Imperfect Cognitions

During Eating Disorders Awareness Week , we take the opportunity to list some useful resources for people who want to know more about what it is like to live with an eating disorder and what can be done to help. B-eat , the UK charity for eating disorders, has organised an event for tomorrow, called " Sock it to Eating Disorders ": you can wear silly socks for a day! B-eat has also just released a report of the costs of eating disorders to the UK economy, which you can read about and download here . The Mental Health Foundation website and the website of Mind, the mental health charity, are a good source of information about eating disorders in general. The MHF features  the story of Casey  that illustrates the difficulties of people facing eating disorders in receiving adequate support. Mind features the story of Hope , who writes about her time in an adolescent psychiatric unit. There are several blogs dealing with eating disorders from different perspectives ...

Neil Van Leeuwen I would like to thank Anna for her insightful  response  to my latest  blog . I’m delighted to respond to her response. The dialectic so far is this. I maintain that psychology and epistemology should posit a cognitive attitude I call religious credence. This attitude is not the same as ordinary, mundane factual belief. But it is also not the same as fictional imagining, the attitude that underlies pretend play and cognition of fiction. I hold this position for a number of reasons. But the motivation I gave in my blog is that most ordinary religious 'believers' are not full-blown fanatics (like Joan of Arc), nor are they fakers, who merely pretend to be religiously committed. Since ordinary religious people are in-between (that is a rough way of speaking), we should posit an attitude that captures their underlying mental state; so I posit religious credence. (See the  full paper  for a more thorough set of empirical and theoretical motivatio...

This is the fourth in our series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here  Catherine Loveday  summarises her paper, co-written with  Martin Conway , ' Remembering, Imagining, False Memories and Personal Memories '.  Ogwo David Emenike once wrote, 'Our imagination goes ahead of us, bringing our yesterday's imaginings into present realities'. This beautifully encapsulates the extraordinary capacity and need that humans have for mental time travel but, more than that, it illustrates the inextricable relationship between memory and imagination. When we remember we imagine and when we imagine we use our memory. Both are mental constructions based on past experience and there is significant evidence to suggest that the same brain structures are involved when we remember and when we imagine. The building blocks for both remembering and imagining are  semantic memory ...

Aimee Wilson This post is part of our series of accounts by experts by experience. Roberta Payne wrote about schizophrenia and outsider art in December, and Ellen White about OCD in January. Today Aimee Wilson tells us about BPD. Hi! I am Aimee and I blog over on www.imnotdisordered.blogspot.co.uk . I’m currently in recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder, after a six year long battle with the illness and a two year admission in a specialist hospital. When Lisa emailed me asking if I would write a post about the positive aspects of the things that have been deemed symptoms of BPD, I was intrigued. I guess, naturally, I’d only ever moaned and ranted about these things especially when they are the things that cause me to be hospitalised or to self-harm and attempt suicide. So, to think of positives sounded like a good challenge. When I was diagnosed with BPD, the diagnostic criteria were to have at least five of nine possible symptoms, and it was widely agreed by prof...

In this post, Jacqueline Gunn and Brent Potter present their recent book Borderline Personality Disorder: New Perspectives on a Stigmatizing and Overused Diagnosis (Praeger Publishers Inc). Dr Gunn is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in New York, specializing in Eating Disorders, Trauma, Interpersonal Problems as well as a variety of other psychological disorders. Dr. Brent Potter is a psychotherapist and wellness specialist with 20 years of direct clinical service. He is the Director for the Society for Laingian Studies, based in Thousand Oaks, California. When you are reading our book, be prepared to challenge your view of what is called “borderline personality disorder” and even the way you see all so-called psychiatric ‘disorders’. This is what we have done as co-authors. We sound a little strong at times, but we really believe in what we are presenting. We take you through exactly why we take this approach, give you historical context and also expla...

This is the third in our series of  posts  on the papers published in  a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here  Jordi Fernández  summarises his paper   ' What are the  Benefits  of Memory Distortion'. There are two intuitively appealing thoughts about episodic (or experiential) memory. One of them is that our memories are supposed to reproduce the contents of some of our past experiences, namely, those in which our memories originate. The other one is that our memories can be beneficial for us in a number of ways. They can, for example, help us make sense of how we feel and behave towards people and situations from our past. What is the connection between these two aspects of memory? One might think that memories are only beneficial for us to the extent that they reproduce the contents of some of our past experiences. In this paper, though, I describe t...

Extended Knowledge Project In this post I interview Duncan Pritchard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Director of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Research Centre . Duncan is currently leading a major three-year AHRC-funded research project on ‘ Extended Knowledge ’, which is hosted by Eidyn. The other co-investigators on this project are Prof Andy Clark and Prof Jesper Kallestrup, and the postdoctoral fellows on the project are Dr J. Adam Carter and Dr S. Orestis Palermos. The project draws on cutting-edge research in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and its aim is to explore different ways of ‘externalising’ knowledge. MA: What are the main research objectives of the Extended Knowledge project and what sparked your interest in this field? DP: My interest in extended knowledge arose out of joining Edinburgh’s School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences in 2007 and becoming immersed in the excellent interdisciplinary work ...

This is the second in our series of posts on the papers published in a  special  issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Maarten Boudry summarises his paper (co-written with  Michael   Vlerick  and Ryan McKay ) ' Can Evolution get us off the Hook? Evaluating the Ecological Defence of Human Rationality '. In the opening lines of his essay ' An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish ', Bertrand Russell wrote that 'Man is a rational animal  –  so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it'. Russell’s cry of despair is echoed by many writers. There is a cottage industry of books purporting to show that man is anything but a rational animal. Human reason, or so we are told, is a paltry and botched device, riddled with bias and error. Humans are foolish, obstinate, supersti...

Experiences of Depression  by Matthew Ratcliffe In this post, Matthew Ratcliffe, Professor of Philosophy at  Durham University , presents his new book, Experiences of Depression. From 1st April 2015, Matthew will be Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Vienna , Austria. My new book, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), is part of a wider-ranging, longer-term research project on the phenomenology of feeling in psychiatric illness. The book is a philosophical exploration of what it is like to be depressed. I start from the observation that many people struggle to describe their experiences of depression. It is often remarked that depression is like being in a ‘different world’, an isolated, suffocating, alien realm that is difficult or impossible to convey to others. By drawing on work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind and several other disciplines, I offer a detailed account of what such experi...

In May 2014 Ema Sullivan-Bissett and I organised a workshop entitled “ Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions ”, hosted by the University of Birmingham and funded by the AHRC. Most of the talks presented during the workshop are now part of a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition, and two additional papers have been included. The purpose of the workshop was to reflect on the effects of false beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations on agents’ wellbeing, success, health, and capacity for knowledge. In the collection of papers, our first objective is to discuss the different types of costs and benefits that such cognitions might have. Our second objective is to explore the relationship among different types of costs and benefits. Contributors consider paradigmatic examples of irrational beliefs, such as beliefs formed as a result of reasoning mistakes; delusions in schizophrenia, delusional disorders, and anosognosia; memories that are either di...