Imperfect Cognitions

The post today is by Evan Westra  (Purdue University) on his recent paper " Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition " ( Philosophical Perspectives , 2023).  Evan Westra If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020 . These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is.   If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: p ). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an...

This post is by Endre Begby (Simon Fraser University). Here Begby presents his new book, Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology (OUP 2021). Are prejudiced beliefs “imperfect cognitions”? In several ways, it would seem natural to classify them as such. After all, they tend to be false, they are formed in light of incomplete information, and they can cause significant harm at both social and individual levels. Accordingly, it is common to think about prejudiced belief as a problem to be overcome, and, in particular, as a manifestation of epistemic irrationality. To overcome the problem, we must presumably become better, more rational, cognizers. But we could also start by critically probing what an ideal of “perfect cognition” might look like here. That prejudiced beliefs tend to be false and are formed in light of incomplete information does not, for instance, obviously distinguish them from most scientific theories throughout history. That they are peculiarly harmful certainly ...

Today's post is by Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) and Mads Gram Henriksen (University of Copenhagen) on their new paper “ Disturbances of Shared Intentionality in Schizophrenia and Autism ” (published in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychiatry). Alessandro Salice In the past decades, shared intentionality (i.e., the capacity to share mental states like beliefs, intentions or emotions) has attracted intense attention in several disciplines. These include various theoretical disciplines (e.g., philosophy and game theory), empirical sciences of the mind (e.g., developmental psychology, social psychology, and cognitive sciences), and social sciences (e.g., anthropology, economics, and sociology). By now, the idea that shared intentionality pervasively characterizes human psychology and, therefore, human forms of social life has become fairly uncontroversial in the literature. However, the large body of insights secured by this burgeoning line of research has, so far, remained la...

Here is the fifth post in our series on social approaches to delusions. Today, Phil Corlett raises some concerns about the arguments proposed in favour of a social turn in the previous posts, offering a different perspective. Phil Corlett Lots of people I like and respect who think about delusions have recently decided that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to delusions. I call this the social turn . The preceding blog posts in this fascinating series suggest: 1) That we give testimony about the quality of other individuals as sources of testimony, and as such, we should define delusions and (given their social contents) delusions arise within individuals, through inherently social processes. 2) That testimonial abnormalities might be domain specific and dissociable from general reasoning abnormalities, and further that the socially specific deficit is one of coalitional cognition – how we form and sustain alliances with conspecifics. 3) That...

The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology formed in 2017, with the aim to “promote interaction in Australasia among philosophers and psychologists, broadly construed to include anyone interested in scientific study of the mind”. The ASPP held their inaugural conference at Macquarie University in December 2018, and I was lucky enough to go along. Here’s a little of what I learned there... If you’ve ever been perplexed by the prevalence of a viewpoint or political stance that you don’t share, then you might be wondering: how do we step outside of the epistemic echo chambers in which we find ourselves in our increasingly online world? Kate Devitt and her team at Queensland University of Technology are on the case.  Inspired by the finding that increasing the number and diversity of hypotheses considered can improve decision making, particularly in an organisational and strategic setting, Kate and her team have built an interactive platform which encourag...

Today’s post was written by  Shannon Spaulding , Assistant Professor of  Philosophy at   Oklahoma State University . Her general philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of science.  The principal goal of her research is to construct a philosophically and empirically plausible account of social cognition. She also has research interests in imagination, pretense, and action theory. Here she introduces her new book,  “How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition” . A question that has long interested me is how we understand others – that is, what are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction – and what happens when we misunderstand others. In philosophy and the cognitive sciences, the orthodox view is that understanding and interacting with others is partly underwritten by mindreading, the capacity to make sense of intentional behavi...

Today's post introduces Guillermo Del Pinal and Shannon Spaulding's paper, " Conceptual Centrality and Implicit Bias ", published in Mind and Language. Guillermo Del Pinal is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor , and Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin . He works in the philosophy of language, mind and cognitive science. His main area of research is the relation between language and general cognition, focusing on topics such as the degree of modularity of language, and the role of natural logic within the language system. Shannon Spaulding is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University . Her general philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of science. The principal goal of her research is to construct a philosophically and empirically plausible account of social cognition. She also has research interests in imagination, pretense, and action theory. How ...