Imperfect Cognitions

Responsibility Project This post is by Benjamin Matheson , Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Gothenburg, working on the Gothenburg Responsibility Project . (Photos of workshop participants are by Gunnar Björnsson). The workshop on ‘Neuroscience and Responsibility’, part of the Gothenburg Responsibility Project, took place in 14 November 20145. The conference was well attended, the talks were informative, and the discussion was lively and productive. Michael Moore (Illinois) kicked things off with his talk ‘Nothing But a Pack of Neurons: Responsible Reductionism About the Mental States that Measure Moral Culpability’. Part of Moore’s current project is to show that reductionism (roughly, the view that mental states are just brain states) is not a threat to our responsibility practices – that is to say, we can still be morally and legally responsible even if mental states reduce to brain states. The worry is that if mental states reduce to brain states, then it is not ...

This post is by Michela Summa (pictured above), who works on the Body Memory project at the University of Heidelberg. Here she summarises her paper ‘ The Disoriented Self. Layers and Dynamics of Self-Experience in Dementia and Schizophrenia ’, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In recent years, several authors have defended a stratified or hierarchical account of the self and self-experience. Some of these accounts have proved to play an important role in the interpretation of psychiatric diseases. In this paper, I addressed the cases of dementia and of schizophrenia in light of the hierarchical model of self and self-experience. Thereby, I set myself two main aims: first, to investigate the potentialities and the limits of applying the hierarchical understanding of the self to dementia and schizophrenia; secondly, to reassess the model itself on the basis of some characteristic traits of both pathologies and possibly to propose some modifications. The paper ...

This post is by Giulia Cavaliere and James Rubert Fletcher, both PhD students in Social Science, Health and Medicine, King's College London.   On November 12th, the third event organized by King’s College London’s new joint venture Philosophy & Medicine took place. Previous events have featured colloquiums about placebo-controlled clinical trials and the challenges of communicating cancer risk . This third colloquium focused instead on the issue of mental health and in particular on the problem of defining delusion . The first part of the colloquium was led by Dr Abdi Sanati, a consultant psychiatrist and a philosophy scholar from the North East London NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Sanati opened with the description of a clinical case concerning a woman experiencing problems with a prosthesis and reporting her wish to have it removed. Her doctors originally encouraged her to keep the prosthesis, addressing her discomfort as something “delusional”. Eventually, after many p...

This post is by  Shaun Gallagher  (pictured above). He is Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. In this post he summarizes his recent article ' Relations between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion ', published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. In a recent paper I offer a response to some philosophers who have raised objections to the idea that in schizophrenic delusions of control and thought insertion the problem is primarily with the sense of agency. Instead, they argue, it concerns the sense of ownership. Let me start by clarifying the distinction, because in fact it is a double distinction, or a distinction made on two levels. On the level of first-order, pre-reflective experience the distinction between sense of agency (SA) and sense of ownership (SO) can be seen in the contrast between voluntary and involuntary movement. In the latter case, for example, if some one pushes me from ...

In this post I interview Helena Matute  (picture below), who is Professor of Psychology and director of the Experimental Psychology laboratory at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. AJ: You are a leading expert on causal illusions. Could you explain what causal illusions and illusions of control are? HM: A causal illusion (or illusion of causality) occurs when people perceive a causal relationship between two events that are actually unrelated. The illusion of control is just a special type of causal illusion in which the potential cause is our own behavior. That is, a causal illusion is often called an illusion of control when people believe that their own behavior is the cause of the unrelated effect, or, in other words, when they believe that they have control over uncontrollable events in their environment. Illusions of causality and of control occur in most people, particularly under certain conditions. For example, when the potential cause and the potential e...

In this post Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from the Loebel Lectures in Psychiatry and Philosophy held on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of November 2015. The lectures were delivered by Professor Steven E. Hyman , former director of the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), and currently at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric research, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  Steven Hyman gave his lectures on ‘The theoretical challenge of modern psychiatry: no easy cure’, which dealt with the future of psychiatry and the potential ‘collision’ between patient’s lived experience and our neurobiological understanding of mental disorders. A small conference was also held on the 5th of November on Hyman’s lectures, where several philosophers of psychiatry spoke, such as Derek Bolton , Tim Thornton , Jonathan Glover , and Julian Savulescu . The title of the first lecture by Hyman was ‘The problem of modern psychiatry: the collision of neurobiological m...

This post is by Matthew Parrott and Philipp Koralus. In a previous post they summarised their recent paper ‘ The Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking ’, published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Ryan McKay, in a post the following week, summarised his recent paper responding to Matthew and Philipp, ' Bayesian Accounts and Black Swans: Questioning the Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking '. In this post, Matthew and Philipp respond to Ryan. We are very grateful to Ryan McKay for taking the time to read our paper, and for formulating helpful questions in response to it. We hope that by addressing these questions, we can clarify any aspects of our theory that might be puzzling. 1) How can we reliably distinguish exogenous and endogenous question raising? As we said in our original post, we propose that patients ‘entertain roughly the same default questions that most people strongly associate with various external stimuli, but that they either envisage fewer alternative ...

Caitrin Donovan  and  Reinier Schuur  report from the 2015 University of Sydney Winter School. The programme was entitled "Cross-cultural psychological differences and their philosophical implications" and seminars were led by  Stephen Stich  (Rutgers) and  Dominic Murphy  (University of Sydney). From the 19th till the 23rd of October the unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney held its second winter school programme, this year on the topic of “Cross-cultural psychological differences and their philosophical implications”. Intuitions have been long been the bread and butter of various philosophical projects, which use them to evaluate semantic, epistemic, ethical and ontological theories and concepts. This can be seen in ‘Gettier cases’ in epistemology where accounts of knowledge are tested against intuitions on what counts as knowledge, and in ‘trolley cases’ in ethics where what is morally justified action i...

This post is by Predrag Teovanović (pictured above), graduate student at the University of Belgrade. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Individual Differences in Cognitive Biases: Evidence Against One-Factor Theory of Rationality ’, co-authored with Goran Knežević and Lazar Stankov, published in Intelligence. If there is a minimal definition of rational behavior, it can be found here . From the normative standpoint, rational behaviour is hard (if not impossible) to maintain all the time. Hence, we satisfice by trying to optimize the boundaries of bounded rationality at the intersection of our own resources (time, information, money, and cognitive capacities) and environmental demands. Cognitive biases (CBs) emerge in that junction.   Since what defines rational behaviour depends on both environment and organism, and since specific CBs arise in different environments - it is reasonable not to expect from CBs to be highly related to individual differences ...