Imperfect Cognitions

The post today is by Evan Westra  (Purdue University) on his recent paper " Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition " ( Philosophical Perspectives , 2023).  Evan Westra If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020 . These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is.   If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: p ). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by Anastasia Christakou and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. Josh Bongard (University of Vermont) opened the workshop presenting his research in robotics, where he and his team challenge the Cartesian assumption that body and brain are separate by simulating first, and creating then robots that have body plans adapting to changes in morphology. Bongard also addressed important questions about AI safety and AI ethics. Based on a recent publication on Machine Behaviour in Nature , he argued that we should treat machine behaviour in the same way as we treat animal behaviour, as something that evolves. Next Emma Borg (University of Reading) presented a paper on understanding agency in other people and in ourselves. She started comparing two accounts of how we explain and predict the agency of others, behaviour-re...

Today’s post was written by  Shannon Spaulding , Assistant Professor of  Philosophy at   Oklahoma State University . Her general philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of science.  The principal goal of her research is to construct a philosophically and empirically plausible account of social cognition. She also has research interests in imagination, pretense, and action theory. Here she introduces her new book,  “How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition” . A question that has long interested me is how we understand others – that is, what are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction – and what happens when we misunderstand others. In philosophy and the cognitive sciences, the orthodox view is that understanding and interacting with others is partly underwritten by mindreading, the capacity to make sense of intentional behavi...

Mind Reading is the yearly conference of the collaboration between UCD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry , researchers at the University ofBirmingham , and the Diseases of Modern Life and Constructing Scientific Communities Projects at St Anne's College, Oxford. Organised by Elizabeth Barrett (Consultant in Liaison Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children’s University Hospital) and Melissa Dickson (Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham) the conference, and project more generally, focuses on two simple questions: Do doctors and patients speak the same language, and how can we use literature to bridge the evident gaps? In what follows, I summarise just some of the talks and workshop sessions. How do cultural norms and expectations shape diagnosis and the experience of illness?  Melissa Dickson  showed us that, in 19th Century Britain, there were multiple literary and medical accounts of a psychosis-like state brought about by…green ...

On 30th-31st July, the University of Tokyo hosted a symposium on Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness at its Komaba Campus. Today's blog post describes the talks presented at the symposium. Akiko Frischhut’s (Akita International) (pictured below) talk “The Silencing Illusion and Its Philosophical Interpretations” was an investigation of the philosophical significance of the silencing illusion. The illusion seems to provide a counterexample to so-called “naive inheritance thesis” about the experience of temporal properties according to any temporal properties that are represented in experience are the properties of the experience itself too. However, Frischhut rejected this interpretation of the illusion. On the basis of a careful philosophical analysis, she concluded that the interpretation is either impossible or unintelligible. In his talk “Targetless States: No New Problem for the Higher-Order Theory”, Graham Peebles (Geneva) (pictured below) discussed s...