Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Dan Cavedon-Taylor who is the author of a paper to appear in Synthese entitled " Must depression be irrational? " Dan Cavedon-Taylor From Capgras syndrome to schizophrenia, anorexia to obsessive-compulsive disorders, mental health conditions are thought to entail failures of epistemic rationality. This includes depression, which is often conceptualised by philosophers as necessarily involving mental states that are ‘unwarranted by’ or ‘disproportionate to’ events in one’s life ( Davies 2016; Wakefield & Demazeux 2016 ; Tully 2019 ). Call this view of depression, the ‘Irrationality View’. For some of us, the Irrationality View seems plainly incorrect. There appears to be a clear difference, in rational terms, between depression caused by change in season versus depression caused by, e.g., homelessness, refuge experience, serious assault, and perhaps even gaslighting ( Abrahams 2024 ). For that reason, I think we ought to prefer a Mixed View of depr...

Today's post is by Jan-Paul Sandmann (Harvard University), on his recent paper " Irrationality and Indecision " ( Synthese,  2023). Jan-Paul Sandmann What is wrong with preferring some option a to option b , b to c , but c again to a ? Why shouldn’t one cling on to such cyclical preferences? The standard response is that one ought not hold on to cyclical preferences because one could be money pumped as a result. By focusing on the binary comparisons alone, it would seem reasonable to pay some amount of money for b rather than c , a rather than b , as well as c rather than a .  If the agent however takes these actions, she ends up with the option she started with, c , while having paid some money. And that clearly does not seem sensible: acting upon a preference cycle would not be in the agent’s interest. The money pump argument thus draws one to conclude that the agent should get rid of her cyclical preferences.  The argument is powerful, but it also makes som...

Today's post is by Reinier Schuur, who is a PhD candidate in philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His primary research interest is in philosophy of medicine. Reinier won the 2022 Peter Sowerby Prize for his essay ‘The Puzzle of Addiction: Knowledge of the Good as an Achievement’. This is a short version of his essay for a wider audience.  Reinier Schuur The puzzle of addiction refers to the problem of explaining how addictive behaviour appears to be both voluntary and destructive. This puzzle arises when we assume that people will stop engaging in a voluntary behaviour if the costs outweigh the benefits, all else being equal. The main solution to the puzzle had been to argue that addictive behaviour is in fact involuntary. This solution, however, has come under criticism over the last few decades, with both empirical data and theoretical analysis arguing that addictive behaviour is voluntary in some significant sense. But this raises again th...

As part of the Knowledge Resistance project, a conference was organised in Stockholm from 23rd to 25th August 2022 to bring together philosophers, psychologists, media studies researchers, and journalists and discuss recent work on misinformation. This event was organised by Åsa Wikforss ( interviewed on knowledge resistance here ).  Stockholm University, Albano In this report, I will summarise some of the talks. DAY 1 In his talk entitled “Resistance to Knowledge and Vulnerability to Deception”, Christopher F. Chabris (Geisinger Health System) argued that we need to understand our vulnerabilities to deception in order to appreciate the social aspects of knowledge resistance. He illustrated with many interesting examples of famous deceptions and frauds how deceivers exploit blind spots in our attention and some of our cognitive habits.  Christopher Chabris For instance, we tend to judge something as accurate if it is predictable and consistent. We make predictions all t...

Today's post is by Quinn Hiroshi Gibson and Adam Bradley , on how to understand monothematic delusions. Quinn Hiroshi Gibson Subjects with Capgras delusion form the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter: The day after her arrival at home, [her] father could not open the front door because YY had locked it from the inside. He rang the bell and YY called the police because ‘there was an impostor outside the house who was picking the lock and pretending to be her father’. (Brighetti at al. 2007, p. 191)   Capgras is a monothematic delusion, a delusion whose content is restricted to a single topic, in this case the identity of YY's father. In ‘ Monothematic Delusions and the Limits of Rationality ’ (published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 2021), we put forward a new account of such delusions. Our view is a version of the two-factor model according to which two factors are responsible for monothematic delusions ( Davies et al. 2001 )...

Today's post is by Alex Gregory , University of Southampton. In this post, Gregory presents his new book, Desire-as-Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality , published by OUP in July 2021. You can read some chapter summaries here . And here is a link to chapter 1, which the publisher has kindly agreed to make available for free as a sample.  What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? I endorse desire-as-belief, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs. More specifically, I say that to desire P is to believe you have normative reason to bring about P. This view is in one respect highly unorthodox, since many – e.g. Plato, Hume – hold that our desires are really quite different from our beliefs. The view is also unorthodox for suggesting that all our desires can be evaluated for whether they are correct or not. But despite being unorthodox in these ways, I argue that the view is nonetheless attractive. Some ort...

Today I interview Rik Peels (Amsterdam) on a new exciting project he is leading, addressing extremism and fundamentalism. The project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and is named, "Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism" (2020-2025).  Rik Peels LB: How did you become interested in fundamentalism? RP: It was a combination of two things. On the one hand, ever since the start of my PhD in 2008, I’ve been working on the ethics of belief. In times of polarization and misinformation, I think the issue of how people form their beliefs and how they should form them has become even more important. On the other hand, especially since 9/11, the so-called new atheists have severely critiqued religious faith on both moral and epistemic grounds, but it has always struck me, as a religious person myself, that they seem to target only fundamentalist and other extreme versions of religion. I felt it was only natural to combine the two interests and the rise of terr...

Today's post is part of a series on the AHRC funded project Deluded by Experience , ran by PI Ema Sullivan-Bissett and Co-I Paul Noordhof . In this post Harriet Stuart (Research Assistant for Deluded by Experience) interviews Carolina Flores about their research interests and most recent work. Carolina is a graduate student in Philosophy at Rutgers, New Brunswick , specialising in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and social philosophy. Carolina Flores HS: Your PhD work seeks to address questions around belief and interactions with evidence, how did you first become interested in these ideas? CF: My interest in these questions has a theoretical and a political source. The theoretical source was my interest, as an undergraduate, in Davidson’s idea that to have beliefs is to be rational. Though I was intrigued by this view, it was also clear to me that it is in tension with the fact that we are frequently irrational, sometimes deeply so (as in the case of delusions). In my undergra...

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...

Today's blog is by Matteo Fiorani (University of Rome, Tor Vergata) and it is the last in a series of posts associated with the special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Matteo's paper (open access) is entitled: " Rationality, Irrationality and Irrationalism in the Anti-institutional Debate in Psychiatry around the Second-Half of the 1970s in Italy ". Matteo Fiorani The 1968 movements overwhelmed psychiatry with anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional criticism. The young protesters demanded, first of all, the rights of madness and, provocatively, of unreason. At the same time, they dismissed the dominant normality, represented by bourgeois common sense. They also affirmed the need not to repress contradictions and suffering. Emotions and affectivity were indeed part of the social and political world. From these premises it was possible to develop a deep political and cultural reflection on the boundary between reason a...

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....