Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by  Matthew Shields at Wake Forest University, on his recent paper “ Rethinking Conspiracy Theories ” in Synthese .  Matthew Shields What do you think of when you think of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists? The first image that typically comes to mind are individuals on dark corners of the internet spinning bizarre tales to explain some major event: that the moon landing was faked, that 9/11 was an “inside job”, that Sandy Hook was a false flag, or that Princess Diana was assassinated. You’re in good company: a great deal of the academic research on the topic takes just these cases to be paradigmatic of what and who conspiracy theories and theorists are. Many philosophers have followed suit. Researchers then go on to defend claims such as the following: conspiracy theorists are political extremists, not well-off socioeconomically, less educated, amateurs who lack and repudiate the relevant expert credentials. The problem of conspiracy theories, in t...

Today we continue our mini series exploring issues regarding technological enhancement in learning and education, featuring papers from the  “ Cheating Education ”  special issue of Educational Theory. T his week, Sophie Stammers discusses her  paper “Improving knowledge acquisition and dissemination through technological interventions on cognitive biases”. When we think about the role that technology could play in enhancing cognition, much of the literature focuses on extending faculties that are already performing well, so that they perform even better. We also know that humans possess a range of cognitive biases which produce systematically distorted cognitions. Could we use technology to erase our cognitive biases? Should we? In this paper I wanted to think about the specific threats that cognitive biases pose to learning and education, and focused on two commonly recognised types of cognitive bias in particular: