Today's post is by Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham) who is addressing self-illness ambiguity. Jodie Russell In a recent paper titled “ Prescriptive ‘selves’ and self-illness ambiguity ” ( Synthese 2025), I explain the phenomenon of self-illness ambiguity and argue that individuals who experience these ambiguities might feel a particular form of social isolation. Self-illness ambiguities occur when people struggle to determine whether a thought, feeling, or behaviour is due to their illness (specifically, a mental disorder) or due to who they are as a person (i.e. stemming from their self). For example, someone with depression might find it difficult to tell whether their sadness after being let down by a friend is a symptom of their depression or a response rooted in their personal history of being let down by others. As Sadler (2004) describes, mental disorder can saturate or transform a person’s relationship to the world, and this transformation can be valuable in itsel...
This post is by Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado , Professor of Philosophy at UNAM (Mexico’s National Autonomous University), where he coordinates the Seminar of Cognitive Diversity. Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado Bereavement deeply affects every aspect of life, but reflections on its epistemic impact are comparatively scarce in philosophy. In my view, the best way to think about this is in terms of epistemic functionality, a core notion from the Epistemic Innocence framework that I’ve found extremely fruitful. When evaluating epistemic functioning, the focus is not on the degree of justification possessed by the beliefs of the bereaved, but on the person’s ability to regularly acquire epistemic goods, such as true beliefs, evidence, and understanding. Bereavement studies provide an important starting point to understand how the death of someone close is epistemically disruptive. The ambivalence and dissonance pertaining to the fact that the deceased is no longer pr...