Imperfect Cognitions

On 11th and 12th April in beautiful Trento, the Foundation Bruno Kessler hosted the final conference of the two-year research project on Resilient Beliefs , organised by Eugenia Lancellotta and featuring a number of international speakers interested in conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, delusions, and similar phenomena. Programme of the conference The first speaker was Scott Hill (University of Innsbruck), highlighting problems for a prominent study on the use of "conspiracy theory". Hill started discussing Miranda Fricker's account of testimonial injustice and then argued that conspiracy theorists do not suffer from a credibility deficit. That is because the credibility they are assigned matches the credibility they deserve. Scott Hill The second speaker was Anna-Maria Asunta Eder (University of Cologne), also working in social epistemology, who discussed the phenomenon of learning from others and resisting the evidence of others. Eder aims to bring some issues wid...

Today's post is by  Sam Wilkinson . You can read Sam's recently published paper,  Expressivism about Delusion Attribution , in the  European Journal of Analytic Philosophy . It appeared in a special issue on the Bounds of Rationality . Sam Wilkinson What is delusion? While we can point to paradigmatic cases, we have struggled to produce an uncontentious definition of delusion. In my paper, I argue that we shouldn’t have been trying to define delusion in the first place, and that it becomes clear why, once we reflect on the sort of concept that delusion is. Delusion attribution, e.g. saying “This person is delusional”, is not (fully) fact-stating. It is not like saying “This person is 6ft tall”. It is fundamentally an evaluation. Some evaluations involve failing to adhere to an objective benchmark, while others are more fundamentally, irreducibly evaluative. One way of thinking about these fundamental kinds of evaluations is as expressive , rather than descriptive.  ...

Today's post is by Selene Arfini , post doctoral researcher in the Computational Philosophy Laboratory at the Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section at the University of Pavia. She presents her recently published book, Ignorant Cognition: A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-Knowing  (Springer 2019). Ignorance, considered without further specifications, is a broad and strange concept. In a way, it is easy to analyze ignorance as something that does not really affect the agent's knowledge: we know A and we are ignorant of B, but the two things are not necessarily related. In another way, we need to face phenomena as misinformation, a highly recognizable form of ignorance that cannot be represented as unaffecting the knowledge of the agent since it has an impact on her/his belief system and understanding. On the one hand, we instinctively frown upon ignorance if we believe it is purposefully cultivated. On the other hand, we know...

Today's post is by Peter McKenna. He is a psychiatrist with some background in psychology, currently working full-time in research in Barcelona . He introduces his new book Delusions: Understanding the Un-understandable . I have been interested in delusions for a long time and around five years ago decided to try and write a book on the topic. The result, for better or worse, is Delusions: Understanding the Un-understandable . The ‘un-understandable’ of the title references Jaspers’ contention that delusions are a) psychologically irreducible, ie they cannot be derived from other psychological experiences, either normal or abnormal; and b) are unmediated, ie they are immediate rather than being the product of reflection (for a good and concise account of Jaspers’ views, see Walker, 1991). Apart from the work of Jaspers, who was a philosopher as well as a psychiatrist and whose thoughts on delusions have influenced successive generations of clinicians, I made ...

Today's post is by  Bill (KWM) Fulford  and Tim Thornton . Bill is Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick.    Tim is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at the University of Central Lancashire. Bill Fulford Tim Thornton What is delusion? Few questions have so vexed philosophers in recent philosophy of psychiatry. An invitation to contribute to Thomas Schramme and Steven Edward’s Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine (Springer, 2016) gave us a welcome opportunity to review progress. The philosopher Naomi Eilan characterized the challenge of delusion as solving simultaneously for understanding and for utter strangeness. Karl Jaspers, the great philosopher-psychiatrist of the early twentieth century and founder of modern descriptive psychopathology, would have approved. He famously thought delusions just too strange to be within the reach of empathic understand...

This post is by Kengo Miyazono  (pictured above), an Associate Professor at Hiroshima University. Here he summarises his recent paper ' Does Functionalism Entail Extended Mind? ', recently published in Synthese. [Penultimate draft available here ]. Andy Clark and David Chalmers ( 1998 ) present the following famous case. Otto Otto suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and like many Alzheimer's patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. […] Today, Otto hears about the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and decides to go see it. He consults the notebook, which says that the museum is on 53rd Street, so he walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum. Clark and Chalmers (hereafter C & C) argue that 'Otto believed the museum was on ...

Michael Brady is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is currently a principal investigator on the The Value of Suffering Project , alongside David Bain . His main research area is the philosophy of emotion. One area of his research focuses on the epistemic status of emotion. He is interested in the idea that emotions have value and can perform an epistemic role. In this post, he introduces his book on these themes, Emotional Insight, which was published by Oxford University Press. My book tries to reconcile two commonsense intuitions: that emotions have considerable epistemic value (we should sometimes ‘listen to our heart’), and that emotions often lead us astray epistemically (emotions lead to epistemic biases). I approach the issue by examining a theory of emotion that is relatively new on the scene but has increasing support: the perceptual model of emotion. On this account, emotional experience is a kind of, or is at least akin to, perceptual experience....

In this post, Allan Hazlett , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico , presents his book, A Luxury of the Understanding (Oxford University Press, 2013). Allan (in the picture above)  works on the value of accurate representation, deference and disagreement, and political epistemology. Philosophers have for some time acknowledged the possibility of irrational and false beliefs that are nonetheless beneficial to the believer. A familiar case is that of the over-confident athlete: it is easy to imagine that Karen is better off over-estimating her tennis abilities, than she would be were her evaluation of her abilities accurate, given the boost to her confidence that this over-estimation provides. However, it is standard for philosophers to argue that, since Karen’s belief is irrational and false, although it may be all-things-considered best for her, it is nevertheless “epistemically” bad. In A Luxury of the Understanding (cover pictured below), I a...