Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Cristina Borgoni (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Graz. Here she summarises her recent paper ' On Knowing One's Own Resistant Beliefs ', published in Philosophical Explorations.  I have two lines of research in philosophy: one is on self-knowledge and the other is on beliefs. In self-knowledge, I am part of a research trend that tries to expand the philosophical agenda in order to incorporate human concerns on the topic. Everybody knows that knowing oneself (e.g., one’s values or one’s deep desires) can be very difficult. However, philosophy has not been concerned with such difficulties. Philosophy has rather traditionally focused on a different issue, namely, on explaining how we know some of our thoughts in an apparently immediate and almost infallible way (e.g., if someone asks whether you believe it is raining now, you will have no problems in knowing immediately what you believe). Howev...

As part of our ERC-funded project,  PERFECT , we promised to run three focus groups with mental health service users and providers on the themes of the project. The first of these focus groups was held in Birmingham on 12th May 2016, organised and facilitated by Magdalena Antrobus and Michael Larkin. Three service users and three service providers were invited to give feedback on PERFECT's research on the potential benefits of false or irrational beliefs. This happened via a game. They were presented with some statements and asked to locate them on a poster, where some areas indicated strong or moderate agreement, some strong or moderate disagreement, and other area no particular opinion. They were then asked to explain their choices. Some notes follow on the parthcipants' views and discussion. Some mental health difficulties may have positive outcomes. EVERYONE AGREED Reasons for this choice included: Some mental health difficulties allow dialogue to hap...

The AISB Convention is an annual conference covering the range of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. The convention is structured as a number of co-located symposia on a wide variety of topics, together with a number of plenary talks and events. This year’s convention took place on 4-6 April at the University of Sheffield and included a most interesting symposium on new approaches to depression. Below I briefly summarise the content of the symposium talks.   Joel Parthemore (University of Skövde, Sweden, pictured above) opened the symposium with his talk ‘Depression viewed from an enactive perspective: It’s the context, stupid.’ He pointed at some most commonly spread myths about depression, which contribute to the popular misunderstanding of the illness and may lead to stigmatization. These include a belief that depression always involves anhedonia or a belief that c...

This post is by James Andow (pictured above), a Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading. James’s research interests are in philosophical methodology, in particular, on intuitions and experimental philosophy. In this post he summarises his paper ‘ How Distinctive Is Philosophers' Intuition Talk ?’ There’s a bomb on the funicular railway. It is about to go off. It’s a tragic disaster in the making. There are two carriages connected by a rope. In the carriage nearest the pier, headed down the cliff, there is a party of schoolchildren with buckets and spades. In the carriage nearest the bandstand, headed up the cliff, there is a bomb planted by ecoterrorists. The carriages are currently alongside each other. If the carriages are stopped, …  Philosophers use intuitions. They use them a lot. This much is beyond question. If you have ever studied any philosophy or talked about philosophy with a philosopher you will doubtless have noted the tendency ...

In this post we are providing some information about Mental Health Awareness Week (16-22 May 2016). The Mental Health Foundation has decided to focus on relationships  this year, based on the fact that good relationships are essential for mental health. The foundation invites us to make some new "relationships resolutions": see the details here . Mind, the mental health charity , follows the lead of the Mental Health Foundation, and focuses on the quality of personal relationships: it invites us to look after each other better, by supporting people who might have mental health issues, in the family, among friends, and at work. Rethink Mental Illness encourages people to become involved by hosting a tea party  and read their series of  guest blog posts by people with experience of mental health issues. Michael Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and investigator in PERFECT , has worked extensively on the role of relationsh...

This post is by Marion Godman (pictured above), researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT) at Helsinki University. In this post she draws on a discussion she lead at the Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Workshop , CRASSH, on 9th October 2015.  As intriguing as reasoning about psychopathy is, it is also bound to make us uneasy. People with the condition commit a disproportionate number of crimes compared to other psychiatric groups (Coid et al. 2009 ) and are also over-represented in the criminal statistics concerning recidivism, predatory violence and serial killings (Hare 1999 ). So for legal and policy purposes, it is imperative to think about these far from perfect minds prone to manipulation and violence. But at the same this makes it difficult to keep one’s head cool when approaching psychopathy. How do we think about the disorder without disapproval and disdain clouding our judgment? Or could it be...

Michael Brady is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is currently a principal investigator on the The Value of Suffering Project , alongside David Bain . His main research area is the philosophy of emotion. One area of his research focuses on the epistemic status of emotion. He is interested in the idea that emotions have value and can perform an epistemic role. In this post, he introduces his book on these themes, Emotional Insight, which was published by Oxford University Press. My book tries to reconcile two commonsense intuitions: that emotions have considerable epistemic value (we should sometimes ‘listen to our heart’), and that emotions often lead us astray epistemically (emotions lead to epistemic biases). I approach the issue by examining a theory of emotion that is relatively new on the scene but has increasing support: the perceptual model of emotion. On this account, emotional experience is a kind of, or is at least akin to, perceptual experience....

This post is by Chris Ryan (pictured above), a psychiatrist and Clinical Associate Professor with the University of Sydney and its Centre for Values Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Though primarily a clinician he maintains an active research agenda focusing on issues at the interface of ethics, law, and psychiatry. In this post he writes about his recent work on risk assessment for suicide. Imagine you are me – a psychiatrist working in a hospital with a large emergency department. This morning, like most mornings, you arrive at work to find that ten people have been seen overnight after presenting in some sort of psychological crisis. Many have attempted suicide. How do you work out who should be admitted to hospital and who should go home? On what basis should you make that call? Here is one tempting answer: admit the people that are at the highest risk of actually killing themselves in the future. If this strikes you as a sensible approach, you’re in good company – indeed ma...

Duncan Pritchard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the Director of the Eidyn research centre . In this post, he introduces his new book. Philosophically speaking, the problem of radical scepticism—that is, the challenge to explain how knowledge is even possible—is both my first love and my true love. It was this puzzle that first drew me into philosophy, and it’s also this topic that I have returned to throughout my academic career. My thinking has finally been distilled into a book, entitled EpistemicAngst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015). In this work I offer a comprehensive—and completely novel—response to the (Cartesian) paradox of radical scepticism. The book falls into four parts. In part one, I argue that the reason why the radical sceptical paradox has been so hard to resolve is that it is in fact two logically distinct paradoxes in disguise—one formulation that turns on the ‘closure...

This post is by Sarah Robins (pictured above), an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and affiliate member of the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Program in Psychology at the University of Kansas. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, with a primary focus on memory. In this post she summarises her recent paper ‘ Misremembering ’, published in Philosophical Psychology. Thanks, Ema, for the invitation to talk about my recent paper ‘Misremembering ’ with Imperfect Cognitions readers. The paper began from my fascination with one of the most common experimental techniques for eliciting memory errors: the Deese-Roediger-McDermott, or DRM, paradigm (Deese 1959 ; Roediger and McDermott 1995 ). I am fascinated because these errors display a blend of success and failure (on which I will elaborate on below). In the paper, I argue that they are best viewed as a distinct type of error, misremembering. I go on to argue that we lack a theory of memory that can e...

A belief is epistemically rational if it is well supported by evidence and responsive to counter-evidence. But do epistemically rational beliefs contribute to our psychological wellbeing? Some believe that epistemic rationality contributes to psychological wellbeing, and that epistemic irrationality is often responsible for psychological distress (for a version of the  traditional view,  see  Healthy Personality,  by Jourard and Landsman, 1980). Others believe that psychological wellbeing requires epistemic  irrationality , and that there are circumstances in which epistemic rationality is responsible for psychological distress (for a version of the  trade-off view, see e.g. Positive Illusions, by Taylor, 1989). The traditional view tells us that people who are psychologically healthy have cognitions that are constrained by evidence and are accurate, that is, they track how things actually are. Their memory reports are reliable, their beliefs wel...