Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Vanessa Schipani  (University of Pennsylvania) who discusses a recent open access  paper on journalism and public trust in science published in Synthese . A version of this post has appeared on the LSE blog on 2 September 2024. Vanessa Schipani During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I was hired as a journalist to report on politicians’ claims about science for FactCheck.org . Coming off of finishing a master’s in the history and philosophy of science, my eye for stories was a bit more philosophical than most.  Starting with my first article on whether climate science was pseudoscience (spoiler: it’s not), I noticed a trend in how politicians misunderstood the scientific process, especially when arguing for policy inaction: They set the bar for action at certain results, and condemned researchers when they offered their opinions about policies. Now on the cusp of finishing a dissertation on trust in science, I see more clearly the trick these po...

On 11th and 12th April in beautiful Trento, the Foundation Bruno Kessler hosted the final conference of the two-year research project on Resilient Beliefs , organised by Eugenia Lancellotta and featuring a number of international speakers interested in conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, delusions, and similar phenomena. Programme of the conference The first speaker was Scott Hill (University of Innsbruck), highlighting problems for a prominent study on the use of "conspiracy theory". Hill started discussing Miranda Fricker's account of testimonial injustice and then argued that conspiracy theorists do not suffer from a credibility deficit. That is because the credibility they are assigned matches the credibility they deserve. Scott Hill The second speaker was Anna-Maria Asunta Eder (University of Cologne), also working in social epistemology, who discussed the phenomenon of learning from others and resisting the evidence of others. Eder aims to bring some issues wid...

Today's post is by Rik Peels. Rik is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Religion & Theology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is currently leading a large research project funded by the European Research Council, on the epistemology and ethics of extreme beliefs . He aims to synthesize empirical work with conceptual and normative approaches to fundamentalism, extremism, and conspiracy thinking.   For almost its entire history, philosophy has studied knowledge and understanding rather than ignorance. I see why: we seek to know and understand reality rather than be ignorant of it, at least for most things (privacy issues and the like may be an exception). And perhaps the tacit idea was that if we get a grip on knowledge and understanding, we thereby also have insight into the nature of ignorance, as ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge, or at least so it was thought.  Even philosophical debates that appealed to ignorance, such as that about Socratic...

Today's post is by Reinier Schuur, who is a PhD candidate in philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His primary research interest is in philosophy of medicine. Reinier won the 2022 Peter Sowerby Prize for his essay ‘The Puzzle of Addiction: Knowledge of the Good as an Achievement’. This is a short version of his essay for a wider audience.  Reinier Schuur The puzzle of addiction refers to the problem of explaining how addictive behaviour appears to be both voluntary and destructive. This puzzle arises when we assume that people will stop engaging in a voluntary behaviour if the costs outweigh the benefits, all else being equal. The main solution to the puzzle had been to argue that addictive behaviour is in fact involuntary. This solution, however, has come under criticism over the last few decades, with both empirical data and theoretical analysis arguing that addictive behaviour is voluntary in some significant sense. But this raises again th...

This post is by Juliette Vazard who recently published a paper entitled " The Doxastic Profile of the Compulsive Re-checker " in Philosophical Explorations, open access. Juliette Vazard What exactly is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? Checking is one of the most common compulsive actions performed by patients with Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)( APA, 2013 ; Abramowitz, McKay, Taylor, 2008 ). And while incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view, it is hard to pinpoint what exactly makes it inadequate from an epistemological standpoint. My suggestion is that, in order to understand exactly what goes epistemically wrong with rechecking, we first need to take a step back from the behaviors themselves, and consider the mental state that the re-checker is in as she goes through the moves. What is she looking for, as she goes back for another check? A first intuitive answer is: although she already has sufficient evidenc...

Today's post is by Chris Letheby (Western Australia/Adelaide) on his new book Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021). We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. “Classic” psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin are the objects of renewed scientific interest. Despite the chequered reputation of these substances, recent clinical trials have shown that psychedelics can be administered safely in controlled conditions, and may have a role in the treatment of various psychological maladies. There is even talk of a “new paradigm” in psychiatric treatment.  But psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (“psychedelic therapy”) has several unusual features that distinguish it from standard psychiatric treatments and raise intriguing questions. In my book Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021) I tackle some of these questions. The most striking feature of psychedelic therapy is that it involves the induction of a dramatically altered state of consciousness. Patients with anxiety, depr...

This post is by Veli Mitova (University of Johannesburg), who guest-edited a special issue of Philosophical Papers on  Epistemic Decolonisation  and here introduces the topic to us and presents the seven essays contributing to the special issue.  Veli Mitova   We live in an epistemically colonial world; that’s no secret. Although the Global North physically left as colonial ‘master’ long ago, it still gets to tell the Global South what counts as genuine knowledge and real science. The call to epistemic decolonisation – which is gaining increasing traction in both academia and everyday life – is the dual call to dismantle the North’s self-arrogated epistemic superiority, and to re-centre the South’s knowledge enterprise onto our geo-historical here and now.  Decolonising Knowledge Here and Now Veli Mitova , the guest editor of the special issue and the author of this post, models epistemic decolonisation on Kwasi Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation: it involves t...

Chloe Bamboulis, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, works on the relationship between classic philosophical views and cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). In this video , she talks for three minutes about self-knowledge in Plato and in CBT. In today's post she summarises a commentary co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti on the utility of CBT, forthcoming in Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology. Chloe Bamboulis A common idea about CBT is that it does not contribute to the person's understanding of reality ( validity ) but encourages ways of thinking that boost the person's wellbeing ( utility ). In our brief commentary, we argue that CBT can also contribute to some of the person's epistemic goals. Suppose James comes to believe that he will not be offered his dream job, the one he is going to be interviewed for. James arrives at this self-prediction by accepting a negative automatic thought about himself as someone who does not perform well at job interviews. A...

Today's post is by Christopher Badura (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College) on the new collection on the epistemic role of imagination  Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge, 2021).  In recent years, philosophical interest in the epistemic role of imagination has blossomed.  Although there are a number of philosophers who remain skeptical, there is now considerable agreement that imagination has an important role to play in the epistemic domain.  But when it comes to the question of how best to articulate that role, or to the related question of what explains the ability of imagination to play that role, there is considerably less agreement.  These are the kinds of issues explored in the 15 contributions to our recently released volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge). The idea for the volume was born in Bochum during summer 2019 when we co-organized a conference on Fiction, Imagination, and Epistemology at Ruhr Un...

This post is by Michela Massimi who tells us about a collection she co-edited with Ana-Maria Cretu , Knowledge from a Human Point of View (Springer Synthese Library), available fully open access, courtesy of the European Research Council OA policy. Knowledge from a Human Point of View is the second edited volume planned for the ERC Consolidator Grant " Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point " and in my original intentions it was meant to explore the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of the view known as ‘perspectivism’. Better known these days among philosophers of science working on scientific modelling and pluralism (albeit not exclusively), perspectivism is a view with a long history. What is at stake in the prima facie platitude that our knowledge is always from a human point of view? Whose else’s point of view if not ours, one might immediately retort? Historically, the shift from knowledge sub spe...

Today's post is by Selene Arfini , post doctoral researcher in the Computational Philosophy Laboratory at the Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section at the University of Pavia. She presents her recently published book, Ignorant Cognition: A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-Knowing  (Springer 2019). Ignorance, considered without further specifications, is a broad and strange concept. In a way, it is easy to analyze ignorance as something that does not really affect the agent's knowledge: we know A and we are ignorant of B, but the two things are not necessarily related. In another way, we need to face phenomena as misinformation, a highly recognizable form of ignorance that cannot be represented as unaffecting the knowledge of the agent since it has an impact on her/his belief system and understanding. On the one hand, we instinctively frown upon ignorance if we believe it is purposefully cultivated. On the other hand, we know...

This post is by Rick Furtak .  Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, where he has taught for over twelve years. In addition to the philosophy of emotions, his other main area of focus is existential thought. He is also a poet and translator who is interested in the literary aspects of philosophy and the philosophical significance of literature. In this post, he talks about his new book Knowing Emotions . This book investigates the question of how our emotions can enable us to know.  It claims that human emotions are not just feelings of physiological disturbance: rather, they are experiences in which we apprehend significant matters of concern.  When Pascal noted that the heart has its own reasons, he indicated that our dispassionate rational faculty alone cannot grasp what is revealed in our affective experience.  Knowing Emotions seeks to explain why human emotions are indeed capable of making us aware of significant ...

Mikkel Gerken is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. In this post he writes about his new book ‘On Folk Epistemology. How we think and talk about knowledge’ . A central claim of my book,  On Folk Epistemology. How we think and talk about knowledge,  is that some folk epistemological patterns of knowledge ascriptions are best explained by cognitive biases. I argue that this approach to folk epistemology yields diagnoses of some hard puzzles of contemporary epistemology. So, On Folk Epistemology seeks to contribute to some prominent debates in contemporary epistemology. For example, I criticize contextualism, pragmatic encroachment, knowledge-first epistemology etc. If you want to check it out, there is an introduction and overview here . In this blog post, however, I will emphasize why the study of folk epistemology is an important task. In a nutshell, it is because folk epistemology is extremely consequential. Consider, for example, the role...

Matthew Frise is a Lecturer at Santa Clara University . He writes on memory in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. In this post he discusses his paper " No Need to Know " published in Philosophical Studies in 2017. Knowing isn’t always best. It’s never best, actually. Something that’s not quite knowledge can be just as great. And folks think knowledge is great. In fact, some philosophers think it’s so great that we should focus on explaining other great things in terms of it. Some even think knowledge isn’t just valuable, but uniquely valuable. Nothing else has its value. Knowledge, after all, closes inquiry. Once we get it, our investigation wraps up. Also, we seem to prefer knowing over any kind of not knowing. Doesn’t that all show knowledge is special? Nope. Some knowledge shares its value with something that isn’t knowledge. If that’s right, knowledge isn’t so special. Its value isn’t unique to it. What shares the value of knowledge? Being in a position to...

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...

In this post, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Gettysburg College , Daniel DeNicola, introduces his just-released book, Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Do Not Know (MIT, August 2017). He writes on a range of ethical and epistemic issues, usually related to education. His new book grew from an earlier work, Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012). Ignorance, it seems, is trending. Political ignorance has become some so severe that the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry seems quaint. Willful ignorance is the social diagnosis of the moment: critics found to be implicated in prejudice, privilege, ideology, and information cocoons. Ignorance is used both as accusation and excuse. In the broadest sense, it is a ineluctable feature of the human condition. And yet, philosophers have ignored ignorance. While occupied with the sources and structure of knowledge, epistemologists for ce...