Imperfect Cognitions

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 ...

Philosophers of mind and cognition gathered for the 11th meeting of the Mind Network in Warwick on Tuesday 29th September 2015. Talks were given by Anya Farrennikova, Olle Blomberg and Giovanna Colombetti. Farrennikova began the meeting with a discussion of unexpected perception and absence. She argued that the novelty of unexpected perception means that it is suboptimal. It is, for example, slow, less likely to be accurate than other perception, disrupts ongoing tasks, and involves increased uncertainty. Farrennikova outlined strategies that can be used to optimize perception of the unexpected: increased sampling and expecting to be surprised. She compared unexpected perception to perception of absence, arguing that both are suboptimal but that the strategies that can be used to optimise perception of the unexpected are unlikely to be successfully utilised to optimise perception of absences. Why is this? Because absences are difficult to predict, and certainly difficult to pre...

This post is by Nevia Dolcini (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macau. In this post Nevia talks about her research and announces two upcoming events. I am interested in how human reasoning works, and I take language and its underlying cognitive and semantic mechanisms to be the ideal starting point for the explanation of mental phenomena. I like to extend the methods of philosophy of language beyond its traditional domain of analysis, so as to include non-linguistic objects such as gestures, and perceptual contents. In my research activity, I often combine philosophy and psychology: scientific literature from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology is particularly relevant to my research activity, but I also enjoy reading fiction (which sometimes offers great cases for philosophical assessment). I have been doing extensive work on linguistic and non-linguistic index...