Imperfect Cognitions

This is part of one week series of posts on a new journal,  Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) who talks about the role of stories in public debates. She is summarising a paper co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti and recently published in the inaugural issue of  Memory, Mind & Media . The paper is available  open access here . Kathleen Murphy-Hollies We are all drawn to stories in their many forms, and the prevalence of them on digital media may be one reason why we have embraced those media so much. On social media we see lots of stories being told, often in support some general claim. For example, people have been sharing experiences of getting the COVID vaccine and of not getting the vaccine, often in the hopes of supporting general claims about whether people should get vaccinated. However, can personal stories be taken as evidence supporting general claims?  People’s stories about...

Chloe Bamboulis, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, works on the relationship between classic philosophical views and cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). In this video , she talks for three minutes about self-knowledge in Plato and in CBT. In today's post she summarises a commentary co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti on the utility of CBT, forthcoming in Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology. Chloe Bamboulis A common idea about CBT is that it does not contribute to the person's understanding of reality ( validity ) but encourages ways of thinking that boost the person's wellbeing ( utility ). In our brief commentary, we argue that CBT can also contribute to some of the person's epistemic goals. Suppose James comes to believe that he will not be offered his dream job, the one he is going to be interviewed for. James arrives at this self-prediction by accepting a negative automatic thought about himself as someone who does not perform well at job interviews. A...

Today's post is by Eugenia Lancellotta, who has recently completed her doctoral project at the University of Birmingham, on the adaptiveness of delusions and delusions in OCD. Here Eugenia presents some ideas from an article she published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology in 2021, entitled: "Is the biological adaptiveness of delusions doomed? ". Eugenia also discussed some themes from her research in this video interview . Eugenia Lancellotta How likely is it that you father has been replaced by an imposter? Or that you are the Emperor of Antarctica? These beliefs are instances of delusions: fixed, irrational beliefs that are not amenable to change in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. In popular culture, delusions are considered to be the mark of madness, while psychiatry usually takes them to be the symptoms of a serious mental illness. However, in countertendency to the narrative that sees delusions as pathological, some researchers working in the f...

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks about a recent paper she co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, “ Do delusions have and give meaning? ”, recently published in  Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  (open access).  Rosa Ritunnano For many people living with psychosis, delusional experiences are hugely distressing. They are not only harmful because of the negative emotions they often carry along, but they are also dysfunctional ( Miyazono, 2015 ). Someone who believes, for example, that everyone in their workplace is reading their thoughts and controlling their movements through a mysterious influencing machine, may feel extremely nervous, gradually withdraw from their friends and family, and give up their job. This can lead to a disruption in good functioning and may be accompanied by a constellation of symptoms attracting...

In this post, Federico Bongiorno (now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, funded by an Analysis Trust and Mind Association award) is summarising a paper he wrote with Lisa Bortolotti while a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. The paper is entitled: "The Role of Unconscious Inference in Models of Delusion Formation" and appeared in Inference and Consciousness , a volume edited by Timothy Chan and Anders Nes and published by Routledge in 2019. Federico Bongiorno Brendan Maher was the first to suggest that the formation of delusions involves an inferential transition—although he denies that the inference from which delusions arise is faulty ( Maher, 1992 ; Maher, 1999 ). Maher defends a view known as ‘explanationism’ ( Maher, 1974 ; Stone and Young, 1997 ), according to which delusions are hypotheses adopted to explain anomalous perceptual experiences and arrived at by inferential reasoning that is neither abnormally biased nor otherwise deficient (...

This post is by Jane Kisbey, PhD student at the University of Birmingham. Jane talks about her research on psychopathy and moral responsibility in this video interview . Jane Kisbey Some philosophers have recognised that in psychopaths there appears to be a failing in prudential concern. Philosophers characterise this in various ways, however I offer a new conceptualisation of the psychopath. My hypothesis says that we can best understand psychopaths as extreme future discounters . This account draws upon Neil Levy’s (2014) account to substantiate my hypothesis. However, there is a crucial difference between mine and Levy’s view. Whilst Levy thinks that psychopaths are unable to imagine what it is like to be a future person, it seems that this is not the case. It is rather that psychopaths cannot see why they should care about their future self, because for psychopaths, it is only what happens now they should care about. Levy argues that psychopaths have an impaired ability to mental...