Imperfect Cognitions

For our series of posts by experts-by-experience, Krista Marie Mills (pictured above) is exploring the 'positive side' of mental illness. Krista has blogged for the Huffington Post, Anxiety United, and Bring Change 2 Mind about her experiences. She has her own blog too,  Loosening the Chains: Life with Anxiety and Depression . When first diagnosed as being ‘mentally ill’ I genuinely believed that my life was over. I could no longer see myself moving out, gaining a degree, having a career and starting my own family. To me, 'mental' was a term used to describe the deranged psychopathic killers you see in those cheesy American movies, not an average twenty year old female who experiences nightmares after watching Crimewatch. However, despite the given ‘title’, what I can now say is that mental illness has made me strive for more. Before falling ill I had lost all direction. My assignment grades were not reflecting my true ability, and I was skipping lectures due to h

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from The Cognitive Futures conference which took place on 13-15 April at Worcester College, University of Oxford (in the picture). Cognitive Futures in the Humanities is a multidisciplinary conference which aims to bring together literary disciplines, linguistics, theater and the arts, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience for our mutual benefit. The three day conference was held at Worcester College, Oxford and is in its third year, the first being held at Bangor and last year's being at Durham. There were a variety of panels on such diverse topics as narrative, imagination, mirroring and reflexiveness, kinesthetics, memory, embodied cognition, perception and hallucination. In the ‘clinical’ panel I (pictured above) presented a paper on thought insertion ('On thought insertion', forthcoming in a special issue of  Review of Philosophy and Psychology  on Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis) where I used first person narrativ

This post is by Michele Tinnirello (pictured above), a PhD student in Philosophy at University of Messina. His research covers the pragmatics of acts of communication within philosophy of language and its relationship with philosophy of mind, neurolinguistics, and artificial intelligence.  My philosophical background concerns mainly the most famous debates within the philosophy of mind and language as well as the relationships with other branches of cognitive science. I am now focusing on the most recent accounts of the semantics/pragmatics debate, in order to achieve, or at least try to achieve, a stronger and global view of how our mind is able to shape and understand meaning.  This, of course, involves not just philosophical questions and speculation, as it requires contributions from a lot of different fields like, e.g., psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Actually, I believe that a multidisciplinary approach is absolutely preferable when it comes to understanding ho

This post is by Miriam McCormick , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond. Miriam presents her new book, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief (Routledge, 2015), pictured above. When I first had a student tell me that she doesn’t believe in evolution I was at a loss of how to respond. To me, that sounded like someone telling me that she didn’t believe in gravity. It seemed both irrational and wrong. Experiences like this are common; we think that one’s actual belief can deviate from how one ought to believe. The dominant view among contemporary philosophers is that any belief formed against the evidence is impermissible. On such a view, which I call “evidentialism,” it is easy to diagnosis what is wrong with my student’s belief. I use the term “pragmatism” to refer to the view that some non-evidentially based beliefs are permissible. A central aim of this book is to defend pragmatism. One challenge to the pragmatist view I defe

Joseph McCaffrey In honour of Dementia Awareness Week 2015 (17th-23rd May), we have a post by  Joseph McCaffrey , a graduate student in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of  History and Philosophy of Science . Here Joseph summarises his recent article ' Reconceiving Conceptual Vehicles: Lessons from Semantic Dementia ', published in  Philosophical Psychology . We take our concepts for granted. When you explore the world, you automatically categorize the objects around you, tapping into a bewildering array of information. You see (or hear) a sheep and instantaneously know it is is a mammal, an animal, a provider-of-wool, a white fluffy thing that bleats, and much more. As a philosopher of cognitive science, I am interested in how the mind stores, accesses, and manipulates this conceptual knowledge. In semantic dementia, a rare variant of frontotemporal dementia , patients lose concept knowledge in a progressive and debilitating fashion. Early on, caused by da

Robert Davies This post is by Robert Davies , a PhD student at the University of York.  Robert is interested in self-knowledge and memory, and particularly how the study of memory can shed light on philosophical problems in self-knowledge.  Here is one variety of introspective failure: I make a choice but, when providing reasons, I offer reasons that could not be my reasons for that choice. Choice Blindness research by Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and their colleagues ( 2005 –) suggests it is surprisingly prevalent (see e.g. Johansson et al. 2008 ), showing a low rate of manipulation detection and a high degree of willingness, in non-clinical participants, to offer confabulatory explanations for manipulated choices across a range of modalities and environments (see e.g. Hall et al. 2006 ; Hall et al. 2010 ). We see ourselves as introspectively competent, rational decision-makers—capable of knowing our reasons, weighing them as reasons , and self-regulating when required—but si

In today's post Quassim Cassam presents his recent book entitled Self-knowledge for humans (Oxford University Press, 2014) . Quassim is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK Quassim Cassam What is it about self-knowledge that makes it philosophically interesting? One familiar answer to this question is that the epistemological privileges and peculiarities of self-knowledge are what justify all the attention paid by philosophers to this topic. There is a presumption that our beliefs about our own thoughts aren’t mistaken, and knowledge of our own thoughts is neither inferential nor observational. A different answer sees the elusiveness and human importance of self-knowledge as the key. On this account, our aim as philosophers should be to understand why self-knowledge matters and explain why it is so hard to get. These motivations for being interested in self-knowledge point in different directions. The standard examples of epistemologically distinct

This post is by Massimiliano Aragona, philosopher at the University of Rome .  Massimiliano Aragona The DSM-5 ( American Psychiatric Association 2013 ) has been published in the midst of unusual controversy. Criticisms had always been advanced, but in the past the DSM system was the dominant paradigm (the 'Bible of Psychiatry'), so they were considered ‘marginal’ complaints by: psychoanalysts, antipsychiatrists, experts of various fields worried about an excessive medicalization of human sufferance, and psychopathologists concerned with the progressive abandonment of deep qualitative phenomenological analysis in favour of superficial quantitative diagnostic criteria. Such criticisms are important per se, but were largely neglected at the time. Today it is different, because it is the credibility of the DSM itself that is in question. And, along with the DSM, it is a general way to conceive psychiatry which is in crisis: 'the neo-Kraepelinian paradigm established

On 16th and 17th of April, the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham held a two day conference on the Neurocognition of Aberrant Experience and Belief to celebrate the launch of the Aberrant Experience and Belief research theme . The conference was organized by Jason Braithwaite and Hayley Dewe , and featured nineteen talks across two days by researchers from different disciplines interested in aberrant experience and belief. In this post I will report on just a handful of these talks (see delegates' reactions by heading over to Twitter with #AEBConference ). In his talk ‘Things that Make you go Weird’, Roger Newport reported on findings using the MIRAGE  machine, which he demonstrated over lunch on the first day. I was lucky enough to have a go and experienced the illusion of an elongated index finger and a missing right hand! Newport suggested that not having these so-called ‘aberrant’ experiences is abnormal, and that future research might look to stu

This post is by  Dominic McIver Lopes , who teaches at the University of British Columbia and has written books and papers on pictorial representation, photography, the aesthetic and epistemic values of images, computer art, and the nature of art and the ontology of art works. His current project derives an account of aesthetic value from accounts of reasons for aesthetic action. Know Thyself. Maybe the advice is that we should each acknowledge our most dearly held values and come to terms with our capacity to act upon them. Or maybe the tone is less Socratic, more practical. We plan. Planning requires a coordination of intentions with the outcomes of action. To reliably get good outcomes, we must act on reasons we know we have. My days go best when they begin with a dose of something bitter. I purchase Cooper's Original because it is bitter. Thus do I assure my well-being. Suppose I lacked access to my reasons for acting. Then my life would amount to a fishing expedition. Only