Mental Illness: Philosophy, Ethics and Society

Matthew Broome and Lisa Bortolotti

On 17 March 2014 Kengo Miyazono organised a public engagement event as part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham on 17 March 2014. The main theme of the event was a reflection on the importance of psychiatric diagnosis in establishing whether someone is responsible for committing a crime.

The event consisted of several activities, a talk by Matthew Broome (Psychiatry, Oxford) on a case study he had written about, featuring a man with schizophrenia committing a crime; a brief commentary by Lisa Bortolotti (Philosophy, Birmingham) explaining how the considerations made about the case study could enlighten the debate on the recent Breivik case in Norway; a questions and answers session with the audience; and a discussion session for which the audience split in two groups. Doctoral students Sarah-Louise Johnson, Rachel Gunn and Ben Costello also contributed to the discussion. Additional activities are planned this week on the event website, Mental Illness: Philosophy, Ethics and Society.

Some of the issues that were raised are also routinely discussed on this blog, such as the nature of delusions, the difficulty in deriving information about an agent's role in a series of events based on a psychiatric diagnosis alone, and the different language and concepts used by philosophers, psychiatrists and mental health lawyers which may impair effective communication and progress with our understanding of the relationship among mental illness, moral responsibility for action and legal accountability.

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...

Imperfect Cognitions

Search This Blog