Ema Sullivan-Bissett gives us an overview of the latest edition of Consciousness and Cognition which she co-edited with Lisa Bortolotti:
In May 2014, Lisa Bortolotti and I organized a workshop on the Costs and
Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions, funded by Lisa’s AHRC grant for her
project on the Epistemic
Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions. We have since edited a special issue of Consciousness
and Cognition, which includes most of the papers presented at the workshop,
plus two more. In this post I will summarise the papers in the special issue
(to see fuller summaries head over to our blog, where the
authors have blogged about their papers).
In our Introduction
Lisa and I describe our two objectives for the issue. The first is to look at
what kinds of costs and benefits imperfect cognitions might have, and the
second is to explore the relationship between such costs and benefits.
Lisa then opens the issue with her paper ‘The
Epistemic Innocence of Motivated Delusions’ (blog post summary here).
She argues that motivated delusions (those which have been understood as
playing a defensive function), may have both psychological and epistemic
benefits, and she introduces the notion of epistemic innocence to capture cognitions which have
epistemic benefits which are otherwise unavailable. She argues for the
conclusion that motivated delusions are sometimes epistemically innocent by
looking at the case of anasognosia, and pointing out that alternatives to the
delusional belief that one is not impaired is unavailable to the subject, since
she does not have direct evidence of her impairment and she is unable to
integrate indirect evidence of her impairment into her concept of self.
In her paper ‘The
Virtual Bodily Self: Mentalisation of the Body as Revealed in Anosognosia for
Hemiplegia’ (blog post summary here),
Aikaterini
Fotopoulou argues that the present self is known via perceptual inference
(whilst the past self is known via inference from autobiographical memory). She
argues that anosognosia for hemiplegia is an exaggerated imperfection of bodily
awareness, which is due to the subject’s inability to update bodily awareness
in response to new information about the affect body parts, as well as an
inability to integrate first and third-person perspectives of the body.
Jules
Holroyd argues in her paper ‘Implicit
Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions’ (blog post summary here),
that one can and should have observational
awareness of the effects of implicitly biased behaviours. If one has
observational awareness, one is aware that one’s behaviour has some morally
undesirable property, for example, the property of being discriminatory. She also
suggests that whether or not people are responsible for their actions guided by
implicit biases may be informed by the relationship between such biases and
other imperfect cognitions (e.g., failures of attentiveness and
self-deception).
Jordi Fernández
defends the possibility of beneficial memory distortion in his paper ‘What
are the Benefits of Memory Distortion?’ (blog post summary here).
He looks at two forms of distorted memory: observer memories, and fabricated
memories, and asks whether they can be adaptive. Looking at these kinds of memory
distortion brings to light an interesting result: if we are narrative function
theorists about memories, observer memories and fabricated memories do not
count as distorted, due to their pragmatic benefits. If we are preservative
theorists about memories, observer memories and fabricated memories do not have
benefits, because only epistemic benefits count. Jordi concludes that these two
cases demonstrate that we should take an inclusive approach to the functions of
memory.
In my paper ‘Implicit
Bias, Confabulation, and Epistemic Innocence’ (blog post summary here),
I explore the nature of confabulatory explanations of action guided by implicit
bias. I frame my discussion with two imaginary cases: that of Roger, whose
implicit bias against women guides his decision not to invite a good (female)
candidate to interview, and that of Sylvia, whose implicit bias against black
people guides her action in crossing the road upon seeing a (non-threatening) black
man. I argued that sometimes confabulatory explanations of decisions or actions
guided by implicit bias can be epistemically innocent, and that when we are
evaluating confabulatory explanations, we ought to take into account the
context in which they occur.
In his paper ‘Delusions
as Harmful Malfunctioning Beliefs’ (blog post summary here),
Kengo Miyazono gives a positive
account of the pathological nature of delusional beliefs. He defends a
Wakefieldian account of delusional belief according to which delusions are
harmful beliefs producing by malfunctioning psychological mechanisms. Delusions
are pathological because they involve a harmful biological malfunction, they
are produced in a biologically abnormal way.
Finally, Martin Conway
and Catherine
Loveday in their paper ‘Remembering,
Imaginings, False Memories and Personal Meanings’ (blog post summary here),
suggest that false memories can carry significant benefits. Drawing on
empirical work on memory, they argue against the preservative function of
memory in favour of a view which has it that memories and imagined events are
constructed in a similar way, via the ‘remembering–imagining system’. They
conclude that the main function of memory is to provide agents with an
understanding of the world which will allow them to adapt to it, via the
generation of personal meanings.
As Lisa and I note in our Introduction, we
think that the eight papers collected in this issue initiate a much needed
interdisciplinary dialogue on imperfect cognitions and their costs and benefits
as they occur in the clinical and non-clinical populations.
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