Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Abigail Gosselin (Regis University). Here she is telling us about her paper, " Philosophizing from Experience: First‐Person Accounts and Epistemic Justice ", published in Social Philosophy in 2019. Many philosophers appreciate hearing the first-person accounts that philosophers sometimes give when they disclose their personal connection to the topic about which they are philosophizing. First-person accounts are valuable for many reasons, including the fact that they establish the first-person authority of the speaker, who has privileged access to and hermeneutical command over their first-person experience. Sharing first-person accounts can also be harmful in many ways, however, such as by exposing the speaker to various vulnerabilities, and must be employed cautiously. First-person accounts of experience that is potentially epistemically impairing—such as accounts of mental illness, intellectual disability, or brain injury—can undermine a speaker’s...

Today's blog is by Emily Thomas, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, and Honorary Fellow at ACU’s Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. She is the author of Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (OUP, 2018) and The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad (OUP, 2020). She tweets @emilytwrites. The Meaning of Travel  has been reviewed in  The Spectator,  and  Literary Review . Emily has written about the connections between travel and philosophy in  The Conversation , and about the philosophy of walking for  OUP's blog . She has been interviewed about the book on  BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week , and  BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking . You might think travel and philosophy don’t have much in common. Travel involves flights, bad sandwiches, train tickets. Philosophy is all about books and bearded Greeks. The Meaning of Travel argues that, despite appearances, they have a lot in common. Travel and philosoph...

In this post, I discuss the relationship among confabulation, choice blindness, and self knowledge. That is the theme in a new open access paper by Ema Sullivan-Bissett and myself, published in Synthese, as part of a special issue entitled: " Knowing the Unknown: Philosophical Perspectives on Ignorance ". Ema and Lisa When subject to the choice-blindness effect, an agent gives reasons for making choice B, moments after making the alternative choice A. Choice blindness has been studied by the Choice Blindness Lab in Lund in a variety of contexts, from consumer choice and aesthetic judgement to moral and political attitudes. Below you see an image of the set up of one of the studies where people were shown photos of strangers and asked to choose the most attractive face. Which face is most attractive? Choice blindness is often described as a form of confabulation. When people confabulate they tell a story that they believe to be correct, but the story is n...

This post is Katherine Hawley , Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. Here she introduces her new book, How To Be Trustworthy (OUP 2019). I set out to write a book about trust, that powerful attitude we sometimes adopt towards other people, towards social institutions, sometimes even towards inanimate objects. But instead I ended up writing a book about trustworthiness, and about the ways in which tough circumstances can make it difficult for us to be trustworthy, no matter how well-intentioned we are. I was led from trust to trustworthiness by thinking about situations where trust is absent, and about what can happen when trust is misplaced. When we think about misplaced trust, we often think first about deception or inadequacy: our trust is misplaced if we direct it towards dishonest manipulators, or towards well-meaning types who nevertheless cannot live up to our expectations. Either way, when we’re faced with untrustworthy people, distrust rath...

This post is by Anthony S. David , Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London. Here he talks about his new book, Into the Abyss: a neuropsychiatrist’s notes on troubled minds (Oneworld Publications, 2020). When I submitted a title for my first non-academic book I did so with some trepidation. Apart from sounding somewhat negative, wouldn’t people think it was something about mountaineering, a cautionary tale perhaps? As I explained to my concerned editor, the intended readership like those of this blog would be, “interested in themes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry” and would instantly pick up the reference to Jaspers, the early 20th Century philosopher-psychiatrist. Somehow he wasn’t reassured.  But the abyss metaphor is a powerful descriptor of the challenge of understanding the experience of the person who is mentally ill – to reach out across the abyss into what Jaspers called ‘an impenetrable country’, the...

Today's post is by Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) who is summarising the main argument in a recent paper co-authored with Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff) on the power of stories in debates about mental health, published in Diametros open access . Autobiographical stories do not merely offer insights into a person's experience but can be used as evidence for a controversial claim within a public debate. Although the function of stories is not typically to persuade your audience that something is the case, some engaging stories are likely to exercise a powerful influence on readers' thought and behaviour. One reason for their influence is that stories are vivid and concrete, more accessible than other forms of evidence which might require expertise or training to be fully understood or evaluated. Our main message in the paper is that, if stories are used as evidence and are influential in changing hearts and minds, then we should treat stories as we treat other forms of...

This post is the second in a series of posts featuring presentations that could not be delivered at Philosophy conferences due to the coronavirus outbreak. Today Nick Byrd, PhD Candidate at Florida State University, summarises his paper, "Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Individual Differences In Philosophers’ Trait Reflection, Education, & Philosophical Beliefs". Many philosophers accept that relying on unreflective intuition is standard fare in philosophy (e.g., Chalmers, 2014 ; De Cruz, 2014 ; Kornblith, 1998 ; Mallon, 2016 ). Many philosophers also consider reflection to be crucial for philosophical inquiry (e.g., Goodman, 1983 ; Hursthouse, 1999 ; Korsgaard, 1996 ; Rawls, 1971 ; Sosa 1991 ). Fortunately, cognitive scientists have developed measures of peoples’ reliable on unreflective and reflective reasoning (e.g., Evans, Barston, and Pollard, 1983 ; Frederick, 2005 ; Sirota, et al., 2018 ). In fact, among laypeople, individual differences in reflection ...