Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Joshua Habgood-Coote  and Nadja El Kassar on their recent paper,  Receptive Publics ( Ergo , forthcoming). Joshua Habgood-Coote is a research fellow at the school of philosophy, religion, and history of science at the university of Leeds. Natalie Ashton is a research associate at VU Amsterdam, Nadja El Kassar is Professor of Philosophy at University of Lucerne. Joshua Habgood-Coote It is common to hear the following kind of complaint: You can’t say anything these days! You never know who might get offended, or whether you’re going to get cancelled for saying something totally innocuous. Back in my day we just said it like it was, we were all a lot more thick-skinned, and we just came out and said uncomfortable truths. This complaint makes a historical comparison: things used to be better because you could say what you thought. Both better psychologically—we weren’t spending our whole time in a defensive crouch—and epistemically—we could get to the truth, ...

In recent months, conspiracy beliefs such as COVID-19 denialism have often been described as delusional. Psychologists have suggested a correlation between the acceptance of conspiracy theories and schizotypal traits, that is, traits characterized by psychotic symptoms ( Douglas et al. 2017 ).  Anna Ichino In this post, I ( Lisa Bortolotti ) discuss some of the similarities and differences between conspiracy beliefs and delusions—this is the topic of a paper co-authored with  Anna Ichino  and  Matteo Mameli  for  Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi . Surface features   Both conspiracy beliefs and delusions of persecution involve attributing evil intentions or responsibility for adverse events to an individual or a group that the person does not trust. Conspiracy beliefs, but not delusions, are typically developed as an alternative to an official, authoritative version of the events ( Ichino and Räikkä 2020 ). Both types of belief are regarded as implausible by tho...

This post is the first in a series of posts featuring presentations that could not be delivered at Philosophy conferences due to the coronavirus outbreak. Today Susan Notess, PhD Candidate at Durham University, tells us about the Discourse Ecology Model. Susan Notess In a healthy democracy all voices should have participation in public discourse. This does not happen if one part of the population does not listen to another part—for example, if white people do not listen to people of colour in a given democratic society. We can try to address this kind of problem with political solutions, such as targeted town hall meetings and encouraging voter turnout. We can also approach it as a problem of epistemic injustice, highlighting the need to resist prejudices and avoid silencing of vulnerable voices. I argue that while both these approaches are needed, we still have a problem if the listening habits of the society as a whole do not change. What we need is a c...