Imperfect Cognitions

Greg Currie Is there any significant link between mental disorders and creativity? As part of my research, I interviewed Greg Currie , Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. Greg’s research focuses on the arts and cognition. His latest essay, entitled “Creativity and the Insight that Literature Brings”, appeared in the edited volume The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014). MA : How would you define creativity? GC : I wouldn’t attempt a watertight definition but I think of creativity as the capacity to find good, unpredictable solutions to problems. Without the first clause about good solutions we simply have wildly unconventional behaviour which does not succeed, and I think a tendency to success is part of what it takes to be creative. The point about unpredictability highlights a point I would want to make about creativity being an epistemic notion: we judge certain behaviours as creative but other beings, knowing more about th...

Jon Robson I am a teaching associate at the University of Nottingham. I work on the epistemology of aesthetic, ethical, and religious judgements (and also on videogames). I hereby assert that God exists and that I am in the fortunate position of knowing this to be the case. Of course I am aware that these assertions are likely to prove ever so slightly controversial (indeed Anna Ichino 's previous post raises some insightful and thought-provoking worries about whether I am even correct in thinking that I believe these things) but let’s assume for the time being that they are correct. Furthermore, let’s suppose that you don’t share this knowledge. What, then, can I do to bring you to a position where you too know that God exists? One obvious suggestion is that I provide you with some cogent argument demonstrating God’s existence. Debates concerning the epistemic status of theistic belief have traditionally centred around the evidential value of such arguments with numerous ...

Mickeln Castle On May 19th and 20th, we had the chance of hosting “ Functions in the mind and brain mechanisms ” – an international workshop, at the Schloss Mickeln of the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany). This event was organized in the broader context of our research project devoted to the classification of mental disorders ( B06 ) of the CRC 991 research center on the Structure of representations in language, cognition and science. The workshop aimed at taking a closer look at the increasingly tighter relations between psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience, while focusing on the role of abnormal cognition in cognitive scientific inquiries. Researchers from disciplines as diverse as psychiatry, philosophies of mind and science, that are unfortunately only tenuously connected, were invited to explore the different available approaches of mental disorders in psychiatry and their relation to cognitive scientific meta-theoretical accounts, such as the widespread me...

Keith Frankish If psychotic patients did not tell us, would we guess what their delusions were? We might see that a patient was depressed, withdrawn, self-neglecting, and so on, but would it occur to us that they thought they were dead , as Cotard patients do? It is doubtful. Deluded patients are firmly attached to their delusions, but the attachment manifests itself most clearly at the verbal level, in what they say and how they argue, and may not show up clearly in their nonverbal behaviour. Most Cotard patients do not (as one early case did) arrange their own funeral. Why is this? The answer, I think, is that delusion is an attitude closely bound up with language -- an attitude sometimes called ‘acceptance’. To accept a proposition, in this sense, is to commit oneself to arguing for it, defending it, using in reasoning, and acting upon it. This is the attitude a scientist takes to a hypothesis, a lawyer to the claim that their client is innocent, a politician to a policy. It ...

Future-Minded by Magda Osman I am Senior Lecturer in Experimental Cognitive Psychology in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. I am interested in developing an understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in learning, decision making, and problem solving in complex dynamic environments. Recently, I participated in a panel discussion at the LSE , hosted by the Forum of European Philosophy and the LSE Choice Group, on wise choices . There, I discussed some ideas from my new book, Future-Minded: The Psychology of Agency and Control (Palgrave 2014). In the book I ask what drives us to do what we do. To answer this, I introduce the latest psychological research on agency, control, causality and the unconscious, and along the way challenge our folk psychological ideas on a wide range of phenomena (consciousness, subliminal priming, illusion of control, addiction). I discuss new theoretical approaches to understanding agency...

Bill Fulford This post has been published on behalf of Bill Fulford and Matthew Broome. Bill Fulford is Fellow of St Catherine’s College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick. Matthew Broome is Senior Clinical Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. Matthew Broome DSM is dead! Long live RDoC! In April this year Thomas Insel, Director of the world’s wealthiest neuroscience funder, the NIMH (the National Institute for Mental Health at Rockville, Maryland), pronounced the then shortly to be launched DSM-5 already dead. Introducing NIMH’s own classificatory framework, the RDoC (Research Domain Criteria), Insel warned that ‘NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.’ There has since been something of a row-back: Bruce Cuthbert, writing with the endorsement of NIMH, notes that Insel’s blog 'was addressed to the research community… rat...

We are posting this on behalf of Professor Heather Widdows (University of Birmingham) who recently gave a talk on beauty as a topic in philosophy and ethics at the Hay Festival .  Heather Widdows I'm John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics in the department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. My current work is on ideals of perfection and beauty and I'm in the progress of writing Perfect Me! (under contract with Princeton University Press). In this book I’m exploring contemporary ideals of beauty and all the gory details which attach to messy, smelly, hairy, saggy and ever-changing human bodies from the perspective of moral philosophy. In Perfect Me! I consider three key ways in which the (moral) ideal of beauty functions. First, as an individual’s aspiration to perfect themselves (‘I want to be perfect’) – a value judgement – that this type of beauty is worth having – a moral claim; second, as assertion of what being perfect is (‘this is what I would be i...

Maarten Boudry This post has been published on behalf of Maarten Boudry (University of Ghent). In my previous post I introduced the psychological mechanisms responsible for people stopping the search for meaning in obscure texts. Here I shall show how these are used by Lacan. Lacan’s pronouncements are couched in a number of highly abstract and complex concepts – the Other, the Symbolic, the objet petit a, jouissance, the Phallus, etc. – which are notoriously difficult to understand. The central tenets of Lacanian theory are that the unconscious is structured like a language and that human beings are trapped in a web of signifiers. By means of language, we try to comprehend reality and each other, but that hope is often frustrated. In Lacan's linguistic re-interpretation of the Oedipus complex, subjects are symbolically castrated upon introduction in the Symbolic order. By means of obscure pseudo-mathematical formulas, Lacan has tried to show that the Real can never be fu...