Imperfect Cognitions

In today's blog post, Mark Blagrove and Julia Lockheart present The Science and Art of Dreaming (Routledge 2023). Mark Blagrove is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Sleep Laboratory at Swansea University. Julia Lockheart is Associate Professor at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. They undertake public discussions and painting of dreams in the DreamsID.com science art collaboration.   Julia Lockheart Mark had become interested in investigating the memory sources of dreams through discussing individual dreams at length with the dreamer: this utilised the free association method of Sigmund Freud in which the putative mechanisms of dream formation during the night are followed back in reverse through free associations to the dream when awake.  This interest had resulted in studies that investigated gains of personal insight to the individual through the open-ended group discussion of dreams and their relationship to the recent waking l...

Today's post is by  Anne Meylan (University of Zurich) and Sebastian Schmidt  (University of Zurich) on their recent paper, " Refusing the COVID-19 vaccine: What’s wrong with that ?" ( Philosophical Psychology, 2023 ) . Anne is the director of the Zurich Epistemology Group on Rationality ( ZEGRa ) and Sebastian is a postdoc at ZEGRa. Anne Meylan This article analyses the cognitive attitudes of people who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine. We argue that vaccine refusers are responsible for their belief that they should not get vaccinated and that they are rational (although mistaken) in holding this belief. We support this conclusion by building on recent philosophical theories of responsibility for belief and of the rationality of attitudes. Our conclusion has further implications for public health policy: there is a reason not to use non-argumentative means, such as mandatory vaccination or certain kinds of nudging, to make rational vaccine refusers comply with vaccination re...

This post is by Darryl Mathieson, doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the Australian National University. In this post, Darryl writes about thought insertion and self-experience in schizophrenia, which is the object of a paper recently published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Darryl Mathieson The Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that when he introspected, he found various mental states like thoughts and perceptions, but no extra subject of experiences that we might call ‘the self’. Hume’s denial has commanded widespread philosophical agreement and has led to the thesis that the self is at best elusive, and at worst does not appear in experience at all.  However, a different path to self-experience that we might take is to look at what happens when consciousness breaks. Just as the deafening silence left in the wake of an air conditioner shutting off makes its constant hum more salient, so too certain experiences pervade everyday consciousness and appear el...

Today's post is by Janko Nešić at Institute of Social Sciences, on his recent paper " Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder " (Synthese, 2023). Janko Nešić Autism (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, with restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. It is still mostly understood from a cognitivist perspective (“mindblindness”). Phenomenological and enactive theories which view it as a lack of affective attunement, pre-reflective understanding and engagement and are all recently gaining traction. I think that an integrative account of autism is much needed at this point. It will bring all the diverse aspects of ASD together and do justice to the lived experience of autism. In my paper “Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder”, I develop a novel approach that connects two aspects of autism (two core types of deficits) found in the current DSM-5 ...

Today's post is by Rik Peels. Rik is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Religion & Theology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is currently leading a large research project funded by the European Research Council, on the epistemology and ethics of extreme beliefs . He aims to synthesize empirical work with conceptual and normative approaches to fundamentalism, extremism, and conspiracy thinking.   For almost its entire history, philosophy has studied knowledge and understanding rather than ignorance. I see why: we seek to know and understand reality rather than be ignorant of it, at least for most things (privacy issues and the like may be an exception). And perhaps the tacit idea was that if we get a grip on knowledge and understanding, we thereby also have insight into the nature of ignorance, as ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge, or at least so it was thought.  Even philosophical debates that appealed to ignorance, such as that about Socratic...

This post is by Matteo Colombo . When we asked our readers to vote for their favourite post among the five most popular posts we ever published, Matteo's "Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science" (27 September 2016) won by a large margin. So, on the occasion of our 10th birthday, we invited him to write for us again and update us on his research. Matteo Colombo Seven years ago I wrote a piece for Imperfect Cognitions , where I described a study aimed at investigating the relationship between explanatory judgement, moral offense and the value-free ideal of science. Conducted in collaboration with psychologists Leandra Bucher and Yoel Inbar , our study showed that the more you perceive the conclusion of a scientific study as morally offensive, the more likely you are to reject it as bad science. For instance, to the extent you find the conclusion that males are naturally promiscuous while females are coy and choosy to be morally offensive, you’ll dismi...

Today's post is an interview with Paolo Costa, who is a researcher at the Center for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation and leads the Resilient Beliefs project, and Eugenia Lancellotta, who is a postdoctoral researcher on the project. We talked about the Resilient Beliefs project.  Paolo Costa KMH: What is the 'Resilient Beliefs' project all about? PC & EL: It is a collaborative program involving 9 researchers in philosophy and theology and three different institutions: the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, in Italy, and the Universities of Innsbruck and Brixen in Austria. It is about hyper-robust beliefs, so to speak. By “hyper-robust beliefs” I mean beliefs that are especially resistant to criticism and change induced by counterargument and counterevidence. Now, these beliefs are often seen as irrational, because we tend to link rationality with revisability, flexibility, adaptability, etc.  But, of course, people who change their mind too ea...