I’m PI on a three-year (2025-2028) £1 million AHRC & FNR funded project, working with Robin McKenna (University of Liverpool) and Thomas Raleigh (University of Luxembourg).

The Role of Cognitive Experience in Decision and Action

The project aims to deliver a new explanation of belief-discordant behaviour - situations where we fail to act in accordance with what we believe. Our hypothesis is that cognitive experience plays a vital role in our everyday actions and decisions. We propose that our beliefs need to seem true to us if they are to play a role in our everyday behaviour. Having a belief seem true involves cognitive phenomenology; experientially taking a belief to be true when we first acquire it and if we later entertain it in thought. (For example, whereas the belief that grass is green seems true, the belief that solid objects are mostly empty space does not.)

On our view, if a belief doesn’t seem true, it won’t be able to play a role in our everyday decisions and actions. What is more, if something seems true to us it will influence our behaviour even if we don’t believe it. The project will also reveal the importance of cognitive phenomenology on our reflective decision-making processes: beliefs which don’t seem true will have less influence over our reflective decision-making than beliefs which do seem true, and propositions which seem true will influence our reflectively made decisions even if we don’t believe them.