Today's post is by Dan Cavedon-Taylor who is the author of a paper to appear in Synthese entitled " Must depression be irrational? " Dan Cavedon-Taylor From Capgras syndrome to schizophrenia, anorexia to obsessive-compulsive disorders, mental health conditions are thought to entail failures of epistemic rationality. This includes depression, which is often conceptualised by philosophers as necessarily involving mental states that are ‘unwarranted by’ or ‘disproportionate to’ events in one’s life ( Davies 2016; Wakefield & Demazeux 2016 ; Tully 2019 ). Call this view of depression, the ‘Irrationality View’. For some of us, the Irrationality View seems plainly incorrect. There appears to be a clear difference, in rational terms, between depression caused by change in season versus depression caused by, e.g., homelessness, refuge experience, serious assault, and perhaps even gaslighting ( Abrahams 2024 ). For that reason, I think we ought to prefer a Mixed View of depr
Katherine Puddifoot has recently edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on bias . In last week's post Katherine considered new ways of conceptualising bias. In this post, Katherine introduces some of the methods for understanding and mitigating bias discussed by the contributors. James Chamberlain, Jules Holroyd, Ben Jenkins and Robin Scaife examine empirical work that they argue fails to distinguish intersectional bias from non-binary categories, does not reflect the heterogeneity of bias, and assumes that when people harbor intersectional biases (e.g., the intersectional implicit bias associating traits with Black Women), these will be a complex compound of simple concepts associated with both of the intersecting identities (e.g., White women and Black men). For Chamberlain and colleagues, it is crucial to do justice to the varying different experiences that members of a social group may have, and how these may change qualitatively based on their membership of mu