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As announced , project PERFECT organised and co-hosted two public engagement events as part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. Both celebrated the role of imagination and the importance of relationships in growing and healing. Here I report on how they went! Red Hands Film Screening A scene from Red Hands Director and screenwriter Francesco Filippi presented his short film in 2D and stop animation, Mani Rosse (Red Hands) , to an engaged and diverse audience at the Midlands Arts Centre on 18th June. The film has been honoured with awards at film festivals worldwide and sparked lots of interest. The screening was followed by a panel discussion featuring experts in youth mental health and experts with lived experience of domestic violence, one of the themes of the film. Panel discussion: Lucy Some of the audience's comments and questions were about how the film was made, what it was inspired by, and what some specific scenes or symbols recurring in the...

Today’s post is written by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Here she overviews her paper ‘ Biased by Our Imaginings ’, recently published in Mind & Language. In my paper I propose and defend a new model of implicit bias according which they are constituted by unconscious imaginings . As part of setting out my view I defend the coherence of unconscious imagination and argue that it does not represent a revisionary notion of imagination. Implicit biases have been identified as ‘the processes or states that have a distorting influence on behaviour and judgement, and are detected in experimental conditions with implicit measures’ (Holroyd 2016 : 154). They are posited as items which cause common microbehaviours or microdiscriminations that cannot be tracked, predicted, or explained by explicit attitudes. The canonical view of implicit biases is that they are associations . The idea is that one’s concept of, say, woman is associat...

In today's post we announce two events celebrating the work of project PERFECT, both to be held later this month. Both events are part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. PERFECT hosted three academic workshops, one on belief in 2016, one on memory in 2017, and one on confabulation in 2018. In 2019 we want to see whether some core themes of the project can be conveyed to a wider public via the means of artistic expression. We have planned the screening of a film, Mani Rosse (Red Hands) by Francesco Filippi ; and an art exhibition entitled Pouring Water Through a Telescope in collaboration with the Art Recovery Group at the Barber Institute . Both events celebrate the role of imagination in promoting growth and healing. Both events explore the importance of personal relationships in wellbeing and success. RED HANDS  Film screening Where: Midlands Arts Centre , Birmingham  When: 18th June, doors open at 6pm. For whom: All welcome. Film suitabl...

In this post,  Anna Ichino ,  Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Milan, working primarily in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology , continues our series of research posts on the special issue in Topoi, introducing her paper " Superstitious confabulations ".  Confabulation is a heterogenous phenomenon, which varies across a number of dimensions – including content, mode of elicitation, aetiology, and more. While acknowledging this heterogeneity, recent philosophical discussions have focussed mostly on some particular kinds of confabulation: notably, confabulations that are about the self, and externally elicited – classic examples being cases of memory distortions and of ‘ choice blindness ’. With a few exceptions, such discussions highlight the epistemic faults of these confabulations, especially in relation to self-knowledge. In my paper, I draw the attention to a different sort of confabulations, which are typically about the world (as op...

This is the second in a series of posts featuring new research on confabulation. Today's contribution is by Kirk Michaelian ( Centre for Philosophy of Memory ) who summarises his paper , "Confabulation as Unreliable Imagining", for the special issue of Topoi on confabulation guest edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. The context for my contribution to the special issue is a debate over the nature of confabulation that has been unfolding for several years now within the philosophy of memory community. In my 2016 book, Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past , I developed and defended a simulation theory of memory. In opposition to the causal theory, the simulation theory denies that remembering an event presupposes the existence of an "appropriate" causal connection between the subject's present representation of the event and his past experience of it, maintaining, instead, that the difference between genuine and...

On 6th and 7th November, Ema Sullivan Bissett organised a conference on  Belief, Imagination, and Delusion  at the University of Birmingham. The PERFECT team attended the event and this report is the result of their collective effort! Anna Ichino on imagination Paul Noordhof on aim of belief Sophie Archer (Cardiff University) started the conference with a discussion of delusion and belief, inviting us to learn some lessons from the implicit bias literature. When the avowed anti-racist says all races are equal but does not behave in ways consistent to this belief, then we assume that there is an additional mental state (not open to consciousness) that is responsible for those behaviours. Is this additional mental state a belief? Archer argues that it is not. On the background, there is a thesis about belief. Even if a mental state responds directly to epistemic reasons, this is necessary but not sufficient for the mental state to be a belief (Epistemic Reasons). If the mental s...

Today's post is by Jordi Fernández . He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide . Jordi's research interests are mainly in philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. He is particularly interested in self-knowledge and memory.  He is the author of Transparent Minds (2013), a monograph on self-knowledge, and he is currently working on a monograph on memory. He is also interested in cognitive science and continental philosophy. Jordi's post is the second of a series on chapters from the New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory collection. (See here for the first in the series.) He discusses his chapter " The functional character of memory ". Consider the question of what is to remember something, as opposed to imagining it. This is a question that I have tackled in a recent article. I try not to appeal to the phenomenology of memories, or the content of memories, or the kind of knowledge that memories provide. The reason is th...

Today's post is by Daniel D. Hutto and Anco Peeters. Daniel D. Hutto  (above right) is Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology and Associate Dean of Law, Humanities and the Arts, at the  University of Wollongong.  and member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. His recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. He is best known for promoting enactive and embodied cognition that is non-representational at root, and for his narrative practice hypothesis about folk psychology. Anco Peeters  (above left) is a doctoral student and tutor at the University of Wollongong. His doctoral project investigates the compatibility of functionalism and enactivism and compares these frameworks in terms of their explanatory power with respect to mind-technology interaction. Attempts to accommodate a range of empirical findings about memory have provoked daring new thinking about what lies at the roots of remem...