Imperfect Cognitions

Rosa Ritunnano This post is by Rosa Ritunnano, consultant psychiatrist and doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, reporting from the 21st Annual Conference of the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP).  The event took place from 22nd-24th October 2019 at the University of Warsaw; it was organised by the Open Seminars in Philosophy and Psychiatry Foundation, with support of the Polish Phenomenological Association and the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network (Collaborating Centre for Values Based Practice, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford). A special thank you note goes to Marcin Moskalewicz (member of the organising committee) for sharing some of photos included in the post.   The INPP conference brought together researchers and professionals working at the interface between Philosophy and Mental Health from 32 countries and provided a lively forum to discuss developments and challenges for the next generation – particu...

Mount Fuji from the venue, Komaba campus On 14th and 15th December 2019 Kengo Miyazono and John O’Dea organised a workshop at the University of Tokyo on themes related to agency and rationality. In this post, I summarise some of the talks presented at the conference. On day 1, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (Veritas Research Centre, Underwood International College, Yonsei University) kicked off the workshop with a talk about social media, data analysis, psychological profiling and freedom. Although social media enables connectivity and has a number of other advantages, it represents a threat to privacy. That is because when we register for platforms like Facebook, we give consent to our data being shared, but that does not count as informed consent. People are often attributed five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Can people be profiled based on their “likes”? It is said that computer-based judgemen...

This post is by Michela Massimi who tells us about a collection she co-edited with Ana-Maria Cretu , Knowledge from a Human Point of View (Springer Synthese Library), available fully open access, courtesy of the European Research Council OA policy. Knowledge from a Human Point of View is the second edited volume planned for the ERC Consolidator Grant " Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point " and in my original intentions it was meant to explore the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of the view known as ‘perspectivism’. Better known these days among philosophers of science working on scientific modelling and pluralism (albeit not exclusively), perspectivism is a view with a long history. What is at stake in the prima facie platitude that our knowledge is always from a human point of view? Whose else’s point of view if not ours, one might immediately retort? Historically, the shift from knowledge sub spe...

In this post Alessandro Salice (UCC) and Kengo Miyazono (Hiroshima) summarise their new paper “ Being one of us. Group identification, joint actions, and collective intentionality ”, in which they defend a minimalistic account of joint actions that is based on a theory of group identification.  In the relevant literature it is generally assumed that, in order to explain joint actions (in contradistinction to actions in strategic equilibrium), one needs to appeal to shared intentions. To use Margaret Gilbert’s famous example, if Pam and Sam are walking together (rather than walking in parallel), then Pam and Sam’s collective action is explained by the fact that they share the intention of walking together ( Gilbert 1990 ). However, the question immediately arises as to what it means for several individuals to share intentions. One way of understanding shared intentions is by identifying the conditions under which standard individual intentions (intentions in the I-form: “...

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...