Imperfect Cognitions

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 (...

In this post, I interview Federico Bongiorno who recently completed a doctoral project on delusion formation at the University of Birmingham. Federico Bongiorno LB: Philosophers are intrigued by delusions. What interests you about them? FB: There are several things that interest me about delusions, which is part of the reason why I decided to write a PhD thesis comprising of self-standing papers rather a single book-like package. I will focus on just one, the question of whether delusions can be beliefs despite being only marginally belief-like. Participants in this debate are typically non-committal as to what beliefs are over and beyond our folk-psychological practices. So, when they ask whether delusions are or aren’t belief-like, what they want to know are things such as whether delusions play the same role as beliefs in predicting intentional behaviour, or whether they conform to the stereotypical cluster of attributes (cognitive, behavioural, phenomenal) that we would normally e...