Imperfect Cognitions

 Ken Pepper This post is by Ken Pepper , who recently submitted his PhD at the University of York. Amputees often feel 'phantom' sensations emanating from their missing limb (for a review, see Giummarra et al 2007 ). This entry discusses the role of action and perception in the constitution of these physically absent yet phenomenally present body parts. I urge the view that phantoms are to some extent enactive – they are constituted by active perceptual engagement with the world (see e.g. Noë 2004 ). Impressed by the way in which a blind man localised sensations at the tip of his cane, Head and Homes ( 1911 ) hypothesised that his brain must update its representation of bodily posture on the fly and treat the cane as part of his arm. It turns out that they were correct; neural representations of limb locations are highly adaptable and continually modified by vision, touch, and kinaesthesia. Experiments on macaques reveal that while using a rake to retrieve food, the recep...

In this post, Nils J. Nilsson presents his new book, Understanding Beliefs (MIT Press). Nilsson is Kumagai Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the author of The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements.  Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Some of our beliefs we call theories, and we are extraordinarily creative at constructing them. Theories of quantum mechanics, evolution, and relativity are examples. But so are theories about astrology, alien abduction, guardian angels, and reincarnation. All are products (with varying degrees of credibility) of fertile minds trying t...

Today Magdalena Antrobus, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, comments on a news story for our new blog feature, "in the news". The divide between humour and disgust seemed to dissolve for one British clothing retailer. “Don’t get mad, take lithium” wrote Joy, a clothes chain, with 26 shops nationwide, on one of their greeting cards, available for sale. Spotted by one of the customers, the words trivialising bipolar disorder sparkled social media, causing anger and distress among those who could relate to the problem of manic-depressive illness, as well as among mental health charities. Stories like this one hit the headlines now and then, exposing a lack of understanding of the nature of mental illness and questionable marketing strategies. However, what usually follows is a more or less sincere apology and withdrawal of the product of interest. The unfortunate story usually makes its exit as quickly as it makes its entrance to the national news. Not th...

My primary research interests are in ethics and philosophy of psychiatry. For the past ten years I have worked as a lecturer and researcher in bioethics at the Centre for Ethics in Medicine, University of Bristol. Self Harm by Kerry Gutridge During the past four years, my research has focused on the ethical, legal, philosophical and policy issues of self harm. In particular, I have been concerned with the ethical questions which arise when doctors or nurses allow patients to self harm in psychiatric hospitals. I first encountered this issue when it was reported in the British press that patients were being allowed to self cut in some NHS hospitals. For example, one inpatient was allowed to keep a piece of glass in a locked draw in her room and use it to cut her knees. This idea is of course controversial . Many people find the idea of allowing patients to self harm in medical institutions at best counter intuitive and at worst sickening and morally wrong. However, I argue that i...

Sahba Besharati I am currently in the 3rd year of my PhD undergoing a split-site collaboration project with the University of Cape Town and University College London. This post will focus on a recent publication featured in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation with my supervisor, Katerina Fotopoulou , and our collaborator in Italy, Valentina Moro , on a prototypical form of unawareness called anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). Neurological disturbances in awareness can offer an important avenue to explore the construction of the bodily self. AHP is one such example of a disorder of self-awareness, where patients have a lack of recognition or awareness of their motor paralysis following a stroke. AHP can have various clinical presentations, ranging from blatant denial of limb paralysis and associated delusional beliefs to emotional indifference of one’s motor disabilities. Although AHP is often transient (sometimes recovering within days or weeks), motor unawareness can significant...

Being Amoral by Thomas Schramme This post is by Thomas Schramme . Thomas introduces his new edited collection,  Being Amoral: Psychopathy and Moral Incapacity (MIT Press) . It would be useful to know what kind of capacities human beings require in order to be moral. This piece of information would have tremendous practical significance, as we could try to organize institutions, such as education, to provide an environment where these capacities can develop and flourish. It would also be an interesting theoretical piece of information, as philosophers have for a long time quarrelled over the issue whether moral capacities are mainly due to reason or emotion. One way of making progress in this debate on the necessary faculties in becoming a moral person is to study people who apparently lack morality; who are, in philosophical parlance, amoral persons. There seem to be indeed real-life exemplars of such amoral persons, and to study them might lead us exactly in the de...

Sam Wilkinson In this post, I will sketch some ideas from a paper that I have been working on with Vaughan Bell . Current aetiological models of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) tend to focus on the mechanisms underlying their occurrence, but often fail to address more fine-grained aspects of the content of the auditory experience. In other words, they tend to ask why there are AVHs at all, instead of asking, given that there are AVHs, why they have the properties that they have. One such property, which has been somewhat overlooked, is why the voices are often experienced as coming from (or being the voices of) agents, and often specific agents. One reason why this has been overlooked (more by theorists than by clinicians) is perhaps the – explicit or implicit – view that, if we can account for the auditory experience, then the agency will follow. Thus Cho and Wu (2013, p.2) claim that ‘it is simple to explain why the patient misattributes the event to another person: th...

A Metaphysics of Psychopathology by Peter Zachar My name is Peter Zachar and I am a Professor in the Psychology Department at Auburn University Montgomery in the U.S. I have spent two decades writing about the philosophy of psychiatry, particularly in the area of psychiatric classification. About four years ago I decided it was time to systematize what I have learned in a book – which has recently been published by the MIT Press with the title A Metaphysics of Psychopathology .   There is an ongoing tension between belief in the reality of psychiatric disorders versus the metaphysical skepticism of social constructionism and the anti-psychiatry movement. Within the mental health professions themselves, people have differing views about how much reality to attribute to conditions such as schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, some professionals consider schizophrenic psychosis to be real, others consider it to be a reified diagnostic category....

Epistemic Innocence logo Yesterday, on September 1st, 2014 our project, Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions , funded by an AHRC fellowship awarded to myself, came to an end. As my work on the project has been the main reason for starting this blog, I thought I would offer some thoughts on how things have gone, and invite your comments. Fellowships are forms of funding awarded to an individual, but this project has been from the very beginning a collective effort.  The researcher working on the project,  Ema Sullivan-Bissett , has contributed to its development and its success in several ways: writing one new paper after the other, giving talks to very demanding audiences and taking excellent care of the blog by commissioning and authoring posts, editing material, all while preparing her (very successful) viva and honouring her teaching commitments. Ema and I were supported by a wider group of Birmingham-based people who greatly helped us by contributing to...