Imperfect Cognitions

On 22nd and 23rd June,  I , together with  Helen Bradley  and  Suki Finn , organised a  Mentoring and Networking Workshop  for graduate and early career women in philosophy, which took place at the University of York. The aim of the workshop was to bring together women in philosophy from a various areas of philosophy in order to offer support and encouragement, and to develop a community of women in philosophy. The workshop had eight graduate or early career mentees, and seven senior women in philosophy who acted as mentors. Jennifer Saul  (Sheffield), pictured above, opened the workshop with her talk 'Women in Philosophy: How the Profession is Improving'. Jennifer talked about the low number of women in philosophy, and the factors which might be responsible. She also talked about how things have improved for women in the profession, and what can be done to further improve them. Mary Edwards (Cork), pictured above, was the first mentee to present her paper,

This post is by Alex Tillas and James Trafford . Alex is a a Research Fellow at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany. He holds a PhD from University of Bristol and is mainly working on philosophy of psychology and cognitive science, broadly construed. James is a Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies at the University of the Creative Arts in London. He completed a PhD in philosophy of mind at the University of East London, and his primary research interests lie in reasoning, rationality, and logical inferentialism.   This post is based on their co-authored papers ' Intuition and Reason: Re-assessing Dual-Process Theories with Representational Sub-Activation ', forthcoming in Teorema, and 'The Fear Factor: Reconsidering the Roles of Emotion in Reasoning', currently under review. Emotionally responding to environmental cues is crucial for adaptive human behaviour. For instance, in the presence of a predator, fear can be a good advisor since it can sha

Today's post is by Rebecca Chamaa, who blogs at ' A journey with you '. I’m not an expert on schizophrenia based on schooling. I do, however, consider myself an expert based on the experience of schizophrenia, because I have lived with the illness for nearly a quarter of a century. I wrote a book: Pills, Poetry & Prose: Life with Schizophrenia that is a short book (approximately seventy pages) and contains essays and poetry about my life with a severe mental illness. I have fairly good recall of the times in my life when I have been psychotic and I try to take the reader on that journey with me. In one essay I talk about the delusion I had of being a healer and during this delusion I baked hundreds of cakes, because I falsely believed that the food I made would heal all of the people who ate it. This essay is a story of a harmless delusion that I had and my neighbor’s response to it. Often times my episodes start out as a somewhat pleasant experience, but

This is a report on the second day of the Deliberation, Interpretation, and Confabulation Workshop held at the Abraham Kuyper Centre for Science and Religion at the VU University in Amsterdam in June 2015 (for a report of the first day, please go here ). The first talk was by Christoph Michel (University of Stuttgart) on the transition from deliberation to evaluation. Michel is interested in developing a theory of self-ascription of attitudes. Knowing one's own attitudes does not imply a full or deep understanding of one's own behaviour and does not come with powerful predictive capacities. Self-knowledge can be gained by self-interpretation (without privilege) and deliberation (with privilege). Some also think that we can gain self-knowledge by introspection. A position on how to achieve self-knowledge depends on what we take attitudes to be: if they are conscious/neuronal states, then they can be scanned; if they are functional/dispositional states, then they can on

This post is by Pablo López-Silva , a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Pablo (pictured above) works on philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia, and is supervised by Joel Smith and Tim Bayne . Here Pablo summarises his recent paper ' Schizophrenia and the Place of Egodystonic States in the Aetiology of Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.  Paradigmatic cases of thought insertion involve the delusional belief with the content [someone/something is placing a thought with the content […] into my mind/head] (Mellor 1970 ; Mullins and Spence 2003 ). Despite the diagnostic relevance of this phenomenon, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. In this context, two projects can be distinguished. On the one hand, the motivational project characterizes thought insertion as resulting from the mind’s attempt to deal with highly stressing psychological conflicts. On the other hand, the

This is a report from the first day of the Deliberation, Interpretation and Confabulation Workshop at the Abraham Kuyper Centre for Science and Religion, VU University in Amsterdam, organised by Naomi Kloosterboer, and held on 19 and 20 June 2015. Note about the workshop poster above: circles are confabulation, squares are deliberation, and triangles are interpretation (how amazingly clever is that! Thanks to Naomi for pointing this out to me). I ( Lisa Bortolotti ) was the first speaker. I talked about features of confabulatory explanations about our own attitudes and choices, and attempted to offer an account of what happens when we confabulate that makes sense of several results in experimental psychology (such as introspective effects, social intuitionism about moral judgements, choice blindness). I argued that people often ignore the factors causally responsible for the formation of their attitudes and the making of their choices; they produce an often ill-grounded claim abo

This post is by  Dorothea Debus  (pictured below), who is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. Her  research is on topics in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology.  At present, I am thinking about our ability to 'engage in future-directed mental time travel', that is, our ability to imagine future events. More specifically, I am interested in cases in which we imagine future events in a vivid, experiential way. For example, try to imagine what you are going to do this coming Sunday. Chances are that when you really try to do this, you will have some vivid imaginary experiences of the things you might hope to do, and the situations you might hope to encounter.  Clearly, such experiential, or 'sensory', imaginations of future events have a characteristic temporal orientation - that is, they are directed towards the future , rather than the past or the present. In an attempt to account for this feature, I show that the context in which relevant

In this post, Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from this year's Cognitio Conference  for young researchers in cognitive science. From the 8th to the 10th of June, I attended the Cognitio 2015 conference on "Atypical Minds: the Cognitive Science of Difference and Potentialities" at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada (UQAM), where I also gave my first conference talk on my doctoral research. The conference atmosphere was incredibly welcoming and friendly, and a great place to make new contacts and give my first conference talk. Many topics presented at the intersection between philosophy, clinical neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology were addressed. The topics of the talks can roughly be divided into four categories: delusions, synesthesia, autism, and the RDoC. One of the reasons why philosophers have been so interested in delusions, and other psychiatric symptoms and conditions, is that explaining such symptoms and conditions prese

This post is by Rachel Upthegrove  who is a Senior Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham.  Childhood trauma is a risk factor for mental illness. This apparently simple statement, with such face validity hardly bears investigation does it? Of course traumatic events will increase the risk of mental distress and disorder - this is stating the obvious. However not all individuals with mental disorder have a history of trauma, or indeed childhood trauma, and certainly not all individuals who experience childhood trauma develop a mental illness. Childhood trauma has been in focus as an environmental risk factor for psychosis, with some authors proposing a causal role with significant lack of recognition and underreporting of childhood trauma in those who treat patients with psychosis. Mechanisms proposed include a process of hypervigilance leading to persecutory ideation and enhanced 'threat to self' networks. However, often studies have looked at sm

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from How the Light Gets in Festival 2015. How the Light Gets in is a philosophy and music festival which takes place annually at Hay-on-Wye. This May was the seventh festival with over 650 philosophy, comedy and music events over a 9 day period. On the 24th May I attended a workshop run by Richard Bentall  (pictured above) about hallucinations – in particular AVHs (auditory verbal hallucinations) also known as ‘voice hearing’. In this workshop Bentall gave us a ‘whistle stop tour’ of the research and literature on ‘voice hearing’. He drew on his own research and the research of others on signal detection analysis (eg: Bentall & Slade, 1985 ; Badcock et. al.,2013 ), the research of Chris Frith and others (eg Frith, 1987 ; Ford & Mathalon, 2005 ) on the neuroscience behind the experience and on research from Marius Romme who has investigated aspects such as history, background and onset (including childhood trauma) to understand