Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, David Hunter , Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada summarizes his paper titled “The metaphysics of responsible believing”, recently published in the Brazilian journal Manuscrito. An important task in the philosophy of mind and action is to understand what it is for a person to be responsible for their mental states and their actions. It is natural to think that a person is responsible for their actions only if they act freely or voluntarily. But most philosophers agree that we cannot believe, desire or intend at will. But then how can we really be responsible for these mental states? In the case of belief, this is called the problem of epistemic agency. My essay is about this problem. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that the standard conception of action tends to obscure our practical agency. It holds that an action is (typically, anyway) a bodily movement caused in certain ways by the person’s mental states. This ...

Today I report from a workshop organised by Anna Ichino and Bence Nanay at the University of Antwerp (pictured below) on 31st May, 2017. The themes included subdoxastic attitudes, imagination, and belief. I ( Lisa Bortolotti , Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it. Next, I argued that confabulated explanations of attitudes and choices involve ignorance and ill-grounded causal explanations. Finally, I looked at potential psychological and epistemic benefits of confabulated explanations, and applied to them the framework of epistemic innocence developed at part of project PERFECT .  I concluded by saying that some confabulated exp...