Imperfect Cognitions

Today I report from a workshop organised by Anna Ichino and Bence Nanay at the University of Antwerp (pictured below) on 31st May, 2017. The themes included subdoxastic attitudes, imagination, and belief. I ( Lisa Bortolotti , Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it. Next, I argued that confabulated explanations of attitudes and choices involve ignorance and ill-grounded causal explanations. Finally, I looked at potential psychological and epistemic benefits of confabulated explanations, and applied to them the framework of epistemic innocence developed at part of project PERFECT .  I concluded by saying that some confabulated exp...

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...

This post is by Miriam McCormick , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond. Miriam presents her new book, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief (Routledge, 2015), pictured above. When I first had a student tell me that she doesn’t believe in evolution I was at a loss of how to respond. To me, that sounded like someone telling me that she didn’t believe in gravity. It seemed both irrational and wrong. Experiences like this are common; we think that one’s actual belief can deviate from how one ought to believe. The dominant view among contemporary philosophers is that any belief formed against the evidence is impermissible. On such a view, which I call “evidentialism,” it is easy to diagnosis what is wrong with my student’s belief. I use the term “pragmatism” to refer to the view that some non-evidentially based beliefs are permissible. A central aim of this book is to defend pragmatism. One challenge to the pragmatist view I ...