Imperfect Cognitions

In this post I report on the Teorema sponsored workshop on Transparency in Belief and Self-Knowledge , held at the University of Oviedo (pictured below) on 9th and 10th November 2015, organized by Luis M. Valdés-Villanueva . Below I summarise the talks given by Sarah Sawyer , Miriam McCormick , José Zalabardo , and Jordi Fernández .  In her talk ‘Contrastivism and Anti-Individualism’ Sawyer argued that contrastive self-knowledge entails externalism about mental content. According to contrastivism about knowledge, saying that a subject S knows a proposition p , is elliptical for saying that S knows that p rather than that q . Understanding this requires the positing of a positive contrast class (the set of propositions in contrast to which S knows that p ), and a negative contrast class (the set of propositions in contrast to which S does not know that p ). Sawyer argued that internalism about mental content makes impossible a negative contrast class in the self-knowledge cas...

This post is by Gottfried Vosgerau , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf. Gottfried's research interests are in the philosophy and metaphysics of mind, neurophilosophy, and cognitive science. Here he summarises his recent paper, co-authored with Patrice Soom , ' A Functionalist Approach to the Concept of 'Delusion ', published in Journal for Philosophy and Psychiatry. Based on the widely accepted DSM definition of delusions, delusions are commonly held to be false beliefs about reality that are not shared by the community the subject lives in and that are sustained despite overwhelming counter-evidence. In our paper, we argue that this conceptualization cannot be used for a scientific investigation of delusions. For this purpose, we argue, delusions should be defined as mental states with asymmetric inferential profiles: While they have inferential impact on other mental states, they are not affected by other mental states (especially not affect...

For our series of first-person accounts, Kitt O'Malley , blogger and mental health advocate, writes about her experience of altered states and what these mean to her. When I was twenty-one upon returning from my grandfather’s memorial mass at which I gave the eulogy, I first experienced a series of altered mental states which I chose to interpret as God calling me to the ordained ministry. I questioned that sense of call due to my intellectual skepticism, my agnosticism, and the fact that I had a history of mental illness, namely major depression and dysthymia. God did not speak to me in my altered mental states. I heard no voices and saw no visions. The altered states I entered were sometimes ecstatic and sometimes tempting and dark. My interpretation of my experiences was influenced by my familiarity with the works of Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism, C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters , and Roman Catholic mystic saints. As I received no definitive instruct...

On 10th November 2015 the Royal Society of Medicine hosted a very interesting conference, entitled "Mind, Body and Soul: An update on psychiatric, philosophical and legal aspects of care nearing the end of life". Here is a report of the sessions I attended on the day. In Session 1,  Matthew Hotopf (King's College London) talked about his experience of treating people with depression in palliative care. Anti-depressants are effective with respect to placebos. People with strong suicidal ideas are in a difficult situation as they cannot be easily moved to psychiatric wards due to the special care they need. The important factor is to be able to contain risk of death by suicide and self-harm. Hotopf concluded by saying that it is normal to have extreme emotions near the end of life, and this does not mean that one suffers from a mental disorder. Annabel Price , Consultant Psychiatrist at the Cambridge and Peterborough Foundation Mental Trust, pictured above, foc...

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. Here she reports on two recently published papers, co-written with  Kengo Miyazono .  Kengo and I have recently been interested in how the considerations raised in the philosophy of belief apply to delusions. In our review paper on Philosophy Compass  (open access) we argue that the delusions literature has helped us focus on some key issues concerning the nature and development of beliefs. What conditions does a report need to satisfy in order to qualify as the report of a belief? What is the interaction between experience and inference in the process by which beliefs are formed? Kengo and I also have a joint research paper that recently appeared in Erkenntnis   (open access), where we ask what the ethics of belief can tell us about delusions. In this post I shall sum up our arguments in the paper, hoping for some feedback from our blog readers. There are several ways we can think of an ethics for belief. For instance, ...

In this post, Rocco J. Gennaro  (picture below) presents his forthcoming edited book titled 'Disturbed Consciousness: New Essays on Psychopathologies and Theories of Consciousness'. My name is Rocco J. Gennaro. I am Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy Department Chair at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana, USA. My Ph.D. in philosophy is from Syracuse University in 1991. I moved from Indiana State University in Terre Haute (where I was for fourteen years) to the University of Southern Indiana in 2009. My main area of specialty is philosophy of mind/cognitive science and consciousness, but I also have strong interests in metaphysics, ethics, and early modern history of philosophy. I have published seven books (as either sole author or editor) and numerous papers in these areas, often defending a version of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness. I have also written on animal and infant consciousness, episodic memory, and ha...

This post is by Joshua Shepherd (pictured above), a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics , and a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College . Joshua's work concerns issues in the philosophy of mind, action, cognitive science, and practical ethics. In this post he discusses the role of conscious experience in the control of action, and summarises his recent paper ' Conscious Control over Action ' published in Mind and Language.  One question we might have concerns the kinds of causal contributions consciousness makes to action control. Another concerns a question regarding the relative importance of consciousness to action control. If consciousness is relatively unimportant, theorizing about ‘conscious control’ might be largely a waste of time. If consciousness is important, however, understanding the contributions of consciousness could be essential to a full understanding of the way we exercise control over our behaviour. ...

Project PERFECT is very proud to announce its first workshop, on False but Useful Beliefs , to be held in London on 4th and 5th of February 2016. The workshop will take place at Regent's Conferences and Event in Regent's Park (see picture below). The idea of the workshop is to explore a variety of beliefs and belief-like states that are epistemically faulty (either false or badly supported by evidence) but that also play a useful function for the agent, either biologically, psychologically, pragmatically, epistemically, or in some other way. The workshop features three types of talks. 1. Talks by invited speakers who are leading experts in the area.  Anandi Hattiangadi from Stockholm University will talk about radical interpretation and implicit cognition,  Neil Van Leeuwen  from Georgia State University will discuss agent-like stimuli in religious practice, and  David Papineau  from King's College London and CUNY will ask whether functional falsity r...

On 15 th -16 th October 2015 the University of Leeds Minorities and Philosophy chapter hosted the MAP@Leeds Implicit Bias Conference . The conference included a large number of high quality talks covering a wide-range of issues relating to implicit bias. This report focuses on three of these talks.   In her talk, “ What do we want from a model of implicit bias?”, Jules Holroyd  (pictured above) noted that competing models of implicit cognition have emerged from different sources, with different priorities and conceptual frameworks. She set out a framework for assessing these competing models. She set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition, set out some test cases, and considered some recent models of implicit bias in light of the desiderata and cases. She showed that models provided by Levy, Schwitzgebel, Mandelbaum, Gendler and Machery each fail to meet the desiderata. In developing this argument she provided a clear articulation of what an accoun...

This post is by André Martens, pictured above. Here André summarises his recent paper ‘ Paternalism in Psychiatry: Anorexia Nervosa, Decision-Making Capacity, and Compulsory Treatment’ , appearing in New Perspectives on Paternalism and Health Care edited by Thomas Schramme. Currently, decision-making capacity (DMC) is intensively discussed in disciplines such as bioethics, philosophy of psychiatry, and psychology. Some authors regard it as (mental) competence. But what exactly is DMC? What are the mental preconditions of making genuine decisions? And what role does DMC play in ethics, especially regarding the normative status of treatment decisions of psychiatric patients with reduced, or even completely lacking DMC? In my paper I try to answer these questions. Initially, I looked at the so-called traditional account of DMC, which is associated with the work of Paul S. Appelbaum and Thomas Grisso , among others. Here, DMC is formulated in terms of certain abilities, each bein...

I'm Adam Harris and I'm an experimental psychologist from University College London. I am perhaps an unusual contributor to the Imperfect Cognitions blog as I have argued that cognitions might seem imperfect because of imperfections in prevalent methodologies, predominantly arising from a failure to appreciate the importance of understanding the appropriate normative basis of a task. Specifically, my work has suggested that the assumed ubiquity of optimism across our species is based on questionable evidence. A prominent example of this work is presented in a paper I wrote with Ulrike Hahn (published in the Psychological Review) in which we demonstrated, through simulation, that rational agents could be labelled as optimistic on the prevalent, comparative method of testing unrealistic optimism. On this method, participants respond to the question "Compared with the average student of your age and sex, how likely are you to..." where future life events ar...

The 17th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology – International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry INPP 2015 – with the topic ‘Why do humans become mentally ill? Anthropological, biological and cultural vulnerabilities of mental illness' - was held in Frutillar, Chile, on October 29th, 30th and 31th, 2015. The Conference has been organised by the Centro de Estudios de Fenomenología y Psiquiatría, Universidad Diego Portales , Santiago, Chile, in coordination with the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry, INPP, to promote and share cross-disciplinary research from the field of Philosophy and Mental Health.  All the lectures and seminars were housed in Teatro del Lago  (picture above) located on the lake in Chilean Patagonia, with an inspiring natural setting and stunning architecture. The programme consisted of 23 plenary conferences, 54 oral presentations, 6 panel discussions, and more than 30 posters of researchers c...

In this post Ryan McKay, summarises his recent paper 'Bayesian Accounts and Black Swans: Questioning the Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking'. Matthew Parrott and Philipp Koralus (hereafter P&K) offer a fresh take on 'imperfect cognitions'. In their recent post they outline how their 'erotetic theory' can account for certain instances of fallible human reasoning. They illustrate this with an example about a fridge containing either beer or wine and cheese (I confess that I fell for the fallacy here; I presume my critical faculties were disarmed by my stomach). My purpose in this brief post is not to contest their analysis of such examples, but to summarise my evaluation of their erotetic approach to delusional thinking , raising my own questions about their theory in the process. The Core Claim P&K’s core claim is that deluded individuals are less inquisitive than healthy individuals; in particular, deluded individuals are selectively d...

Today's post is by Jonny Ward who tweets as the Anxious Fireman  and has also blogged for the Stigma Fighters.   Hello to all reading this. My name is Jonny Ward. I’m 31, male, straight, white and a firefighter with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service. I can grout the shower, chop logs, I have an anxiety disorder, I have travelled a lot of the world and I enjoy mountain biking. If you had to ask me about any one of my interests or traits from that list, which would it be? And why? If this had been someone else and it was three years ago, I would have picked the anxiety disorder part. Because back then I was just as naive to mental ill health as most men. I would consider it unusual, a strange thing to say or admit too. But over the last two years my mind-set has changed tremendously. I suffered with anxiety and panic attacks. It happened after a long period of stress. I was doing too much work, too many projects, trying to please too many people. All of which meant...

What is the relation between mental disorders and physical disorders? Is it possible to find a biological basis for mental disorders? What purpose would a reduction of mental disorders to physical disorders serve? These are some of the questions addressed at the workshop ‘Pathologizing Mind and Body’ organized by Jonathan Sholl and Marcus Eronen. Philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists approached this topic from different angles and highlighted problems and recent developments. In the first talk, Ignaas Devish stressed the distinction between suffering and pain, claiming that suffering is not a phenomenon that is amenable to diagnostic operationalisation and medicalization. He argued that because of this, victims of traumatic events should be offered an ethical debriefing in addition to psychological debriefing, which allows them focus on their suffering and the existential problems they face from a non-medical perspective. Arantza Exteberria talked about ‘Interacti...

This post is by Matthew Parrott and Philipp Koralus. Here they summarise their recent paper ‘ The Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking ’, published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry.  Matthew Parrott In this paper, we appeal to the recently developed erotetic theory of reasoning in order to explain three patterns of anomalous reasoning associated with delusion: mistaking a loved-one for an impostor (as in the Capgras delusion), the well-documented tendency to ‘jump to conclusions’, and surprising improvements in a certain reasoning task involving conditionals (Mellet et. al. 2006 ). According to the erotetic theory, the aim of human reasoning is to answer questions as directly as possible (for further discussion and for a formal account of the theory, see Koralus and Mascarenhas 2013 ). More precisely, according to the erotetic theory, reasoning proceeds by treating an initial premise or set of premises as a question and then treating subsequent information as a maximally strong a...

In this post Maksymilian Del Mar  (in the picture above) presents the recent book Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice   (Springer 2015),  co-edited with William Twining . Treating Menorca as if it is a suburb of London, or a ship as if it was a person, or pretending that persons who form contracts are made by rational agents with knowledge of the commitments they are making, or that states who take over other states find a land empty of life (as in the doctrine of terra nullius) – or, positing the existence of consent, malice, notice, fraud, intention, or causation when evidence clearly points to the opposite conclusion (or to no conclusion at all)… All these are example of legal fictions. They fly in the face of reality. And, in the literature on theories of law and legal reasoning, they are not very popular. In this new collection – Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (Springer, 2015, co-edited by William Twining and Maks Del Mar) – 18 chapters explore anothe...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin , Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and co-investigator in project PERFECT. Michael talks about his research interests for this second year of the project, and focuses on shared experience and parity of esteem . My colleague Lisa Bortolotti has written recently about Project PERFECT , and the importance of understanding those aspects of human cognition which are common to both those who seek support from mental health services and those who do not. Lisa’s conceptual work illuminates some of the ways in which, at times, we all may hold beliefs which are difficult for others to share, or act upon reasoning which is difficult for others to understand. Yesterday, I spent a fascinating morning with two clinical psychologists and a group of trainee clinical psychologists, exploring some of the differences and commonalities between ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ in our research and practice. We discussed how the task f...

On February 25th and 26th we will be hosting an interdisciplinary workshop on optimism at Senate House, London. The first day will be dedicated to the question what unrealistic optimism is and how it is caused. Why is it that we see such a wide-spread tendency to be unrealistically optimistic abour our own future? Are the primary factors motivational or cognitive? What processes allow us to think ‘it won’t happen to me’? We will be hearing about the brain processes underlying optimistic belief formation patterns and from Tali Sharot; and Bojana Kuzmanovic will be speaking about evidence that optimistically biased belief updating recruits brain areas associated with motivational processes. I will be considering the question whether the wide-spread tendency to be unrealistically optimistic about one’s own future can be explained by the fact that these belief patterns were adaptive in the past. Constantine Sedikides will be discussing unrealistically optimistic beliefs as one type...

On 9th October CRASSH organised a Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Conference in Cambridge, featuring keynote talks, panel discussions and discussion groups. This is a brief report on the sessions in which I participated. The first session was a panel symposium with Josh Greene (Harvard) and Molly Crockett (Oxford) on the future of moral psychology chaired by Richard Holton. Josh started discussing the assumption in popular culture and the media that there is a “moral faculty” where all moral beliefs and decisions can be found, somewhere in the brain. But this is a myth according to him: morality is like a vehicle. “Vehicle” is a category, but what makes something a vehicle is not its internal mechanics. What makes something a vehicle is its function. Same with morality. If morality is a thing, people who study morality are interested in its function. The processes, operating principles and behavioural patterns involved in moral thinking are not distinct to morality. Molly mad...

This post is by Maarten Boudry (picture above), Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University. Here Maarten writes about the inspiration for his recent paper, co-authored with Stefaan Blancke and Massimo Pigliucci , ' What Makes Weird Beliefs Thrive? The Epidemiology of Pseudoscience ', published in Philosophical Psychology.  Science does not just explain the way the universe is; it also explains why people continue to believe the universe is different than it is. in other words, science is now trying to explain its own failure in persuading the population at large of its truth claims. In Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not , philosopher Robert McCauley offers ample demonstrations of the truth of his book title. Many scientific theories run roughshod over our deepest intuitions. Lewis Wolpert even remarked that 'I would almost contend that if something fits with common sense it almost certainly isn't science.’ It ...