Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Katrina Sifferd  (pictured below). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from King’s College London, and is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. After leaving King’s, Katrina held a post-doctoral position as Rockefeller Fellow in Law and Public Policy and Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. Before becoming a philosopher, Katrina earned a Juris Doctorate and worked as a senior research analyst on criminal justice projects for the National Institute of Justice. Many thanks to Lisa for her kind invitation to introduce our recently published book, Responsible Brains: Neuroscience, Law, and Human Culpability . Bill Hirstein , Tyler Fagan , and I , who are philosophers at Elmhurst College, researched and wrote the book with the support of a Templeton sub-grant from the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project  managed by Al Mele at Florida State University. Responsible Brains joins a larger discussion about the ways evidence ge...

This post is by Tyler Flanagan, and in this post he briefly introduces and outlines his recent publication in Res Cogitans entitled “ Emotions, Practical Rationality, and the Self .” He is a first year Master’s student in Philosophy at Virginia Tech. What I am attempting to do in my paper is defend the view that our emotions are quite amenable to the view of ourselves as rational beings. Rather than throw out the picture of the emotional human, I argue that we should embrace the view instead. Our emotions do not in any way stop us from reasoning properly, and in fact provide us with reasons for action that seem to outweigh even our most thoughtful contemplation ( Arpaly, 2002 ; Jones 2004 ) With this view in tow, I suggest that the emotions we have about ourselves, such as regret or shame, act as a guide to how well or how poorly we are attending to our goals and what we care about, and in some instances can show us when we are valuing what we should not. In these ways our em...

The Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind is an annual event organized by the Center of Subjectivity Research . It aims to provide essential insights into central themes within the philosophy of mind, viewed from a phenomenological perspective. The general topics covered this year were intentionality, experience, reflection, perception, attention, self-awareness, rationality, normativity and methodology. Over a period of 5 days, the schedule included keynote lectures, PhD presentations, discussion groups and seminars. The late afternoons and evenings were dedicated to different social events (such as visits to the city, a harbour tour) which allowed for opportunities to exchange ideas amongst researchers. In this post, I give a detailed summary of the main points made by the keynote speakers. On the first day Søren Overgaard talked about Embodiment and Social Perception. The question he set up to answer was whether Social Perception Theory d...

This post is by Adam Harris  (University College London) who recently published a paper entitled: " Understanding the coherence of the severity effect and optimism phenomena: Lessons from attention ". The paper appeared in a special issue on the nature and consequences of optimism, guest-edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. In this post, Adam (pictured below) offers a precis of his paper. Popular belief maintains that humans are prone to an almost universal optimistic bias, including a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. Related research findings include (all references are in the paper [AH1] ): Wishful thinking . For example, estimates of the likelihood of a sports team winning being higher from that team’s supporters than neutral individuals; Unrealistic comparative optimism . People think they are less likely to experience negative events, such as cancer, than...

In this post I interview Steve Cole Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine . VM: Loneliness has been characterized in reference to feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a mismatch between a person’s desired and achieved levels of social relations. In some of your latest papers you suggest that the experience of loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon but that, as any other adaptive predispositions, it can be found across phylogeny. In what sense can we say that animals desire social relations and experience loneliness?  SC: We begin by assuming that certain experiences are privileged to human beings but the more we understand about how human experience arises from the way the brain works, the more we find that there are small or vestigial versions of even the most esoteric human experiences in other animals. Most animals, for example monkeys and mammals, broadly speaking, are to some extent, ...

In this post, Matilde Aliffi (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) reports from the 7th International Summer School of Affective Science (ISSAS) held at Château de Bossey between the 7th and the 14th July 2016. This year ISSAS was entirely dedicated to investigating the role of emotions in fiction and virtual worlds. World leading experts in philosophy, psychology, educational science, neuroscience, affective computing and game design gave their lecture to an audience composed by an international and interdisciplinary community of about forty PhD students.   During the school, workshops were also held on thought experiments, data-analysis, programming and text-based emotion recognition. Participants were divided in eight teams and had the opportunity to design and present a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project tied to the topics of the school. Alongside the lectures, participants also enjoyed artistic events that complemented nicely the lectures wit...

The Early Career Mind Network (ECMN) is a new initiative with the aim to establish a strong network of early career researchers in the philosophy of mind who do not yet have permanent positions in academic philosophy. On 27th to 28th April 2016 the University of Warwick hosted the first ECMN research forum , organised by Alisa Mandrigin. This blog post provides an overview of the research ideas explored by the researchers at the event. Tom McClelland spoke first on the Grand Illusion Hypothesis (GIH). According to the GIH, we overestimate how rich visual experience is outside of focal attention. McClelland described empirical findings showing that our visual systems compensate for the limits of attention by encoding information about the average features of groups or crowds. McClelland outlined precisely how findings relating to this ‘ensemble perception’ should be viewed as important to the GIH. He denied that the findings show that there is no Grand Illusion, but a...

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....

This post is by Joshua Shepherd (pictured above), a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics , and a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College . Joshua's work concerns issues in the philosophy of mind, action, cognitive science, and practical ethics. In this post he discusses the role of conscious experience in the control of action, and summarises his recent paper ' Conscious Control over Action ' published in Mind and Language.  One question we might have concerns the kinds of causal contributions consciousness makes to action control. Another concerns a question regarding the relative importance of consciousness to action control. If consciousness is relatively unimportant, theorizing about ‘conscious control’ might be largely a waste of time. If consciousness is important, however, understanding the contributions of consciousness could be essential to a full understanding of the way we exercise control over our behaviour. ...

Henry Taylor My name is Henry Taylor and I have recently submitted my PhD in philosophy at Durham University. In this post, I would like to discuss some issues that I address in my paper ‘Is Attention Necessary and Sufficient for Phenomenal Consciousness?’ With some notable exceptions, attention has until relatively recently been neglected as a topic in its own right in analytic philosophy. This has occurred despite its widespread use in fields as diverse as aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. However, in the last few years this attitude has radically and suddenly shifted, and attention is one of the most exciting topics in contemporary philosophy of psychology. One of the most striking questions within this domain is whether it is possible to use attention to explain consciousness. Amongst many psychologists, and philosophers, there is hope that by studying consciousness in terms of attention, the problem of consciousness may turn out to be empirically tractable. ...

On August 25th and 26th, the Swiss Centre for the Affective Sciences held a workshop on epistemic emotions and epistemic feelings.  Epistemic emotions are a type of mental state that includes the feeling of understanding, the feeling of knowledge, and the feeling of interest.  The workshop was put on by the Phrontis research group on attention, interest, and epistemic emotions and organized by Anne Meylan and network member Richard Dub. The workshop opened with a presentation by Brian McLaughlin (Rutgers) entitled 'Delusions and Feelings'.  McLaughlin presented a model of the Capgras delusion (the delusion that a loved one has been replaced with an imposter).  McLaughlin argued that it is necessary to posit the "cognitive feeling" of unfamiliarity to explain how Capgras belief is acquired.  The experience of unfamiliarity has a strongly affective aspect that causes the sufferer to straightaway acquire the belief that the person in front of her is unfamiliar...

Attention by Wayne Wu I am Wayne Wu, currently Associate Professor in, and Associate Director of, the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition . Consider some mundane situations: (a) you've lost your keys and look around searching for them; (b) you watch picnickers throw a frisbee when suddenly, it flies towards you and you reach to catch it; (c) you memorize the first 30 digits of pi and then later, recall them; (d) you drink some wine and figure out what flavors it exemplifies; (e) you ponder various reasons for making a significant decision or for justifying a specific claim; (f) while onlookers are oblivious, a child's straying too close to a busy road captures your attention. These mundane situations reflect instances of bodily and mental agency, of conscious awareness, of directed thought, and of epistemic and practical reflection. They are tied together by the subject's selective attunement to various facets of a situation. That is, they exemplify ...