Imperfect Cognitions

Michael Bishop is a philosopher at Florida State University. He wrote, with J.D. Trout, Epistemology and the Psychology ofHuman Judgment (Oxford, 2005). And more recently he ’ s written The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychologyof Well-Being (Oxford 2015). The goal in both books is the same: Build a theory that makes sense of what both philosophers and psychologists have to say about normative matters. Bishop is currently working on a number of projects, including one that aims to show how we might improve how we teach critical thinking. You can find more of his writings at his blog . There ’ s an old yarn about six people groping in the dark to study an elephant: The tusk was thought a spear, the side a wall, the trunk a snake, the leg a tree, the ear a fan, and the tail a rope. A happy life is like the elephant. It consists of many varied parts. And we philosophers, groping in the dark, hold fast to our little corner of the elephant, confident that we ’ ve go...

My name is Matteo Colombo . I am an Assistant Professor in the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics and Philosophy of Science , and in the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. My work is mostly in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, in the philosophy of science, and in moral psychology. I am interested in questions about evidence and explanation, and in how resources from the sciences can help address philosophical puzzles about mind and moral behaviour. I pursue these interests by combining experimental and non-experimental methods. In a recent experiment study , Leandra Bucher , Yoel Inbar , and I investigated how moral value can bias explanatory judgement. Our general goal was to assess the empirical adequacy of a popular view in the philosophy of science, which contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, or economic values, but only by the avai...

On 5th and 6th September the University of Sheffield hosted the conference Bias in Context : Psychological and Structural Explanations, organized by Erin Beeghly and Jules Holroyd  (pictured above). Here I summarise the seven papers given at the conference. Joseph Sweetman  (pictured below) opened day one with his paper ‘Evidence-based Social Equality: Current Problems and Future prospects’. The talk was structured around answering five questions related to identifying the phenomenon of social inequality, whether we should do anything about social inequality, and what we should do, what the evidence for social inequality is, and the efficacy of unconscious bias training in Higher Education. After giving answers to the first four questions, Joseph reported on his evaluation of an unconscious bias training programme in order to speak to the fifth. He found that though post-training awareness of unconscious bias was higher in the participants, there were no significant diff...

Today's post is by Patrizia Pedrini (University of Florence). Here she summarises her recent paper, “Rescuing the ‘Loss-of-Agency’ Account of Thought Insertion”, which appeared in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2015. Every day we think hundreds of thoughts. We form opinions, hold beliefs, develop intentions, feel desires, emotions, sensations, entertain fantasies. All this thinking activity typically comes to our consciousness with a fundamental feature that seems as natural as the thinking it accompanies: our capacity for self-ascription of it. When we think a thought, we also self-ascribe that thought, and such capacity for self-ascription is routine, immediate, unproblematic. However, this is a capacity that can break down. There is a disorder, known as thought insertion , that occurs in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and related forms of mental illness, the puzzling feature of which appears to amount to the impairment of such capacity. The subject aff...

On 30th-31st July, the University of Tokyo hosted a symposium on Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness at its Komaba Campus. Today's blog post describes the talks presented at the symposium. Akiko Frischhut’s (Akita International) (pictured below) talk “The Silencing Illusion and Its Philosophical Interpretations” was an investigation of the philosophical significance of the silencing illusion. The illusion seems to provide a counterexample to so-called “naive inheritance thesis” about the experience of temporal properties according to any temporal properties that are represented in experience are the properties of the experience itself too. However, Frischhut rejected this interpretation of the illusion. On the basis of a careful philosophical analysis, she concluded that the interpretation is either impossible or unintelligible. In his talk “Targetless States: No New Problem for the Higher-Order Theory”, Graham Peebles (Geneva) (pictured below) discussed s...

Amy Hardy (pictured above) is a Research Clinical Psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London and Psychology Lead for Posttraumatic Stress in Psychosis in the Psychosis Clinical Academic Group, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.  In this post, Amy describes a paper  published in the journal  Schizophrenia Bulletin  by the Psychosis Research Partnership that supports the causal role of childhood victimisation in psychosis by demonstrating how understandable reactions to trauma contribute to psychotic experiences. We know there is a relationship between trauma and psychosis, and research is unraveling the puzzle of how they are linked. Findings point towards childhood victimisation playing a causal role in psychotic experiences, at least for some people. For example, trauma has been shown to occur before the onset of psychosis, trauma severity is associated with the magnitude of psyc...

Pacifico, Yokohama PERFECT was invited to present a symposium at the 31st International Congress of Psychology (ICP), which took place at Pacifico Yokohama in Japan and was attended by over 8000 people from 95 countries. The symposium, entitled ‘Explaining Delusion: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches to Delusion Formation’ featured speakers from philosophy (myself,  Rachel Gunn ), Kengo Miyazono and Phillip Gerrans) and from psychology (Eriko Sugimori and Rochelle Cox). Eriko Sugimori ’s talk entitled ‘Effects of Positive and Negative Delusional Ideation on Memory’ covered a study where participants were given a learning task in which they were shown 40 adjectives projected one at a time on a screen.  Fifteen minutes later they were shown 80 adjectives and asked to state whether those adjectives had featured in the learning task. The participants were assessed for delusion proneness as well as degree of positive delusional ideation (consisting of traits such as guarde...

This post is by Angharad de Cates  (pictured above), a Senior Registrar in General Adult Psychiatry and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Unit of Mental Health and Wellbeing at the University of Warwick. Broadly, her research interests are neurocognition, self-harm, mood disorder, and mental health promotion and wellbeing. In this post, she summarises her recent article “ Can we use neurocognition to predict repetition of self-harm, and why might this be clinically useful? A Perspective ” co-authored with Matthew Broome, and published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry in January 2016. The first issue in research about self-harm is to define what it actually is, which in part depends on which style of terminology you wish to use. According to patient and user groups, self-harm as a general catch-all term is preferred, where there is no attempt by clinicians or researchers to restrict by method or intent, but instead to focus on the fact that one has harmed ...

This post is by James Shepperd , Gabrielle Pogge and Jennifer Howell who recently authored a paper entitled, " Assessing the Consequences of Unrealistic Optimism: Challenges and Recommendations ", to be published in a special issue of Consciousness & Cognition on unrealistic optimism , guest-edited by Anneli Jefferson, Bojana Kuzmanovic and Lisa Bortolotti. In this post, James, Gabrielle and Jennifer summarise the content of their new paper. James Researchers have argued that unrealistic optimism (UO) can have both desirable and undesirable consequences. Yet, understanding the consequences of UO is a remarkably difficult. We identified eight challenges faced by researchers wanting to understand the consequences of UO. Gabrielle Unrealistic comparative optimism might be overstated . Recent evidence suggests that measurement decisions may exaggerate both the frequency and magnitude of UO in research—UO may neither be as common or sizable as once believed....

In this post, Matilde Aliffi (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) reports from the 7th International Summer School of Affective Science (ISSAS) held at Château de Bossey between the 7th and the 14th July 2016. This year ISSAS was entirely dedicated to investigating the role of emotions in fiction and virtual worlds. World leading experts in philosophy, psychology, educational science, neuroscience, affective computing and game design gave their lecture to an audience composed by an international and interdisciplinary community of about forty PhD students.   During the school, workshops were also held on thought experiments, data-analysis, programming and text-based emotion recognition. Participants were divided in eight teams and had the opportunity to design and present a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project tied to the topics of the school. Alongside the lectures, participants also enjoyed artistic events that complemented nicely the lectures wit...