Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg) and Christiana Werner (University of Duisburg-Essen) about their recently edited book, Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge 2024). Recent approaches in philosophy of mind and epistemology have shown a growing interest in examining the nature of phenomenal knowledge and the epistemic value of having an experience. The basic idea in these debates has been that having an experience has a unique character and provides the experiencer with a kind of knowledge which otherwise cannot be achieved. As expressed by an ancient proverb: “Experience is the best teacher.” That there is a specific type of knowledge we can only gain by means of experience is a claim defended in the debate about the mind–body problem and consciousness (e.g., Nagel 1974; Jackson 1982), and in the debate on the so-called “knowledge argument” in particular.  Christiana Werner Simultaneously, the philosophy of imagination...

This post is by Cherise Rosen . Cherise is a faculty member in the Departments of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a co-investigator in the Chicago Longitudinal Study (PI: Martin Harrow) and has conducted extensive research in the phenomenological construct of psychosis, with particular emphasis on auditory verbal hallucinations and delusions.    Cherise Rosen Cherise summarizes her recent paper (co-authored with Martin Harrow, Clara Humpston, Liping Tong, Thomas H. Jobe, and Helen Harrow) entitled  ‘An experience of meanings’: A 20-year prospective analysis of delusional realities in schizophrenia and affective psychoses , recently published in  Frontiers in Psychiatry . The authors would like to thank all the individuals who participated in the Chicago Longitudinal Study as their contributions over the 20 years of follow-up made this research possible. This work was supported in part by USPHS Grants MH-...

This post is by Chiara Caporuscio (Berlin School of Mind and Brain). Here Chiara discussed some ideas from her paper Introspection and Belief , published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2021). Chiara Caporuscio Are beliefs about the external world psychologically and epistemically different from beliefs about what is going on in our own mind? The belief that it’s a rainy day outside is formed by weighing different sources of evidence, such as the view from my window or the weather forecast. It might be influenced by motivational factors, such as my desire to have a picnic later in the day. It is prone to error - for example, my upstairs neighbour watering the plants on their balcony might have caused me to jump to conclusions - and it can be revised and updated when new evidence comes in. My belief that I’m feeling happy, on the other hand, has been regarded by a long philosophical tradition as being fundamentally different: direct, incorrigible, and protected from error. In m...

This post is part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media . Today, Qi Wang talks about her research on the triangular self. Her paper, ‘ The triangular self in the social media era ’, is now available open access. Qi Wang is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University. Her research examines how cultural forces, including the Internet technology, impact autobiographical memory and the sense of self. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture (OUP 2013) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition . Qi Wang In the era of social media, we can share online our daily experiences as our lives unfold, at any time and as frequently as we’d like, with diverse audiences physically afar. This way of remembering and sharing personal experiences is unprecedented in human history. It also uniquely contributes to how we view ourselves in a digitally mediated world. I propose a triangular theory of self...

In today's post Paul Noordhof discusses the possibility of imagining pain, summarising a paper, Explaining impossible and possible imaginings of pain , that appears open access in a forum dedicated to responses to Jennifer Radden's article, Imagined and Delusional Pain , in Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia. Noordhof's paper is an output of the AHRC Project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett  at the University of Birmingham.  Paul Noordhof One form of imagining has a content that is like our sensory experiences and bodily sensations. For example, if I’m asked how many windows the front of my mother’s house has, I might answer by imagining the house as if I am looking at it. Equally, we can imagine our hand being warmed by a close-by fire. In a recent paper, inspired and responding to a paper by Jennifer Radden entitled ‘Imagined and Delusional Pain’, I considered the question of whether it is possible to imagine a pain in the same wa...

This week we feature the AHRC Project Deluded by Experience , led by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. In today's post she overviews the first of the Project’s outputs, co-authored with Paul Noordhof (Co-I): ‘ The Clinical Significance of Anomalous Experience in the Explanation of Monothematic Delusions ’, recently published in Synthese (open access).  Subjects with monothematic delusions often undergo some highly anomalous experiences. For example, in Capgras delusion, the strange experience has been understood as one of absence of something expected, the subject has reduced affective response to familiar faces traceable to ventromedial prefrontal damage (Tranel, Damasio, and Damasio 1995, Coltheart 2007), or right lateral temporal lesions and dorsolateral prefrontal damage (Wilkinson 2015, Corlett 2019). Empiricists about delusion formation take it that these experiences play an explanatory role in the formation and maintenan...

This week we feature the project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. The project will last 30 months (January 2021–June 2023) and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with Ema as PI and  Paul Noordhof  as Co-I. You can follow the Project on twitter  @del_by_ex .  In today's blog, I ask Ema about the project. LB: What is  Deluded by Experience  about?  ESB:  Deluded by Experience  is focused on three main areas. The first is monothematic delusion formation. Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists have argued that subjects with monothematic delusions have anomalous experiences in which delusions are rooted. However, few take anomalous experience to be the only clinically relevant factor. This is the one-factor approach. The current orthodoxy has it that a second clinical factor (cognitive deficit, bias...

This post is by Jasper Feyaerts, who is discussing a paper he co-authored with Mads G Henriksen, Stijn Vanheule, Inez Myin-Germeys, and Louis A Sass, entitled "Delusions beyond Beliefs", and published in The Lancet Psychiatry . With this link, there will be free access to the article for a few weeks. Jasper Feyaerts Delusions are commonly conceived as false beliefs that result from epistemic failures to represent reality correctly. This view has been dominant throughout the history of psychiatry, and continues to inform contemporary research and practice. In explanatory research, it underlies (neuro)cognitive attempts to explain delusions in terms of impairments or biases in cognitive reasoning. In clinical practice, it motivates cognitive-behavioral strategies focusing on the rational evaluation of delusional appraisals. Yet despite being the standard view of delusion in psychosis research, this conception has not gone entirely unchallenged. Most notably in the tradition ...

This post is by Phil Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett . It is a reply to the post we published on Tuesday on Metaethics and Mental Time Travel . In Metaethics and Mental Time Travel , Fileva and Tresan (F&T) fairly and accurately reconstructed (improved?) and intricately dissected our paper. We cannot follow every twist and turn in a short blog post so concentrate on the key issue. They partially agree with us that semantic knowledge detached from diachronic self-awareness is insufficient for moral agency but disagree (i) whether that awareness needs to be "richly experiential" and (ii) the nature of diachronic deficits in the cases we discuss (see their discussion of these cases which is deeper than ours). As they say, Representations with past- or future-oriented, autobiographical content, crucially, awareness of one’s past actions or future options as consistent or inconsistent with one’s principles do seem necessary : but MTT involves experiential repres...

A month from the end of project PERFECT, Michael Larkin (Co-Investigator) and Valeria Motta (Doctoral Research Fellow) reflect on what the project meant for them. One helpful way to think about being involved in a project as expansive as PERFECT is to reflect on where it is sending you next. In this post, we discuss some of the things they have learned from our interdisciplinary work together. Michael Larkin Michael : One of the most interesting aspects of PERFECT for me has arisen from the opportunity to work with you on your PhD. It’s going to be a really innovative combination of philosophical argument and phenomenological-psychological investigation. I’m aware that – coming into it – you were already very well-read on the phenomenological philosophy. I’m curious to know what has struck you most about getting to grips with qualitative methods in psychology? Valeria Motta Valeria : Thank you Michael. It was very interesting for me working with you too. I was s...

This post is by Federico Bongiorno , a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham working primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Earlier this year, he was a visiting research fellow at Yale University. Here he offers an overview of his paper ‘Is the Capgras delusion an endorsement of experience?' which was recently published in Mind & Language . The Capgras delusion is a condition in which a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by an identical or near-identical other (this can take a variety of forms, such as an imposter, clone, alien, robot, etc.). A more careful definition would specify two propositions that the person believes (Aimola-Davies & Davies, 2009 ): the proposition that someone is not a certain known individual (e.g., this man is not my father ), and the proposition that someone has replaced a certain known individual (e.g., this is a replacer of my father ). I name the content of the former proposi...

Five years ago I started this blog with a post by Kengo Miyazono...  Happy birthday Imperfect Cognitions!  I am very grateful to all the people who have worked hard during this time to keep the blog active and engaging: Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Kathy Puddifoot, Andrea Polonioli, Sophie Stammers, Magdalena Antrobus, Valeria Motta, and Anneli Jefferson.  And special thanks to our regular contributors and assiduous readers. To the next five years! Lisa 💛 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-  On the 5th birthday of the Imperfect Cognitions blog  Michael Larkin (Aston University)  considers some conceptual propositions of the Power Threat Meaning framework, arguing that the framework is both a step towards a more humanising concept of mental health problems, and a missed opportunity to be more inclusive. Enjoy this very rich and thought-provoking celebratory post! Often we are disappointed because we want the thing presented to us to be the thin...

A workshop, entitled “Exploring Culture and Experience: choosing methodologies in qualitative research”, took place at Aston University on the 26th of April 2018. This brief report is written by two of the organisers, William Day (graduate teaching assistant/PhD student in Psychology at Aston) and Tiago Moutela (research assistant/PhD student at Aston). Most of the talks were recorded, and are linked to at the end this write-up. This workshop was organised by members of the interdisciplinary, interuniversity, group Phenomenology of Health and Relationships (PHaR) . PHaR meets bi-monthly at Aston University to read, discuss and share insights into any work which brings a phenomenological focus to the study of health and illness. We are especially interested in understanding the relational context of health and illness, and what we might call a 'health relationship.' Together, some members of PHaR successfully submitted an application to a workshop fund ran by the Psychol...

This post is by  Raphaël Millière  (University of Oxford), reporting from the interdisciplinary conference The Sense of Self  hosted by the Ertegun Scholarship Programme and held from 29th-31st of May at the University of Oxford.  The idea that a sense of self pervades ordinary conscious experience appears to have at least an intuitive appeal for a number of authors in philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The aim of this conference was to investigate the very notion of sense of self, which is notoriously elusive and polysemous.  In order to bring some clarity to these discussions and to bridge the gap between conceptual and experimental approaches to the notion, philosophers and scientists were invited to present their work and participate in this interdisciplinary exchange over the course of three days. The first morning was dedicated to conceptual issues regarding the sense of self. The philosopher Marie Guillot (Un...

On Thursday 13 April 2017, a workshop organized at Columbia University by the Centre for Science and Society and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America sought to explore an important and still partly unresolved question: How does our brain make sense of scents and flavors? Importantly, a key goal of the exploration was to debunk some myths about the human sense of smell. Most notably, it targeted the view that our olfactory abilities are underdeveloped and lack cognitive significance. An eminent advocate of this proposition was Immanuel Kant, who wrote the following: "Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy; for there are more disgusting objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across something fragrant, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient" ...