Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Uku Tooming (Hokkaido University) on his new paper “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ” (2020, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly ). Uku Tooming In my paper, “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ”, I argue that there are two kinds of self-ascription of desire. First, there are easy cases where a sincere self-ascription seems to be immediately expressive of self-knowledge. For example, if I believe that I want to eat ice cream then, given the person I am, my self-ascription is true and there is no room for doubt. Second, there are hard cases which lack this kind of immediacy and where one could have easily been wrong about one’s self-ascription. For example, when I believe that I want to have a child then, given the person I am, this self-ascription is not immediately expressive of self-knowledge and can be put under question. How to explain the difference between easy and hard cases? In particular, what makes a self-ascription of a desire an easy case? Since in t...

Today's post is by Adam Andreotta . He earned his PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2018. His research and teaching interests include: epistemology, self-knowledge, the philosophy of David Hume and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.  Here, he introduces his article, " Confabulation does not undermine introspection for propositional attitudes ", that has recently appeared in the journal Synthese. For more of his work, see his PhilPapers profile . Most of us think there exists an asymmetry between the way we know our own minds, and the way we know the minds of others. For example, it seems that I can know that I intend to watch Back to the Future , or that I believe that Australia will win the Ashes, by introspection: a private and secure way of knowing my own mental states. If I want to know whether my friend intends to see Back to the Future or believes that Australia will win the Ashes, I need to ask them or observe their behaviour. This co...

We continue to hear from contributors to our special issue on confabulation in Topoi. In today’s post, Leon de Bruin , Senior Research Fellow in philosophy at VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen , and Derek Strijbos , psychiatrist and research fellow at Dimence Group in Zwolle, and a post-doctoral philosopher at Radboud University Nijmegen, introduce their paper “ Does Confabulation Pose a Threat to First-Person Authority? Mindshaping, Self-Regulation and the Importance of Self-Know-How ”. In social practice, self-ascriptions of mental states are often treated as having a special kind of first-person authority. When people self-ascribe mental states, we by default treat them as being in a privileged position to know their own mind. That is: relative to what others know and claim about their mental states. In our paper we focus on the issue how confabulation, both of the everyday and clinical kind, affects this first-person authority of mental state self-...

Helena De Preester is assistant professor and researcher at University College Ghent, as well as a visiting research professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the University of Ghent. Her research focuses on the connection between the human mind, embodiment, technology, and wider society.  Manos Tsakiris is professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he leads the lab of Action & Body and the INtheSELF ERC-funded project . His research focuses on the link between body and self and how we become aware of ourselves and others. In this blog post they introduce their new co-edited, interdisciplinary volume on interoception. Interoception is the body-to-brain axis of signals originating from the internal body and visceral organs (such as gastrointestinal, respiratory, hormonal and circulatory systems), and plays a unique role in ensuring homeostasis. Interoception therefore refers to the sensing of the state of the inner bod...

Today's post is by Patrizia Pedrini (University of Florence). Here she summarises her recent paper, “Rescuing the ‘Loss-of-Agency’ Account of Thought Insertion”, which appeared in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2015. Every day we think hundreds of thoughts. We form opinions, hold beliefs, develop intentions, feel desires, emotions, sensations, entertain fantasies. All this thinking activity typically comes to our consciousness with a fundamental feature that seems as natural as the thinking it accompanies: our capacity for self-ascription of it. When we think a thought, we also self-ascribe that thought, and such capacity for self-ascription is routine, immediate, unproblematic. However, this is a capacity that can break down. There is a disorder, known as thought insertion , that occurs in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and related forms of mental illness, the puzzling feature of which appears to amount to the impairment of such capacity. The subject aff...