Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Umut Baysan. Umut teaches philosophy at the University of Oxford and works in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Most of his published work is available on his website . Umut Baysan I am grateful to the Imperfect Cognitions blog for inviting me to write a post on my recent publication “Are propositional attitudes mental states?” , forthcoming in Minds and Machines . In the paper, I explore some implications of the view that some group entities (e.g., clubs, governments, companies) can have beliefs and desires. I argue that if group entities can have beliefs and desires, this would show that beliefs and desires are not mental states. I am not entirely convinced that group entities can really have beliefs and desires---though I think there are some reasons to take this possibility seriously, as I discuss in the paper. What I really want to achieve in the paper is to show that if you are prepared to accept this position, you should be prepared to accept the somewh...

This post is by Gottfried Vosgerau , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf. Gottfried's research interests are in the philosophy and metaphysics of mind, neurophilosophy, and cognitive science. Here he summarises his recent paper, co-authored with Patrice Soom , ' A Functionalist Approach to the Concept of 'Delusion ', published in Journal for Philosophy and Psychiatry. Based on the widely accepted DSM definition of delusions, delusions are commonly held to be false beliefs about reality that are not shared by the community the subject lives in and that are sustained despite overwhelming counter-evidence. In our paper, we argue that this conceptualization cannot be used for a scientific investigation of delusions. For this purpose, we argue, delusions should be defined as mental states with asymmetric inferential profiles: While they have inferential impact on other mental states, they are not affected by other mental states (especially not affect...

This post is by Edoardo Zamuner (pictured above), a senior research fellow in the School of Psychology of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He previously held research and teaching positions at University College London, La Trobe University (Melbourne) and the University of Hong Kong. While he is a philosopher by training, he is a psychologist by trade and persuasion. His current research in psychology focuses on visual perception of faces and facial properties such as gender, expression and personality. His work in philosophy of mind concerns the emotions. Here he summarises his recent paper ‘ Emotions as Psychological Reactions ’, published in Mind and Language.  What kinds of mental states are emotions? My paper argues for the view that emotions are reactions to our experience and thoughts, broadly construed. But what exactly is a reaction? And why should we think of emotions as reactions? Talk of reactions is a reflection of everyday causal explanations, just as...

The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Annual Conference took place on 2-3 July 2015 at the University of Manchester. Throughout two days philosophers of science presented their recent work in this fascinating field, including well-established researchers as well as some postgraduate students. In this post I summarise five out of a broad spectrum of papers presented during the Open Sessions, related to – broadly understood – philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. Brice Bantegnie (pictured below) kicked off the Open Sessions with his paper ‘A Shift in Focus: From Mental States to Mental Capacities’. The author reviewed different mental capacities investigated in cognitive psychology and argued that a greater attention ought to be paid to the work of psychologists in order to better understand a great diversity of these capacities. Bantegnie stressed that the good criterion of individuation can lead us to postulate a very high number of sensory modalities.

We are posting this on behalf of Dorothea Debus , Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York.   Dorothea Debus Hello! My name is Dorothea Debus, and my research is on topics in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology. I've recently written a paper on a new paradigm in experimental psychology, the paradigm of 'mental time travel', and Lisa has asked me to write a piece for this blog on my work on that topic. 'Mental Time Travel' is a comparatively new research paradigm in experimental psychology and the neurosciences. Relevant empirical work starts from the observation that there might be important similarities between, and maybe even a shared neuro­physiologial basis for, our engaging with the past in memory, and our engaging with the future in foresight. Both ways of relating to times other than the present are then, in an attempt to emphasize relevant similarities, referred to as cases of 'mental time travel'.