Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Valentina Cardella (Università di Messina). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Rationality in Mental Disorder: Too little or too much? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Valentina Cardella Are people with mental disorders irrational? At first sight, this seems to be a trivial question: madness is the realm of non-sense. When someone tells you that her neighbour installed a tracking device in her abdomen, or that her internal organs are decomposing, you can’t help to wonder: how can she believe such impossible things? Where has her rationality gone? The common conceptualization of madness, which dates back to the Enlightenment, reflects this common-sense intuition: in people with mental disorders emotions are abnormal and unrestrained, and, on the other side, reason is severely affected. People with mental disorders can’t reason properly, healthy people can....

Today's post is by Clara Humpston. Clara is a Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Not long ago I completed my PhD from Cardiff University and this paper was first written a couple of years ago when I was a PhD student there . My PhD research focused on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopted a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach by incorporating behavioural and phenomenological investigations. In my second post for Imperfect Cognitions, I summarise my most recent theoretical paper on the paradoxical nature of self-awareness in schizophrenia, published in Philosophical Psychology . The primary manifestations of schizophrenia in my opinion, are basic self-disturbances leading to the adoption of a solipsistic lifeworld that provides fertile ground for the development of psychotic phenomena such as first-rank symptoms. First-rank symptoms are often disruptions of one’s ego-boundary: that is,...

This post is by Michela Summa (pictured above), who works on the Body Memory project at the University of Heidelberg. Here she summarises her paper ‘ The Disoriented Self. Layers and Dynamics of Self-Experience in Dementia and Schizophrenia ’, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In recent years, several authors have defended a stratified or hierarchical account of the self and self-experience. Some of these accounts have proved to play an important role in the interpretation of psychiatric diseases. In this paper, I addressed the cases of dementia and of schizophrenia in light of the hierarchical model of self and self-experience. Thereby, I set myself two main aims: first, to investigate the potentialities and the limits of applying the hierarchical understanding of the self to dementia and schizophrenia; secondly, to reassess the model itself on the basis of some characteristic traits of both pathologies and possibly to propose some modifications. The paper ...