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Christopher McCarroll is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp. He works on memory and mental imagery, with a particular interest in perspective in memory imagery. In this blog post Chris talks about his recently published book Remembering From the Outside: Personal Memory and the Perspectival Mind. In his 1883 study into psychological phenomena, Francis Galton described varieties in visual mental imagery. Writing about the fact that some people "have the power of combining in a single perception more than can be seen at any one moment by the two eyes", Galton notes that "A fourth class of persons have the habit of recalling scenes, not from the point of view whence they were observed, but from a distance, and they visualise their own selves as actors on the mental stage" (1883/1907: 68-69). Such people remember events from-the-outside. In the language of modern memory research such images are known as ‘observer

In this post,  Daniel Williams , Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, responds to last week's  post  from  Ben Tappin  and  Stephen Gadsby  about their recent paper " Biased belief in the Bayesian brain: A deeper look at the evidence ".  Ben Tappin and Stephen Gadsby have written an annoyingly good response to my paper, ‘ Hierarchical Bayesian Models of Delusion ’. Among other things, my paper claimed that there is little reason to think that belief formation in the neurotypical population is Bayesian. Tappin and Gadsby—along with Phil Corlett , and, in fact, just about everyone else I’ve spoken to about this—point out that my arguments for this claim were no good. Specifically, I argued that phenomena such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and the so-called “backfire effect” are difficult to reconcile with Bayesian models of belief formation. Tappin and Gadsby point out that evidence for the backfire eff

The Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp held a workshop on the 27th November 2018 on the topic of belief and belief formation. Here’s a brief summary of the excellent talks given at the workshop, kindly written by Dan Williams . Neil Levy (Oxford/Macquarie) gave the first talk, entitled ‘Not so hypocritical after all: how we change our minds without noticing’. Levy focused on a phenomenon that many people assume to be a form of hypocrisy—namely, cases in which individuals come to change their beliefs about, say, politics when popular opinion (or the popular opinion within their relevant tribe or coalition) changes. (Levy gave the example of many ‘Never Trumpers’ who then apparently changed their opinion of Trump when he came to power). Levy argued that at least some examples of this phenomenon are in fact not best understood as a form of hypocrisy; rather, they arise from people forming beliefs “rationally”. Specifically, he drew attention to two important

Today’s post comes from  Ben Tappin , PhD candidate in the  Morality and Beliefs Lab  at Royal Holloway, University of London, and  Stephen Gadsby , PhD Candidate in the  Philosophy and Cognition Lab , Monash University, who discuss their paper recently published in Consciousness and Cognition, “ Biased belief in the Bayesian brain: A deeper look at the evidence ”. Last year Dan Williams published a critique of recently popular hierarchical Bayesian models of delusion, which generated much debate on the pages of Imperfect Cognitions . In a recent article , we examined a particular aspect of Williams’ critique. Specifically, his argument that one cannot explain delusional beliefs as departures from approximate Bayesian inference, because belief formation in the neurotypical (healthy) mind is not Bayesian . We are sympathetic to this critique. However, in our article we argue that canonical evidence of the phenomena discussed by Williams—in particular, evidence of the backfire effect,

This post is written by José Luis Bermúdez , who is Professor of Philosophy and Samuel Rhea Gammon Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University . Prof. Bermúdez has published seven single-author books and six edited volumes. His research interests are at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, focusing particularly on self-consciousness and rationality.  In this post, he presents his new edited collection " Self-Control, Decision Theory, and Rationality " published by Cambridge University Press.  Is it rational to exercise self-control? Is it rational to get out of bed to go for a run, even when staying in bed seems preferable at the time? To resist the temptation to have another drink? Or to forego a second slice of cake? From a commonsense perspective, self-control is a way of avoiding weakness of will, and succumbing to weakness of will seems to be a paradigm of irrationality – something that involves a distinctive type of inconsistency and pr

This post is authored by Juliette Vazard, a PhD candidate at the  Center for Affective Sciences  at the University of Geneva, and at the  Institut Jean Nicod  at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.  In this post she discusses her paper “ Epistemic Anxiety, Adaptive Cognition, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ” recently published in Discipline Filosofiche. I am curious about what certain types of dysfunctional epistemic reasoning present in affective disorders might reveal about the role that emotions play in guiding our epistemic activities. Recently, my interest was drawn to the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety has often been understood as belonging to the domain of psychopathology, and the role of this emotion in the everyday lives of healthy individuals has long remained understudied. In this article I argue that anxiety plays an important role in guiding our everyday epistemic activities, and that when it is ill-calibrated, this is likely to result in maladaptive epistemic activitie

In September 2018, a team of Birmingham philosophers, comprising Kathy Puddifoot , Valeria Motta , Matilde Aliffi , EmaSullivan-Bissett and myself , were in sunny Rijeka, Croatia, to talk a whole lot of Epistemic Innocence at the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology . Epistemic innocence is the idea at the heart of our research at Project PERFECT . A cognition is epistemically innocent if it is irrational or inaccurate and operates in ways that could increase the chance of acquiring knowledge or understanding, where alternative, less costly cognitions that bring the same benefits are unavailable. Over the last few years, researchers on the project and beyond have investigated the implications of epistemic innocence in a range of domains (see a list of relevant work here ). Our epistemic innocence symposium at ESPP2018 was a mark of the relative maturity of the concept, and the opportunity for us to start expanding its applications.             I went first, exploring the phe

Today’s post is by  Dorothea Debus , Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. Together with Kirk Michaelian and Denis Perrin I've recently edited a collection of newly commissioned papers in the philosophy of memory ( New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory , Routledge 2018 ), and I've been invited to say something about my own contribution to that collection here. My paper bears the title " Handle with Care: Activity, Passivity, and the Epistemological Role of Recollective Memories ", and it is concerned with one particular type of memory, namely with memories that have experiential characteristics. The paper starts from the observation that such experiential or 'recollective' memories (here: 'R-memories') have characteristic features of activity as well as characteristic features of passivity :  A subject who experiences an R-memory is characteristically passive with respect to the occurrence of the R-memory its