Imperfect Cognitions

Salpetriere Hospital, Paris The 18th Meeting of the Psychopathology Section of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) and the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) took place on the 5th and 6th December 2014 at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France. Over two days those invited to speak presented their talks related to the meeting’s leading theme – Nature and Narratives of Depression: Philosophical and Psychopathological Aspects , followed by plenary discussion. The meeting was chaired by Michael Musalek and the list of presenters included: Femi Oyebode, Pedro Varandas, Maria Luisa Figueira, Luis Madeira, Norbert Andersch, Raimo Salokangas and Gilberto Di Petta.

Will McNeill This post is by Will McNeill , currently a teaching fellow at King's College London. He researches the epistemology of perception and recognition. The main focus of  PERFECT  is on finding the epistemically valuable within mental pathologies of varying seriousness; of identifying pathological beliefs which are at least epistemically innocent. But in this post I want to bring our attention back to the cognitive processes of those with no serious cognitive impairments. It would not surprise me if many of our cognitive processes turn out to be epistemically innocent in a particularly  direct  way. They may turn out to be reliable, and to produce justified beliefs, while not being capable of  explaining  why the beliefs they produce are justified. Justified beliefs which are the direct products of such epistemically innocent processes are – I believe – foundational. Suppose that we had good reason to think that someone was good at spot...

Ellen White at the 2014 Mind Media Awards Our new feature is a series of posts by experts by experience to be published on the last Monday of each month. Last month we had Roberta Payne who wrote about schizophrenia and "outsider art" . This month, we are delighted to host Ellen White who was recently awarded the 2014 Mind Media Award as Top Blogger. In her influential and inspirational blog , Ellen writes about the positive and negative effects of OCD and depression on her life, and challenges public attitudes towards mental illness. You can also follow her on Twitter . Suffering from a mental health condition can be for the most part extremely distressing. An everyday battle with our minds. Not knowing what to believe, what not to believe, feeling like your own mind is working against you. However, living with a mental health condition can often go hand in hand with educating ourselves about the conditions we are suffering with and mental health in general. To rec...

Anna Ichino Thank you, Neil, for your greatly interesting post . I am very sympathetic to the negative part of your view: I definitely agree that the attitude of most religious people is not best described in terms of what you call ‘factual belief’. I am less persuaded by the positive part of your suggestion, though. The same reasons (some of which I summarized in a previous post ) why I think that religious attitudes are not beliefs, lead me to think that they are imaginings, instead. So I do not clearly see the need for the new category of ‘religious credence’ that you suggest. You argue that to describe religious attitudes as imaginings would force us to see religious people as fakers, which is obviously an undesirable consequence. On the other hand, you note, if we described religious attitudes as factual beliefs, we would be forced to see most religious people as fanatics: also undesirable. In order to make room, between fakers and fanatics , for a category of ‘normal rel...

Launch of the report On 27 November 2014 the British Psychological Society (Division of Clinical Psychology) launched a new ground-breaking report on Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, edited by Anne Cooke. At the meeting, contributors and other interested parties offered their own view of the challenges that need to be met to ensure that people hearing voices and having unusual beliefs can get support in an effective way. I only attended the morning session, and this is a brief report of the content of the talks I heard. Peter Kinderman (Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool) opened the session and welcomed the audience and the speakers. The first speaker, Luciana Berger (MP and shadow Minister for Public Health and Mental Health) highlighted the need to invest more in mental health and make sure that mental health receives the same attention and resources as physical health. She praised those sections of the report suggesting that psychosi...

Neil Van Leeuwen This post is by Neil Van Leeuwen , Assistant Professor at Georgia State University.  Between the fanatics and the fakers lie the normal religious 'believers'. That is the view I defend in my recent paper, ' Religious credence is not factual belief'. Joan of Arc, a fanatic, heard spiritual voices throughout her life. For her, the existence of these voices as external entities was, as far as we can tell, regarded with the same attitude of factual belief as, say, the voices of her baker or next-door neighbor. She took these voices as part of the furniture of the world around her. The unbelieving clergy studied by Dan Dennett , on the other hand, are fakers. They are, in point of fact, atheists who, because of the momentum of their social circumstances, continue to pretend God exists. These fakers have fictional imaginings to the effect that Christ performed miracles—among other propositions. These imaginings guide their pretense in church every S...

WASP 50th Jubilee Congress On November 13th-15th 2014, the World Association of Social Psychiatry held its 50th Jubilee Congress . The event was a joint conference with the Royal College of Psychiatrists , organised in Park Plaza Hotel in Central London. The Congress assembled a programme of wide scientific interest, marking the achievements of social psychiatry as a keystone to excellence in mental health care. It welcomed participants from 50 different countries and consisted of 60 lectures, seminars, workshops and talks as well as nearly 200 poster presentations. This report presents only a small selection of what was an enormously rich and interesting programme. In his opening speech, the WASP President Dinesh Bhugra addressed current challenges to psychiatric practices in the 21st century. Bhugra put a particular emphasis on mental health issues arising as a result of globalization and use of modern technology, including cyber-bullying, internet-based religious radi...

The Forum (BBC World Service) We all recall situations where our choice did not bring about the outcome we expected. This can happen to a couple planning a family, scientists predicting the result of a new experiment, politicians implementing a new policy to overcome a problem. For each of these individual situations there may be specific reasons that explain why the outcome was unexpected, but I am interested in the general question, Why is it that our actions have unintended consequences? We can think about the issue of unintended consequences in terms of the capacities that would make it more likely for us as human agents to reliably predict the events our actions give rise to when we make decisions, reflecting on the wealth of empirical data coming from the psychological literature. Being able to predict the outcomes of our actions would require good memory, sound reasoning, and effective deliberation. So, we could remember what consequences our previous actions have had, i...

In this post, Harold Kincaid and Jackie Sullivan present their edited volume titled Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds (MIT Press, 2014) Harold Kincaid We are Harold Kincaid and Jackie Sullivan . Harold is Professor in the School of Economics and Director of the Research Unit in Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics at the University of Cape Town . He works primarily in the philosophy of the social sciences and has published numerous books and articles on topics in this research area. Jackie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario . She works primarily in the philosophy of neuroscience and is the author of multiple recent journal articles on topics in this research area. Together, we edited a volume entitled Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds , which was published by MIT Press in April 2014. The volume asks whether psych...

Stephen Wright I 'm Stephen Wright, a lecturer at the University of Oxford. I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2014, I mainly work on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of language. Whilst my research is primarily in the epistemology of testimony, I have recently been thinking about philosophical issues concerning lying, in preparing a piece for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Lying edited by Jörg Meibauer . One of the questions at the centre of philosophical investigations into lying concerns what exactly lying is. In particular, I have been looking at the question of whether lying involves saying something that is untrue, or something that is untruthful. Put another way, the question is whether what I say can be a lie only if it is false, or if it merely seems to me that it is false. Those that defend that idea that lying involves saying something untrue endorse the following claim: (1) S’s statement that p is a lie only if p is false. ...

Is Evidence-Based Psychiatry Ethical? This post is by Mona Gupta , psychiatrist and bioethics researcher at the University of Montreal in Canada. For the last 15 years, I’ve been working on ethical issues relating to the use of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in psychiatric practice. EBM has been enormously influential in clinical medicine, particularly in psychiatry. This intersection between ethics, EBM and psychiatry is the theme I develop in my new book, Is Evidence-Based Psychiatry Ethical? , published by Oxford University Press in 2014. EBM is a phrase that first appeared in the medical literature in the 1990s. It promotes a seemingly irrefutable principle: that clinical decision-making should be based, as much as possible, on the most up-to-date research findings. Nowhere has this idea been more welcome than in psychiatry, a field that continues to be dogged by a legacy of controversial clinical interventions. Many mental health experts believe that following the rules...