Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is from Aisha Qadoos (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) on her recently published paper Ambiguous Loss: a loved one's trauma (RHV) published in a special issue on memory and trauma . Research on interpersonal trauma predominantly looks at the effects of first personal trauma i.e., the experiences of those who directly undergo the experience. In this paper on ambiguous loss, I take the perspective of the friends and family of the one who has undergone the experience, a paradigmatic case being that of the partner of a veteran. Aisha Qadoos First, using L.A. Paul’s concept of transformative experience , I make the claim that traumatic experiences are transformative experiences . That is to say, they are experiences that result in some change in one’s sense of self (personally transformative) and/or epistemic standing (epistemically transformative). Personally transformative experiences are experiences that change what it is like to be you, resulting in cha...

Today's post features Christopher Mole, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of the Programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia. In this post he outlines a recent debate concerning the causes of intrusive memory in post traumatic stress.  Christopher has published on this topic in his papers "A methodological flaw in 'The neural basis of flashback formation: the impact of viewing trauma'" (Psychological  Medicine, 46(8), p. 1785) and "Causes and correlates of intrusive memory: a response to Clark, MacKay, Holmes and Bourne." (Psychological Medicine, 46(15), p. 3255). People often witness events that cause post-traumatic stress in others, without suffering from such stress themselves. Because of that, it has been supposed that the explanation of PTSD should not be sought in the experience of the traumatizing event, but in disruptions to the processes that occur in the days and weeks after it: processes of grievi...

This post is by Christopher Mole , Chair of the programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia . He is the author of Attention is Cognitive Unison (OUP, 2010), and The Unexplained Intellect (Routledge, 2016). This post outlines the argument of his recent article, “ Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question ” (Philosophical Psychology, 8(3): 557-571). Discussions of autism are often euphemistic: We speak of ‘service users’ rather than patients; and ‘atypicality’ rather than illness. By avoiding the rhetoric of disease we avoid the implication that the autistic point of view is a defective one, which would be gone from a world in which everything was operating correctly. Those who do use the vocabulary of disease might reject such motivations, while congratulating themselves on their straight-talking, no-nonsense approach. This would, I think, be a mistake. According to one tradition, the mistake would be that of applying a ‘medical mod...

In this post, I interview Louise Moody , Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York, and Tom Stoneham , Professor of Philosophy & Dean of the Graduate Research School, also at the University of York. Tom and Louise are presently researching dreaming: specifically, they are investigating an alternative model of dreaming (one that holds dreams are confabulations on waking rather than experiences of some type that are remembered and reported as dreams) and whether this model might be beneficial for those experiencing parasomnias. SS: Why is the topic of dreaming of interest to philosophers and what contributions have philosophers made so far? LM & TS: The first thing to say is that dreaming takes up a surprisingly large amount of our mental lives with most of us apparently dreaming 4-6 times a night – indeed, awakenings from all sleep-phases (i.e. both r.e.m and non-r.e.m sleep) elicit dream reports between 50-90% of the time (e.g. Dement & Kle...