Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) and Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada). It is based on their chapter “ Embodied, embedded, enactive, extended… and exclusionary? Toward an inclusive E-Cognition for cognitive diversity, ” published in Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition , which explores how 4E approaches can be made more inclusive of neurodiversity.  Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) If, following Alice Crary and the political turn in analytic philosophy, one takes the conceptual and methodological to be political, then 4E Mental Health concepts express a range of political commitments. Some of these merit special attention in debates about how cognitive diversity and disability should be understood and recognized. In our chapter at Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition , this is exactly our goal: to critically examine 4E Mental Health from the lens of the Neurodiversity movement and its academic branch, the neurodiver...

This post is by Pablo Andrés López Silva (University of Valparaíso) and Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada). It draws on their paper “A Roadmap to 4E Mental Health,” published in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, where they develop a 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) framework for understanding mental health and psychopathology.  Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo  (University of Granada)       As a teenager, I (Miguel) spent a significant amount of my weekend nights compulsively collecting all the trash left in the parks where I used to get trashed with my friends. Back home, I would then spend some more time aligning all the stuff in my massively misaligned desk in straight angles. And I did so out of fear that a nasty, omnipotent Karmic force—whose existence I deemed almost certainly impossible—could hurt my then-partner in retaliation for my past misbehavior. Fortunately, I eventually escaped the grip of my Karmic ob...

Today's post is by Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham) who is addressing self-illness ambiguity. Jodie Russell In a recent paper titled “ Prescriptive ‘selves’ and self-illness ambiguity ” ( Synthese 2025), I explain the phenomenon of self-illness ambiguity and argue that individuals who experience these ambiguities might feel a particular form of social isolation. Self-illness ambiguities occur when people struggle to determine whether a thought, feeling, or behaviour is due to their illness (specifically, a mental disorder) or due to who they are as a person (i.e. stemming from their self). For example, someone with depression might find it difficult to tell whether their sadness after being let down by a friend is a symptom of their depression or a response rooted in their personal history of being let down by others. As Sadler (2004) describes, mental disorder can saturate or transform a person’s relationship to the world, and this transformation can be valuable in itsel...

Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the American College of Greece and Visiting Professor of Parenting and Special Education at KU Leuven. His research regards the philosophy of psychiatry, particularly issues of evidence based diagnosis, as well as phenomenological psychiatry and the use of client expertise in psychotherapy. In this post, he discusses the themes of his recent BJPsych editorial . Themistoklis Pantazakos For seventy years psychiatry has hunted biological markers to anchor its diagnoses in hard science. From brain imaging to genomics, each new tool promised parity with the rest of medicine, yet no major mental disorder has a specific biomarker. This gap feeds two linked accusations: psychiatric categories don’t track real diseases, and, without biomarkers, psychiatrists wield excessive, culturally loaded authority, sometimes inflating pathology in step with pharmaceutical incentives. Critics imply that bioma...

This post is by Sanja Dembić. Sanja is a research associate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a member of the “Human Abilities” Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Here, she discusses her recent book 'Philosophy of Mental Disorder: An Ability-Based Approach'.  What is it to have a mental disorder? There are many different answers to this question in the literature, the most prominent being those that refer to the concept of biological dysfunction. These views are usually developed with reference to clear cases of bodily disorders (or: diseases). The idea behind them is that if we have an adequate analysis of the concept of bodily disorder, we will also have an adequate analysis of the concept of mental disorder. In contrast, my aim was to develop a concept of mental disorder that is developed with reference to clear cases of mental disorder. In this book, I offer an ability-based view of mental disorders. I argue that an individual has a mental disorder if and o...

Today's post is by Dan Degerman  on his recent paper, " Epistemic injustice, naturalism, and mental disorder: on the epistemic benefits of obscuring social factors " ( Synthese , 2023). Dan Degerman is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.  Dan Degerman Naturalistic understandings that frame human experiences and differences as biological dysfunctions constitute a major source of epistemic injustice in disease and disability, according to many philosophers. Epistemic injustice refers to injustices committed against people in their capacity as knowers. This occurs, for example, when someone is disbelieved because of their social identity or when a lack of suitable interpretive resources means that someone cannot make their experiences intelligible to themselves or others. Critics have argued that naturalistic understandings of human experiences and differences can lead to both kinds of epistemic injustice because they tend t...

This post is by Elly Vintiadis (The American College of Greece Deree College) on her recent paper " Mental Disorders as Processes: A More Suited Metaphysics for Psychiatry " (2022, Philosophical Psychology ). (This is an updated version of her previous post  in 2019.)  Elly Vintiadis In most discussions about the mind and mental disorders, the metaphysical framework within which they take place is rarely questioned. It is however, important to check our metaphysical beliefs – including our beliefs about what the world is made up of - because whether they are held consciously or not, they affect the way we understand the world and how we approach it scientifically.  For this reason, in my recent work I explore what a metaphysical framework that puts at its center the notion of a process can add to our understanding of the mind and its disorders. I contend that seeing the world as fundamentally ‘processual’ in nature rather than in terms of substances and things, provides...

Today's post is by Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien. Anne-Marie is a postdoctoral fellow at the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and also affiliated with the École normale supérieure (ENS). She works on philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, social epistemology and epistemic injustice. Here, she discusses her recent paper on dysfunction and the definition of mental disorder.  Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien One big question in North-American psychiatry (at least) is the meaning of “mental disorder”. This is an issue that goes back to the 1960s-1970s when the discipline was the subject of heated debate. At that time psychiatry was under attack from all sides, but one of the most important criticisms was to show problems with one of its central concepts, “mental disorder”. One of the arguments was that the concept of mental disorder was not based on anything scientific or empirical and was therefore only a tool of social control to regulate social deviance (e.g., depression would not be a...

Today's post is by Justin Garson . Justin is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He writes on the philosophy of madness, the evolution of mind, and purpose in nature. He also contributes to PsychologyToday.com . Today he writes about his new book, " Madness: A Philosophical Exploration ". Since the 1970s, Western psychiatry has been locked into a disease paradigm of madness. This paradigm has such an ironclad grip on our thinking that it’s sometimes hard to see outside of it. I call this paradigm madness-as-dysfunction. In essence, it sees the forms of madness – delusions, dissociative episodes, depression – as so many different ways that the mind can break down, or fail to function as it should. We all know the slogans. “Depression is like diabetes.” “Schizophrenia is like cancer.” These give voice to madness-as-dysfunction while investing it with the force of an ethical imperative. Justin Garson But what if mad...

In today's post, Anneli Jefferson discusses her new book , Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge 2022) .  She is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and at the intersection of the two.  In the last 20 years or so, neuroscience and psychiatry have increasingly been researching what brain differences can be found in people suffering from mental distress, and how these might help to explain and treat mental disorders. There is a long-standing belief that mental disorders must be brain disorders, because whatever psychological dysfunction we find must have some basis in the brain. However, many psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and philosophers strongly resist this idea, and debates about this issue can get quite heated. In my book  I set out to get to the bottom of what makes this debate so intractable and provide a way forward in the debate. I argue that resistance to calling mental disorders brain di...

Amy MacKinnon is a graduate student at Western University studying philosophy of psychiatry, mind-brain sciences, and disability. Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. His book, Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences , will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.  Amy MacKinnon Understanding the nature of psychiatric disorders is something that philosophers of psychiatry, as well as practicing psychiatrists and psychotherapists, are concerned about. Every so many years, after a long revision process, a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is produced by the American Psychiatric Association. In the most recent edition (DSM-5), as in all previous editions, some disorders were removed, some re-named, and some new ones added. With each revision, the hope is that we are gaining validity and reliability.  As philosophers, we’re interested in the underlying basis of thes...

Today's post is by Harriet Fagerberg at King’s College London & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on her recent paper “ Why mental disorders are not like software bugs ” (forthcoming, Philosophy of Science ). What, if anything, is the difference between mental disorders and brain disorders? Are mental disorders brain disorders? If not, are they disorders at all? According to one prominent view in the philosophy of psychiatry, mental dysfunction does not entail brain dysfunction just as software dysfunction does not entail hardware dysfunction in a classical computer. Wakefield writes:  It is true that every software malfunction has some hardware description; that is not at issue. Rather, the point is that a software malfunction need not be a physical hardware malfunction. Analogously, even if all mental states are physical states, it does not follow that a mental dysfunction is a physical dysfunction. (p. 129, Wakefield, 2006 ; see also Papineau, 1994 ) Nevertheless, because dysf...

 This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcase a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue is on the  Philosophy of Medicine  with guest editors Saana Jukola and Anke Bueter.  Today's post is the second post of the series. Kathleen Murphy-Hollies discusses her paper in the special issue, which you can read  here . Kathleen is a philosophy PhD student and teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, working primarily on confabulation and its effects for embodying virtuous traits.  Kathleen Murphy-Hollies In my paper, I discuss whether Wakefield’s hybrid account of disorder helps clarify the thorny issue of whether Gender Dysphoria (GD) should be included in the DSM as a disordered state or left out as merely a socially disvalued state. In the DSM-5, GD is described in individuals as “a marked incongruence between the gender they have been assigned to...

This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcase a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue is on the Philosophy of Medicine  with guest editors Saana Jukola and Anke Bueter.  In today's post, Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien discusses her paper in the special issue, which you can read here . Anne-Marie is a postdoctoral fellow at the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and also affiliated with the École normale supérieure (ENS). She works on philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, social epistemology, and epistemic innocence.  Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien Medicalization is the process through which nonmedical problems are conceptualized and treated as medical problems ( Conrad and Slodden 2013 ). It has become a controversial topic both within and outside psychiatry, especially since the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disord...

In this post, Antonella Mazziotta, MSc student at the  Institute for Mental Health  at the University of Birmingham, discusses Gender Dysphoria. Gender Dysphoria is a topic not so well understood by scientists and society with this being reflected in the type of treatments and stigma around LGBTQ+ communities. Antonella's research interests include exploring Gender Dysphoria in childhood as well as language comprehension and production in Mental Health conditions. Antonella Mazziotta I had the opportunity to observe how dysphoria affects transgender people, especially children, and how society plays a vital role in the psychological outcomes of treatment for young people. This led to my interest in researching the pathological features of Gender Dysphoria. Do we believe that transgender children are aware of their inner identity or simply confused and therefore have a mental disorder? The DSM-IV called this condition ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ which was changed to ‘Gender Dysp...

This post is by Anthony S. David , Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London. Here he talks about his new book, Into the Abyss: a neuropsychiatrist’s notes on troubled minds (Oneworld Publications, 2020). When I submitted a title for my first non-academic book I did so with some trepidation. Apart from sounding somewhat negative, wouldn’t people think it was something about mountaineering, a cautionary tale perhaps? As I explained to my concerned editor, the intended readership like those of this blog would be, “interested in themes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry” and would instantly pick up the reference to Jaspers, the early 20th Century philosopher-psychiatrist. Somehow he wasn’t reassured.  But the abyss metaphor is a powerful descriptor of the challenge of understanding the experience of the person who is mentally ill – to reach out across the abyss into what Jaspers called ‘an impenetrable country’, the...