Imperfect Cognitions

On today’s post, Bethany Linham explores whether delusions can be understood as a way of experiencing the world. Bethany is a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, where her work draws on phenomenology and imagination to explore the nature of delusional experience. Bethany Linham Delusion: bad believing, or something more? Throughout my career, I have always been struck by the overwhelmingly pathocentric approach researchers and clinicians take to delusions. There is a common tendency to lean on the assumption that delusions are mere byproducts of a faulty cognitive system – paradigmatic instances of ‘bad’, irrational beliefs. This cannot be the full story. After all, delusions have a profound effect on a subject’s life as a whole, not just on their cognitive performance. I argue that to experience a delusion is to undergo a fundamental existential shift. The foundations of one’s life world become compromised: shared spaces, objects, everyday encounters, and relationships all tak...

In today’s post, Monica A. Ross explores how medicalised interpretations can shape how a person is understood and who they are taken to be. Monica is a psychotherapist and Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, whose work focuses on psychiatric classification, clinical records, and narrative identity. Monica A. Ross I am a psychotherapist with ten years of clinical experience. I have received several diagnoses over my lifetime, none of which adequately captures how I understand myself today.  Perhaps we are all mad in different ways, at different moments, and to different degrees, though the consequences of being understood that way are unevenly distributed. People differ in how extensively their experiences are documented through psychiatric classifications and how closely they identify with them.  What happens when a medicalised interpretation becomes durable enough to function as a fact about who a person is? Clinicians, patients, and others who encounter medical records may come...

 This week's post is by Virginia Ballesteros, an assistant professor at the University of Valencia.  Virginia Ballesteros In contemporary theories of social cognition, autism is predominantly framed through cognitivist paradigms, such as "theory of mind" or "simulation theory". These frameworks treat social understanding as an individualistic, internalist epistemic puzzle: the challenge of knowing the inaccessible mental states of others from one's own isolated mind. From this perspective, autistic difficulties are construed as impairments in the cognitive faculties or neural machinery required to make the inferences or simulations needed to read the mental states of others. In contrast, approaches rooted in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy aim not to solve this puzzle, but to dissolve it. From a Wittgensteinian standpoint, minds are not hidden, private entities; rather, emotions, intentions, and psychological states are visibly manifested in behavior, gestu...

On today’s post, Mara Floris explores the role of existing medical evidence in identifying instances of epistemic injustice. Mara is a philosophy of science researcher at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, working on epistemic injustice, healthcare communication, and gender-fair language. Mara Floris Recent debates on epistemic injustice in healthcare have raised an important methodological question: how can we establish that epistemic injustice is occurring? Nielsen et al. (2025) argue that the field needs clearer conceptual criteria and stronger empirical evidence, particularly for claims about testimonial injustice. A response by members of the EPIC project develops this discussion, arguing for an empirically informed but methodologically pluralistic approach (Byrne et al., 2026) . Færge et al (2026) similarly emphasise methodological pluralism. My recent paper takes this discussion in another direction: we need better ways of identifying epistemic injustice, but shoul...

On today's post, Yufeng Liu (Lancaster University), whose research focuses on metaphor, health communication and AI, explores whether AI can understand the metaphors we use about illness. Yufeng Liu Can AI Understand the Metaphors We Use About Illness?  When people talk about cancer or depression, they often use metaphors. Cancer can be an “enemy” to fight, recovery can be a “journey”, and depression can feel like “darkness”, a “heavy burden”, or being “trapped in a box”. These expressions do more than describe illness. They help people make sense of difficult experiences and communicate feelings that may otherwise be hard to put into words.  I use “AI” broadly here to include large language models, and this study focuses on ChatGPT. As more people turn to it for comfort, or simply someone to talk to, I asked: can ChatGPT pick up the metaphors people use about illness, and does it respond differently when the same experience is expressed literally? In my recent article, “ Expl...

In today’s post, Mateo Boberg, Julie Nordgaard and Mads Gram Henriksen (University of Copenhagen) explore how reliable psychiatric diagnoses are in the 21st century.                                                                                                                                   Mads Gram Henriksen Mateo Boberg  Julie Nordgaard What happens if two psychiatrists assess the same patient? Most people, including many clinicians, would probably expect them to reach the same diagnosis. After all, modern psychiatry has spent decades developing operational diagnostic criteria intended to improve diagnostic reliability. But how reliable are psychiatri...