Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Chiara Caporuscio (Berlin School of Mind and Brain). Here Chiara discussed some ideas from her paper Introspection and Belief , published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2021). Chiara Caporuscio Are beliefs about the external world psychologically and epistemically different from beliefs about what is going on in our own mind? The belief that it’s a rainy day outside is formed by weighing different sources of evidence, such as the view from my window or the weather forecast. It might be influenced by motivational factors, such as my desire to have a picnic later in the day. It is prone to error - for example, my upstairs neighbour watering the plants on their balcony might have caused me to jump to conclusions - and it can be revised and updated when new evidence comes in. My belief that I’m feeling happy, on the other hand, has been regarded by a long philosophical tradition as being fundamentally different: direct, incorrigible, and protected from error. In m...

Today's post is by Lu Teng at NYU Shanghai on her recent paper “ Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication? ” (2021, Australasian Journal of Philosophy ). Lu Teng The cognitive penetrability of perception brings some new problems to the discussion of perceptual justification in epistemology. In the above case, if the subjects were cognitively penetrated to see an entirely grey banana as yellowish-grey, did this experience give them the same amount of justification for believing that the banana was yellowish-grey as an ordinary, non-penetrated yellowish-grey experience would normally give? Many philosophers maintain that the penetrated experience has less justificatory power, although it remains hotly debated why cognitive penetration makes the experience epistemically downgraded.  In my article “ Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication? ” I critically examine a prominent approach to the epistemology of cognitive penetration, according to which some cognitively p...

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks about a recent paper she co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, “ Do delusions have and give meaning? ”, recently published in  Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  (open access).  Rosa Ritunnano For many people living with psychosis, delusional experiences are hugely distressing. They are not only harmful because of the negative emotions they often carry along, but they are also dysfunctional ( Miyazono, 2015 ). Someone who believes, for example, that everyone in their workplace is reading their thoughts and controlling their movements through a mysterious influencing machine, may feel extremely nervous, gradually withdraw from their friends and family, and give up their job. This can lead to a disruption in good functioning and may be accompanied by a constellation of symptoms attracting...

In this post, Federico Bongiorno (now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, funded by an Analysis Trust and Mind Association award) is summarising a paper he wrote with Lisa Bortolotti while a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. The paper is entitled: "The Role of Unconscious Inference in Models of Delusion Formation" and appeared in Inference and Consciousness , a volume edited by Timothy Chan and Anders Nes and published by Routledge in 2019. Federico Bongiorno Brendan Maher was the first to suggest that the formation of delusions involves an inferential transition—although he denies that the inference from which delusions arise is faulty ( Maher, 1992 ; Maher, 1999 ). Maher defends a view known as ‘explanationism’ ( Maher, 1974 ; Stone and Young, 1997 ), according to which delusions are hypotheses adopted to explain anomalous perceptual experiences and arrived at by inferential reasoning that is neither abnormally biased nor otherwise deficient (...

Nick Byrd is a PhD candidate and Fellow at Florida State University, working in the Moral & Social Processing (a.k.a., Paul Conway) Lab in the Department of Psychology , and in the Experimental Philosophy Research Group in the Department of  Philosophy  at Florida State University . In this post, he introduces his paper “ What we can (and can’t) infer about implicit bias from debiasing experiments ”, recently published in Synthese. Implicit bias is often described as associative, unconscious, and involuntary. However, philosophers of mind have started challenging these claims. Some of their reasons have to do with debiasing experiments. The idea is that if debiasing is not entirely involuntary and unconscious, then implicit bias is not entirely involuntary and unconscious. Sure enough, some evidence suggests that debiasing is not entirely involuntary and unconscious (e.g., Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012 ). So it seems that implicit bias can be consci...

This post is by Josh May , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He presents his book, Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind  (OUP, 2018). May’s research lies primarily at the intersection of ethics and science. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011. Before taking a position at UAB, he spent 2 years teaching at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. My book is a scientifically-informed examination of moral judgment and moral motivation that ultimately argues for what I call optimistic rationalism, which contains empirical and normative theses. The empirical thesis is a form of (psychological) rationalism, which asserts that moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally driven by reasoning or inference. The normative thesis is cautiously optimistic, claiming that moral cognition and motivation are, in light of the science, in pretty good shape---at least, the empirical ev...

This post is by Michael D. Kirchhoff and Julian Kiverstein. They present their recent book, Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: a Third Way . Kirchhoff is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has edited a special issue of Synthese on Predictive Brains and Embodied, Enactive Cognition. His research spans across topics in philosophy of mind and cognition, philosophy of neuroscience, and theoretical biology. He is currently a member of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project exploring the explanatory basis of minds in skillful performance. Julian Kiverstein is Senior Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has published extensively on philosophy of 4e cognition and phenomenologically-inspired philosophy of mind. He is currently a member of an interdisciplinary project investigating changes in lived experience of patients being treated with deep brain stimulation for o...

In this post, Sophie Stammers , Research Fellow on Project PERFECT at the University of Birmingham, introduces her article, “ A Patchier Picture Still: Biases, Beliefs and Overlap on the Inferential Continuum ” recently published Open Access at Philosophia. ‘Implicit’ is a designation that does a lot of work in the philosophy and cognitive science of thoughts. This follows many decades of research which demonstrates that human minds don’t always behave in ways that many of have expected them to. For instance, people (a) sometimes appear to be unaware of factors which influence their decisions; or (b) they often think or do things in spite of evidence to the contrary, or fail to think or do things in spite of evidence in favour; or (c) people think or do things automatically, without having deliberated first; or (d) they think or do things in spite of sincerely disavowing the thinking or doing of these things – or, all of (a)-(d) at once. Many theorists have made sense of...

In this post, Susanna Siegel , Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, introduces her book, The Rationality of Perception . On a traditional conception of the human mind, reasoning can be rational or irrational, but perception cannot. Perception is simply a source of new information, and cannot be assessed for rationality. I argue that this conception is wrong. Drawing on examples involving racism, emotion, self-defense law, and scientific theories, The Rationality of Perception makes the case that perception itself can be rational or irrational. The Rationality of Perception argues that reasoning and perception can be deeply intertwined. When unjustified beliefs, fears, desires, or prejudices influence what we perceive, we face a philosophical problem: is it reasonable to strengthen what one believes, fears, or suspects, on the basis of an experience that was generated, unbeknownst to the perceiver, by those very same beliefs, fears, or suspicions? I argue that it is not ...

Hello, readers! I’m Patricia Rich , and I’m currently a philosophy postdoc on the new Knowledge and Decision project at the University of Hamburg . This post is about a paper stemming from my dissertation, entitled Axiomatic and Ecological Rationality: Choosing Costs and Benefits . It appeared in the Autumn issue of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics . My paper defends a specific method of evaluating rationality. The method is general and can be applied to choices, inferences, probabilistic estimates, argumentation, etc., but I’ll explain it here through one example. Suppose I’m worried about my friend Alex’s beliefs regarding current affairs. Her claims often seem far-fetched and poorly supported by evidence. As rationality experts who want to help, how should we evaluate Alex? I embrace several components of the “ ecological rationality ” research program, which many readers will know from other posts . First, it’s important to move beyond particular belief...