Imperfect Cognitions

Jes se Summers (pictured above) is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Duke University, where he is also a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and a Lecturing Fellow for the Thompson Writing Program. In this post he writes about rationalization and some of its benefits, summarising his paper " Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Some Benefits of Rationalisation ", which is forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Explorations on false but useful beliefs. The special issue is guest edited by Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett and is inspired by project PERFECT's interests in belief. You really shouldn’t trust me. At the very least, you shouldn’t trust me when I tell you why I’ve acted. Part of the reason you shouldn’t trust me is that I often—much more often than I realize—don’t know why I’m doing something. The neuroscientist tells you that my brain predisposes me to act. Psychologists, too, assume that many factors and forces move me—my mood,...

In this post I report on the Teorema sponsored workshop on Transparency in Belief and Self-Knowledge , held at the University of Oviedo (pictured below) on 9th and 10th November 2015, organized by Luis M. Valdés-Villanueva . Below I summarise the talks given by Sarah Sawyer , Miriam McCormick , José Zalabardo , and Jordi Fernández .  In her talk ‘Contrastivism and Anti-Individualism’ Sawyer argued that contrastive self-knowledge entails externalism about mental content. According to contrastivism about knowledge, saying that a subject S knows a proposition p , is elliptical for saying that S knows that p rather than that q . Understanding this requires the positing of a positive contrast class (the set of propositions in contrast to which S knows that p ), and a negative contrast class (the set of propositions in contrast to which S does not know that p ). Sawyer argued that internalism about mental content makes impossible a negative contrast class in the self-knowledge cas...

In this post Maksymilian Del Mar  (in the picture above) presents the recent book Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice   (Springer 2015),  co-edited with William Twining . Treating Menorca as if it is a suburb of London, or a ship as if it was a person, or pretending that persons who form contracts are made by rational agents with knowledge of the commitments they are making, or that states who take over other states find a land empty of life (as in the doctrine of terra nullius) – or, positing the existence of consent, malice, notice, fraud, intention, or causation when evidence clearly points to the opposite conclusion (or to no conclusion at all)… All these are example of legal fictions. They fly in the face of reality. And, in the literature on theories of law and legal reasoning, they are not very popular. In this new collection – Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (Springer, 2015, co-edited by William Twining and Maks Del Mar) – 18 chapters explore anothe...

Aimee Wilson This post is part of our series of accounts by experts by experience. Roberta Payne wrote about schizophrenia and outsider art in December, and Ellen White about OCD in January. Today Aimee Wilson tells us about BPD. Hi! I am Aimee and I blog over on www.imnotdisordered.blogspot.co.uk . I’m currently in recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder, after a six year long battle with the illness and a two year admission in a specialist hospital. When Lisa emailed me asking if I would write a post about the positive aspects of the things that have been deemed symptoms of BPD, I was intrigued. I guess, naturally, I’d only ever moaned and ranted about these things especially when they are the things that cause me to be hospitalised or to self-harm and attempt suicide. So, to think of positives sounded like a good challenge. When I was diagnosed with BPD, the diagnostic criteria were to have at least five of nine possible symptoms, and it was widely agreed by prof...

In May 2014 Ema Sullivan-Bissett and I organised a workshop entitled “ Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions ”, hosted by the University of Birmingham and funded by the AHRC. Most of the talks presented during the workshop are now part of a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition, and two additional papers have been included. The purpose of the workshop was to reflect on the effects of false beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations on agents’ wellbeing, success, health, and capacity for knowledge. In the collection of papers, our first objective is to discuss the different types of costs and benefits that such cognitions might have. Our second objective is to explore the relationship among different types of costs and benefits. Contributors consider paradigmatic examples of irrational beliefs, such as beliefs formed as a result of reasoning mistakes; delusions in schizophrenia, delusional disorders, and anosognosia; memories that are either di...