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, ...

Today's post is by Elmar Unnsteinsson  (University College Dublin). Here Unnsteinsson asks why we talk to ourselves. The other day I saw someone enjoying a walk while deeply engaged in conversation but I couldn’t see the other person. The ledge between us was too high. When I turned the corner I saw that the person was alone and actually talking to no one. Well, no one else I should say. It’s unremarkable that I had assumed that there was a pair of people, dancing conversational tango, but, it does raise the question why we think of conversation as, essentially, a multi-player game? As a matter of fact, many of us thoroughly enjoy having conversations. We seek them out to achieve catharsis, form strong social bonds of trust and friendship, learn surprising new things, and obviously the list could be endless. So, it never even occurs to us to ask why we would spend our time talking to others. We couldn’t even list half of the good reasons to do so. Why is it then so surp...

Justin Sulik Here is the fourth post in the series on social approaches to delusions, after the posts by Miyazono , Williams and Montagnese , and Wilkinson . In today's post, Justin Sulik, Charles Jefferson, and Ryan McKay discuss their new paper, “ Collectively Jumping to Conclusions: Social Information Amplifies the Tendency to Gather Insufficient Data ”. Justin Sulik is a postdoctoral researcher in the Cognition, Values and Behavior group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.  Charles Efferson is Professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne.  Ryan McKay is Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.   Charles Efferson Human beings are inveterate misbelievers. At the individual level, our propensity to false beliefs about our prowess and prospects can be costly and dangerous: promoting harmful behaviours like unsafe driving, smoking and overspending. Spreading and amplifying in large groups, however,...

Today's post is by Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter) and it is the third in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Sam Wilkinson This series of posts has sought to show how there has been a “social turn” in thinking about delusions. The excellent posts by Kengo Miyazono and Dan Williams on their respective co-authored papers ( Miyazono and Salice 2020 ; Williams and Montagnese preprint ) are testament to the fruitfulness of going beyond individual cognition and individualistic epistemology when theorising about delusion. In this post I draw inspiration from their work to reflect on precisely what we might mean by delusions being social. Let’s draw a distinction between delusions being social in their formation (call this “the social formation claim”), and in their evaluation (call this “the social evaluation claim”). In other words, social factors (deficits in social cognition, social epistemology) may play a role in generating those things that we end up calling delusi...

Today's post is by Daniel Williams and Marcella Montagnese and it is the second in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Daniel is an Early Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, and Marcella is a doctoral student in the Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, at King’s College London. Here Daniel and Marcella talk about their new paper “ Bayesian Psychiatry and the Social Focus of Delusions ”.   Daniel Williams As with many other areas of psychology and philosophy, the study of delusions is taking a social turn. This has different manifestations. For example, in an extremely interesting article , Sam Wilkinson argues that the very attribution of delusional status to certain beliefs is wrapped up in social practices of folk-epistemic approval and disapproval. To call something a delusion, Wilkinson argues, is not to describe – or at least not only to describe – reality but to express a certa...

Today's post is by Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University) and it is the first in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Here Kengo talks about his new paper with Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) “ Social Epistemological Conception of Delusion ” (open access in  Synthese ). Kengo Miyazono The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic ( Broome & Bortolotti 2009 ). Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of some epistemic notion, e.g., evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. For instance, DSM-5 characterizes delusions as “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence ” (italics added: p. 87), and they are said to be “based on incorrect inference about external reality” and “firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary” (italics added:...

                 Today's post is written by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall . In this post, they present their new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread , published by Yale University Press. Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine.  James Owen Weatherall is a philosopher of physics and philosopher of science. He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science.    Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformatio...

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...