricable relationship between memory and imagination. When we remember we imagine and when we imagine we use our memory. Both are mental constructions based on past experience and there is significant evidence to suggest that the same brain structures are involved when we remember and when we imagine. The building blocks for both remembering and imagining are  semantic memory ...

This is the third in our series of  posts  on the papers published in  a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here  Jordi Fernández  summarises his paper   ' What are the  Benefits  of Memory Distortion'. There are two intuitively appealing thoughts about episodic (or experiential) memory. One of them is that our memories are supposed to reproduce the contents of some of our past experiences, namely, those in which our memories originate. The other one is that our memories can be beneficial for us in a number of ways. They can, for example, help us make sense of how we feel and behave towards people and situations from our past. What is the connection between these two aspects of memory? One might think that memories are only beneficial for us to the extent that they reproduce the contents of some of our past experiences. In this paper, though, I describe t...

Epistemic Innocence logo Yesterday, on September 1st, 2014 our project, Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions , funded by an AHRC fellowship awarded to myself, came to an end. As my work on the project has been the main reason for starting this blog, I thought I would offer some thoughts on how things have gone, and invite your comments. Fellowships are forms of funding awarded to an individual, but this project has been from the very beginning a collective effort.  The researcher working on the project,  Ema Sullivan-Bissett , has contributed to its development and its success in several ways: writing one new paper after the other, giving talks to very demanding audiences and taking excellent care of the blog by commissioning and authoring posts, editing material, all while preparing her (very successful) viva and honouring her teaching commitments. Ema and I were supported by a wider group of Birmingham-based people who greatly helped us by contributing to...

I interviewed John Sutton , Professor of Cognitive Science at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University, Sydney. John is interested in memory, skill, and distributed cognition, and in his work he seeks to integrate philosophical, psychological, and historical ideas and methods. This is the first in a series of three posts. ES-B: Do you think that distorted autobiographical memories might have pragmatic benefits insofar as they may function to fill gaps in a person’s recollection of the past, or are distorted in a self-enhancing way? JS: "I think that’s a very difficult question, and it’s probably going to pan out differently for different kinds of memory pathology. In general, yes, for sure, the mechanisms which give rise to distortions can be adaptive mechanisms, distortions might just be a by-product of mechanisms that work well enough most of the time. I am uneasy about pushing the line that specific distortions themselves ...

Greg Currie Is there any significant link between mental disorders and creativity? As part of my research, I interviewed Greg Currie , Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. Greg’s research focuses on the arts and cognition. His latest essay, entitled “Creativity and the Insight that Literature Brings”, appeared in the edited volume The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014). MA : How would you define creativity? GC : I wouldn’t attempt a watertight definition but I think of creativity as the capacity to find good, unpredictable solutions to problems. Without the first clause about good solutions we simply have wildly unconventional behaviour which does not succeed, and I think a tendency to success is part of what it takes to be creative. The point about unpredictability highlights a point I would want to make about creativity being an epistemic notion: we judge certain behaviours as creative but other beings, knowing more about th...

We are posting this on behalf of Professor Heather Widdows (University of Birmingham) who recently gave a talk on beauty as a topic in philosophy and ethics at the Hay Festival .  Heather Widdows I'm John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics in the department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. My current work is on ideals of perfection and beauty and I'm in the progress of writing Perfect Me! (under contract with Princeton University Press). In this book I’m exploring contemporary ideals of beauty and all the gory details which attach to messy, smelly, hairy, saggy and ever-changing human bodies from the perspective of moral philosophy. In Perfect Me! I consider three key ways in which the (moral) ideal of beauty functions. First, as an individual’s aspiration to perfect themselves (‘I want to be perfect’) – a value judgement – that this type of beauty is worth having – a moral claim; second, as assertion of what being perfect is (‘this is what I would be i...