Thursday 27 July 2017

Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry

This post is by Dr Şerife Tekin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy; Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Daemen College, and Associate Fellow; Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, and Dr Jeffrey Poland, Visiting Professor; Science and Technology Studies; Brown University, and Senior Lecturer; History, Philosophy and Social Science; Rhode Island School of Design.




Thank you for giving us the opportunity to provide some information about our book, Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry: Responses to the Crisis in Mental Health Research, published with the MIT Press in January 2017. We hope to introduce some of the main themes for the book here, and encourage the readers of the blog to join this important conversation on the philosophy and science of psychiatry.

As evident from the intriguing posts featured in the Imperfect Cognitions blog, the last decade has been a very exciting time to be doing philosophy of psychiatry. With the recent developments in psychiatric science, philosophers have many opportunities to ask fundamental questions and contribute to scientific change.





The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was published in 2013, closely followed by the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) declaration of the DSM-5 as unfit for use in psychiatric research and its subsequent initiation of the Research Domain Criteria Initiative (RDoC) to spearhead such research. In addition, there are many research programs in psychiatry whose theoretical frameworks and methodologies transcend the boundaries of the traditional DSM-led research programs, including various types of research in neuroscience and genetics. Accompanying these research developments are first-person accounts from clinical circles: those affected by mental illness are narrating their experience of mental disorder and psychiatric treatment, while clinicians are speaking of the limitations of conventional psychiatric research and treatment.


Tuesday 25 July 2017

Defining Agency after Implicit Bias


My name is Naomi Alderson. In 2014, I graduated from Cardiff University and was accepted onto a programme, led by Dr Jonathan Webber, that helped graduates to turn an undergraduate essay on the topic of implicit bias into a publishable paper. My paper, ‘Defining agency after implicit bias’, was published in March 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, and will be summarised here. In writing it, I found more questions concerning agency, cognition and behaviour than I was able to answer; I am going to continue my studies at UCL this September in the hope of getting closer to the truth.

Implicit biases are associations that affect the way we behave in ways that can be difficult to perceive or control. One example is so-called ‘weapon bias’, studied by Keith Payne (2006) among others. Payne showed participants images of gun-shaped objects asked them to make split-second decisions about whether they were guns or not.

He found that many participants were more likely to misidentify harmless objects as guns and to correctly identify guns more quickly if they were shown a picture of a black man’s face than if they were shown a white man’s face, due to an implicit association between black men and guns.

This bias was found even in people with no explicit racial bias and, moreover, was not directly controllable by reflective, deliberative effort: simply concentrating on not being biased was not enough to eliminate its effect.

The resistance of some implicit biases to deliberative control poses a threat to traditional reflectivist accounts of agency, whereby being an agent means being able to deliberatively choose an action and then act it out. If we cannot simply choose to be unbiased, then our implicit biases limit our ability to be agents on this account.

My paper aims to defend and update the reflectivist account of agency by outlining what kinds of control we do have over implicit biases and commenting upon what these forms of control suggest about the nature of agency itself.

Thursday 20 July 2017

Interview with Dan Zahavi on Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology

In this post I interview Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen.


VM: In an interesting study published in Qualitative Health Research you used a phenomenological approach to understand the experiences of self, other, and the world in patients who had recently suffered a stroke and were experiencing hemispatial neglect. Could you say a bit more about the study, and expand on the idea that the findings show the importance of meaning and meaningmaking in the process of rehabilitation?

DZ: In that study we investigated first person accounts of neglect soon after a stroke. Many stroke patients experience hemispatial neglect, that is, they no longer notice the left side of their body and the perceptual field. We interviewed 12 patients, using an open-ended format. When interviewing the patients, we were guided by phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity, and sought to explore the way these impairments affected the patients’ experiences. 

Some of our findings replicated findings already present in the neglect literature.  But we also looked at how the stroke affected interpersonal relations. We discovered that the condition was influenced by social affordances. One salient example concerned a mother who could hold her baby with the left arm, but who didn’t notice other things which were less important and meaningful to her. We also found that some patients responded better to challenges to explore the left, when prompts were coming from close friends and family. This suggests the importance of emotional stimuli. 


Tuesday 18 July 2017

Is Smell an Aesthetic Sense?


Ann-Sophie Barwich (pictured above) is an empirical philosopher and historian of science and the senses at Columbia University. She investigates olfaction as a new model system for neuroscience and looks at the nature of smell for philosophical inquiry about perception (Barwich 2016). For this, she works in close collaboration with the neuroscience laboratory of Stuart Firestein, in addition to interactions with other olfactory labs.

The human sense of smell has a remarkably bad reputation. We are often told to have too poor a nose to appreciate the richness of sensory information that is conveyed through small volatile molecules in the air. Over the past two decades, however, scientific insight has proven many of the predominantly pejorative beliefs about human smell perception wrong. It turns out that our olfactory system is much more elaborate than previously thought, both in its physiological and cognitive functions (Shepherd 2004; 2012; Gilbert 2008; Barwich 2016; Majid 2016; McGann 2017). Still, we also know notably little about our oldest sense. To date, many of the key questions remain unresolved: Is there a natural order underlying the classification of the multitude of odors? How are smells represented in the brain?

In a recent article (Barwich 2017), I addressed one of the most persistent preconceptions about the human nose: Can our sense of smell be a source of aesthetic perception? The majority of opinions in aesthetic studies will give you a negative verdict or ignore the sense of smell altogether. In response, I looked at the reasons for dismissing odors in past aesthetic discourse. These reasons were largely twofold. First, aesthetic experience is commonly considered to be about features of objects, not personal preferences (Carroll 2001). In this context, the assessment of odor quality is held as being heavily subjective. Odors seem to represent phenomenological 'feels' instead of objects (Batty 2010). Second, aesthetic perception has a strong cognitive load. By contrast, olfactory percepts may not possess sufficient differentiation in their content. Rather, they are seen as presenting us with a synthetic experience of an immediate but undifferentiated sensation (Lycan 2000).

Thursday 13 July 2017

Cognition, Affect, and Motivation

On June 9th, the University of Birmingham hosted a workshop, "Cognition, Affect, and Motivation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues", sponsored by Project PERFECT and the Mind Association. The conference brought together academics and students from philosophy and related disciplines, as well as members of the public, who were interested in issues relating to the interaction between cognition, affective responses and motivation. It aimed to foster interdisciplinary discussion around philosophical questions about the relation between these three drivers of human behaviour.



Maura Tumulty’s talk focussed on how we can take control over our mental states, especially those with strong affective content. Many of our mental states are controlled by our judgements. However, Tumulty discussed states that are in tension with our sincerely endorsed judgements. 





Say, for example, that a person is predisposed to be attracted to smoking although she sincerely endorses the judgement that smoking is bad for her health. Or suppose that someone harbours an implicit bias associating Black people with violent crime but explicitly judges that the bias is wrong.

In such cases, we cannot control our mental states through our judgements. We will continue, for example, to have positive affective responses that are associated with smoking, and negative affective responses that are associated with Black people, that are recalcitrant in face of conflicting judgements. Tumulty discussed how we can take managerial control when our judgements fail to control our mental states, we can adopt methods that control our mental states. For example, I might try to associate smoking with negative imagery by looking at pictures of unhealthy lungs whenever I encounter a person smoking.

Tuesday 11 July 2017

The Cognitive Structure of Social Stereotypes


My name is Matthew Hammond, and I research social cognition, romantic relationships, and stereotyping in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand).

A recent project with Andrei Cimpian (New York University) investigated the cognitive structure of social stereotypes. We aimed to refine the current psychological definition of stereotypes—which is simply that stereotypes are “beliefs about groups.” This definition underspecifies the kind of beliefs that make up stereotypes. Our research question involved distinguishing between statistical beliefs and generic beliefs as elements of stereotypes, drawing upon research in philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics.

Statistical beliefs are about the prevalence of features within groups, such as believing that 1 in 3 humans have brown eyes. Generic beliefs, such as the belief expressed by the statement “sharks attack swimmers,” are not about any specific quantities or frequencies but rather consist of generalizations about a category considered as a whole (e.g., sharks).

Relative to statistical beliefs, generic beliefs are developmentally prior, less cognitively demanding, and less tied to reality: People tend to agree that “sharks attack swimmers” even though shark attacks are very rare, but they don’t think that “Americans are right-handed” even though most are.

In a paper recently published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we describe four studies that tested whether stereotypes of social groups are primarily comprised of generic beliefs or statistical beliefs.

We used a functional criterion to answer our question: The function of stereotypes is to guide people’s judgments about the social world, so we deemed that whichever belief (generic or statistical) more strongly guided people’s social judgments is also more central to stereotypes.

We first asked a group of participants to list common stereotypes (e.g., politicians are liars). Then, we measured the extent to which a separate group of participants endorsed these stereotypes in generic form (e.g., agreement with generic statements such as “politicians are liars”) and statistical form (e.g., answers to prevalence estimation questions such as “what percentage of politicians are liars?”).

We used participants’ responses to predict a social judgment: the perceived likelihood that an unfamiliar group member behaves stereotypically. For example, participants were told “Person Y is a politician,” and asked “How likely is it that Person Y is a liar?” In sum, we measured people’s (1) generic beliefs, (2), statistical beliefs, and (3) social judgments of applying a stereotypical behavior to a target, for a range of social stereotypes.

Thursday 6 July 2017

Subdoxastic Attitudes, Imagination, and Belief Workshop

Today I report from a workshop organised by Anna Ichino and Bence Nanay at the University of Antwerp (pictured below) on 31st May, 2017. The themes included subdoxastic attitudes, imagination, and belief.




I (Lisa Bortolotti, Birmingham) was the first speaker and discussed costs and benefits of confabulated explanations of one’s attitudes and choices. I started defining confabulation and providing several examples from the clinical and non-clinical literature. Then, I considered the standard philosophical reaction to confabulation, that it is evidence for a failure of self-knowledge, and rejected it.

Next, I argued that confabulated explanations of attitudes and choices involve ignorance and ill-grounded causal explanations. Finally, I looked at potential psychological and epistemic benefits of confabulated explanations, and applied to them the framework of epistemic innocence developed at part of project PERFECT

I concluded by saying that some confabulated explanations can be epistemically innocent, depending on whether they have benefits for epistemic agency and on whether there are better-grounded explanations available to the person. Another important consideration is whether the confabulation involves the adoption of other ill-grounded beliefs.

Lars Danzer (Essen) talked about subdoxastic states, subpersonal states, and the relationship between the two distinctions. Some subdoxastic states are subpersonal, but not all of them are. Danzer focused on tacit knowledge of linguistic rules as the principal case. What are subpersonal states? Following Zoe Drayson (2012), the distinction is between level of description or explanation, not between kinds of processes

Personal-level is the level of folk-psychology (e.g. beliefs). Subpersonal level is the level of computational psychology and neuroscience (e.g. neural states). The subpersonal level is supposed to provide vertical explanations of personal-level facts. But drawn this way, the distinction is not exclusive. If you hold an identity theory, there are no two different categories.

Are subdoxastic states (inaccessible to consciousness and inferentially insulated) located only at the subpersonal level? No! Certain subdoxastic states may be found only at the personal level (e.g. in rationalising explanations).

Anna Ichino (Antwerp) presented her thoughts on imagination and its relation to belief based. She started with some examples of conspiracy theories and superstitions to show how common they are, and referred to several robust results from psychological studies. This magical way of thinking differs from the scientific view of the world and sometimes it involves ontological confusion (it is scientifically impossible, not just implausible).

What sort of attitudes/mental states are these, and how do they affect behaviour? Ichino listed four options: (1) standard belief account (or in-between believing and not-believing); (2) direct imagination account; (3) indirect imagination account; (4) novel state account (aliefs or credences). Ichino argued that for most cases the direct imagination account is the best, and openly argued against the belief account. The standard belief account is endorsed by psychologists (‘Believing in Magic’ by Vyse, ‘Supersense’ by Hood) and based on the motivational power of superstition and magical thinking.

For Ichino this is not a sufficiently good reason to endorse (1), because superstitions and magical thinking do not meet the other constraints on belief: sensitivity to evidence and inferential integration. She used the case of conspiracy theories on Lady Diana’s death and other examples to make this point. Finally, she explains how the formation of magical and superstitious thoughts proposed by Risen(2016) and her Psychology of Belief and Judgement Lab fits with her interpretation of them being a form of imagination: system 2 detects the intuition offered by system 1 but does not correct it (acquiescence).

Tuesday 4 July 2017

What Makes Delusions Pathological?


My name is Valentina Petrolini and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati. I work in philosophy of psychiatry, where my research focuses on the nature of mental disorders and on pathologies of belief such as delusions.

In my paper “What Makes Delusions Pathological?” I draw on Lisa Bortolotti’s work to suggest that delusional beliefs are irrational in a particular way. I accept the Continuity Thesis that Bortolotti proposes, namely the idea that beliefs lie on a continuum of rationality with delusions at the most irrational end. Yet, this formulation leaves an important problem unsolved. If delusions cannot be distinguished from other irrational beliefs by their failure to live up to rational norms, what makes delusions distinctively pathological? My solution consists in fine-tuning the notion of rationality to explore the influence that processes like emotions and relevance detection have on belief formation.