Imperfect Cognitions

This book is edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler ,  Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Collaborative Research Centre 1171 “Affective Societies: Dynamics of social coexistence in mobile worlds”at Freie Universität Berlin and Jan Slaby , Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. This post is by Jan Slaby. Affect epitomizes a dimension of meaning within human sociality that is not a matter of established discourse, of stable identities, institutions, cultural norms or categories, but rather something that is lived, from moment to moment, at a level of sensuous bodily reality beyond codification, consolidation or capture. Affect unfolds dynamically and relationally between actors, artifacts and within spatial arrangements of various sorts. It incessantly transgresses individual perspectives and frames of reference, including that of the autonomous subject of the liberalist tradition. As Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and othe...

Adam Powell is a junior research fellow in theology and religion at Durham University and a core member of the ' Hearing the Voice ' project, an interdisciplinary investigation of voice-hearing (auditory verbal hallucinations) funded by the Wellcome Trust. He is the author of Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and God-Making Heresy ; Hans Mol and the Sociology of Religion and numerous essays on 19th-century religious experience. Did you have a dream last night? How do you know? Was it vivid or dull? Was it real? Was it really a dream? If it was not a dream, what was it? For those who experience hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping) or hypnopompic (between sleeping and waking) hallucinations, the sense perceptions they experience in the middle of the night seem quite real. They report vivid images, felt presences, diffuse light, out-of-body experiences, and extreme emotional states like euphoria or dread. What is more, studies of prevalence estimate that 39% to 85% of the gen...

This blog post is by Philip A. Goff . I am currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, although from next year I will take up a post at the University of Durham. My main area of interest is the problem of consciousness, the challenge of understanding how consciousness fits into our scientific picture of the world. In fact, I think that the problem has been already been solved. I believe that Bertrand Russell’s 1927 book The Analysis of Matter did for consciousness studies what Darwin’s Origin of the Species did for the life sciences. Tragically, Russell’s novel contribution to philosophy of mind was pretty much forgotten about for much of the twentieth century, although it has recently been rediscovered leading to the view that has become known as ‘Russellian monism’. The starting point of Russellian monism is that physical science tells you a lot less than you think about the nature of matter. In the public mind, physical scienc...

Five years ago I started this blog with a post by Kengo Miyazono...  Happy birthday Imperfect Cognitions!  I am very grateful to all the people who have worked hard during this time to keep the blog active and engaging: Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Kathy Puddifoot, Andrea Polonioli, Sophie Stammers, Magdalena Antrobus, Valeria Motta, and Anneli Jefferson.  And special thanks to our regular contributors and assiduous readers. To the next five years! Lisa 💛 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-  On the 5th birthday of the Imperfect Cognitions blog  Michael Larkin (Aston University)  considers some conceptual propositions of the Power Threat Meaning framework, arguing that the framework is both a step towards a more humanising concept of mental health problems, and a missed opportunity to be more inclusive. Enjoy this very rich and thought-provoking celebratory post! Often we are disappointed because we want the thing presented to us to be the thin...

A workshop, entitled “Exploring Culture and Experience: choosing methodologies in qualitative research”, took place at Aston University on the 26th of April 2018. This brief report is written by two of the organisers, William Day (graduate teaching assistant/PhD student in Psychology at Aston) and Tiago Moutela (research assistant/PhD student at Aston). Most of the talks were recorded, and are linked to at the end this write-up. This workshop was organised by members of the interdisciplinary, interuniversity, group Phenomenology of Health and Relationships (PHaR) . PHaR meets bi-monthly at Aston University to read, discuss and share insights into any work which brings a phenomenological focus to the study of health and illness. We are especially interested in understanding the relational context of health and illness, and what we might call a 'health relationship.' Together, some members of PHaR successfully submitted an application to a workshop fund ran by the Psychol...

Today's post is written by Kenny Easwaran, who is an Associate Professor in the  Department of Philosophy  at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in 2008 from the  Group in Logic and Methodology of Science  at UC Berkeley, doing interdisciplinary work on the mathematics and philosophy of conditional probability. This post is about " The Tripartite Role of Belief " which appeared in Res Philosophica as part of a special issue on Bridging Formal and Traditional Epistemology . This paper and the others in the issue were presented at a workshop at St. Louis University. (The paper can be found  here .) This paper considers three broad accounts of the role belief and related notions play in our lives, and suggests connections between them, and the way that different philosophical literatures have privileged one or another. My focus has been on work in epistemology within the analytic tradition, though there is some interactions with psychology, econo...

Joëlle Proust is an Emeritus CNRS Director of Research at Institut Jean-Nicod , Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. She published The Philosophy of Metacognition in 2013, and co-edited in 2012 a collective volume entitled The Foundations of Metacognition . In this post, she presents a new collective book co-edited with Martin Fortier , Metacognitive Diversity: Interdisciplinary approaches. The control and monitoring of one's own cognitive actions is called "metacognition". For example, try to remember Mark Twain's original surname. If you fail to retrieve it immediately, you may have the feeling that you will soon do: you have a "feeling of knowing". Other metacognitive feelings include the feeling of familiarity (when seeing a face), of understanding (an utterance), of being right (in drawing a conclusion) – with their negative versions: unfamiliarity, puzzlement, feeling of error. Other feelings lead you to decide whether or not to perform a task a...