Imperfect Cognitions

This week's blogpost is from Adam Blehm (Biblical Worldview Director at Rejoice Christian School) on his recent publication  The Viciousness of Psychological Resilience ( Phenomenology of Cognitive Sciences, 2025).  Adam Blehm Generally speaking, psychological resilience seems to be a good thing. By  psychological resilience I mean something like a psychological disposition that enables  us to cope with difficult things in life. Resilience is thus a good thing because it helps us  live our lives without being upended with debilitating psychological distress. Positive psychologists have identified several traits that appear to make one  more resilient. One of the key characteristics of resilient people is that they tend to  exemplify what psychologists Southwick and Charney call “acceptance.” Essentially  “acceptance” refers to the disposition to accept the “reality of our situation, even if that  situation is frightening or painful.” If we a...

This week we are happy to have Christophe Gauld and colleagues presenting a recent paper investigating philosophical conceptual competence among French psychiatrists.  Christophe Gauld A recent international study published in L’Encéphale aim to offer an overview of how psychiatry residents and psychiatrists in France relate to conceptual and philosophical aspects of their discipline. Based on responses from 353 participants, the survey highlights a strong endorsement (over 90%) for integrating philosophy into psychiatry curricula, with a more cautious self-assessment of conceptual confidence.   This result highlights a situation where interest and perceived importance coexist with limited perceived preparedness. While 80% support the development of specific conceptual skills, many respondents report uncertainty or limited familiarity with the relevant philosophical frameworks. Such findings suggest that the place of conceptual reflection in psychiatric training remains poten...

In this post, Katja Crone and Max Gab (TU Dortmund) present the Special Issue “Minimal Forms of Shared Intentionality,” which they recently guest-edited for  Philosophical Psychology . Max Gab Shared intentionality is a ubiquitous, fundamental, and multifaceted phenomenon. People act together, share thoughts, beliefs, and emotional states. It lies at the heart of basic human capacities like joint attention, communication, and social cognition. The concept is also used to explain higher-level forms of human organization, such as corporate agency, political communities, and even monetary systems. This has led to a sprawling field of research that combines ideas and methods from various disciplines, including developmental and evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, phenomenology, and classical analytical approaches in philosophy.  While debates about shared intentionality have been productive, established approaches to explain it also face problems that motivate an investigati...

This post is by Carme Isern-Mas and Ivar R. Hannikainen whose paper , "Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual Structure", was recently published open access in  Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Carme and Ivar In the first episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , successful New York lawyer Rebecca Bloom bumps into her ex-boyfriend Josh Chan, who announces he is moving back to his hometown in California. Impulsively, Rebecca quits her job and follows him. Although she claims this is simply to live near the beach, it is clear to the audience that she is really hoping to win Josh back. Does Rebecca’s case count as self-deception? As with many other concepts in analytic philosophy, this hinges on how different features or conditions shape the concept of self-deception. Intentionalists argue that self-deception requires the agent to intend to deceive themselves, often starting from an unwelcome true belief. On this view, Rebecca must knowingly suppress her true motive and deli...

This post is by Chenwei Nie  (University of Warwick). In this post, Chenwei discusses a proposal detailed in his new chapter, "Why rational people obstinately hold onto irrational beliefs: A new approach", to appear in a book entitled Epistemic Dilemmas and Epistemic Normativity ( Routledge). Chenwei Nie In the middle of this brutal summer, with scorching heatwaves across Europe, Asia, and North America, it is poignant that so many believe that climate change is not real. Nearly 15% of Americans believe it is not real ( Gounaridis & Newell, 2024 ), and among the members of the 118th US Congress, almost a quarter share this belief, who are all Republicans ( So, 2024 ). Even more alarming, climate change denial is just one example in a much broader, unsettling set of irrational beliefs, including but not limited to cases of superstitious, religious, political, and conspiratorial beliefs. The burning question is: Why do people obstinately hold onto irrational beliefs in the ...

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...