Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by  Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini who talks about a recently published article in Philosophical Studies . In this paper, I defend the claim that a mental attitude is a belief if it shows at least a minimal degree of doxastic rationality. More specifically, beliefs are minimally rational in the sense that they respond to perceived irrationality by re-establishing internal coherence (or at least by clearly attempting to do so). A traditional view in philosophy is that it is a necessary condition for being a belief that an attitude behaves largely in a rational way (I call this view “Traditionalism”). That it, belief is typically (i) an attitude sensitive to the relevant evidence. It is also (ii) inferentially connected with other beliefs and other mental attitudes (e.g. emotions), and (iii) it typically causes actions when linked to a relevant desire. Contrary to this view, there is now strong empirical evidence that that some of the attitudes that we comfortably ca...

This post is by Rachel Gunn summarising an article co-authored with Michael Larkin and published in Psychosis . The article is based on Rachel's PhD work at Birmingham. The research findings and conclusions, framed in terms of the Enactive Approach, are a move towards a need for understanding the phenomenology of a person’s experience in terms of sense-making within a person-environment system. Rachel Gunn A person ordinarily understands and negotiates the world based on familiar patterns derived from her cultural and historical experience. She is born into a family, the family consists of particular relationships and the family lives within a relatively circumscribed culture. Humans are flexible and adaptive. The difference between the lived experience of a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon Rainforest and an investment banker in the City of London highlights this flexibility.  There might be circumstances under which an alteration in a person’s lived experience would be so radical th...

Today's post is by Shelby Clipp. If you want to know more, check her thesis, " Delusions as Hetero-Dynamic Property Clusters ." The standard position about the nature of delusions is doxasticism, according to which delusions are best characterized as a type of belief . However, the features of clinical delusions often differ from those typically associated with belief. For example, delusions tend to be highly resistant to counterevidence; and unlike typical beliefs they tend to exhibit limited or inconsistent behavioral guidance. The discrepancy between the features of delusions and ‘normal’ beliefs has inspired an ongoing debate between doxasticists: those who take delusions to be beliefs and non-doxasticists: those who take delusions to be instances of some other kind of state, such as imaginings or acceptances. In my thesis, “Delusions as Hetero-Dynamic Property Clusters,” I refer to this debate as the doxastic status debate . Despite efforts, the doxastic status debat...

Today’s blog post by Marion Nao adds a discourse analytic perspective to imperfect cognition via Goffman’s sociological theory of frame trap. It presents some key insights from a recent paper in Language and Communication , entitled:  'The lady doth protest too much, methinks': Truth negating implications and effects of an epistemic frame trap. Marion Nao holds a PhD in Language and Communication Research from Cardiff University, UK, and currently teaches online for Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain.   Many of us may be uncomfortably familiar with the concept and experience of a double-bind or Catch-22 situation, in which, crudely put, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Add to the complex a discursive mechanism by which the more you do, the more damned you are, in anticipation of which being damned if you don’t might seem like the lesser of the two evils, and you likely have the workings of a frame trap. In short, and metaphorically, with increased resistanc...

Today's post is by Joe Pierre , Acting Chief at the Mental Health Community Care Systems, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The blurry line separating psychopathology and normality, in the real world and the DSM, has been a longtime interest. Twenty years ago, I attempted to disentangle religious and delusional beliefs using the “continuum” model of delusional thinking based on cognitive dimensions. More recently, I’ve tried to understand other “delusion-like beliefs” (DLBs) including conspiracy theories, a frequent topic of my blog, Psych Unseen . A forthcoming paper models belief in conspiracy theories as a “two component, socio-epistemic” process involving epistemic mistrust and biased misinformation processing. Delusions and DLBs remain challenging to distinguish in clinical practice and in the internet ...

Today's post is by  Robert N. McCauley , William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University and George Graham, Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. Robert N. McCauley Our book, Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind , promotes a naturalistic approach, which we call Ecumenical Naturalism, to accounting for the long recognized and striking cognitive continuities that underlie familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. The case for those continuities rests on two considerations. The first is empirical findings that mental phenomena (e.g., hearing voices) associated with mental disorders are more widespread than typically assumed. The second consideration concerns those continuities’ grounding in one sort of intuitive, unconscious, automatic, instantaneous (System 1) cognition, viz., maturationally natural cognition (MATNAT). MATNAT systems address...

This post is by Michael Connors and Peter Halligan. Here they discuss their recent paper entitled 'Delusions and theories of belief' that was published in Consciousness and Cognition . Michael Connors is a research associate in the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing at the University of New South Wales. Peter Halligan is an honorary professor in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University.  Michael Connors One approach to understanding cognitive processes is through the systemic study of its deficits. Known as cognitive neuropsychology, the study of selective deficits arising from brain damage has provided a productive way of identifying underlying cognitive processes in many well-circumscribed abilities, such as reading, perception, attention, and memory. Peter Halligan The application of these methods to higher-level processes has been more contentious. Known as cognitive neuropsychiatry, researchers over the past 30 years have applied similar methods to studying delusions – ...