Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Konrad Banicki and Peter Zachar. Book cover Personality disorders are among the most contentious topics in clinical psychology and psychiatry. Thus, it is surprising to see how little attention has been paid to this domain within the philosophy of psychiatry. In our recently published book Conceptualizing Personality Disorder: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychological Science, and Psychiatry (Cambridge University Press, 2025) we set out to potentially alter the scholarly landscape by encouraging philosophers to tackle the complicated issue of personality disorder. We also wanted to invite psychologists and psychiatrists to participate in the task of bringing more philosophy to personality disorders.   One of the contexts for this volume is a loss of confidence in the neo-Kraepelinian categorical model under whose guidance personality disorders gained renewed importance in psychiatry with the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical ...

This post is by Olivia Siegfried, currently studying for a Master’s degree in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Olivia is interested in youth mental health, personality disorders, and forensic psychology, and adopts a social constructionist perspective to understand these issues. This is part of a series of posts by students of the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module at the Institute for Mental Health. They share some of their views on key topics discussed in the module. Olivia Siegfried Responsibility without blame As personality disorders are notoriously hard to treat, Hannah Pickard has put forward the ‘responsibility without blame’ approach ( Pickard, 2011 ) for clinicians to adopt to foster the best clinical outcomes. Although sounding inherently paradoxical, we can hold people responsible without blaming them by segregating responsibility from morality and instead defining it through a person’s agency.  Taking responsibility for...

Today's post is by Şerife Tekin at University of Texas at San Antonio on her recent paper “ Participatory Interactive Objectivity in Psychiatry ” in Philosophy of Science .   Şerife Tekin  As evident from the compelling body of scholarship featured in the Imperfect Cognitions blog, the last decade has been a very exciting time to be doing philosophy of psychiatry. What has been even more exciting for me, as a philosopher who has long been promoting the view that giving uptake to the first-person perspectives and testimonies of individuals diagnosed with mental disorders is necessary for enhancing rigorous research and ethical clinical practices, is the increased philosophical interest in thinking about how to include service users/ patients/ex-patients/survivors into enhancing research.  As can be seen, for example, from the line-up of speakers and their abstracts, in a recent conference organized by Sam Fellowes on “ Philosophically Analysing the Role of Service User...

Amy MacKinnon is a graduate student at Western University studying philosophy of psychiatry, mind-brain sciences, and disability. Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. His book, Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences , will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.  Amy MacKinnon Understanding the nature of psychiatric disorders is something that philosophers of psychiatry, as well as practicing psychiatrists and psychotherapists, are concerned about. Every so many years, after a long revision process, a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is produced by the American Psychiatric Association. In the most recent edition (DSM-5), as in all previous editions, some disorders were removed, some re-named, and some new ones added. With each revision, the hope is that we are gaining validity and reliability.  As philosophers, we’re interested in the underlying basis of thes...

This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcased a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue on the Philosophy of Medicine was guest-edited by Anke Bueter and Saana Jukola . In this third and final post, the guest editors of the issue Anke and Saana give a summary of the special issue and the other papers included in it. Anke is an associate professor at Aarhus University. Her main research interests lie within feminist philosophy of science and philosophy of psychiatry. Saana is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She is interested in the philosophy of medicine, social epistemology, and values in science. Anke Bueter Philosophy of medicine has become established as a distinct branch of philosophy relatively recently. Of course, philosophical questions concerning, for instance, the nature of disease or the ethical responsibilities of physicians are not new. Ho...

 This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcase a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue is on the  Philosophy of Medicine  with guest editors Saana Jukola and Anke Bueter.  Today's post is the second post of the series. Kathleen Murphy-Hollies discusses her paper in the special issue, which you can read  here . Kathleen is a philosophy PhD student and teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, working primarily on confabulation and its effects for embodying virtuous traits.  Kathleen Murphy-Hollies In my paper, I discuss whether Wakefield’s hybrid account of disorder helps clarify the thorny issue of whether Gender Dysphoria (GD) should be included in the DSM as a disordered state or left out as merely a socially disvalued state. In the DSM-5, GD is described in individuals as “a marked incongruence between the gender they have been assigned to...

This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcase a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue is on the Philosophy of Medicine  with guest editors Saana Jukola and Anke Bueter.  In today's post, Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien discusses her paper in the special issue, which you can read here . Anne-Marie is a postdoctoral fellow at the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and also affiliated with the École normale supérieure (ENS). She works on philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, social epistemology, and epistemic innocence.  Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien Medicalization is the process through which nonmedical problems are conceptualized and treated as medical problems ( Conrad and Slodden 2013 ). It has become a controversial topic both within and outside psychiatry, especially since the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disord...

This post is by Rachel Gunn summarising an article co-authored with Michael Larkin and published in Psychosis . The article is based on Rachel's PhD work at Birmingham. The research findings and conclusions, framed in terms of the Enactive Approach, are a move towards a need for understanding the phenomenology of a person’s experience in terms of sense-making within a person-environment system. Rachel Gunn A person ordinarily understands and negotiates the world based on familiar patterns derived from her cultural and historical experience. She is born into a family, the family consists of particular relationships and the family lives within a relatively circumscribed culture. Humans are flexible and adaptive. The difference between the lived experience of a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon Rainforest and an investment banker in the City of London highlights this flexibility.  There might be circumstances under which an alteration in a person’s lived experience would be so radical th...

The author of the post is Walter Glannon , who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary in Canada. He has held other academic appointments at McGill University and the University of British Columbia.  Walter grew up and received all of his education in the US. Following a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the University of Chicago, for 5 years (2000-2005) he was clinical ethicist at 3 hospitals in Montreal and Vancouver. This is largely how he developed his interest in research and clinical aspects of psychiatry. Advances in psychiatric research and clinical psychiatry in the last 30 years have given rise to a host of new questions that lie at the intersection of psychiatry, neuroscience, philosophy and law. Such questions include: Are psychiatric disorders diseases of the brain, caused by dysfunctional neural circuits and neurotransmitters? What role do genes, neuro-endocrine, neuro-immune interactions and the environment play in the ...

Today’s post is provided by Jorge Gonçalves of IFILNOVA , Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL) and the Lisbon Mind & Reasoning Group (group included in IFILNOVA). In this post he provides a summary of his chapter "Why are delusions pathological?" in Hipólito, I., Gonçalves, J. Pereira, J. G.  Schizophrenia and Common Sense: explaining the relation between madness and social values . The aim of the article is to identify a characteristic of delusions: that which makes them pathological. This aim may appear a bit strange at first because one believes that delusions just are a pathological alteration of the mind. However, some authors have shown that although pathological delusions are the most studied, not all delusions have necessarily harmful consequences for the delirious subject or for others. Hence, it seems pertinent to question what makes delusions a pathological state. “Pathological” is here understood as that which damages the subject (not that which d...

This post is by Dr Şerife Tekin , Assistant Professor of Philosophy; Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Daemen College, and Associate Fellow; Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, and Dr Jeffrey Poland , Visiting Professor; Science and Technology Studies; Brown University, and Senior Lecturer; History, Philosophy and Social Science; Rhode Island School of Design. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to provide some information about our book, Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry: Responses to the Crisis in Mental Health Research , published with the MIT Press in January 2017. We hope to introduce some of the main themes for the book here, and encourage the readers of the blog to join this important conversation on the philosophy and science of psychiatry. As evident from the intriguing posts featured in the Imperfect Cognitions blog, the last decade has been a very exciting time to be doing philosophy of psychiatry. With the recent dev...

In this post, Reinier Schuur, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews  Dominic Murphy  (pictured below), Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, on current debates in the philosophy of psychiatry. RS: Many people have said that over the last 20 years, philosophy of psychiatry has grown, as has the interaction between philosophers and psychiatrists. Do you agree? Do you think this interaction will increase, and what should the role of philosophers be in psychiatry, and vice versa? DM: I suppose it has grown. When I started thinking about psychiatry in the mid-90’s (I started my PhD in 1994), back then there very few philosophers of psychiatry. Reznek had just written his  book  ,  Jennifer Radden  and  Stephen Braude  had written, and  Ian Hacking  was about to start his writing. The field was very small and it has certainly grown. I think probably psychiatrists are interacting with philosophy. There h...

This post is by Giulia Cavaliere and James Rubert Fletcher, both PhD students in Social Science, Health and Medicine, King's College London.   On November 12th, the third event organized by King’s College London’s new joint venture Philosophy & Medicine took place. Previous events have featured colloquiums about placebo-controlled clinical trials and the challenges of communicating cancer risk . This third colloquium focused instead on the issue of mental health and in particular on the problem of defining delusion . The first part of the colloquium was led by Dr Abdi Sanati, a consultant psychiatrist and a philosophy scholar from the North East London NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Sanati opened with the description of a clinical case concerning a woman experiencing problems with a prosthesis and reporting her wish to have it removed. Her doctors originally encouraged her to keep the prosthesis, addressing her discomfort as something “delusional”. Eventually, after many p...

In this post Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from the Loebel Lectures in Psychiatry and Philosophy held on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of November 2015. The lectures were delivered by Professor Steven E. Hyman , former director of the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), and currently at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric research, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  Steven Hyman gave his lectures on ‘The theoretical challenge of modern psychiatry: no easy cure’, which dealt with the future of psychiatry and the potential ‘collision’ between patient’s lived experience and our neurobiological understanding of mental disorders. A small conference was also held on the 5th of November on Hyman’s lectures, where several philosophers of psychiatry spoke, such as Derek Bolton , Tim Thornton , Jonathan Glover , and Julian Savulescu . The title of the first lecture by Hyman was ‘The problem of modern psychiatry: the collision of neurobiological m...

Caitrin Donovan  and  Reinier Schuur  report from the 2015 University of Sydney Winter School. The programme was entitled "Cross-cultural psychological differences and their philosophical implications" and seminars were led by  Stephen Stich  (Rutgers) and  Dominic Murphy  (University of Sydney). From the 19th till the 23rd of October the unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney held its second winter school programme, this year on the topic of “Cross-cultural psychological differences and their philosophical implications”. Intuitions have been long been the bread and butter of various philosophical projects, which use them to evaluate semantic, epistemic, ethical and ontological theories and concepts. This can be seen in ‘Gettier cases’ in epistemology where accounts of knowledge are tested against intuitions on what counts as knowledge, and in ‘trolley cases’ in ethics where what is morally justified action i...

This post is by Gottfried Vosgerau , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf. Gottfried's research interests are in the philosophy and metaphysics of mind, neurophilosophy, and cognitive science. Here he summarises his recent paper, co-authored with Patrice Soom , ' A Functionalist Approach to the Concept of 'Delusion ', published in Journal for Philosophy and Psychiatry. Based on the widely accepted DSM definition of delusions, delusions are commonly held to be false beliefs about reality that are not shared by the community the subject lives in and that are sustained despite overwhelming counter-evidence. In our paper, we argue that this conceptualization cannot be used for a scientific investigation of delusions. For this purpose, we argue, delusions should be defined as mental states with asymmetric inferential profiles: While they have inferential impact on other mental states, they are not affected by other mental states (especially not affect...

The Mind, Value and Mental Health International Conference in Philosophy and Psychiatry took place on 25 July 2015 at the picturesque St. Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford. It attracted philosophers, psychiatrists and psychologists both from the UK and from abroad. Below I summarise four of the papers presented on that immensely fascinating day. The first talk was given by Rachel Cooper, Lancaster University (pictured below with Matthew Parrott) and was entitled ‘DSM-5: Stasis and Change’. Cooper argued that classifications like the DSM can be thought of as forming part of the infrastructure of science, and have much in common with material infrastructure. The implications are, Cooper suggested, are that as with material technologies it becomes possible for ‘path dependent’ development to cause a sub-optimal classification to get ‘locked in’ and hard to replace. Cooper argued that the DSM has become locked-in and as a consequence any changes to the diagnostic criteria have...

In this post, Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from this year's Cognitio Conference  for young researchers in cognitive science. From the 8th to the 10th of June, I attended the Cognitio 2015 conference on "Atypical Minds: the Cognitive Science of Difference and Potentialities" at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada (UQAM), where I also gave my first conference talk on my doctoral research. The conference atmosphere was incredibly welcoming and friendly, and a great place to make new contacts and give my first conference talk. Many topics presented at the intersection between philosophy, clinical neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology were addressed. The topics of the talks can roughly be divided into four categories: delusions, synesthesia, autism, and the RDoC. One of the reasons why philosophers have been so interested in delusions, and other psychiatric symptoms and conditions, is that explaining such symptoms and conditions prese...