tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44301114505753565262024-03-17T00:45:22.784+00:00Imperfect CognitionsBlog on delusions, memory distortions, confabulations, biases and irrational beliefs.Kengo Miyazonohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01643685718519136099noreply@blogger.comBlogger947125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-81182692899049005332024-03-15T00:16:00.002+00:002024-03-15T00:17:16.321+00:00Disentangling the relationship between conspiratorial beliefs and cognitive styles This post is by <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Biljana-Gjoneska">Biljana Gjoneska</a>, who is is a national representative and research associate from the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Here, she discusses <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.736838/full">her paper</a> in the <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/16768/the-psychology-of-pseudoscience/overview">Psychology of Pseudoscience special issue</a> introduced <a href="https://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-psychology-of-pseudoscience.html">last week</a>, and is the second post this week in this series on papers in this special issue. <div><br /></div><div>Biljana investigates the behavioural aspects (conspiracy beliefs) and mental health aspects (internet addiction) of problematic internet use. She has served in a capacity as a national representative for the EU COST Action on “<a href="https://conspiracytheories.eu/members/">Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories</a>” and has authored, reviewed and edited numerous scientific outputs on the topic. The most recent topical issue can be seen <a href="https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/10.1027/2151-2604/a000548">here</a>.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirWcMEUFalNV1hCSaDxDHG73T5ilT5fKOUiwfzCgKE5hyxxhzIgI5HnlotpAovtyZPmfSu3-3L_srju_FVDPgz_PGO3nm0ghD_bXTyrmjw6YJQsBphF7m5JTYbaPDoAL8-5DQtOoTHbMBn7IpYM-nAr424WjIaGh8z0YYyEfwCVTYRj2ZVKkaD8JWwZCHi/s1674/Biljana.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1674" data-original-width="1211" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirWcMEUFalNV1hCSaDxDHG73T5ilT5fKOUiwfzCgKE5hyxxhzIgI5HnlotpAovtyZPmfSu3-3L_srju_FVDPgz_PGO3nm0ghD_bXTyrmjw6YJQsBphF7m5JTYbaPDoAL8-5DQtOoTHbMBn7IpYM-nAr424WjIaGh8z0YYyEfwCVTYRj2ZVKkaD8JWwZCHi/s320/Biljana.jpg" width="231" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Biljana Gjoneska</td></tr></tbody></table><br />In <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.736838/full">my article</a> for this special issue in Frontiers, I offer an integrated view on the relationship between conspiratorial beliefs (that secret and malevolent plots are forged by scheming groups or individuals) and three distinct cognitive styles (analytic thinking, critical thinking and scientific reasoning). To best illustrate my reasoning and the theoretical conceptualizations, I will draw from personal experience and contemplate one (seemingly) unrelated situation: <br /><br />Prior to writing this post, I received another invitation to summarize my study for a popular outlet. The invitation was sent by email from an unknown address. The sender claimed to be a freelancer journalist, who is writing a piece for the New York Times Magazine, and is interested to learn more about the reasons why some people seem more prone to endorse conspiracy theories. <br /><br />As scientists, we receive various sorts of daily invitations that are related to our work (to review articles, contribute to special issues, join editorial boards among others), many of which prove to be false, or seven predatory. So, I first aimed to to understand whether the person and the invitation are real, realistic and reliable. Hence, I employed my analytic thinking (which is slow, deliberate and effortful) to conduct a comprehensive search and gather information from verifiable sources. In essence, analytic thinking helped me to discern fact from fiction in my everyday processing of information. <br /><br />Once I realized that the invitation seems credible, I needed to make decision whether to accept it. For this, I had to remain open and willing to (re)consider, (re)appraise, review and interpret facts, as a way to update my prior beliefs associated with similar experiences (e.g., with seemingly exaggerated claims and invitations received by email), In short: I employed critical thinking, as a way to decide whether to believe or not certain information. Critical thinking is essential when making judgments and daily decisions. It is only then, that I proceeded to accept the invitation. <br /><br />Once I made the decision to accept the invitation, I started to anticipate the topics of discussion, as a way to improve the overall quality of the planned conversation. In doing so, I employed my scientific reasoning competencies (relying on induction, deduction, analogy, causal reasoning), for the purposes of scientific inquiry (hypothesizing on the cause for the invitation, and the possible outcomes of the conversation). In short, I relied on my scientific reasoning in an attempt to gain wholesome understanding of the observed subject matter by solving problems and finding solutions. <br /><br />With this, I conclude my presentation on the three cognitive styles that are covered in my perspective article. Analytic thinking, critical thinking and scientific reasoning, are all guided by rationality and goals for reliable information processing, decision making, and problem solving. All three rely to a different extent, on our thinking dispositions, metacognitive strategies, and advanced cognitive skills. As such they comprise a tripartite model of the reflective mind (that builds on the tripartite model of mind by <a href="https://books.google.mk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OLXIsMI83JwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA195&ots=AE8ap_sZ5v&sig=i9rdjVaKudWyk9OVkuzI26SAzo0&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">Stanovich & Stanovich. 2010</a>). <br /><br />Importantly, a failure in any of these domains might be associated with an increased tendency to endorse conspiratorial beliefs or other pseudoscientific claims. This explains why, in certain instances, people with high cognitive abilities, or even advanced analytic thinking capacities, remain ‘susceptible’ toward conspiratorial beliefs. At the moment, there is ample evidence to support the link between the analytic thinking and the (resistance to) conspiratorial beliefs, while the literature on the latter two categories remains scarce. <br /><br />In closing of this post, I will refer back to the original story that served to illustrate my key points. Namely, a poignant piece of writing stemmed from the conversations with the scientists who contributed to this special issue, and was published in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/magazine/younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-comet.html">New York Times Magazine</a>. It tells a story of verified scientists who became proponents of a disputed theory, using scientific means (arguments but also publishing venues) to advance their claims. This piece contemplates on the possibilities for a failed scientific reasoning, and highlights the associated risks. Needless to say, they are quite dangerous, because they might heavily blur the lines between fact and fiction, leaving a sense of shattered reality in so many people. <br />Kathleen Murphy-Hollieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02905930670976270299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-31754164582650167442024-03-13T07:00:00.007+00:002024-03-17T00:30:18.644+00:00Stakes of knowing the truth: the case of a “miracle” treatment against Covid-19<div class="separator">Tiffany Morisseau is a researcher in Cognitive Psychology at the Laboratory of Applied Psychology and Ergonomics (LaPEA, University of Paris). Her current research projects mainly focus on the question of epistemic trust and vigilance, and the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying how people come to process scientific information. <br /><br />Tiffany is a member of the Horizon Europe KT4D consortium KT4D (<a href="http://kt4democracy.eu/">kt4democracy.eu</a>), on the risks and potential of knowledge technologies for democracy, and leads the Psychology part. Here, she talks about <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.708751/full">her paper</a> in the <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/16768/the-psychology-of-pseudoscience#overview">Philosophy of Pseudoscience special issue</a>, introduced <a href="http://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-psychology-of-pseudoscience.html">last week </a>by editor Stefaan Blancke.</div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3HL1jLHRMonC3UV0KyE1E1DS0R45AiCzmuvdluUOxV70ZM-FLQaLFh6YYJi7zBy1s-yLxyQYzppF92LyCtYTkG9oTqb1bgaeIVUxPC1gPi2ih5CSdgpGVVhQfz9ozIRHZmDdgHh9M_yjipHOXDe4mWpaM_m3bSP6ofTI4fpS2TOz_FU42SuIux2Qc6Q9o/s768/Tiffany-1.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="762" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3HL1jLHRMonC3UV0KyE1E1DS0R45AiCzmuvdluUOxV70ZM-FLQaLFh6YYJi7zBy1s-yLxyQYzppF92LyCtYTkG9oTqb1bgaeIVUxPC1gPi2ih5CSdgpGVVhQfz9ozIRHZmDdgHh9M_yjipHOXDe4mWpaM_m3bSP6ofTI4fpS2TOz_FU42SuIux2Qc6Q9o/w199-h200/Tiffany-1.jpeg" width="199" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;">Tiffany Morisseau</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Improving science education and media literacy is an important aspect of dealing with online misinformation. By doing so, the level of accuracy at which information is considered false is raised, thereby ensuring that blatant errors that are no longer perceived as plausible, are eliminated from the public sphere. But merely being plausible is not a sufficient condition for information to be valid! Information can be both plausible and false, and the likelihood of it being true must be critically assessed. <div><br /></div><div>This requires some cognitive effort, especially when it comes to complex scientific information that is not easily accessible to the public at large. From an individual point of view, engaging in such an investigation is only worthwhile if the stakes of knowing the truth are high enough. Significant efforts in media and science education may therefore not be enough: one can consume and share false facts while being highly educated, for reasons other than the search for truth. <br /><br />In our paper (Morisseau, Branch & Origgi, 2021) published in this special issue in Frontiers, we illustrated this with the example of hydroxychloroquine, which has been considered as a potential treatment for Covid-19 and has been the focus of much media and popular interest, particularly in France. </div><div><br /></div><div>Professor Didier Raoult and his team at the IHU Méditerranée Infection (Marseille) had reported positive results from a study on the effect of HCQ against Covid-19, in March 2020 (Gautret et al., 2020). Although relatively unknown to the general public a few months earlier, Raoult was becoming increasingly popular. But in the weeks and months that followed, many questioned the assumption that HCQ was actually useful against Covid-19, with scientific consensus soon emerging that it was not effective. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, HCQ remained very popular with the public. What was the reason? Let us try to answer this question. To begin with, the hypothesis was certainly plausible, so it was cognitively and socially acceptable to hold it as true. <br /><br />Secondly, holding the efficacy of HCQ to be true had many benefits, allowing for the satisfaction of a number of social and psychological motivations - from understanding the world (Lantian et al., 2021) to protecting one's identity (Nera et al, 2021; Nyhan and Reifler, 2019), as well as social integration and reputation management (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Dunbar, 2012; Graeupner and Coman, 2017; Mercier, 2020). </div><div><br /></div><div>In particular, the promotion of HCQ has been strongly associated with an attitude of distrust towards French elites, perceived as arrogant and disrespectful of popular practices and lifestyles (Sayare, 2020). The appeal to popular common sense and pragmatism, as opposed to experts suspected of being disconnected from the field with their complicated methodologies, has also been used by politicians to justify pro-HCQ positions (Risch, 2020). </div><div><br /></div><div>But when its objective (in this case, the promotion of a political stance) moves away from the transmission of information per se, communication ceases to be associated with a strong presumption of truthfulness (Lynch, 2004; Cassam, 2018). <br /><br />Of course, it is important to use accurate information when making decisions that rely on it. But in this particular case, neither the efficacy of the drug nor its actual adverse effects were paramount. First, the virus was initially perceived as posing little threat to healthy adults and children (Baud et al., 2020), and the question of whether HCQ was actually effective was ultimately of minor importance to most people. </div><div><br /></div><div>Secondly, the risks associated with taking HCQ were perceived as very low anyway. Many Covid-19 patients testified to the innocuous nature of the treatment, and the question of its dangerousness at the population level was not so relevant at the individual level. <br /><br />More generally, we live with many false or approximate beliefs anyway (Boyer, 2018; Oliver and Wood, 2018). This is not necessarily a problem as such, if these beliefs do not lead individuals to make choices against their own interests, or against the interests of society at large. But precisely, the building of a science-based consensus shared by all members of a society is essential to create the conditions for translating this knowledge into effective policies. </div><div><br /></div><div>When “superficial” opinions – i.e., opinions that do not have a strong epistemic basis – enter the public sphere (in April 2020, a poll published in the newspaper Le Parisien claimed that “59% of the French population believed HCQ was effective against the new coronavirus”), they influence the way societal issues are conceived. </div><div><br /></div><div>This can negatively affect the quality of policy decisions that are made, with concrete consequences for people's well-being. Public opinions on scientific issues must therefore be interpreted at the right level, especially as they will determine major political and societal choices.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div>Kathleen Murphy-Hollieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02905930670976270299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-25702699818414159592024-03-06T07:00:00.015+00:002024-03-07T02:34:39.495+00:00The Psychology of Pseudoscience <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Stefaan Blancke is a philosopher of science
at the department of Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and a
member of the Tilburg Center for Moral Philosophy, Epistemology and Philosophy
of Science (TiLPS). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">His current research mainly focuses on the role of
cooperation and reputation in science, pseudoscience, and morality. His website
is <a href="http://www.stefaanblancke.com/">www.stefaanblancke.com</a>; you can
also find him on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/Stblancke">@stblancke</a>). This post is about a <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/16768/the-psychology-of-pseudoscience#overview">special issue on the Psychology of Pseudoscience</a>, which Stefaan was an editor for. </span></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf6W4bCaTKH7D0eaVFbgIcK0PNObPnaalKwEk4UBBMUGdEHP6Ptu-JJnfFvBfR7m6Syz5kYmWiEOIImkzgAyBk_rROZMP-ISMsADj4ODGCAn4uANrZYet_eYirQ_8L54I8chWPZ_NvVu613cmFfOFBACffjFJCG5Ez_X7GCkeU96rZs9RlQOdfiTiUdhw4/s750/stefaan.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="750" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf6W4bCaTKH7D0eaVFbgIcK0PNObPnaalKwEk4UBBMUGdEHP6Ptu-JJnfFvBfR7m6Syz5kYmWiEOIImkzgAyBk_rROZMP-ISMsADj4ODGCAn4uANrZYet_eYirQ_8L54I8chWPZ_NvVu613cmFfOFBACffjFJCG5Ez_X7GCkeU96rZs9RlQOdfiTiUdhw4/w200-h200/stefaan.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stefaan Blancke</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">As a philosopher of science, I have since
long been interested in pseudoscience. Not only because pseudoscience induces
us to think about what science is – so that we can explain why pseudoscience is
not science; but also, because I want to understand what makes our minds
vulnerable to beliefs that plainly contradict our best scientific theories. Examples
of pseudoscience abound, from creationism over homeopathy and anti-vaccination
to telepathy. Given that we should expect the mind to reliably represent the
world this is surprising. Why do so many people cherish weird beliefs?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">To answer this question, we must first
understand the human mind, which inevitably brings us to the domain of psychology.
Building on research in evolutionary and cognitive psychology and anthropology
we can assume that pseudoscientific beliefs tend to become widespread because
they tap into our evolved intuitive expectations about the world. These
intuitions are in place because they allow us to effectively navigate our
surroundings. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">However, they also create biases by which we are disposed to
adopt beliefs that conflict with a scientific understanding of the world. <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226051826-020/html">Creationism</a>,
for instance, taps into our psychological essentialism and teleological
intuitions, whereas mechanisms for pathogen detection and aversion make us
suspicious of and even oppose modern technologies such as <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360138515000771">genetic
modification</a>. Their intuitive appeal makes these beliefs contagious. Furthermore,
pseudoscientific beliefs also <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/theo.12109">adopt the
trappings of science</a> to piggyback on the epistemic and cultural authority
of science. This study of the spread of pseudoscientific beliefs has resulted
in an <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09515089.2014.971946">epidemiology
of pseudoscience</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In line with this research on the frailness
of the human mind I, together with a team of fellow philosophers and
psychologists, edited <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/16768/the-psychology-of-pseudoscience#articles">a
special collection on the psychology of pseudoscience</a> for <i>Frontiers in
Psychology</i>. The collection consists of four contributions each of which sheds
a new light on a different aspect relating to the central theme. As three out
of the four articles will be presented in more detail by the authors, I will
just briefly introduce them here. <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.708751/full">Tiffany
Morisseau, T.Y. Branch, and Gloria Origgi</a> discuss how people often use scientific
information for social purposes which makes them less concerned about the
accuracy than the plausibility of the information. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">This allows controversial
scientific theories to spread. <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.732666/full">Joffrey
Fuhrer, Florian Cava, Nicolas Gauvrit, and Sebastian Dieguez</a> provide a
conceptual analysis of pseudo-expertise, a phenomenon notoriously common in
pseudoscience. The authors also develop a framework for further research. <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.736838/full">Biljana
Gjoneska</a> investigates how the cognitive styles of analytic thinking,
critical thinking and scientific reasoning relate to (dis)trust in
conspiratorial beliefs. And, finally, in an article not presented here, <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.739070/full">Spencer
Mermelstein and Tamsin C. German</a> argue that counterintuitive pseudoscientific beliefs spread because they play into our communication evolution mechanisms. <br /><br />I heartily recommend reading next week's post from Tiffany Morisseau on her paper in the issue, and consulting the articles of our collection. I hope you enjoy the read!</span></p><br /><p></p>Kathleen Murphy-Hollieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02905930670976270299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-48322492369268499832024-02-28T07:00:00.025+00:002024-02-28T07:00:00.135+00:00Loneliness as a closure of the affordance space: The case of COVID-19 pandemicThis post is by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She works in embodied cognitive science, the enactive approach, phenomenology, and habits. This post is about her <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-023-09935-0">recent paper </a>on loneliness and the COVID-19 pandemic. <br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSHR7vYrGXBrtb9lseLDaziUUTuy0bh19bD9GoEoWk5P3AeH8Uh0erk5NHTAmYKJzpNxeITVFsDmIWzVf5_VlgsI5AxWgurTOWkT1v7glMi_W0aAX-OjxvUqgusy02MbxCiM9EIJvyquu3e5EES6uiK6o-krJ5Ma6ETJT6OMo3CkEIAA_wfbyi3czzBQY_/s2622/SusanaRamirezVizcaya.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2449" data-original-width="2622" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSHR7vYrGXBrtb9lseLDaziUUTuy0bh19bD9GoEoWk5P3AeH8Uh0erk5NHTAmYKJzpNxeITVFsDmIWzVf5_VlgsI5AxWgurTOWkT1v7glMi_W0aAX-OjxvUqgusy02MbxCiM9EIJvyquu3e5EES6uiK6o-krJ5Ma6ETJT6OMo3CkEIAA_wfbyi3czzBQY_/w200-h187/SusanaRamirezVizcaya.jpeg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />When social distancing measures were implemented to reduce the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many specialists were concerned about a potential dramatic upsurge in loneliness, which was particularly worrying given the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-020-01889-7">wide range of physical and mental health problems associated with it</a> (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use, cognitive decline, cardiovascular diseases, and suicide risk). However, the few longitudinal studies comparing loneliness levels before and during the social contact restrictions present inconsistent results, with many factors influencing whether the levels of loneliness increased, decreased, or remained constant. <br /><br />These inconsistent findings underscore the fact that loneliness is not the same as social isolation, so one may feel lonely even among many other people or, conversely, may not experience loneliness even if socially isolated. Thus, the reduction in the number of face-to-face interactions during pandemic-related social restrictions is not a reliable indicator of people’s level of loneliness. In this regard, I propose that loneliness, unlike social isolation, arises not from a lack of social contacts but from a lack of connections, in the sense that, while experiencing loneliness, one lacks meaningful relationships not only with other living beings but also with oneself and aspects of the environment. <br /><br />I explore this idea by conceiving of loneliness as resulting from a closure in one’s affordance space, i.e., a closure in the range of relevant possibilities for action and interaction that are open to a concrete individual with a particular repertoire of habits. Given a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_5">relational reading of the notion of affordances</a>, this closure pertains to both individuals and the materiality of their environment, so the same aspects of the environment could show up as meaningful and solicit action for one person but not for another. Importantly, the relevant affordances missing in loneliness are those that a person would find enjoyable or attractive to engage with if they were present and she had the adequate skills to do so. Moreover, I argue that the lack of those affordances that are most central to our habitual identities, and therefore more meaningful to us, will have a greater impact on our experience of loneliness. <br /><br />To support this proposal, I consider three possible ways in which the COVID-19 lockdown may have increased levels of loneliness in some people by suddenly contracting their affordance spaces, thus disrupting their habitual possibilities for (1) joint action, (2) affective regulation, and (3) embodied social interaction. I also present some examples from qualitative studies that suggest that some people managed to overcome this contraction ––and even expand their affordance spaces–– by engaging with new affordances or increasing the affective allure of existing ones. This reconfiguration of their affordance spaces may have prevented some people from experiencing the high levels of loneliness that were expected at the beginning of the pandemic. For them, this experience could have been an opportunity to connect or reconnect with others, themselves, and the wider community. However, this opportunity was not equally open to everyone, as is the case for older adults, whose levels of loneliness increased during the pandemic.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Kathleen Murphy-Hollieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02905930670976270299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-1180973556381454442024-02-21T08:00:00.001+00:002024-02-21T08:00:00.145+00:00Anorexia Nervosa and Delusions – What Can We Learn?<p>Today’s post is from Kyle De Young and Lindsay Rettler on their recent paper, “<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-023-00703-y" target="_blank">Causal Connections between Anorexia Nervosa and Delusional Beliefs</a>” (published in <i>Review of Psychology and Philosophy</i> in 2023). </p><p><a href="https://www.uwyo.edu/psychology/faculty/deyoung.html" target="_blank">Kyle</a> is a clinical psychologist specializing in eating and related behaviors, who oversees the <a href="https://undeatingbehaviors.wixsite.com/uwyoeatingbehaviors" target="_blank">Eating Behaviors Research Lab</a> at the University of Wyoming. <a href="http://lindsayrettler.weebly.com/" target="_blank">Lindsay</a> is a philosopher at UW teaching ethics and philosophy of mental health, who oversees the ethics curriculum for Wyoming’s med school (<a href="https://www.uwyo.edu/wwami/index.html" target="_blank">Wyoming WWAMI Medical Education Program</a>).</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL_wXkAhGL6-dhLcG9tMF9iprTOO-DiDJX7WYTQETmhGdwg2KmWYw2N9eZkVKhaRm3T6F6QmEV6Hc1bSXOihcFv29kU7Vx5_-e_RHQhv6bhQxDFnTPUruJg3Zu3gdbaExSt4kNY99oZaFgXfdlMu1FuYeUZX4HULXxQO8ko1ZMhb3AVeA50tT1qO7bsPE/s1880/Screenshot%202023-11-07%20at%2011.58.40.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1354" data-original-width="1880" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL_wXkAhGL6-dhLcG9tMF9iprTOO-DiDJX7WYTQETmhGdwg2KmWYw2N9eZkVKhaRm3T6F6QmEV6Hc1bSXOihcFv29kU7Vx5_-e_RHQhv6bhQxDFnTPUruJg3Zu3gdbaExSt4kNY99oZaFgXfdlMu1FuYeUZX4HULXxQO8ko1ZMhb3AVeA50tT1qO7bsPE/w400-h288/Screenshot%202023-11-07%20at%2011.58.40.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lindsay and Kyle</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe mental disorder associated with mortality and functional impairment. It is complex, multi-systemic (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, endocrine, gastrointestinal), and requires multidisciplinary evidence-based treatment at various levels (e.g., outpatient, inpatient). Despite the availability and use of intense treatments, outcomes are poor, with only 1 in 3 individuals recovering within 9 years. </p><p>Complicating matters is that although 10-30% of individuals with AN experience delusions, AN is not understood as a psychotic disorder nor conceptualized in terms of how delusions relate to its development or maintenance. Focusing on the connections between delusions and AN is a promising way to shed light on this complicated condition, possibly pointing researchers and clinicians in fruitful directions to improve outcomes for this terrible disorder.</p><p>Believing that eating a piece of chocolate will cause me to gain 5 lbs might not seem very similar to a psychotic delusion of persecution. But I may hold the belief in a way that floats free of evidence. Is the belief then delusional? The DSM-5 characterizes delusions in varied and sometimes inconsistent ways. These definitions focus on the content of delusions (are they false, unshared, bizarre, etc.?), the degree of conviction with which the delusional belief is held, whether a person has insight to the origins of their belief, whether the belief is irrational, and whether the belief is fixed. </p><p>In our paper we sort through these characterizations and argue that fixedness is the core feature of delusions. When a belief is maintained in a way that’s insensitive to evidence or unresponsive to reasons, the belief is fixed. </p><p>How are these delusions related to AN? We consider several possibilities and conclude that most likely the psychopathology of AN causes delusions, and delusions are likely reciprocally causal with AN. The content of delusions in AN is typically limited to eating, digestion, and body shape/weight, and the delusions function as explanations for behaviors that are otherwise hard to justify. </p><p>Starving oneself to the point of emaciation, medical complications, and interpersonal and occupational impairment when food is readily available are hard to understand without the accompanying delusional belief that one’s body cannot process food, for instance. Delusions may help explain this extreme behavior and in so doing help subdue the fear brought about by AN. As the seriousness of the condition amplifies, the need to hold firmly to the delusion grows.</p><p>If delusions and AN are reciprocally causal, intervening on one should improve the other. Most promising is to add treatment components known for their efficacy in ameliorating delusions to existing evidence-based approaches for AN to test whether such additions improve outcomes. Antipsychotic medications that might increase cognitive flexibility could be tried. Some have been tested in AN, generally with underwhelming results, but no trials investigated whether individuals with delusions specifically benefit.</p><p>Other approaches include acceptance-based psychotherapies that help individuals change behavior despite their cognitions or specific variants of cognitive therapy developed for delusions. Although we can't estimate the impact on AN of intervening on delusions, even if it helps in only 10-30% of cases, the potential for improving outcomes is great. So, we hope that research will move in this direction!</p><p><br /></p>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-19699325024484296092024-02-14T08:00:00.000+00:002024-02-14T08:00:00.141+00:00Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition<p>The post today is by <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/ewestraphilosophy/">Evan Westra</a> (Purdue University) on his recent paper "<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phpe.12196">Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition</a>" (<i>Philosophical Perspectives</i>, 2023).</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ4cYsvuFuLmVXnFb7_1qcLRbXIDtTuwbXJ2GmY4ICDVJi3Yq_t6ttmm5CjqewArBJCCed0zYkbMi11m7RJHibTJ5oCZTR0nIHEeU90HOVjpZWto-tBnAo2AFHKRj-iUu0V8uAEyeHxKl9OlQjbCh8sDpcXYDW8dIbCyqw-CAlxmSMHyByRzzqz96SD0UX/s2389/Evan%20July%2022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2389" data-original-width="1792" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ4cYsvuFuLmVXnFb7_1qcLRbXIDtTuwbXJ2GmY4ICDVJi3Yq_t6ttmm5CjqewArBJCCed0zYkbMi11m7RJHibTJ5oCZTR0nIHEeU90HOVjpZWto-tBnAo2AFHKRj-iUu0V8uAEyeHxKl9OlQjbCh8sDpcXYDW8dIbCyqw-CAlxmSMHyByRzzqz96SD0UX/w171-h227/Evan%20July%2022.jpg" width="171" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Evan Westra</td></tr></tbody></table><div>If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: <i>Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020</i>. These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is. <p>If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: <i>p</i>). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an accurate representation of the world, are generally coherent, responsive to evidence, and that the pursuit of our goals and desires. </p><p>This doesn’t seem to be what the non-philosopher is doing when they’re telling you about their beliefs. Instead, they’re telling you about attitudes that<i> matter</i> to them, that express <i>what they stand for</i>. These are not the kind of attitudes that one readily updates in response to evidence; indeed, if we were presented with counterevidence to these beliefs, we’d probably do our best to explain it away. Unlike the philosopher’s mundane “beliefs,” these “beliefs” are the kind of attitude one might express to signal one’s identity and affirm one’s status as a member one’s community. They’re also the kind of attitude that we might look for when deciding whether or not a person belongs to one’s ingroup or outgroup, and perhaps even enforce as a criterion for group-membership.</p><p>The non-philosopher also has attitudes about whether today is Wednesday, or whether the cat is on the mat, of course. And they’d probably find the philosopher’s way of using the word <i>belief </i>perfectly sensible (albeit somewhat formalistic and weird – much like philosophers in general). Nevertheless, they’re much more likely to express such mundane attitudes using more common attitude verbs like <i>think</i> or <i>know</i>. But for some pragmatic or semantic reason, the term <i>belief</i> is much more likely to be used to express religious, moral, and ideological attitudes. </p><p>Here's my question: in cases like these, are the philosopher and non-philosopher talking about the same type of mental state? That is, are they both employing the same basic folk psychological concept of belief? </p><p>In my recent paper in <i>Philosophical Perspectives</i>, “Symbolic belief and social cognition,” I suggest that the answer to this question is <i>no</i>. Drawing on several different lines of evidence, I argue that in our day-to-day lives, we regularly employ two distinct concepts of belief, each with a distinct folk psychological profile and socio-cognitive function. <i>The epistemic concept of belief</i> corresponds roughly to what the philosopher means by “belief,” though it is more commonly expressed by the verb<i> to think</i>. This concept is used primarily for <i>mindreading</i> – that is, to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. <i>The symbolic concept of belief </i>is more commonly expressed by the verb to believe. It describes a very different kind of mental state, with a strong affective and volitional dimension, and well as preference-like characteristics and limited sensitivity to evidence or updating. I argue that the primary function of this concept is<i> mindshaping</i>: we express symbolic beliefs in order to signal our identities and thereby regulate how others behave towards us, and we also monitor and normatively enforce certain symbolic beliefs in others. Along the way, I touch on the ways that questions about the folk psychology of belief intersect with questions about the ontology of belief, and how each debate might inform the other. <br /> <br /><br /></p></div>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-77186936547149762322024-02-11T13:30:00.000+00:002024-02-11T13:39:45.468+00:00Why Human Nature Matters<p>We celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) with a post by Matteo Mameli (King’s College London) on his new monograph, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/why-human-nature-matters-9781350189768" target="_blank">Why Human Nature Matters: Between Biology and Politics</a> (Bloomsbury 2024). In the book, Mameli discusses Darwin’s views on mental faculties, human differences, and the transformative agency of organisms. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIic3S-M5epWx4pIs3InLpjxA0VTHLaTYNAWnDudv9QAjI9qT3eSjvXGLDSvXH5p7p43Bq-wIvkDRrFiIk4NzLsv4JF6GBUCgd7CGIYo2btI4GIPVWaXh_QVgP8sLaxtVGrD4f485OJ4hHYq3p9ZDtyfxnPUu0WtVSQMO_Fm2qI9D3Z0GFHzvTsY_TJpA/s1310/Screenshot%202024-02-08%20at%2013.10.01.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Cover of Why Human Nature Matters (with barnacles)" border="0" data-original-height="1310" data-original-width="890" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIic3S-M5epWx4pIs3InLpjxA0VTHLaTYNAWnDudv9QAjI9qT3eSjvXGLDSvXH5p7p43Bq-wIvkDRrFiIk4NzLsv4JF6GBUCgd7CGIYo2btI4GIPVWaXh_QVgP8sLaxtVGrD4f485OJ4hHYq3p9ZDtyfxnPUu0WtVSQMO_Fm2qI9D3Z0GFHzvTsY_TJpA/w434-h640/Screenshot%202024-02-08%20at%2013.10.01.png" width="434" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>My monograph addresses classic and contemporary perspectives on human nature and makes a novel proposal, one that stresses the biological and political significance of human diversity and mutability. Darwin’s ideas on variation and niche construction play an important role in my argument, which also draws on insights from Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Sylvia Wynter, and others. The cover image is a plate from one of Darwin’s books on barnacles. To discover why Darwin was so interested in barnacles, you will have to read the book!</p><p>Below are some excerpts from the introductory chapter:</p><p></p><blockquote>Organisms inherit genetic material from their parents, but they also inherit the outcomes of the choices and activities of their conspecifics and non-conspecifics. […] In relation to changes in their conditions of life, both internal and external, corporeal and extracorporeal, organisms are both subjects and objects, agents and patients, sources as well as recipients of change. […] Human niche construction has profoundly transformed both humans and the rest of nature, with the pace of transformation continually accelerating. Finding the right way to grasp the similarities and differences between human niche construction and the niche-constructing processes of other species is of utmost importance. </blockquote><blockquote>In the current epoch of genetic and molecular engineering, anthropogenic climate change, and ecological collapse, the human planetary footprint is becoming every day more evident. Will we destroy our conditions of life and cause our own extinction? Will we bio-engineer our bodies and those of other living organisms? Will we geo-engineer Planet Earth? Will we be able to remove the barriers that separate us and other terrestrial beings from better modes of life? Will we revolutionize our praxis? If so, in what ways? </blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote>The elaboration, modification, and spread of ideas about human nature is a part of human praxis that shapes other parts of human praxis and that, by doing so, conditions the ways we live, including the ways we organize and reorganize our social systems and our interactions with the rest of nature. Symbols can be causally powerful, including those symbols with which we humans think about ourselves as members of a species. […] A view that draws attention to the ways in which human nature can mutate is better than an eliminativist approach. However, for a view of human nature as mutable through praxis to work, one needs to acknowledge not just the transformative impact of human praxis but also its concrete materiality. We need to avoid seeing human nature as something rigid and unchangeable; at the same time, we need to reject any “attenuation of materialism.” </blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote>In Part One of this book, I explore various classic perspectives on human nature, featuring ideas from Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, and others. The discussion shows how debates about human nature are often debates concerning the ways humans can or cannot cooperate and the ways our nature enables or constrains the social production (and reproduction) of valuable human goods and relations. Ideas about human nature often have a profound influence on how we continuously recreate and govern our modes of life. </blockquote><blockquote>In Part Two, I make an intervention in contemporary discussions on the concept (or notion, or conception) of human nature. This part of the book criticizes various proposals concerning how we should think about human nature in abstract terms, and it makes an alternative proposal—one that focuses on plasticity, diversity, and transformative processes. In today’s context, ideas about human nature cannot be isolated from evolutionary biology and the sciences of human biocultural differences, as long as these sciences are understood in fully niche-constructionist terms. At the same time, a good way of thinking about human nature needs to consider the role played by ideas about human nature in social conflict and in structuring our modes of life. </blockquote><blockquote>In the Conclusions, I revisit Timpanaro’s critique of Gramsci’s attenuated materialism and the general issues concerning human nature, human modes of life, and the embeddedness of human praxis.</blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-71447507139144345442024-02-07T08:00:00.000+00:002024-02-07T08:00:00.241+00:00Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases<p>Today's post is by <a href="https://sekowski.weebly.com/">Krzysztof Sękowski </a>(University of Warsaw) on his recent paper, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/episteme/article/concept-revision-concept-application-and-the-role-of-intuitions-in-gettier-cases/C0E9394BC51B82666622260BE2D46685">Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases</a> (<i>Episteme, </i>2022).</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji6hlq5kRPaQNbeA4fWL4EwhQ09mB0xTHSg1KXpTrCmxYAJXn514UJdpY_BdRmQWW-yyTvW0I_79U0vscannfMsvoE95W2CrmOqgAEXXg9eMZeT3kA-ME9dPUOeBFGZ9bOTfmb0DUIqW_AK1z_6I1ZtX9Rqgx1_mVnzFNA1uUylr6K4jFFLTmKMNSb6nLY/s5110/zdj.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="5110" data-original-width="3632" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji6hlq5kRPaQNbeA4fWL4EwhQ09mB0xTHSg1KXpTrCmxYAJXn514UJdpY_BdRmQWW-yyTvW0I_79U0vscannfMsvoE95W2CrmOqgAEXXg9eMZeT3kA-ME9dPUOeBFGZ9bOTfmb0DUIqW_AK1z_6I1ZtX9Rqgx1_mVnzFNA1uUylr6K4jFFLTmKMNSb6nLY/w167-h235/zdj.JPG" width="167" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Krzysztof Sękowski</td></tr></tbody></table>According to the standard view, in thought experiments (or more specifically in the method of cases) the conclusion is justified by intuitions about the applicability of a given concept. For instance, in Gettier Cases our intuition that we can not say that the protagonist in a story KNOWS something justifies our conclusion that JTB theory of knowledge is false. According to this view, the method of cases enables us to establish some truths about that concept. Therefore, it is considered a descriptive method, as it helps discover truths about a given concept without revising, regulating or explicating its meaning.<p>The paper presents a different view on this method. According to it this method can be interpreted as a normative method, within which arguments for revising the meaning of a scrutinized concept are provided. Thus, the method of cases might be understood not only as a method used within conceptual analysis but also as part of the conceptual engineering enterprise.</p><p>The paper discusses two crucial distinctions. The first one distinguishes between intuitions of intension (intuitions about general properties that an object falling under a given concept has), and intuitions of extension (intuitions about the applicability of a given concept in particular situations). The second distinction distinguishes between concept-application arguments and concept-revision arguments. Concept-application arguments aim to provide reasons for a claim that a particular concept applies in a given case, while concept-revision arguments aim to provide reasons for why we should think about a given concept in a particular way. The paper argues that the method of cases might be interpreted as providing one of both of these kinds of arguments. The crucial difference between them is that concept-application arguments rely on the content of intuitions of extension, while concept-revision arguments rely on the content of intuitions of intension. The paper shows, on the example of Gettier Cases, that the crucial feature of the normative interpretation of the method of cases in which its conclusion is justified by concept-revision arguments, is that it provides reasons based on general expectations towards the concept for abandoning intuitions on whether it applies to a certain case or not. Thereby, this interpretation of the method of cases makes it a useful tool for conceptual engineering purposes.</p><p>In the last parts of the paper, it shows that the normative interpretation of the method of cases provides a defense from the critique of that method provided by the negative program of experimental philosophy. This critique aims to show that this method is unreliable as it relies on intuitions, which are, according to empirical findings, sensitive to philosophically irrelevant factors such as culture, gender, personality, etc.. However, the paper argues that the conceptual-engineering-friendly interpretation, according to which the method of cases is justified by concept-revision arguments and the content of intuitions of intension, can be defended with the help of some particular form of expertise defense. The paper argues that experts' intuitions, that is, intuitions of speakers who are immersed in philosophical discourse and who express their expectations about a target concept, can form a reliable source of evidence for revisionary arguments. This is because they do not serve as evidence for the method of cases' conclusions but they provide reasons for a particular conceptual change.</p><div><br /></div>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-55192734998103864022024-01-31T08:00:00.000+00:002024-01-31T17:05:11.885+00:00The Know-How of Virtue<p>This post is by <a href="http://hleenmurphyhollies.weebly.com">Kathleen Murphy-Hollies</a>, on her recent paper 'The Know-How of Virtue', published <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12704">open-access </a>in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd7SI_vWRODeE7JPoJyfkrBIzmm-so747kQazCLF5zuONsCnsbeQ9Bct_w69p7xNWgdJJFQnbIeJYo22mW4oJ4JrY3jTx2Bok_HKABZHQWBX82W-P4Ccp-jpYuk1ll3R88vUW_aB4KO_B0RXdiWo78WSNPD8dtcxNj2cUuxztVlKKeVbSm631l9mAx4Jbb/s2319/3%20cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2319" data-original-width="1844" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd7SI_vWRODeE7JPoJyfkrBIzmm-so747kQazCLF5zuONsCnsbeQ9Bct_w69p7xNWgdJJFQnbIeJYo22mW4oJ4JrY3jTx2Bok_HKABZHQWBX82W-P4Ccp-jpYuk1ll3R88vUW_aB4KO_B0RXdiWo78WSNPD8dtcxNj2cUuxztVlKKeVbSm631l9mAx4Jbb/w159-h200/3%20cropped.jpg" width="159" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kathleen Murphy-Hollies</td></tr></tbody></table><p>How can we be good people who do things for the right
reason, when we very often confabulate a good reason for our behaviour after
the fact?</p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Imagine, for example, that I do not give money to a person
in need on the street, and instead rush home. But then, later on, my friend mentions
seeing the person who needed help and I express that I saw them too. Then they
ask me, ‘why didn’t you help them?’. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In these circumstances, we might confabulate. This means
that, only upon being asked, do we start formulating an answer to that
question. In that way, confabulation is post-hoc. We come up with reasons for
our behaviour which protect our positive self-conceptions. So I might say to my
friend, ‘Oh I was in a rush and the street was too busy for me to stop!’. This
explanation protects my self-concept of still generally being kind and helpful.
I explain away this instance with an ill-grounded claim, because in fact the
street was not busy at all. This is a core feature of confabulations; they are
not appropriately based on the relevant evidence, so they usually make false
statements about the world (it is not impossible for them to be true by
accident/mere luck). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Importantly, people confabulate <i>with no intention to
deceive</i>. So, we believe our confabulations to be an authentic account of
why we behaved in the way we did. In a way, this is surely what makes confabulation
so worrying. When we are prompted to look more closely at our behaviour,
confabulation seems to hide our shortcomings from us, because we immediately
come up with a self-protecting story. We don’t notice that we’re doing this,
and we don’t notice that we don’t actually have a good understanding of why we
acted in some way. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So it would seem that confabulation is surely a worry for
virtuous behaviour, which ought to be ‘for the right reason’. Virtuous
behaviour should be a <i>response to </i>the values inherent in a situation,
and the agent should have this right reason at the forefront of her mind when
acting. But, in confabulation, we reverse this story and posit those ‘right
reasons’ after the fact, believing that we were responding to those reasons at
the time. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In my recent paper, I argue that confabulation is not
necessarily such a barrier for virtuous behaviour, and is actually probably
involved in the development of virtue a lot of the time. This is because
confabulation actually has some benefits, which can be applied in the
development of virtue. In seeking to protect our positive visions of ourselves,
we can give them a more explicit space in our ongoing self-narratives. These
self-conceptions are not passive, but also guide and influence future
behaviour. So, engaging in the construction of good self-image, even at the
expense of getting all the facts of the matter right, can be efficacious in
making that image a reality. And therefore, in a sense, making it true. Maybe
next time, you’ll actually <i>respond to </i>the reasons which you had previously
only posited post-hoc in a confabulation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is quite an optimistic outlook for confabulation,
though. Surely for some people, confabulation will mean that they just continue
masking their bad behaviour to themselves, indefinitely. I agree that gaining these
benefits from confabulation is far from guaranteed. I argue that what makes the
difference, is having certain self-related skills and attitudes. These include attitudes
such as being open-minded to what other people say to you in response to your
confabulations, being curious about other explanations of your behaviour to the
one you’ve given, and being attentive to your thoughts, feelings, and desires
for your idealised self. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I use a mindshaping framework to flesh out how these attitudes,
which require a skilful know-how rather than propositional knowledge about the
self, play an extremely valuable role in the fundamentally social enterprise of
sharing reasons for behaviour. Not only does this bring self-knowledge, but the
process shapes and thus <i>constitutes </i>it. Due to our cognitive limitations
and desires to have an understanding of our actions, the reasons that we share
may well often be confabulatory. However, that doesn’t mean that this process of
social shaping can’t take place and be valuable, particularly for the formation
of consistent virtuous behaviour. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Finally, I posit that this know-how is a meta-virtue because
the skills encompassed by it could be applied to the development of any other particular
virtue. Patience, generosity, compassion, will all require the development of
capacities to see specific values and needs in a situation, and we will need
the help and input of others in the development of these capacities. Then, we
can come to respond to them appropriately, as reasons for action. In essence,
if you’re interested in being a virtuous person who acts for the right reasons,
you should work on having these pro-social attitudes, rather than on trying to
somehow never confabulate. <o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Kathleen Murphy-Hollieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02905930670976270299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-10165207322960101882024-01-24T08:00:00.049+00:002024-01-25T00:09:09.067+00:00The Sense of Existence<p> Today's post is by <a href="https://univ-lille.academia.edu/AlexandreBillon">Alexandre Billon</a> (Université de Lille) on his recent paper, "<a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/ALETSO-19.pdf">The Sense of Existence</a>" (<i>Ergo</i> 2023).</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRXgxXkA6dC3jKi9tbDEti2prlj21s-9j8EjW2EPMzNFu36ehjsIspZMZF_Jl_r0snsj4aw1dd7gyNREDncQVLa20jSYABN9asjYnANokY0L-E3FmNdHVWA1GNo-xu3JJdH792isN173B58zROL_AKfOg8ydb1_5Fn_0kgBGm_fCR98wt_3nVtXHb8zVZJ/s614/Picture1.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="478" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRXgxXkA6dC3jKi9tbDEti2prlj21s-9j8EjW2EPMzNFu36ehjsIspZMZF_Jl_r0snsj4aw1dd7gyNREDncQVLa20jSYABN9asjYnANokY0L-E3FmNdHVWA1GNo-xu3JJdH792isN173B58zROL_AKfOg8ydb1_5Fn_0kgBGm_fCR98wt_3nVtXHb8zVZJ/w156-h200/Picture1.png" width="156" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Alexandre Billon</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Things we perceive typically seem to be real to us. Unlike Bigfoot or Pegasus, this sparrow flying above the building for example seems to be real to me and I indeed judge that it is real. The sense of reality is the kind of awareness or seeming that underlies such judgments of reality. </p><p>There has been a lot of work on the sense of reality lately in the philosophy of mind, in psychology, and even in aesthetics (think about the difference between an apple on a trompe l'oeil and a regular painting). The terminology is not quite settled, however: some talk of the sense of reality, others of the sense of presence, yet others of "real presence". Nor is the conceptual landscape: it is sometimes unclear whether all authors who talk about the sense of reality talk about the same thing.</p><p>Although it is usually ignored, there is also a long tradition, in philosophy of studying the sense of reality. Hume and Kant have had interesting insights about the "idea of existence", the 18th century Encyclopedists (Diderot, Turgot), 19th-century Ideologists (Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, Maine de Biran) as well as major 20th-century figures such as Dilthey, Husserl, and Bergson developed interesting accounts of the "feeling of existence" or the "feeling of presence" some of which were based, or at least closely tied, to the psychology of their time.</p><p>My aim in this paper was twofold. First I wanted to draw on the contemporary literature and on the philosophical tradition to brush a landscape of the various possible theories of the sense of reality and put forward a consistent terminology for these theories. That required to get clear on the meaning of "real", and I decided to focus on reality in the sense of existence: what is real in this sense is what really exists.</p><p>My second aim was to assess these various theories. Focusing mainly on "derealization" (a condition in which people perceive their surroundings and themselves as unreal) I argue that no extant theory of the sense of reality quite succeeds, and that we should carefully distinguish the sense of reality from the various senses to which some theories have identified it: </p><p>-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the sense of resistance, </p><p>-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the sense of phenomenological depth (the awareness that the object has hidden parts exhibited by so-called “amodal completion”), </p><p>-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the sense of perceptual presence (the awareness that the object belongs to the same spatial manifold as me), </p><p>-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the sense of the temporally present, </p><p>-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the sense of directedness (the awareness of being directly related to the object), </p><p>-<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and the sense of affective value (the awareness of the object is or at least can be affectively moving).</p><p>At the end of the paper, I put forward an alternative theory of the sense of reality that given our present state of knowledge seems to fare better than all other theories. This alternative theory construes the sense of reality as a sense of substantiality. I indeed suggest that normally, we are implicitly and more or less determinately aware that unlike say, virtual objects, the things we perceive have a certain ordinary substrate that gives them substantiality and that this substrate endows the things with a sense of being real. This sense of substantiality would be lacking in derealization. </p>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-2763774794421899352024-01-17T08:00:00.111+00:002024-01-17T18:16:40.769+00:00Receptive Publics<p>Today's post is by <a href="https://joshuahabgoodcoote.com/">Joshua Habgood-Coote</a> and Nadja El Kassar on their recent paper, <a href="https://philarchive.org/rec/HABRPN">Receptive Publics</a> (<i>Ergo</i>, forthcoming). Joshua Habgood-Coote is a research fellow at the school of philosophy, religion, and history of science at the university of Leeds. <a href="https://nataliealanaashton.notion.site/nataliealanaashton/Home-c6e13a3024b845c18a6d5fb787855476">Natalie Ashton</a> is a research associate at VU Amsterdam, <a href="https://www.unilu.ch/en/faculties/faculty-of-humanities-and-social-sciences/institutes-departements-and-research-centres/department-of-philosophy/staff/prof-dr-nadja-el-kassar/#tab=c148638">Nadja El Kassar</a> is Professor of Philosophy at University of Lucerne.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqvjWn_jSjAc2AsjzEZOIvS0EsQMYhaByDQvPfqab_rcVnxi68unBSZPFgE9eQyGQYZhFu9xKRHNGPzXnAIQtWPOJ34HdYpae3AKlhku0xzPeHFCHxWQHuyLf4Jvub-YLsOIn-8-tHaAzIltycviD5FYM4XsXcJRqTOB8OCzmSDH2mWtJA_Vra1T0qKg1u/s1280/EVENTPHOTOGRAPHYBRISTOL%20WEB%20457%20EP3_3537.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="853" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqvjWn_jSjAc2AsjzEZOIvS0EsQMYhaByDQvPfqab_rcVnxi68unBSZPFgE9eQyGQYZhFu9xKRHNGPzXnAIQtWPOJ34HdYpae3AKlhku0xzPeHFCHxWQHuyLf4Jvub-YLsOIn-8-tHaAzIltycviD5FYM4XsXcJRqTOB8OCzmSDH2mWtJA_Vra1T0qKg1u/w133-h200/EVENTPHOTOGRAPHYBRISTOL%20WEB%20457%20EP3_3537.jpeg" width="133" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joshua Habgood-Coote</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><p>It is common to hear the following kind of complaint:</p><blockquote style="border: medium none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">You can’t say anything these days! You never know who might get offended, or whether you’re going to get cancelled for saying something totally innocuous. Back in my day we just said it like it was, we were all a lot more thick-skinned, and we just came out and said uncomfortable truths.</p></blockquote><p>This complaint makes a historical comparison: things used to be better because you could say what you thought. Both better psychologically—we weren’t spending our whole time in a defensive crouch—and epistemically—we could get to the truth, even when it was uncomfortable. And this is no longer the case.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK9ovBwoD2XANsIyixE6abq4XfehwR2bjEjAyiCb3X-wGtDIZxZyrZYIOyx9-fuqRs22CCwrs7HKZ5Wa2aCHjI4xj5D1Mo2Q4eJBjWICNuQKL5RphHeigp0W9GOn066bwCUdY83b6P99BURRTYXDE_C51pcUz4wKFHB2wXrGcyxagJpiDPwKWxF3xtAGyf/s630/PastedGraphic-1.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="630" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK9ovBwoD2XANsIyixE6abq4XfehwR2bjEjAyiCb3X-wGtDIZxZyrZYIOyx9-fuqRs22CCwrs7HKZ5Wa2aCHjI4xj5D1Mo2Q4eJBjWICNuQKL5RphHeigp0W9GOn066bwCUdY83b6P99BURRTYXDE_C51pcUz4wKFHB2wXrGcyxagJpiDPwKWxF3xtAGyf/w161-h176/PastedGraphic-1.png" width="161" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Natalie Ashton<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>At this point it’s going to be tempting to contest both the historical and the contemporary part of the complaint. Hold your horses: we’re not interested in whether the complaint is true. Rather, we’re interested in the kind of criticism it makes. Like so much of the criticism of contemporary discourse, concerns about cancelling and the censorious youth are centred around what it is possible and permissible <i>to say</i>. The quality of speech is surely an important part of the epistemic quality of public discourse, but surely just as important a factor is the quality of public<i> listening</i>. In fact, we suspect that a significant reason why people complain about not being able to say anything these days is that they haven’t acquired the listening skills to process and understand the political concerns raised by minority groups.<div><br /><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwcuQYl3HA7oTfhC2-sRjKFwKrItqtzh7Rsp4dQ6bzERmk3uLkcdJHhStX3kcfP8l8Ia6BnOK4_EUkc3EV0xJsi19hispdithgwRcGLcUKXW69ZEy7pYNlgHiGfINcwwQnwK6HwcQGXBmWLb0CBS28hOf6wFfP-4-3J2kxs2p96fm064cvhDX8XwdVFds8/s313/Screenshot%202023-09-20%20174332.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="312" data-original-width="313" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwcuQYl3HA7oTfhC2-sRjKFwKrItqtzh7Rsp4dQ6bzERmk3uLkcdJHhStX3kcfP8l8Ia6BnOK4_EUkc3EV0xJsi19hispdithgwRcGLcUKXW69ZEy7pYNlgHiGfINcwwQnwK6HwcQGXBmWLb0CBS28hOf6wFfP-4-3J2kxs2p96fm064cvhDX8XwdVFds8/w178-h177/Screenshot%202023-09-20%20174332.jpg" width="178" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nadja El Kassar</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>In <i>Receptive Publics</i> (forthoming in Ergo), we try to open up a set of questions about the quality of political listening. Drawing on the history of liberation movements, we suggest that there is an important set of discursive spaces which have been established with the goal of allowing non-marginalised people to listen to marginalised people. Promoting and supporting this kind of space is a pressing political issue </p><p>To start off with, we offer a diagnosis of what we call the listening problem. We argue that the listening problem has three parts. The first is the high social costs of speech in the public sphere, which we argue is a consequence of the unmanaged epistemic friction between different epistemic frameworks. The second is the unequal recognition and distribution of epistemic labour between marginalised and non-marginalised people. And the third is antagonistic relationships which impede the progress of new concepts into the public sphere.</p><p>Next, we suggest that within the public sphere tradition there is a lack of resources for thinking about spaces for collective political listening. Besides the main public sphere, and counterpublic groups which bring together members of marginalised groups, there are receptive publics: spaces for the reception of ideas from counterpublics, and or the development of the skills needed to listen effectively to marginalised speakers.</p><p>With the concept of a receptive public in hand, we apply it to some examples. We consider to what extent the feminist podcast the <i>Guilty Feminist</i> and the audio social media app <i>Clubhouse</i> have enabled receptive public spaces. Part of the goal of the paper is to open up a bridge between social epistemology and work in media studies which employs the notions of a public sphere and a counterpublic. We think that social epistemologists have a good deal to learn from media studies researchers—and vice versa—and research into different kinds of discursive spheres offers a good opportunity to establish conceptual connections between these research projects.</p></div>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-47103281795645141132024-01-10T08:00:00.040+00:002024-01-10T15:58:17.240+00:00The case of poor postpartum mental health: a consequence of an evolutionary mismatch–not of an evolutionary trade-off<div>Today's post is by <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Orli-Dahan">Orli Dahan</a> (Tel-Hai College) on her recent paper, "<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09910-4">The case of poor postpartum mental health: a consequence of an evolutionary mismatch–not of an evolutionary trade-off</a>" (<i>Biology & Philosophy</i>, 2023).</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiABSqOZADgCBTZpYfxmBV8yGI5ErMEjHXho04QLeVRCvZArqpPvK61tZ3pLf13VmxCbRDq0lDYfQwlb7uSPfNyTqaQi5ODwp8ridT2mQjMj238_PbBhUNYTaewIARlIn6DWUErX9GZ7_fQPgZIOfjCA8c1cBDHkysgqqdN8p4d-0GuQN_E0YValow4BfjN/s1836/1694603172954.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1836" data-original-width="1080" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiABSqOZADgCBTZpYfxmBV8yGI5ErMEjHXho04QLeVRCvZArqpPvK61tZ3pLf13VmxCbRDq0lDYfQwlb7uSPfNyTqaQi5ODwp8ridT2mQjMj238_PbBhUNYTaewIARlIn6DWUErX9GZ7_fQPgZIOfjCA8c1cBDHkysgqqdN8p4d-0GuQN_E0YValow4BfjN/w155-h263/1694603172954.jpg" width="155" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Orli Dahan</td></tr></tbody></table><div><div><br /></div><div>In my paper I criticize an evolutionary explanation to the phenomena of postpartum mood disorders and offer a different evolutionary explanation. These disorders develop shortly after childbirth in a significant proportion of women and have severe effects. I suggest that poor postpartum mental health is a classical mismatch situation: Namely, that a trait or function adaptive in a previous human environment becomes maladaptive in the modern environment. This is an argument used to explain many human health problems, such as diabetes and allergies. </div><div><br /></div><div>The evolutionary explanation that I reject is the ‘evolutionary trade-off’ explanation. According to it, poor postpartum mental health is a consequence of an evolutionary trade-off – a compromise of neurological changes in the maternal brain during pregnancy which, on the one hand, maintain pregnancy, and on the other, increase the likelihood for women after giving birth to develop psychopathology. </div><div><br /></div><div>I demonstrate that the trade-off explanation ignores the crucial event of childbirth. I elaborate on environmental features of childbirth, a physiological process that is substantially different in the current versus evolutionary childbirth and postpartum setting, and show that maternal brain neuroplasticity and biochemical alterations are not an evolutionary trade-off, but an adaptation. </div><div><br /></div><div>Additionally, the incidents of poor postpartum mental health are better viewed as a maladaptation of the typical modern environments – an evolutionary mismatch. Thus, the potential to suffer from poor mental health in postpartum is an external, dependent on contemporary childbirth and postpartum environments, and not due to any essential property women possess as a result of evolutionary compromise.</div><div><br /></div><div>I argue that many women today are at risk for poor postpartum mental health, but not because it is an evolutionary trade-off. The approach of an evolutionary trade-off posits that there is something inherently not healthy in postpartum women: The tendency toward poor mental health is the price a woman must pay for becoming a mother. Instead, I argue that the physiological process of becoming a mother once included the triggering of feeling like a superwoman, but the modern birth setting and post-birth environment have turned this adaptation into the maladaptation we now face. </div><div><br /></div><div>Women after a physiological childbirth are probably adapted to feel euphoric pleasure and enhanced self-esteem – as a natural aid in adjusting to motherhood. However, most deliveries nowadays are not physiological deliveries, but highly medicalized and traumatic. Thus, unfortunately, the exceptional adaptation, in our current setting, became a maladaptation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Furthermore, I claim that accuracy in use of evolutionary concepts is crucial for making good science, as well as for developing beneficial practices. Hypotheses have consequences for future research programs, psychological and medical treatments, prevention strategies, and intervention procedures. Thus, mere screening postpartum women at risk is insufficient. Distinguishing between evolutionary concepts (such as ‘evolutionary mismatch’ and ‘evolutionary trade-off’) in the context of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood is vital for developing more accurate preventions and interventions.</div></div><div><br /></div>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-59774934860716231092024-01-03T08:00:00.009+00:002024-01-03T08:00:00.134+00:00On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories<p>The blog post today is by <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/patrick-brooks">Patrick Brooks </a>(Rutgers University) on his recent paper, "<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-023-02040-3">On the origin of conspiracy theories</a>" (<i>Philosophical Studies</i>, 2023).</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyXMGF7qv2YiqoNXKmk7zuPmsr0J4sQfvuAvnJlpiwwsdajgLHZbHrjk1jVw5ZObZRRtbLF1YjNCLB_B3pCxOw4MCoWScgkqRLUv_j21d2e1hBsacB8IWLl_M2npSMjtLonxJguLqwY1P8nnO1JJq19V_PPpWX8cBC2WbntZf7YsnE_2GTmLXP9IssPGvy/s1080/PB%20Profile%20Picture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyXMGF7qv2YiqoNXKmk7zuPmsr0J4sQfvuAvnJlpiwwsdajgLHZbHrjk1jVw5ZObZRRtbLF1YjNCLB_B3pCxOw4MCoWScgkqRLUv_j21d2e1hBsacB8IWLl_M2npSMjtLonxJguLqwY1P8nnO1JJq19V_PPpWX8cBC2WbntZf7YsnE_2GTmLXP9IssPGvy/w213-h213/PB%20Profile%20Picture.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patrick Brooks</td></tr></tbody></table><p>In the last, say, 20 years or so, a lot has been written about conspiracy theories. Much of this has focused on what conspiracy theories are, why people believe them, and so on. Very little has been said, however, about why people might posit a conspiracy theory in the first place. My recent paper, “On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories” (2023) attempts to do this for a significant subset of conspiracy theories—namely, those conspiracy theories that run counter to an official or standard account of some event of phenomenon. Here’s a very brief sketch of the argument.</p><p>People in open, broadly democratic societies have a somewhat naïve view of how their societies and the institutions within them work. These are the kinds of things we learned about, e.g., the scientific method or governmental processes, in primary and secondary school. Many people think of science, for example, as a highly collaborative process in which loads of very smart people engage in a good faith pursuit of the truth. Having this sort of understanding of something like science generates certain normative expectations on scientists. Indeed, if we think that scientists are engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth, we expect them to be responsive to evidence, willing to engage with critics, etc., because these sorts of behaviors are conducive to figuring out how the world is.</p><p>So, suppose that some theory becomes the standard view—i.e., the one that is widely held and endorsed by relevant epistemic authorities—for some event or phenomena. Further suppose that there are some anomalies that are not captured by the theory. Finally, imagine that someone either points out these anomalies as a problem for the theory or else comes up with some rival hypothesis. How should proponents of the official view respond, given the assumption that they’re engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth? Clearly, they ought to respond by taking the evidence seriously, by looking carefully at the rival theory, and so on. Unfortunately, however, this is not always how scientists or other epistemic authorities respond to this sort of thing. Too often, they dismiss people out of hand, resort to name-calling, and so on. That is, they act in ways that are inconsistent with the norms generated by being engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth. Sometimes, people attempt to resolve such tensions by positing a conspiracy theory (or so I claim!). </p><p>Here's an example from the paper. In 1947, something crash landed on Mac Brazel's ranch in Roswell, NM. The Roswell Army Air Field initially said that they had recovered a “flying disc” at the site of the crash. This is the story that ran in the Roswell Daily Record. Over the next several decades, the U.S. Gov’t changed their story a half-dozen times. Whenever someone inevitably pointed out a flaw with whatever story was the “official” one at the time, the response from various officials and epistemic authorities was to dismiss that person as a kook or crank obsessed with “little green men.” These people then come up with their own (often conspiratorial) explanations for why the epistemic authorities are behaving in the way that they are rather than like people who are engaged in a good faith pursuit of the truth. </p><div><br /></div>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-55935090149116918692023-12-27T08:00:00.036+00:002023-12-28T15:13:07.064+00:00Addressing Autistic Mental Health from the First Person<p>Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos and Gert-Jan Vanaken. Themistoklis (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Psychiatry at The American College of Greece and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He works on phenomenological psychiatry, focusing on treatment methods that make sense of the point of view of client users and their communities. </p><p>Gert-Jan (he/him) is a post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp. He works at the intersections of bioethics, disability studies and clinical autism research. His work focuses on developing neurodiversity-affirming autism care practices. Here, they argue that interventions for autism should address autistic mental health directly, and that a first-person approach is key for adapting psychotherapy to the needs of the autistic population. The full article is <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1225152/full">here</a>, available open access.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHjJiw0PROb_1rwxZ9mBtPm7vpx1lCtWxxfP_itm0L3fOKmPktoIrQYCKNGCFvutHxviMJ1HMv_Pn8BN9Fk3NW5JfpvuilOqfZdvbrrsP-iPzxjONd4qNwEWPBV_JZ83CcCbxnV4F9J9DhE1FqxgxRCb_xyRPlKr82D9B0FipI6YDpb8vs6Uz1V7CK-LK0/s1365/pantaz.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="1364" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHjJiw0PROb_1rwxZ9mBtPm7vpx1lCtWxxfP_itm0L3fOKmPktoIrQYCKNGCFvutHxviMJ1HMv_Pn8BN9Fk3NW5JfpvuilOqfZdvbrrsP-iPzxjONd4qNwEWPBV_JZ83CcCbxnV4F9J9DhE1FqxgxRCb_xyRPlKr82D9B0FipI6YDpb8vs6Uz1V7CK-LK0/w200-h200/pantaz.jpeg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Themistoklis Pantazakos<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><blockquote><span style="color: #ffd966;"><br />"[R]ight from the start, from the time someone came up with the word ‘autism’, the condition has been judged from the outside, by its appearances, and not from the inside according to how it is experienced."</span> </blockquote><blockquote>- Donna Williams (Autism: An Inside Out Approach)</blockquote><p><br />Autistic people face a mental health crisis that is hard to overstate. Compared to the general population, autistics among us are significantly more likely to experience most major psychiatric disorders, two and three times more in the case of anxiety and depressive disorders respectively. Alarmingly, 31% of the premature deaths of autistics is due to suicide compared to 4% in the general population. <br /><br /> Public perception is often that the problem of autistic people is autism itself. This view is shared with the dominant, medical approach to autism, which conceptualizes it as a set of neurological and psychological dysfunctions within the individual. Correspondingly, interventions for autism most often aim at making the person less autistic. Particularly so, behavioral interventions, which constitute an overwhelming majority of the interventions publicly funded and undertaken for autism, are purposed to eradicate ‘problematic’, autistic behaviors and establish typical, pro-social ones. </p><p><br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQrADeQhwzbdw6pn19aEiq720rl7i5_ObOpXSXylph3iX5PdgpgUe4518T8babP6zVe8p_CuLByXqalvbIdjhBg35D51AorZbufex6OxuMwnKZH8KptkMiL2dmHxOhBC9gJOXZU68-E5IOkSzcx34leIdcOZqND4wL5aEFkY9jDg_EB0dMfIDRHL0k6IZj/s934/Gert-Jan.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="934" data-original-width="916" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQrADeQhwzbdw6pn19aEiq720rl7i5_ObOpXSXylph3iX5PdgpgUe4518T8babP6zVe8p_CuLByXqalvbIdjhBg35D51AorZbufex6OxuMwnKZH8KptkMiL2dmHxOhBC9gJOXZU68-E5IOkSzcx34leIdcOZqND4wL5aEFkY9jDg_EB0dMfIDRHL0k6IZj/w196-h200/Gert-Jan.jpeg" width="196" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gert-Jan Vanaken</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p> First, our paper highlights that this view is not well-supported by the evidence. If autistic ‘symptom’ severity was indeed to blame for the mental health crisis, we would expect to see a positive correlation between the degree of autistic characteristics and mental health problems, which cannot be found at this point. In line with a social model of disability and with claims made by autistic self-advocates, we cite preliminary evidence pointing to a correlation between the wellbeing of autistic individuals and the perceived quality of support and the degree of social acceptance they enjoy. We conclude that what is necessary to address the crisis is not yet more ‘symptom’-targeting interventions and attempted normalization of autistic individuals but approaches that directly aim to improve mental health instead. <br /><br /> Second, we argue that contemporary psychotherapy is ideally posed to fill this lacuna in the autistic mental healthcare landscape if it overcomes a major contradiction. On the one hand, to be neurodiversity-affirming, psychotherapy needs to respect and embrace the ways in which autistic people experience the world, and their different ways of being. On the other hand, psychotherapy is in principle posed to maintain an element of critical disbelief towards what an individual professes to know about themselves. Indeed, the job of therapy is to work against the ‘default mode’, the cognitive and emotional automations of clients, when these automations fail them. Helping clients thus necessitates taking them seriously, not literally. <br /><br /> This impasse, we contend, may be solved by utilizing phenomenology, the philosophical method of inquiring about one’s experience ‘from within’. For medicine in particular, phenomenological approaches emphasize how conditions of interest are lived as unitary experiences, not as disparate biological bodily symptoms. Correspondingly, the focus of phenomenology-based mental health approaches is to make this experience better: to minimize suffering and maximize enjoyment for the involved individual. <br /><br /> Our proposal is not to straightforwardly ask clients what works for them and abide by that. We encourage therapists to maintain the critical attitude that is sine qua non for psychotherapy. What we promote is that the process is occasionally subjected to a phenomenological check: a review of how treatment has impacted the subjective well-being of the client. Therapists should not shy away from trying something new because it does not come easy to the client but, all the same, they should drop the plan if, given enough time, no substantial improvement is noted from a first-person point of view. <br /><br /> On a practical level, we are very sympathetic to the further dissemination of the practice of autistic therapists, who are more naturally posed to know what it is like to be autistic. Correspondingly, we urge non-autistic mental health practitioners to familiarize themselves with phenomenological literature on autism, and researchers to further develop such literature, following the young but strong movement to look at autism ‘from within’. <br /><br /></p>Kathleen Murphy-Hollieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02905930670976270299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-47905329901497416792023-12-20T08:00:00.001+00:002023-12-20T11:06:51.240+00:00Is OCD Epistemically Irrational?<p>Today’s post is by <a href="https://pablohubacherhaerle.wixsite.com/website">Pablo Hubacher Haerle</a> on his recent paper “<a href="https://philarchive.org/rec/HAEIOE">Is OCD Epistemically Irrational?</a>” (Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 2023). Pablo Hubacher Haerle is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is on the epistemology and metaphysics of the mind. He is particularly interested in desire, inquiry and the philosophy of psychiatry.<br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9uXC_PlLc-BE49p_nXL9xjuPPj92Yes9IqkvMVHWTim5avLCUnD2ErREKyAViKV4ah5Xa7yk7NHl-uNlAAN0inr3lYso0_jgVTn1f3jH67-HvmFkqKgdNvyzz9nIBF0Sv29x5tKuFco6Z60-R_SHJ5ToOz-HlOCF-aYAqokvdjgzwPGNUyanRyK5rZ-YJ/s640/032_32.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9uXC_PlLc-BE49p_nXL9xjuPPj92Yes9IqkvMVHWTim5avLCUnD2ErREKyAViKV4ah5Xa7yk7NHl-uNlAAN0inr3lYso0_jgVTn1f3jH67-HvmFkqKgdNvyzz9nIBF0Sv29x5tKuFco6Z60-R_SHJ5ToOz-HlOCF-aYAqokvdjgzwPGNUyanRyK5rZ-YJ/w304-h203/032_32.jpeg" width="304" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pablo Hubacher Haerle</td></tr></tbody></table><p>On the mainstream picture of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), people experiencing OCD have intrusive thoughts which lead them to form epistemically irrational beliefs. Consider this classic example: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">Amelia is driving in their car. Suddenly, she hears a weird noise which she can’t identify. She forms the belief that she’s run someone over and spends hours looking for the supposed victim. </p></blockquote><p>But it is true that Amelia must have a <i>belief</i> that she’s run someone over? Following recent advances in the literature (<a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/KAMOA">Kampa 2020</a>; <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/TAYDKA">Taylor 2021</a>), I consider it much more plausible to construe Amelia’s recurrent thoughts as <i>what if</i> <i>questions.</i> This matters for the assessment of rationality, since the rationality conditions for questions are<i> different</i> from those for beliefs. Imagine that you discover an unknown spoor while hiking in the wild. Here, it seems rationally permitted to <i>ask the question</i> whether this means that a bear is near, even though it would be<i> unreasonable</i> to believe that a bear is, in fact, near. Moreover, given how high the stakes are, it might even be mandated to ask that question. </p><p>This doesn’t mean that questions can <i>never</i> be irrational, though. As<a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/FRICA-2"> Jane Friedman (2019)</a> convincingly argues, sometimes reality is so obvious it would be ridiculous to question it. If you’re directly looking at me, it doesn’t make sense for you to ask where I am. But even if you were to think that people like Amelia are irrational because they’re inquiring into questions whose answers are just completely obvious, there are other instances of OCD where the grounds for a charge of epistemic irrationality are much weaker. Consider this case, adapted from a clinical case study (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25738067/">Bhatia and Kaur 2015</a>; <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-54144-000">Williams and Wetterneck 2019</a>): <br /></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">For four years, Joseph has had uncontrolled repetitive thoughts about being gay. He is constantly distressed about this. He constantly has doubts about his sexual orientation. </p></blockquote><p>Joseph suffers from the condition of <i>sexual</i> obsessive-compulsive disorder where the object of endless inquiry is not something in the external world, but instead the patient’s own desires. This complicates the assessment of rationality since now we’re not guaranteed an objective viewpoint on how much evidence for this hypothesis Joseph actually has. He might have repressed desires. Moreover it’s unclear we can trust his own testimony because he might be affected by motivated reasoning as a result of homosexuality still being heavily sanctioned in our societies. Thus, it’s not true that Joseph’s inquiry is irrational in virtue of questioning the completely obvious. </p><p>I conclude that so far we don’t know what’s epistemically irrational about this specific kind of OCD. It might be that OCD isn’t irrational after all, or that its irrationality is merely practical, or that there isn’t <i>one</i> form of irrationality common to all cases of OCD. Personally, I believe that what makes OCD epistemically irrational is the fact that it induces <i>unsuccessful</i> inquiries. But whatever conclusion will be reached in this debate, it’s clear that—in line with research by <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-epistemic-innocence-of-irrational-beliefs-9780198863984?cc=gb&lang=en&">Lisa Bortolotti (2020)</a> and <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/RATIBU">Sahanika Ratnayake (2021)</a>—also in the case of OCD we cannot distinguish between the pathological and the non-pathological by appeal to epistemic irrationality alone. <br /><br /></p>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-21519788378477832582023-12-13T08:00:00.001+00:002023-12-15T14:37:32.150+00:00Introspection in the Disordered Mind and the Superintrospectionitis ThesisThis blog post is by <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/alexandre-billon" target="_blank">Alexandre Billon</a> who presents his argument in a paper recently published in the <a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2023/00000030/f0020009/art00003;jsessionid=5sl2lvqlanm97.x-ic-live-02" target="_blank">Journal of Consciousness Studies</a>. This paper is a commentary on Kammerer and Frankish's <a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2023/00000030/f0020009/art00002">article</a> on what forms introspection could take. <div><br /><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjT7YUA7-HIUzBm8FJ_49aPdmo91Jss7EUtGIF6ILnb03M7j9D7MV5GtKWw9rXbrCHxnPbCQQZrIjFZsDutjXRd_mjco4KtJZ7y_wpfk5F5_mBB3BbzGJQXjG0D9xz880wHjDrze03JdnKjh34ept1-iZqe3iyr9onwoKUz55Ammgg9ySDjRz2QJGkbWk/s906/Screenshot%202023-11-15%20at%2006.45.28.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="898" data-original-width="906" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjT7YUA7-HIUzBm8FJ_49aPdmo91Jss7EUtGIF6ILnb03M7j9D7MV5GtKWw9rXbrCHxnPbCQQZrIjFZsDutjXRd_mjco4KtJZ7y_wpfk5F5_mBB3BbzGJQXjG0D9xz880wHjDrze03JdnKjh34ept1-iZqe3iyr9onwoKUz55Ammgg9ySDjRz2QJGkbWk/s320/Screenshot%202023-11-15%20at%2006.45.28.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alexandre Billon</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /><div><br /></div><div>A couple of authors have suggested that schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder (DD) involve an enhancement of introspective abilities regarding certain important features of our experiences --- call that the Superintrospectionitis Thesis. <br /><br /><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Schizophrenia</span></h4>In the phenomenological tradition, Blankenburg argued that reports of some people with schizophrenia ‘reveal, in a kind of immediacy the conditions of possibility of our existence that otherwise remain concealed’ (<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/37090/pdf" target="_blank">Blankenburg, 2001</a>, p. 308). Likewise, <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/37095/" target="_blank">Kimura (2001</a>, p. 335) suggested that schizophrenia might render manifest, through introspection, the ‘innate structure of all human beings that happens to be hidden in healthy people owing to some mechanism or other’. More recently <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-017-9532-0#:~:text=Alterity%20is%20thus%20a%20constitutive,self%2Dduplication%20occurring%20in%20schizophrenia." target="_blank">Stephenson and Parnas (2018)</a> have compared schizophrenia to an ‘amplified mirror image’ that reveals a ‘differentiation or potential alterity implicit in the dynamic nature of subjectivity’.<br /><br /><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Depersonalization Disorder</span></h4>The term ‘depersonalization’ comes from the works of the Swiss diarist Amiel who arguably suffered from it but was quite ambivalent with regard to it. He sometimes described it as an awful psychological disorder, sometimes as a metaphysical blessing and a confirmation of Schopenhauer’s Buddhist views on the unreality of self (<a href="https://www.abebooks.fr/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31155310264&searchurl=an%3Damiel%26sortby%3D17%26tn%3Djournal%2Bintime&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title2" target="_blank">Amiel, 1894</a>). This ambivalence about DD is still common. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even though DD is usually dysphoric and the strange experiences of people with DD are usually considered misleading, the popular writer Suzanne Segal, aided by her Buddhist teachers, has argued that her DD was the first step of a spiritually enlightening journey (<a href="https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Collision-With-the-Infinite-by-Suzanne-Segal-author/9781916290334" target="_blank">Segal, 1996</a>). She has been followed by some philosophers who saw in DD a confirmation of Buddhist views on the unreality of the self (see manuscript by Chadha, "Depersonalization and the sense of self") and has led many patients to question the deep meaning of DD (as witnessed by frequent discussions of DD forums).</div><div><br />I consider and reject various arguments for the Superintrospectionitis Thesis (coming from the phenomenological and Buddhist traditions and from evolutionary psychiatry) and I provide a simple, tentative argument against it, the “fine-tuning argument”. <br /><br /><h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #f1c232;">The Fine-Tuning Argument</span></h4>Suppose you open a radio receiver, choose one wire randomly, and disconnect it, or connect it to a different slot. Suppose that, as a result, you cannot listen to CDs on your stereo anymore. You might still be able to listen to your favorite radio stations. Maybe not. But the chances that it might now better receive the range of radio waves it used to receive, or that it might receive a new range of radio waves, seem extremely meager. The reason why is that a stereo is a fine-tuned system, that is, a system optimized to fulfill a certain set of functions, and whose functioning is extremely sensitive to a set of parameters. </div><div><br /></div><div>Accordingly, if you modify these parameters, you are likely to end up with something that cannot properly fulfil some of its functions, and extremely unlikely to obtain something that fulfils some of its functions better. Now, our minds are likewise fine-tuned: they are optimized to fulfil a certain set of functions, including introspection. On the most plausible accounts, schizophrenia, and DD are mental disorders, a mental disorder involves a (harmful) dysfunction of the mind (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1594724/" target="_blank">Wakefield, 1992</a>), and it is extremely unlikely that a dysfunction of a fine-tuned system might make it better at fulfilling some of its (other) functions such as introspection.<br /><br />The Fine-Tuning Argument does not forbid that some people with mental disorders might become better at introspection after some time, by a form of overcompensation or hyperspecialization (compare with auditory overcompensation to early blindness). Unfortunately, advocates of the Superintrospectionitis Thesis all claim that the earliest symptoms of schizophrenia (in fact the prodromes) and depersonalization disorder reveal a form of introspective enhancement. So overcompensation and hyperspecialization are excluded here.</div><div><br /></div><div>(For interest, Kammerer and Frankish respond to this commentary <a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2023/00000030/f0020009/art00018?fbclid=IwAR2xbcj1aXqW7eiG84WVSRrBn3M9ai_nu3DM86CX7AL7FlQvgQZhoo5eEAY">here</a>). <br /><br /></div></div></div>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-15890559776598510952023-12-06T09:40:00.001+00:002023-12-10T00:09:13.368+00:00Silence<p>This post is by Dan Degerman, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, soon to join the new project EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award. (A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog on 15th September 2023.)</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjJ_l98JTDanrInQyaTBqBQnKc9W7Jbi2zF_uOyXCOj7b7-xKJufWwx1NcY-ZZqNEskPENrY02QI86mjqCPtozgWWnv18twki35qfD1OVBTzEZhlvt4vCkbkt7a_RVZ3C7HzUVc9aMMmjlU36P2A_yL_vjsOPUMJBWNRbTq61PkLtQPCBxj4_4WGA853U/s2000/EPIC%20team.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="2000" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjJ_l98JTDanrInQyaTBqBQnKc9W7Jbi2zF_uOyXCOj7b7-xKJufWwx1NcY-ZZqNEskPENrY02QI86mjqCPtozgWWnv18twki35qfD1OVBTzEZhlvt4vCkbkt7a_RVZ3C7HzUVc9aMMmjlU36P2A_yL_vjsOPUMJBWNRbTq61PkLtQPCBxj4_4WGA853U/w400-h300/EPIC%20team.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some members of team EPIC: Matthew Broome, Ian Kidd, <br />Dan Degerman, Havi Carel, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, and Fred Cooper.</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>Silence is an important phenomenon in mental health. But while philosophers have had much to say about the social silencing of people with psychiatric diagnoses, other ways in which silence can feature in psychopathology have been underexplored. In a recent workshop at the University of Bristol, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we sought to begin to address this neglect by exploring the different faces of silence in psychopathology.</p><p><a href="https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/departments/philosophy/people/ian.kidd" target="_blank">Ian Kidd</a> opened the workshop with a talk that explored painful silences common in bereavement grief. In particular, he focused on four silences, each characterised by a loss of communicative possibilities that follows the death of a loved one. This included, for example, silence as the loss of the distinctive communicative style of the deceased and silence as the permanent absence of narrative closure. For the person subject to these silences, they are painful for three reasons, Ian explained. Firstly, these silences cannot be filled. Secondly, they involve the awareness that the ways of being in the world the relationship with the deceased made possible are now impossible. Thirdly, they involve the awareness that one can no longer be the same person that one was with the deceased.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF5B97LSfSV77nTqyr7q_zIbDEnd09WvsLzyRZ1eKrZCAPRoUpW69QkKW-kN6anliwCmCT30xY2XLnfrv8yeIjrYALWbFQMYtsWC_UrVjAzFFfGLkYoAdAzmTucv1uXv71pMl0PoOyIRvW6DS2ITYjtknyY7K4CuwVLxDOALysWrQAmuEctB1418sgdGYl/s2048/Ian.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF5B97LSfSV77nTqyr7q_zIbDEnd09WvsLzyRZ1eKrZCAPRoUpW69QkKW-kN6anliwCmCT30xY2XLnfrv8yeIjrYALWbFQMYtsWC_UrVjAzFFfGLkYoAdAzmTucv1uXv71pMl0PoOyIRvW6DS2ITYjtknyY7K4CuwVLxDOALysWrQAmuEctB1418sgdGYl/s320/Ian.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ian Kidd<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />The second speaker, <a href="https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/communication-and-media/staff/richard-stupart/" target="_blank">Richard Stupart</a>, drew on accounts of investigative journalists working in South Sudan to shed light on some of the mental dangers of being silent. He argued that journalists are at a heightened risk of moral injury, referring to the negative psychological impact a person experiences when they are unable to respond to a situation in what they consider a morally appropriate way. Journalists in conflict and crisis situations are particularly vulnerable to such injury because they often find themselves subject to structural pressures that may prevent them from communicating their knowledge about morally charged stories.<div><br /><p></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7JuHIvmfTgXQA_f2fKKj5ebbnNovUGnCbQlnwAD2sFQ8Jf9qKWrggQ09v0ZqieJFf0GYJ2nWPN8obVZVQcCntv6HsWylFrGUkWKUQyBre29fOKDnwapAXW1kMrZNKdfZD2v_-SBHzVXeZCuP1kf08wOU-o_9huzS74FDDt6iiw1DDJYxrxQnfM7ie2jYZ/s2048/Richard.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7JuHIvmfTgXQA_f2fKKj5ebbnNovUGnCbQlnwAD2sFQ8Jf9qKWrggQ09v0ZqieJFf0GYJ2nWPN8obVZVQcCntv6HsWylFrGUkWKUQyBre29fOKDnwapAXW1kMrZNKdfZD2v_-SBHzVXeZCuP1kf08wOU-o_9huzS74FDDt6iiw1DDJYxrxQnfM7ie2jYZ/s320/Richard.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Stupart<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Inner speech in mental disorders was the subject of the next talk by <a href="https://sociology.exeter.ac.uk/staff/sam_wilkinson/">Sam Wilkinson</a>. He defended what he called a strong dialogical account of inner speech, which entails that all inner speech is directed at a recipient, namely, ourselves. This account also suggests, among other things, that inner speech plays a central role in shaping our identity. Sam then outlined some ways this account can help clarify the implications of inner speech and its absence in different mental disorders. For example, the strong dialogical account indicates that negative inner speech in anxiety and depression is not just an epiphenomenon of pre-existing a person’s feelings but that it can create a downward spiral of those feelings.<p></p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhinzpv-YXk1AIPge5i8dHWuTtZFOymmTHmeOZchZqUZQaPUSD0R7hvns-h_85GDHLCB3wgX_V-VVg81fkeQe5HnreN0Hknfn4f7RTGIkw8B0pQSggjFplNu9xvQW21c7P62wrix023mB7SK9ACSUpJjQHKAcMELcg6KRbQJhHz4YV6EpAgVxRDDCws5xA8/s2048/Sam.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhinzpv-YXk1AIPge5i8dHWuTtZFOymmTHmeOZchZqUZQaPUSD0R7hvns-h_85GDHLCB3wgX_V-VVg81fkeQe5HnreN0Hknfn4f7RTGIkw8B0pQSggjFplNu9xvQW21c7P62wrix023mB7SK9ACSUpJjQHKAcMELcg6KRbQJhHz4YV6EpAgVxRDDCws5xA8/s320/Sam.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sam Wilkinson<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p><br />The fourth talk by <a href="https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/anna.bortolan/" target="_blank">Anna Bortolan</a> examined experiences of silence in social anxiety. Drawing on some distinctions proposed in a recent <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-022-00652-5" target="_blank">paper</a> on silence in mood disorders, Anna showed that these capture experiences described by people with social anxiety as well. She then went beyond that account to argue that a further two experiences of silence can be discerned in accounts of social anxiety. The first is characterised by a perceived inability to fill certain silences when one wants to do so, and the second is accompanied by a diminished sense of agency over how silences are filled.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEkPWqGPrVq4T-IqTCXa1WX0eWoJe3uPVdUiQZaybafjrOWO4Nx4YATjm9IKZXSB2WGPKfg0O8TZFIoDJgaBOtWGrUVjFfWHd8GZmHUIXKaupWspaU4Z7sFiCKkQ7pLV92AzMjWkTuhfNjZahp1o0NQEUG5FwEUK4B2PN8mtuqFKD08g0VnQd6PMski8za/s2048/Anna.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEkPWqGPrVq4T-IqTCXa1WX0eWoJe3uPVdUiQZaybafjrOWO4Nx4YATjm9IKZXSB2WGPKfg0O8TZFIoDJgaBOtWGrUVjFfWHd8GZmHUIXKaupWspaU4Z7sFiCKkQ7pLV92AzMjWkTuhfNjZahp1o0NQEUG5FwEUK4B2PN8mtuqFKD08g0VnQd6PMski8za/s320/Anna.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anna Bortolan<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Finally, in <a href="https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Dan-Degerman-c9e8192b-1c94-4da5-8a7b-05b402f0e2a6/" target="_blank">my</a> talk, I argued for the importance of attending to first-person experiences of silence in psychopathology through a case study drawn from accounts of depression. Using a phenomenological framework inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty, I described an experience common in first-person accounts of depression that I termed empty silence. This is an unpleasant experience that involves a solicitation to speak and a breakdown in a person’s habitual relationship with words, which confronts them with their own outward and inner silence. I proceeded to argue that if lived repeatedly, it may give rise to bodily doubt in one’s ability to speak.</div><div><br /><p></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEbLQn11yYCiLJGCOeuwdfTbEGtHp1Y1LXPm22Rkyt41X3O1pjoT5J8PLNAE277zNuRo8yYY4QwUxV1TfVQYpEFGDz9E5SKVb2nVjcY6AK8T56E1jo02pwlU2l7fKF9fE0Xu8Q3txLeyycTe2mSKu0goYbNPW_HhOzu01djJqrR9n-_GtEj_-W0WwS_klt/s2048/Dan.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEbLQn11yYCiLJGCOeuwdfTbEGtHp1Y1LXPm22Rkyt41X3O1pjoT5J8PLNAE277zNuRo8yYY4QwUxV1TfVQYpEFGDz9E5SKVb2nVjcY6AK8T56E1jo02pwlU2l7fKF9fE0Xu8Q3txLeyycTe2mSKu0goYbNPW_HhOzu01djJqrR9n-_GtEj_-W0WwS_klt/s320/Dan.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dan Degerman<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /></div><div>If you are interested in learning more about the talks, presentation materials from most of them can be found <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n1h77y0i48b35zf/AACF5Yp7G4-DmwdhQZGPV8YMa?dl=0" target="_blank">here</a>. The talks were followed by wonderful discussions with the interdisciplinary audience that was in attendance in the room and online, and I want to extend heartfelt thanks to all those who participated.<p></p><p>The workshop was the capstone event for my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. However, it also served as an informal launch event for the EPIC project, with many of its team members in attendance, including Ian Kidd, Havi Carel, Matthew Broome, Fred Cooper, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, and myself. The conversations and explorations that began during this workshop on silence and psychopathology will continue as part of the <a href="https://epistemicinjusticeinhealthcareproject.blogspot.com" target="_blank">EPIC project</a>, and if you are interested in contributing or participating in some way, please <a href="mailto:dan.degerman@bristol.ac.uk">do get in touch</a>.</p><p><br /></p></div>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-69370919251604663342023-11-29T08:00:00.048+00:002023-11-29T08:00:00.138+00:00Remembering requires no reliability<p>This post is by Changsheng Lai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University).</p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy7pKmaKwCZyLONsrWeGH-Jdn9kowR7F4GpbdfTF95d7TFbYZ87ZcNNCM3pbxq0-lH-9MvuE9yhNVpYd84_72pk26DenWDVg-g-3FqUMbHDBmIeX5-v3QhPR60yXpjMf6sBrTXw7etYjyl8nH86pLsA9y9aQPoE-_EJXB74stih495-pdnjn4N4DxP7Zc/s696/Screenshot%202023-11-22%20at%2019.43.38.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="696" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy7pKmaKwCZyLONsrWeGH-Jdn9kowR7F4GpbdfTF95d7TFbYZ87ZcNNCM3pbxq0-lH-9MvuE9yhNVpYd84_72pk26DenWDVg-g-3FqUMbHDBmIeX5-v3QhPR60yXpjMf6sBrTXw7etYjyl8nH86pLsA9y9aQPoE-_EJXB74stih495-pdnjn4N4DxP7Zc/s320/Screenshot%202023-11-22%20at%2019.43.38.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Changsheng Lai</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>You believe that you locked the door before you left your house, but do you really remember that? Your belief about the past episode might be true, but in what sense is the past episode genuinely remembered rather than being just accurately imagined or veridical confabulated? A popular view, which I refer to as ‘mnemic reliabilism’, suggests that the process of remembering is distinguished by its reliability condition. That is, successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process. </p><p>Prominent champions of this view include the simulationist Kourken Michaelian (<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262034098/mental-time-travel/">Michaelian 2016</a>) and the causalist Markus Werning (<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-020-00471-z" target="_blank">Werning 2020</a>). Besides, you might also find mnemic reliabilism attractive if you are sympathetic to both the orthodox view that ‘remembering entails knowing’ and the idea that ‘knowledge requires reliability’.</p><p>In my recent paper entitled ‘<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-023-02073-8#:~:text=Contra%20mnemic%20reliabilism%2C%20I%20have,remembering%20as%20a%20necessary%20condition." target="_blank">Remembering requires no reliability</a>’, I argue against mnemic reliabilism. I demonstrate that there are cases where past events can be successfully remembered despite the unreliability of the corresponding memory processes. Roughly, my cases can be divided into two types:</p><p>The first type of cases focuses on patients with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). There is ample empirical evidence to show that AD severely undermines the reliability of patients’ episodic memory by causing frequent memory distortions. However, AD does not deprive patients of the capability of remembering, at least occasionally, some past events. After all, discussions about ‘true memories’ or ‘remembering’ in AD patients are ubiquitous in the psychological literature. It is also untenable to claim that AD patients cannot successfully remember any past event just because they cannot remember many past events reliably.</p><p>The second type of cases illustrates how healthy subjects can remember the past unreliably. Empirical studies have discovered many factors that can render our memory processes unreliable. For instance, divided attention (during the stage of encoding or retrieval) has proven to be able to result in more inaccurate memories than accurate ones (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11958721/" target="_blank">Perez Mata et al. 2002</a>). Likewise, high mental stress during post-encoding consolidation also tends to impair memory performance and increase false memories (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26670187/" target="_blank">Pardilla-Delgado et al. 2016</a>). </p><p>Memory processes involving those reliability-affecting factors tend to end up with false memories; however, they can still sometimes end up with true memories. For example, in Pardilla-Delgado and colleagues’ (2015) DRM-style experiments, while stressed participants remembered more false than true words, there was still a 29% chance that presented words could be accurately remembered. Therefore, an overall unreliable memory process can nevertheless lead to successful remembering.</p><p>The upshot is, any satisfactory analysis of remembering should avoid including the reliability condition. Moreover, if successful remembering can still provide defeasible justification for our memory beliefs without requiring reliability, then a reliabilist account of (memory) justification is also questionable. Finally, if reliability-affecting factors are prevalent enough in daily life, then perhaps we ought to reexamine the received view seeing memory as a reliable epistemic source.</p>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-34846115517745306782023-11-22T08:00:00.008+00:002023-11-23T09:25:07.713+00:00Reichenau Summer School: Dealing with Uncertainty<p>In today's post I report on the <a href="https://www.zfp-reichenau.de/fileadmin/Freigabe_ZfP_Reichenau/Bilder/News/Programm_8._Reichenauer_Sommerschule.pdf" target="_blank">Summer School in Reichenau</a> which I had the pleasure to attend on 25th and 26th August 2023. The theme was <i>Belief, meaning, knowledge: how we deal with uncertainty</i>. Delusions was a topic often discussed in the presentations, from philosophical, phenomenological, and clinical perspectives. Organisers of the event were Johannes Rusch, Daniel Nischk, Dorothea Debus, and Thomas Müller.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWY0tXLKUXCBIV1ucj2-2eRyJPcx0fP32bArXEqhwuI-TbgMz1-2fLDf2GKxiXVG9mOJBTejhYC8aOLdiikosTvC9wuHFZzfzMMcYbrM__G5r6VWHjdbt2aEZkmxtuG8xV7IIxDXqZbIonx9H6NAf55FOtav-rdhwq1Ju5FzswSaOcaQ5ImkYrZewM_us/s4032/IMG_3115.HEIC" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWY0tXLKUXCBIV1ucj2-2eRyJPcx0fP32bArXEqhwuI-TbgMz1-2fLDf2GKxiXVG9mOJBTejhYC8aOLdiikosTvC9wuHFZzfzMMcYbrM__G5r6VWHjdbt2aEZkmxtuG8xV7IIxDXqZbIonx9H6NAf55FOtav-rdhwq1Ju5FzswSaOcaQ5ImkYrZewM_us/s320/IMG_3115.HEIC" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rathaus Reichenau (front)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrAlYU68yigONGv4Kc-wtzRTMZLskbfdzkHtfxpYA-9lxrnUQDBcXE0L-ANzzic_5HC1D3VCg9Lqmp8-ifxPrq8eETBsLLz9J1tz6sdSPZk8CO_0PoVh7JWe5VpRpYQX3UnlfAgkRFgpUGlVye3lVWyFfNySS-T0SVpejYaxCXZhbq8l1g95KfIca8_1A/s4032/IMG_3123.HEIC" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrAlYU68yigONGv4Kc-wtzRTMZLskbfdzkHtfxpYA-9lxrnUQDBcXE0L-ANzzic_5HC1D3VCg9Lqmp8-ifxPrq8eETBsLLz9J1tz6sdSPZk8CO_0PoVh7JWe5VpRpYQX3UnlfAgkRFgpUGlVye3lVWyFfNySS-T0SVpejYaxCXZhbq8l1g95KfIca8_1A/s320/IMG_3123.HEIC" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rathaus Reichenau (courtyard)</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>The first speaker was <span style="color: #f1c232;">Rico Gutschmidt (Konstanz)</span> with a presentation on <b><span style="color: #f1c232;">Mysticism and Delusions</span></b>. Fundamental uncertainties are limitations of knowledge and experience and three questions arise: (1) Where do we come from? (2) Why there is anything at all rather than nothing? (3) Who are we? Although such questions are not easy to answer or possible to answer they can evoke transformative experiences. Philosophical experiences such as struggling with these questions can be transformative because they change the type of people we are. They change our attitude towards life. They contribute to the mystery of existence.</p><p>Mystical experiences are an extreme form of transformative experiences. They can be induced by substances and meditation and can include a feeling of unity with everything and the loss of the self. People feel like they understand a deeper level of reality that is often ineffable -- cannot be put into words. Such experiences can be both positive and negative, they are often overwhelming. Gutschmidt argued that mystical experiences can be reinterpreted as experiences of the unboundedness of existence.</p><p>In a recent study led by Gutschmidt and Nischk several participants were interviewed and their interviews analysed in interpretive phenomenological analysis: it was found that some delusions are very similar to mystical experiences (loss of the self etc.). So these types of delusions can also be interpreted as experiences of the mysteries of existence. In this sense, delusions are not pathological and involve a revelation of a deeper reality (enlightenment); the sense that one is outside time and space and past, present, and future are fused together; and ineffability. Patients describe delusions as meaningful experiences.</p><p>The second speaker was <span style="color: #f1c232;">Uwe Herwig (Konstanz and Zurich) </span>who presented about <b><span style="color: #f1c232;">Psychedelics: Phenomenology and Psychotherapy</span></b>. As the talk was in German, I will offer only a very brief summary of its contents. Herwig started with an introduction on psychedelics. Often psychedelic phenomena occur in ritualistic settings. Psychedelics are a group of substances that modify the qualitative nature of the experience. The words "psyche" and "delos" mean "opening the soul". A typical psychedelic substance is Psyllocybin and an atypical one is Ketamine.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvbDKfSs-fei_0Q5qb1zNHE5DS5KQ6bcTpAMTXwUE9H1i-V4-ivM578S-MKDvWYN-Of77eSx_mm2bURQaYiL6fMOv7bw5WVN4EWDATvfv61OF7pkftisJe07G_eCP8JZGDLa03ZIFFUU-q9f-mm415k-Mf-Vn9ZjQ0hki4Wrc5FmU7Iu3jtPNTzxaqpmo/s4032/IMG_3124.HEIC" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvbDKfSs-fei_0Q5qb1zNHE5DS5KQ6bcTpAMTXwUE9H1i-V4-ivM578S-MKDvWYN-Of77eSx_mm2bURQaYiL6fMOv7bw5WVN4EWDATvfv61OF7pkftisJe07G_eCP8JZGDLa03ZIFFUU-q9f-mm415k-Mf-Vn9ZjQ0hki4Wrc5FmU7Iu3jtPNTzxaqpmo/s320/IMG_3124.HEIC" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Uwe Herwig presenting on psychedelics</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Then Herwig provided a brief history of the use of psychedelic drugs in clinical contexts. First therapeutic use of psychedelics occurred in the fifties, mainly for anxiety and depression. New applications have been introduced since 2020, for post-traumatic stress disorder and substance dependency as well as anxiety and depression, with various measures of success. The study by <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25586402/" target="_blank">Hendricks et al. (2015)</a>, showing that psychedelic use is associated with reduced psychological distress and suicidality, was discussed in some detail, as well as more recent studies. In the last part of the talk, Herwig explored the psychophenomenology and neurobiology of psychedelic treatments, arguing that such treatments work and clinicians need to be prepared to offer them.</p><p>On the second day, <span style="color: #f1c232;">Philipp Sterzer (Basel)</span> presented a paper on the <b><span style="color: #f1c232;">Functionality of Delusions</span></b>. He started defining psychosis and its symptoms (delusions and hallucinations) and described the Bayesian approach to explaining psychosis. The key is abnormality in inferential mechanisms: what we perceive is always an active process of inference where we predict what things are like given what we already know. If we fail in our prediction, then there is a prediction error, and that's usually a bad thing. But via prediction errors, we can update our beliefs. Inference is to minimise prediction errors. </p><p>When we have psychotic symptoms, our priors are not precise and the new experience is very salient. So, the story goes, in psychosis we are more guided by the actual stimulus and tend to ignore priors. What does the evidence say? People with delusions are more resistant to visual illusions and their priors are weak. However there is also some evidence that people with hallucinations have strong priors. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBXVPPNxokhZvUeouDlb30HvvhfSHc3AOxmVY0b40oKGVlM_CAV76PAo77BBODFf-Prs7CePLkXTixcTgzpHMlN0uMZJYuxoNSdGidux0SFqL3EZRwqkzuUK8Po2wJHrkFgWQvvBV7wXL2UHVBgEIzQvGq8RM7xUg_6ZiYede2mYCFooVBXPvxZubYFSo/s3671/IMG_3149.HEIC" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2653" data-original-width="3671" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBXVPPNxokhZvUeouDlb30HvvhfSHc3AOxmVY0b40oKGVlM_CAV76PAo77BBODFf-Prs7CePLkXTixcTgzpHMlN0uMZJYuxoNSdGidux0SFqL3EZRwqkzuUK8Po2wJHrkFgWQvvBV7wXL2UHVBgEIzQvGq8RM7xUg_6ZiYede2mYCFooVBXPvxZubYFSo/s320/IMG_3149.HEIC" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Philipp Sterzer and a picture of his book, <br /><i>Die Illusion der Vernunft</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>So it would seem that there are two separate mechanisms:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><blockquote><li>Weak prior -> Aberrant salience demands explanation -> Emergence of delusions (bottom-up)</li><li>Strong prior -> Sensory signals interpreted in accordance to priors -> Persistence of delusions and emergence of hallucinations (top-down)</li></blockquote></ul><p></p><p>But a more complex hierarchical model solves the apparent paradox:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><blockquote><li>Weak <b>low-level</b> priors -> Aberrant Salience demands explanation -> Emergence of delusions</li><li>Strong <b>high-level</b> priors -> Sensory signals interpreted in accordance with priors -> Persistence of delusions and emergence of hallucinations.</li></blockquote></ul><div>Studies on perceptual ambiguity and on perceptual uncertainty conducted in Sterzer's lab show that weak priors can be at the origins of both delusions and hallucinations. Schizophrenia patients use sensory evidence more than controls to disambiguate stimuli. In sum, what we have in psychosis is lower perceptual history biases and higher sensitivity to disambiguating evidence. In this framework, delusions are a compensatory mechanism used to minimise prediction errors. And the people most likely to adopt delusional beliefs are those whose brains create more ambiguity. </div><div><br /></div><div><span style="color: #f1c232;">Susanna Burri (Kostanz)</span> was the last speaker of the day and the Summer School, and her talk was on <b><span style="color: #f1c232;">Final (and Other) Goodbyes</span></b>. She asked what a good dying process looks like: what type of death should we hope for? Two options are the Sudden Exit (e.g., just drop dead) and the Some Advance Notice (e.g., knowing you will die in two weeks).</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlIZGBLo8rFbiarnKYY7iPILK-V6rzh-bnXdMiD4DjOdTHvJLcniCHRRpj5VLuSMiPqv5KWvcrTZm-_rEFSBJ9rzscMcNStf1GvaGShaIdbWoF4pCjgCRpSwGl8-R3eURud7h0ALSG_cvx8ZbDhjtoJ8zAfsd6xiNOk586qrIdBnOog6PCj6njg_RjRi0/s4032/IMG_3151.HEIC" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlIZGBLo8rFbiarnKYY7iPILK-V6rzh-bnXdMiD4DjOdTHvJLcniCHRRpj5VLuSMiPqv5KWvcrTZm-_rEFSBJ9rzscMcNStf1GvaGShaIdbWoF4pCjgCRpSwGl8-R3eURud7h0ALSG_cvx8ZbDhjtoJ8zAfsd6xiNOk586qrIdBnOog6PCj6njg_RjRi0/s320/IMG_3151.HEIC" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Susanna Burri discussing good ways to die</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div>Occasions for goodbyes include when we leave people behind (in a valued relationship); when we leave places we are attached to, or other non-persons; when there is no increased physical distance but when there is increased psychological distance (e.g., the relationship changes). A goodbye is about anticipating and acknowledging a loss. Burri offers a definition of saying goodbye:</div><div><br /></div><div><b></b><blockquote><b>Goodbye</b>: to say goodbye is to openly acknowledge and reflect on the fact that a valued relationship or set-up is about to come to an end or change significantly.</blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>What is bad about goodbyes: (1) goodbyes are meaningless performances, (2) they are awkward and delay things for those leaving, (3) they detract from the fun and they interrupt the flow for those staying, (4) they are unpleasant because they are an ending. What is good about goodbyes: (1) goodbyes are respectful and helps those left behind to adjust their expectations, and (2) they help people prepare for the ending which will make grief easier later. Preparing for a loss means interpreting it and helps us determine what the value of thing or person you are losing is. As a result, saying goodbye provides orientation: it prevents feeling lonely and drifting. Goodbyes also help showing appreciation for something that was valued.</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">===</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The Summer School was a really great opportunity to interact with people with different backgrounds and enabled participants to discuss all the key themes in detail and in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-20793742365672232402023-11-15T08:00:00.068+00:002023-11-15T08:00:00.141+00:00Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience (2)<p>This blog post is by Zsuzsanna Chappell. Zsuzsanna is an independent scholar and research associate at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics. She currently writes on the social philosophy and ethics of mental illness, and the role of researchers with subject-relevant lived experience in the human sciences. Previously, she held academic positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester and is the author of <i>Deliberative Democracy: A Critical Introduction</i>, Palgrave 2012.</p><p>Zsuzsanna reports from the third annual <span style="color: #ffd966;">Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience workshop</span>. The workshop was held on 17-18 April 2023, online (hosted by the University of Umeå). The aim of these workshops has been to bring together philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference, and are also writing on these topics. </p><p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj715vfSDnRWTzFr2ZDlgTpuolDEMWvdXLbHCgvuBGA6B413jt3fHJpiaB7VLhV39CzJ9WSeMZDM0EvYp5TU1PkS6f5sxKRDjyD9wnUMUabGG7CJp-ImCc6J5MIm_2ABNkN24qUUU1CKXxj0lw2EpuIpiFBEZdKmZlv-AGR5r4smj6k680oFcHGhUbLyVE/s716/Screenshot%202023-08-22%20at%2020.05.42.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="716" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj715vfSDnRWTzFr2ZDlgTpuolDEMWvdXLbHCgvuBGA6B413jt3fHJpiaB7VLhV39CzJ9WSeMZDM0EvYp5TU1PkS6f5sxKRDjyD9wnUMUabGG7CJp-ImCc6J5MIm_2ABNkN24qUUU1CKXxj0lw2EpuIpiFBEZdKmZlv-AGR5r4smj6k680oFcHGhUbLyVE/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-22%20at%2020.05.42.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Zsuzsanna Chappell</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>Our <a href="https://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com/2023/11/philosophy-of-psychiatry-and-lived.html" target="_blank">first post</a> described our main activities so far and why we believe there is a need for a workshop specifically for philosophers with subject-relevant lived experience. Last week's post also summarised two of the six papers presented at this year’s workshop. This post will describe the remaining four.</p><p><br /></p><h4>Shay Welch (Spelman College): Am I Safe Enough For You? On Borderline Personality Disorder</h4><p>Welch offered an erudite phenomenological insight into what it is like to live with borderline personality disorder (BPD). It is a way of being which is full of inconsistencies; of overwhelmingly hatred for oneself while still loving oneself, of over-riding boredom and emptiness accompanied by emotional fullness. Based on her own experiences of erasure and inner death, she drew out the implications of erasing this borderline sense of self, something which is demanded by society and by psychiatry. </p><p>She contrasted BPD and responses to it with addiction, arguing that the demand on BPDers is to erase what it is tobe themselves, rather than to simply let go of a dysfunctional habit or way of life. This kind of self-erasure is a kind of violence not seen in society’s response to all mental disorders, which for the most part BPDers will finally consent to, even if they will still continue longing for their unmedicated selves. Rather than seeing BPD as an inherent source of vice, she argued that the qualities that come from it, - whether impulsiveness or empathy, - demand a different way of cultivating virtues to a high level which can make BPDers a valuable part of our moral community. This paper is now forthcoming in The Philosophical Forum.</p><p><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Rachel Handley (Trinity College Dublin): Mental Illness and Transformative Experience</h4><p>For Handley, their anxiety is a special kind of transformative experience. Rather than changing them from one moment to the next, it transformed them over time. This experience, they argued, would be impossible to understand without taking into account its transformative component. This seems to have an epistemic component as well for them: the sheer outrageous excess of anxiety disorder needs to be experienced to be believed. At the same time, their anxiety was closely tied to their identity: anxiety was part of them. </p><p>They cannot look at their disability and assess it from above, there in no non-anxious Rachel we can compare anxious Rachel to. This complicates the way in which we can understand transformative experience. It is not immediate, there is no easy baseline against which the transformation can be measured, the transformation may even be episodic. Very interestingly, they argue that certain kinds of transformations can even block further transformations, for example when it comes to resistance to a medicated self. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsGSQiMmOnFzw_RqaIKvjYQiU6BuO7gFvcv_dhEcLRbcdzM4zNFHVO626Rr0y4tkEurQs2KtH2FuiJWHfRdkFcEjuvV30dqOtplcWBBYvt59i-58BZG9w0yUCSw2ixPLIdw7jI1Vb9G3EpafOt3cPvAKC5jr6pAUCL5pdPg1Oa-vxOx8Oy7TgaF0jp89o/s950/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.34.23.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="746" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsGSQiMmOnFzw_RqaIKvjYQiU6BuO7gFvcv_dhEcLRbcdzM4zNFHVO626Rr0y4tkEurQs2KtH2FuiJWHfRdkFcEjuvV30dqOtplcWBBYvt59i-58BZG9w0yUCSw2ixPLIdw7jI1Vb9G3EpafOt3cPvAKC5jr6pAUCL5pdPg1Oa-vxOx8Oy7TgaF0jp89o/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.34.23.png" width="251" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rachel Handley</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Zsuzsanna Chappell (independent scholar): Shared decision-making in psychiatric diagnosis</h4><p>Access to the internet and social media have made people more aware of possible diagnoses, while at the same time there is also increased official reliance on self-diagnosis (just think of Covid-19 home tests or the recorded phone messages urging us to check the NHS website before we are connected to the GP receptionist). Medical sociologists (eg Jutel) argue that as a result doctor-patient relationships have changed, have become less unequal in many ways. These changes may be harder to accept in psychiatry, given that patients are often supposed to lack insight. </p><p>Chappell argues that this is problematic as diagnostic labels strongly influence both internal, personal identity and external, social identity, and thus some will be easier to wear than others. This gives us an increased incentive to take into account patients’ ideas of what their problems may be, especially if we believe that psychiatric diagnoses are to some extent social constructs in the way that many other medical diagnoses are not. This is made possible if we take into account the inherent relationality of diagnoses: they will influence the relationships of the patient with themselves, with their clinicians, with friends, family and wider society. </p><p>This preserves psychiatrists’ expertise but in a modified form: the point is not to allow patients to self-diagnose themselves inappropriately, but to give greater scope to shared decision-making when differential diagnoses are available.</p><p><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">David Ellis (Leeds Trinity University): A Phenomenological Investigation of ADHD - Language and Medication</h4><p>Ellis drew on his personal experience of growing up with with ADHD to map out how language around ADHD and its management, introduced at a young age, inevitably shapes the development of the self. This can leave ADHDers unsure whether their neurodivergence is a disability or whether their medication is “treatment” in any meaningful sense. This touches not only on experiences of authenticity, but also turns the self into a battle ground between the “normal” and the “deviant”. </p><p>Ellis was told that his ADHD was “undesirable”, that taking tablets and learning coping mechanisms would help, to the point that he came to identify his “real” self as the self without ADHD. Yet it also became increasingly obvious to him that managing someone’s ADHD is at least as much for the benefit of doctors and teachers. In the abstract he writes: “Being given medication whilst being told that it will ‘help’ not only caused me to think that the real me is the medicated me, but that the default natural me is akin to an illness in need of treatment, and that one of its symptoms is my inability to recognise my illness and interests. This develops attitudes of self-rejection, where part of me was seen as something that should not be seen.” </p><p>His conclusion from these reflections is that since ADHD is part of the self, it is in fact unhealthy to develop negating, medicalising views towards a part of oneself. This contradicts the language of help which is usually adopted by professionals. Ellis’s talk really brought it home to me how neurodivergent children are positioned as the problem which not only needs to be solved, but which just requires too much effort from everyone to manage. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb64uWo_pvmhw5fbX2dCqPLhyhy1hOdBHUR_T_FaXT2j_J3q73X3byUEr3ddEQs73eZe7LZ98Sh1_FFvlOzP45X8iLi3V9XuuWFxEo1mv3gh60zFwXn-Sa5WS-X4-fwdIZgZDhHVhsuwXDl658ZB8gUBNe95ofz_IeH0tBtA6UIeFMJfQd4kuV8zNb71U/s892/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.34.16.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="892" data-original-width="654" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb64uWo_pvmhw5fbX2dCqPLhyhy1hOdBHUR_T_FaXT2j_J3q73X3byUEr3ddEQs73eZe7LZ98Sh1_FFvlOzP45X8iLi3V9XuuWFxEo1mv3gh60zFwXn-Sa5WS-X4-fwdIZgZDhHVhsuwXDl658ZB8gUBNe95ofz_IeH0tBtA6UIeFMJfQd4kuV8zNb71U/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.34.16.png" width="235" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Ellis<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>================================================</p><p>So far, we have limited participation in our workshops to academic philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference. (We never ask for any details or disclosure beyond a basic self-identification.) Presenters are free to give talks which are as personal or as abstract and general a they wish. </p><p>Our group is not a “secret” one, but we have struggled with working out how to advertise it effectively beyond word of mouth. We have also talked about a workshop where we would share our work with “Sane” allies, about the possibility of starting a blog, and are planning a workshop based in an American time zone. </p><p>This blog post is part of our efforts to publicise our work more widely. If you are a philosopher of psychiatry / mental health / neurodiversity with lived experience or if you are an ally who would like to support our project, we would love to hear from you at <span style="color: #f1c232;">PhilPsyLivedExp@gmail.com</span></p>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-63332191963227601782023-11-08T08:00:00.063+00:002023-11-08T08:00:00.141+00:00Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience (1)<p>This blog post is by Zsuzsanna Chappell. Zsuzsanna is an independent scholar and research associate at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics. She currently writes on the social philosophy and ethics of mental illness, and the role of researchers with subject-relevant lived experience in the human sciences. Previously, she held academic positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester and is the author of <i>Deliberative Democracy: A Critical Introduction</i>, Palgrave 2012.</p><p>Zsuzsanna reports from the third annual <span style="color: #ffd966;">Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience workshop</span>. The workshop was held on 17-18 April 2023, online (hosted by the University of Umeå). The aim of these workshops has been to bring together philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference, and are also writing on these topics. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqFMzlnwObWz_d8PK31oLrKtBH6UN5N7D05sbu0q_mKS7Rpxj7ajvanxJCMTUZarMDtUGwDbWVAnjQb00ye6MNx3-NKfP-AsfNhe-jhC36jYwUn4JJKS9W7brIjHufEsLznLNXJCCMg6QACl2dRL2PvwTHwwq15eUgT731i2p2CW1bmRFVDioXqt3qrEk/s1150/Screenshot%202023-08-22%20at%2019.57.02.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="588" data-original-width="1150" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqFMzlnwObWz_d8PK31oLrKtBH6UN5N7D05sbu0q_mKS7Rpxj7ajvanxJCMTUZarMDtUGwDbWVAnjQb00ye6MNx3-NKfP-AsfNhe-jhC36jYwUn4JJKS9W7brIjHufEsLznLNXJCCMg6QACl2dRL2PvwTHwwq15eUgT731i2p2CW1bmRFVDioXqt3qrEk/w400-h205/Screenshot%202023-08-22%20at%2019.57.02.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">University of Umeå</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>Zsuzsanna Chappell (me!), Sofia Jeppsson and Paul Lodge started organising these workshops during the pandemic. We have since been joined by August Gorman and Elliot Porter. All of us are Mad philosophers and we all felt that there was a need for a safe place where philosophers with experiences which are often difficult to talk about and stigmatised could talk freely and provide feedback on each others’ work. The workshop is open to anyone with lived experience, regardless of the concept and identity they prefer to use: madness, neurodiversity, mental illness, and so on. </p><p>Why the need for a workshop just for scholars with subject-relevant lived experience? Sofia Jeppsson writes that talking to each other as Mad / neurodivergent scholars helps us to see how diverse our experiences are. Paul Lodge views it as a form of consciousness raising among Mad scholars, and argues that a philosophy of psychiatry, where there are relatively few contributions by Mad philosophers, is as if feminist philosophy was dominated by the voices of men. </p><p>I (ZC) argue that it is important to have a space reserved for those of us with lived experience, as it allows us to present ideas with an audience like ourselves in mind, rather than primarily addressing the “Sane” majority and their needs. I hope that these workshops will create space for views and voices which would not otherwise be heard, and encourage more people to do this sort of philosophical work. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOQTsPV2_gmIsIGeBqb0zrSES_V6Gy8N_G3kqvUcigd50ijr3oECmRzMsXtaDNkuvAhe_fb0-8XmiM531CB4007-iNGjdoKa78Vc8OD02xcTtzdJASvoUm6xsLuWjdV2kZNZOSJ5xAH-iYtEfZCr6Ncn5z1PBL_BoW7JztgSI7O-ktesUIVSfm2ULtaQw/s762/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.40.08.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="762" data-original-width="616" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOQTsPV2_gmIsIGeBqb0zrSES_V6Gy8N_G3kqvUcigd50ijr3oECmRzMsXtaDNkuvAhe_fb0-8XmiM531CB4007-iNGjdoKa78Vc8OD02xcTtzdJASvoUm6xsLuWjdV2kZNZOSJ5xAH-iYtEfZCr6Ncn5z1PBL_BoW7JztgSI7O-ktesUIVSfm2ULtaQw/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.40.08.png" width="259" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Zsuzsanna Chappell</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>August Gorman argues that by truly grappling with the lived realities of philosophers whose experiences are at times quite different from the presumed ‘Ideal/Typical/"Normal" Person’ who plays an implicit role in shaping so many of our theories, we have to upend a lot of what is assumed. They find it useful to have a community of fellow travelers to build new things back up again with. </p><p>Elliott Porter writes that Mad people have very particular interpretive needs, and a community of mad enquirers is therefore what we need to refine our interpretive tools. This doesn’t just allow us to navigate madness more effectively, but it also allows us to condense the particular knowledge that Mad points of view have privileged access to. </p><p>So far, we have limited participation in our workshops to academic philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference. (We never ask for any details or disclosure beyond a basic self-identification.) Presenters are free to give talks which are as personal or as abstract and general a they wish. Our group is not a “secret” one, but we have struggled with working out how to advertise it effectively beyond word of mouth. </p><p>We have also talked about a workshop where we would share our work with “Sane” allies, about the possibility of starting a blog, and are planning a workshop based in an American time zone. This blog post is part of our efforts to publicise our work more widely. If you are a philosopher of psychiatry / mental health / neurodiversity with lived experience or if you are an ally who would like to support our project, we would love to hear from you at PhilPsyLivedExp@gmail.com</p><p>Six papers were presented this year. Two are described in this post while the remainder will be described in a post to appear next week. </p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Sam Fellowes (Lancaster University): How the lived experience of experts-by-experience relates to the abstract nature of science</h4><p>Fellowes made a really interesting argument about how an abstract concept such as “autism” will influence the study of that same concept even if we draw of the involvement of “experts-by-experience”, that is people who have a lived experience of autism. He argued that such disorder definitions require abstract science and cannot be derived from lived experience. Of course, this led to a good debate during discussions about the extent to which those with subject-relevant lived experience can be epistemic authorities on the nature of that experience. </p><p>Fellowes made the point that since definitions and concepts are not only abstract, but also highly abstracted from reality, they will only represent individual experiences very imperfectly. This means that experts-by-experience may be best placed to help make value judgments during the process of scientific research, while they may need to accept the existing techniques for abstraction as given. Lived experience itself will need to be interpreted through scientific notions. I really enjoyed listening to a talk on what was in essence philosophy of science rather than philosophy of psychiatry, as this showed how wide the scope of our shared topics of interest are. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg812lorPrHkXoXoCeJhEqdA0e2Z_QBYtbcyy3druYJwFOVC-pqdnS_ycOT-ELCeaye4Vuu7XmpDIIFHZQH9GNiNXo2YfwJcsDJxAMr7SAXaK3dlNcyBzLC7NH8liF9wKG_abl3L8XadJZ1c2iBME7IZyMLYSDzFOFgdgj8zxenntQtNdYbLNg_ch1EMUc/s924/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.37.14.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="924" data-original-width="610" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg812lorPrHkXoXoCeJhEqdA0e2Z_QBYtbcyy3druYJwFOVC-pqdnS_ycOT-ELCeaye4Vuu7XmpDIIFHZQH9GNiNXo2YfwJcsDJxAMr7SAXaK3dlNcyBzLC7NH8liF9wKG_abl3L8XadJZ1c2iBME7IZyMLYSDzFOFgdgj8zxenntQtNdYbLNg_ch1EMUc/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20at%2009.37.14.png" width="211" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eliott Porter</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Elliott Porter (University of Birmingham): Madness, Silencing, and Colloquial Terms</h4><p>Porter raised the question of how Mad people can understand themselves when so much of our colloquial language uses words such as “crazy” rather liberally. I found it especially interesting how our views diverged during Q&A. Someone else found the term “crazy” objectionable, I myself draw the line at “psycho” being used as a common term to describe e.g. ex-lovers or politicians. Porter argues that using this kind of language is subordinating and silencing. Once something or someone is ruled “insane”, we are invited not to pay attention anymore. Yet, we all continue to use such language, even if we are aware of its potentially troubling aspects. </p><p>He argued that it is better to think of these thoughts as illegitimate, rather than symptomatic. Illegitimacy is a local failing, whereas symptomatic thought speaks to a wider deficiency. Drawing on the self-trust literature and McGrath’s (2019) account of undercutters to moral knowledge, he argues that madness-language with connotations of illegitimacy is a valuable hermeneutic resource for Mad people particularly because it allows us to interpret illegitimate thoughts in ways that do not undercut self-trust.</p><div><br /></div>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-41324049006715344062023-11-01T08:00:00.000+00:002023-11-01T08:00:00.138+00:00Self-narratives and Medicalization in Psychiatric Diagnosis<p>This post was published on the EPIC blog in July 2023. It is by Richard Hassall, a qualified clinical psychologist, now retired. After retirement, Richard enrolled at the University of Sheffield to do an MA in philosophy, followed by a PhD which was completed in 2022. At the time of writing, Richard is an affiliate researcher attached to the Department of Philosophy at Sheffield.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Yyjv3i9kmykZcPDqxQJr0Fyc2NStXzQ6qGIKhvKDH6N7XNs4uH2_O5RjXoFGiLtGXWAQS5R0WZdmS_LC9f2arcnr3SYGN4dOUtbMAYc7RcjARz-hmMZGhp2rVcIDgKdrP1Lj9D6mxvF7t4LYBbd_DsFzsPP4KbmMX0KadQbp-WEt324U8f12dxMKi4I/s926/Screenshot%202023-07-19%20at%2016.40.53.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="926" data-original-width="838" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Yyjv3i9kmykZcPDqxQJr0Fyc2NStXzQ6qGIKhvKDH6N7XNs4uH2_O5RjXoFGiLtGXWAQS5R0WZdmS_LC9f2arcnr3SYGN4dOUtbMAYc7RcjARz-hmMZGhp2rVcIDgKdrP1Lj9D6mxvF7t4LYBbd_DsFzsPP4KbmMX0KadQbp-WEt324U8f12dxMKi4I/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-19%20at%2016.40.53.png" width="290" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Hassall</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>My area of interest is philosophy of psychiatry, with a particular interest in the nature of psychiatric diagnostic categories and the effect these have on the individuals who receive them. I argue in my PhD thesis that a psychiatric diagnosis may, in some cases, lead the recipient to becoming a victim of epistemic injustice, and specifically of hermeneutical injustice. I argue that this effect can be understood in terms of narrative theory and the self-narratives that individuals construct for themselves.</p><p>People gain meaning in their lives through their self-narratives, but such narratives can be changed by the person’s social circumstances and by extraneous events. Receiving a psychiatric diagnosis is one such event in some people’s lives, and it can significantly impact on the recipient’s self-narrative.</p><p>The codification of psychiatric diagnoses in disease nosologies, such as the DSM-5 of the American Psychiatric Association, can convey the implication that these represent disease entities of some sort. Patients are often told that their condition is “an illness like any other”. The reductionist methodology characteristic of the biomedical model of diseases can suggest that mental disorders are somehow caused by neurochemical abnormalities in the brain, an idea reinforced by the frequent treatment of such disorders with medication. Consequently, the diagnosis may be understood as a medicalized explanation of the person’s difficulties. However, most such diagnoses are based purely on symptom descriptions and do not explain how the person’s symptoms arose.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS_pICapP6gndS2kKnXc9qaeu6sKC-4vP6wMO5Re8Vt9yPq_Ps2ioL_C0MAmxQE1W2MB-uovqHItiMgLasrRV2aEvzoOD-G5HCHVG9Xp3LGw5K3z1ce0JsVNOTvOnkxPpq1wM_Y86S5ay6XTVLt5tmLto8tjEEcd_WVsqognnCKquFFSzEtxRRe33F1EM/s1634/Screenshot%202023-07-19%20at%2016.50.05.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1114" data-original-width="1634" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS_pICapP6gndS2kKnXc9qaeu6sKC-4vP6wMO5Re8Vt9yPq_Ps2ioL_C0MAmxQE1W2MB-uovqHItiMgLasrRV2aEvzoOD-G5HCHVG9Xp3LGw5K3z1ce0JsVNOTvOnkxPpq1wM_Y86S5ay6XTVLt5tmLto8tjEEcd_WVsqognnCKquFFSzEtxRRe33F1EM/w400-h272/Screenshot%202023-07-19%20at%2016.50.05.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>The medicalization implicit in psychiatric diagnoses conveys a biomedical narrative which may conflict with or marginalise the recipients’ previous self-narratives at a time when they will be experiencing significant emotional distress. As such, the recipients’ own hermeneutical resources can become marginalised. In other words, their capacity for understanding and expressing their own experiences can be minimised or neglected by clinicians. This can result in them becoming victims of hermeneutical injustice, particularly if they are mistakenly led to believe that their condition is a chronic one, from which full recovery is unlikely to happen.</p><p>The biomedical narrative associated with such diagnoses can undermine the recipients’ beliefs about their sense of agency and lead to feelings of hopelessness about recovery. While it is not an inevitable consequence of such diagnoses, there is evidence from testimonies of former service-users that this can happen to some people.</p>Lisa Bortolotti http://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-33228686113553936132023-10-25T08:00:00.006+01:002023-11-02T12:12:10.610+00:00Revisiting Maher’s one-factor theory of delusion<p>Today's post is by <a href="https://www.chenweinie.com/">Chenwei Nie</a> on his recent paper, "<a href="https://philarchive.org/rec/NIERMO">Revisiting Maher’s one-factor theory of delusion</a>" (<i>Neuroethics</i>, 2023). Currently, he is a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6lrK6j9w1tARsKvUJQCo3cukZhrUHNy4SggbvXliD1O4PCZFs0Gq0oqBTKwcxnNmV28w5a9Pp9RKYD408gmsKk40r9kJ41fwFeXHUEGDGzQrPIWufzCfKMhIdinhZZ-pEMGm7aphV3UMf4hA6lKq39wiH1-lYcXQMnIRpkLYFD6Vz9z_0Mtk1tLyWZ0nA/s320/Chenwei%20Nie_Oxford%20Port%20Meadow.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6lrK6j9w1tARsKvUJQCo3cukZhrUHNy4SggbvXliD1O4PCZFs0Gq0oqBTKwcxnNmV28w5a9Pp9RKYD408gmsKk40r9kJ41fwFeXHUEGDGzQrPIWufzCfKMhIdinhZZ-pEMGm7aphV3UMf4hA6lKq39wiH1-lYcXQMnIRpkLYFD6Vz9z_0Mtk1tLyWZ0nA/w241-h181/Chenwei%20Nie_Oxford%20Port%20Meadow.jpg" width="241" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chenwei Nie</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div>Suppose your friend, Ava, is suffering from a delusional belief that her partner is replaced by an imposter. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary - such as the supposed imposter's identical appearance to her partner and knowledge of intimate details, and reassurances from you and her other friends - Ava steadfastly maintains this belief. In this unfortunate circumstance, it is obvious that something must have gone wrong in the formation and maintenance of Ava’s belief. It is likely that Ava would be diagnosed with the Capgras delusion. Unravelling what exactly has gone wrong, however, has proven challenging.<p>According to a classic one-factor theory of delusion developed by Brendan Arnold Maher (1924-2009), the only factor, i.e. departure from normality, is the patient’s anomalous experience, of which the delusion is a normal explanation. Let us call this sort of anomalous experience the Maherian experience. If this theory is true, then Ava’s belief that her partner is an imposter should be considered as a normal explanation of her particular Maherian experience. Here, ‘normal’ means that if a typical, non-delusional person were to have Ava’s experience, they might also formulate the imposter hypothesis and come to believe that their partner is an imposter.</p><p>But is the one-factor theory a satisfactory explanation for delusions? In the past decade or so, a growing number of papers have argued in its favour. My paper, ‘Revisiting Maher’s One-Factor Theory of Delusion’, scrutinizes these one-factor arguments and reveals two fundamental issues.</p><p>First, the notion of the Maherian experience is too elusive. For example, advocates of the one-factor theory have been unable to articulate what exactly the Maherian experience is in the Capgras delusion. More often than not, they suggest that the Maherian experience could be an ‘intense’, ‘prolonged’, and ‘profound’ feeling of unfamiliarity. However, these descriptors are not informative enough to tell us why a far-fetched hypothesis like the imposter belief could somehow become a normal explanation.</p><p>Second, the notion of normal explanation is overly encompassing. In recognition of the above issue, some supporters of the one-factor theory suggest that suboptimal reasoning might play a part in delusion formation, but they maintain that these suboptimal reasoning processes are still within ‘the normal range’. Yet, without a more tangible account of the Maherian experience, it remains obscure how the reasoning processes that result in delusional explanations are normal.</p><p>Unless one-factor theory advocates can adequately address these issues, I think a more promising approach may involve abandoning the idea that the Maherian experience is the only factor in the aetiology of delusion and instead concentrate on searching for additional contributing factors.</p><div><br /></div></div>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-92166341235599381932023-10-18T08:00:00.000+01:002023-10-18T08:00:00.141+01:00Naturalistic understandings of mental disorder can be epistemically empowering<p>Today's post is by <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dan-Degerman-2">Dan Degerman</a> on his recent paper, "<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04210-6">Epistemic injustice, naturalism, and mental disorder: on the epistemic benefits of obscuring social factors</a>" (<i>Synthese</i>, 2023). Dan Degerman is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihAzEiodZ_SP22jxShIzDvfQQbpeqXDkUSB_w2BTZDgQPuNjb_ZDClGQmvkW0Oy0EjUAGTUZgRlLgBjVXipwIw8ne5OrQW_k9G-_rkV-mHI2sG2EB_Qy0jahYNcvXhJjvyGJXbBWzuLFJM-HiRqTcExfqRvqvuATgKuyBZzhEdD9yXj3z552Jpk2WZVELQ/s3600/GW4-Crucible-Researchers-Portraits_BMS9743_.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3600" data-original-width="2520" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihAzEiodZ_SP22jxShIzDvfQQbpeqXDkUSB_w2BTZDgQPuNjb_ZDClGQmvkW0Oy0EjUAGTUZgRlLgBjVXipwIw8ne5OrQW_k9G-_rkV-mHI2sG2EB_Qy0jahYNcvXhJjvyGJXbBWzuLFJM-HiRqTcExfqRvqvuATgKuyBZzhEdD9yXj3z552Jpk2WZVELQ/w169-h242/GW4-Crucible-Researchers-Portraits_BMS9743_.JPG" width="169" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Dan Degerman</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Naturalistic understandings that frame human experiences and differences as biological dysfunctions constitute a major source of epistemic injustice in disease and disability, according to many philosophers.</p><p>Epistemic injustice refers to injustices committed against people in their capacity as knowers. This occurs, for example, when someone is disbelieved because of their social identity or when a lack of suitable interpretive resources means that someone cannot make their experiences intelligible to themselves or others. Critics have argued that naturalistic understandings of human experiences and differences can lead to both kinds of epistemic injustice because they tend to obscure the social factors involved in causing those experiences and differences. </p><p>Though such understandings can indeed contribute to epistemic injustice, I think the epistemic benefits they can offer people vulnerable to epistemic injustice have been overlooked.</p><p>Consider an apparent exemplar of a naturalistic understanding, namely, the neurobiological understanding of mental disorder. According to that understanding, the key cause of the disorder is some dysfunction in the individual’s brain.</p><p>Critics of the neurobiological understanding of mental disorder argue that it prevents people from considering the range of possible factors that might contribute to their often distressing experiences. That is because it <i>decontests</i> the experiences involved, making alternative understandings that focus more on social factors seem irrelevant. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/deconstructing-the-seductive-allure-of-neuroscience-explanations/568C206CD761E70374975276BBF69737">Empirical research</a> on what has been called the seductive allure effect of neuroscience indicates the critics are right. But what those critics generally fail to appreciate is that for some people with mental disorder, this is an epistemic feature rather than a bug.</p><p>After all, people with psychiatric diagnoses often struggle to get others to take their distress and needs seriously. For instance, participants in a recent ethnographic study by <a href="https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/117487/">Rebecca Lane</a> recounted how their efforts to discuss their bipolar disorder had been met with trivializing responses. Those responses drew on the contested status and alternative understandings of bipolar disorder to make it appear less serious. As <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josp.12194">Jake Jackson</a> has argued, such trivialization can constitute and perpetuate epistemic injustices against people diagnosed with mental disorder. </p><p>The decontesting capacity of the neurobiological understanding of mental disorder can help people with psychiatric diagnoses avoid trivialization and associated epistemic injustices. At least, that is what the experiences of some participants in the Lane’s study suggest. For example, one of them said: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">[W]ith bipolar[,] people generally think oh he’s lazy—it’s fashionable—a lot of people get misdiagnosed and you know—but if I say brain disorder and my neurotransmitter[s] don’t do what they’re supposed to… people just leave it like that. (pp. 161-2) </p></blockquote><p>This person has effectively deployed the neurobiological understanding of bipolar disorder to decontest his suffering and, thereby, avoid epistemic injustice.</p><p>Their testimony is not evidence that would-be trivializers abandon their trivializing beliefs when met with a neurobiological understanding of mental disorder. But it is evidence that such an understanding can prevent outright dismissal and that some people with mental disorder value that function highly.</p><p>I’m not trying the argue that the neurobiological understanding of mental disorder or naturalistic understandings of disease and disability more generally is unproblematic. Some<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41235-018-0136-1"> research</a> shows that people who endorse a neurobiological understanding of mental disorder are more likely than others to endorse stigmatizing claims about people with a psychiatric diagnosis. So we should think carefully about how and when that understanding is deployed.</p><p>But, if we are serious about addressing the epistemic injustices that people with psychiatric diagnoses suffer, we cannot simply ignore first-hand testimonies about the value that naturalistic understandings of mental disorder have for those people. Doing so and simply pushing ahead with projects to undermine those understandings risks exacerbating the very problem we are trying to solve.</p>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-17171032970673191182023-10-11T08:00:00.001+01:002023-10-11T16:56:53.413+01:00The experience of dysmenorrhea<p>Today's post is by <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/carlota-serrahima">Carlota Serrahima</a> on her recent paper, "<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04148-9">The experience of dysmenorrhea</a>" (<i>Synthese,</i> 2023). She is a postdoctoral fellow within the ERC funded project "<a href="https://rethinking-agency.org/">Rethinking Conscious Agency</a>", based at the Universitat de Barcelona.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXOmjRQv96Csf8VNxlleS4zHsTUzEs6wispjxEK04aAZJOoqlluwZtmGrW93J9hkeDdloNHofUZKyOGafJMWvtFwutyKJwYhQLMPs_aYEM_pQujDfSX-YAABTnc2ZDYXChB0CeZYqm02SH8oqTZ_K_QfAt0m2c_2C2go8T0MDiNyF2OYB_wYoxr9A24i8g/s640/Carlota.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXOmjRQv96Csf8VNxlleS4zHsTUzEs6wispjxEK04aAZJOoqlluwZtmGrW93J9hkeDdloNHofUZKyOGafJMWvtFwutyKJwYhQLMPs_aYEM_pQujDfSX-YAABTnc2ZDYXChB0CeZYqm02SH8oqTZ_K_QfAt0m2c_2C2go8T0MDiNyF2OYB_wYoxr9A24i8g/w234-h234/Carlota.jpeg" width="234" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Carlota Serrahima</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">My main research topic is the philosophy of bodily awareness, and Manolo Martínez has worked on the philosophy of pain. We were both surprised that, in the literature our work overlaps on, menstrual pain — technically, “dysmenorrhea” — is rarely mentioned. For one of us, dysmenorrhea is the pain most often experienced, and we suspected that this was so for many people. Indeed, according to conservative estimates almost half of menstruators experience dysmenorrhea. That’s probably close to a billion people.</span></div><p></p><p>Our paper highlights an important tension: various assumptions operative in the philosophical literature about pain are actually doubtful, or maybe even false, of dysmenorrhea. In the paper we criticize the model of pain conjured up by those assumptions, which we call the <i>injury-centered </i>model of pain [ICMP], and investigate the phenomenological and functional profile of dysmenorrhea beyond this model.</p><p>The first assumption of the ICMP is that pain is primarily a tool for the management of bodily damage. Pain is then adaptive when and because it is a response to such damage. But uterine contractions that expel endometrial tissue during menstruation are part of the correct functioning of the reproductive system, and hence, typically, not damaging. Yet, they are painful in dysmenorrhea. </p><p>This is problematic for mainstream intentionalist views on pain, which would disappointingly deem dysmenorrhea an illusory or misguided pain. Fixing this requires significant elaboration of the intentionalist picture, and in particular of the kind of damage pain is supposed to respond to.</p><p>The second assumption is that pains subside as the triggering injury disappears. In other words, injury-centered pains are acute. In fact, dysmenorrhea cannot be readily categorised as either acute nor chronic: it is a<i> cyclical </i>pain, sharing features of both. On the one hand, it occurs in relatively short-lived episodes; on the other, because it recurs, it can result in central sensitisation, as chronic pains do.</p><p>We speculate that this temporal profile puts dysmenorrhea in a special position regarding pain catastrophising. First, because its recurrence allows for dysmenorrheic women to get used to the typical unfolding of their pain. Second, because of the widespread, but false, belief that dysmenorrhea is normal. We hypothesize that this broader network of pain-related beliefs will affect the way in which women feel threatened by and catastrophise about dysmenorrhea.</p><p>Finally, the ICMP sees pain as an affective kind independent from others, in particular moods. Dysmenorrhea, however, belongs to a class of affective conditions that includes both pain and negative mood intertwined in phenomenologically inextricable ways. Because of this phenomenological profile, and because it is likely that mechanisms underlying pain and mood in dysmenorrhea overlap substantially, the experience of dysmenorrhea is in important respects close to those conditions that fall under the so-called “pain-depression dyad,” such as fibromyalgia.</p><p>Anyway, we’ve tried to pay attention to the peculiarities of the lived experience of women, hoping that it will result in a richer understanding of the intricacies of pain, beyond injury management.</p>Kiichi Inarimorihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02805649554198708518noreply@blogger.com0