Imperfect Cognitions

We often say things like “you shouldn’t believe that the Earth is flat” or “just look at the evidence, you really ought to believe that vaccinations save lives”. Just as one might think that we have particular obligations to behavemorally, one might suspect that this sort of talk reveals that we have obligations to believeparticular things, or perhaps, to believe in a particular way. Is that right? And if so, what do those obligations consist in? On 30th – 31st May, a workshop investigating issues related to these questions was held at St. Thomas University , Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Organised by Scott Stapleford , Professor of Philosophy at St Thomas University, and Kevin McCain , Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the workshop comprised eight talks over the course of two days. Here, I summarize just a few of them. Sharon Ryan was interested in the question of whether we have an epistemic obligation to be open-minded. She ...

Vasco Correia (pictured above) is currently a Research Fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy ( Universidade Nova de Lisboa ), where he is developing a project on cognitive biases in argumentation and decision-making. In this post, he summarises a paper he recently published in Topoi. This paper is an attempt to show that there are reasons to remain optimistic—albeit cautiously—regarding our ability to counteract cognitive biases. Although most authors agree that biases should be mitigated, there is controversy about which debiasing methods are the most effective. Until recently, the notion that critical thinking is effective in preventing biases appealed to many philosophers and argumentation theorists. It was assumed that raising awareness of biases and teaching critical thinking to students would suffice to enhance open-mindedness and impartiality. Yet the benefits of such programs are difficult to demonstrate empirically, and some authors now claim that critical th...

The Epistemic Vices Conference , held in Durham in September 2015, put epistemic vices in the spotlight, with a series of talks on both what makes something an epistemic vice and the nature of specific epistemic vices. On day one Heather Battaly argued that virtues and vices are traits that express who someone is as a person, even if the person is not responsible for the possession or exercise of the traits. She argued that this view—personalism—is better equipped than existing forms of virtue epistemology to tackle some examples where people display intellectual vice, e.g. where a person is prejudiced due to their upbringing in a racist society. Quassim Cassam argued that intellectual vices are traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. He described how intellectual vices perform a significant role in explaining poor epistemic conduct. Responding to the situationist challenge, he claimed that virtues are often local rather than global traits. I highlighted a fa...