Imperfect Cognitions

This post is the second in a series of posts featuring presentations that could not be delivered at Philosophy conferences due to the coronavirus outbreak. Today Nick Byrd, PhD Candidate at Florida State University, summarises his paper, "Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Individual Differences In Philosophers’ Trait Reflection, Education, & Philosophical Beliefs". Many philosophers accept that relying on unreflective intuition is standard fare in philosophy (e.g., Chalmers, 2014 ; De Cruz, 2014 ; Kornblith, 1998 ; Mallon, 2016 ). Many philosophers also consider reflection to be crucial for philosophical inquiry (e.g., Goodman, 1983 ; Hursthouse, 1999 ; Korsgaard, 1996 ; Rawls, 1971 ; Sosa 1991 ). Fortunately, cognitive scientists have developed measures of peoples’ reliable on unreflective and reflective reasoning (e.g., Evans, Barston, and Pollard, 1983 ; Frederick, 2005 ; Sirota, et al., 2018 ). In fact, among laypeople, individual differences in reflection ...

This post is by Hugo Mercier , Cognitive Scientist (French National Center for Scientific Research) and co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason . In this post, he discusses the argumentative theory and refers to some of his most recent publications ( 1 ; 2 ; 3 ).  It is easy nowadays to find long lists of biases (such as this one ). In turn, these lists of biases have given rise to numerous attempts at debiasing. The popular system 1 / system 2 framework has been useful in framing these attempts at debiasing. System 1 would be a set of cognitive mechanisms that deliver quick, effortless intuitions, which tend to be correct but are prone to systematic mistakes. System 2 would be able to correct these intuitions through individual reflection. Teaching critical thinking, for instance, can then be thought of as a way of strengthening system 2 against system 1. The problem is that, as Vasco Correia noted in a recent post , debiasing attempts, including the teac...

Today's post is by John M. Doris , Professor in the Philosophy–Neuroscience–Psychology Program and Philosophy Department, Washington University in St. Louis. Doris has been awarded fellowships from Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities (three times), and is a winner of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s Stanton Prize. He authored Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge, 2002) and Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency (Oxford 2015). With his colleagues in the Moral Psychology Research Group, he edited The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford, 2010). At Washington University, Doris’ pedagogy has been recognized with an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Graduate Student Senate and the David Hadas Teaching Awar...

In today's post Quassim Cassam presents his recent book entitled Self-knowledge for humans (Oxford University Press, 2014) . Quassim is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK Quassim Cassam What is it about self-knowledge that makes it philosophically interesting? One familiar answer to this question is that the epistemological privileges and peculiarities of self-knowledge are what justify all the attention paid by philosophers to this topic. There is a presumption that our beliefs about our own thoughts aren’t mistaken, and knowledge of our own thoughts is neither inferential nor observational. A different answer sees the elusiveness and human importance of self-knowledge as the key. On this account, our aim as philosophers should be to understand why self-knowledge matters and explain why it is so hard to get. These motivations for being interested in self-knowledge point in different directions. The standard examples of epistemologically distinct...