PERFECT Year 4: Lisa

In this post, I offer my take on what the project has achieved in the last year and tell you about my plans for the next twelve months. On the next four Tuesdays the rest of the team will do the same.

The team

PERFECT has been incredibly active and at the top of its capacity in the past year, with three post-docs and two PhD students all working full time. Andrea Polonioli (picture below), who is leaving the project, continued Ema Sullivan-Bissett's work on belief, and focused on biased cognition and confabulation, examining also some interesting methodological issues that apply to philosophical investigation. He also worked really hard on improving the blog and our social media presence.

Magdalena Antrobus (picture below), who is also leaving the project, completed her PhD dissertation on the psychological and epistemic benefits of depression. As well as preparing several articles for publication on her own research, she co-authored with me a paper on depressive delusions.

We are extremely grateful to Andrea and Magdalena for their work on the project and hope they will continue to be involved in our activities as much as their new busy schedules will allow them to do. A special thanks goes to Magdalena for designing our beautiful project logo:

Research

My time has been divided between pursuing an investigation of the optimism bias and examining different forms of confabulatory explanation. With Anneli Jefferson and Bojana Kuzmanovic I published a paper on the nature of the optimism bias which is one of the most read papers in Consciousness & Cognition, and further outputs in that area are forthcoming.

With Ema Sullivan-Bissett, I co-edited a special issue entitled False but Useful Beliefs for Philosophical Explorations, containing a short introduction by us and eight original articles, all open access. I also continued working on memory and delusions.

I am planning a short book on delusions as beliefs for Palgrave Pivot with contributions by network members Rachel Upthegrove, Philip Corlett, and Richard Bentall. I am also writing a paper on the epistemic innocence of memory mechanisms with Kathy Puddifoot, and a paper on doxastic irrationality with Andrea Polonioli and Sophie Stammers.

This year I want to think more about confabulation and try to understand the phenomenon of choice blindness which seems to be very relevant to our project themes.

Outreach and Impact

The project has really made waves on impact and outreach in the last twelve months and Kathy Puddifoot and Sophie Stammers will update you about their collaborations with the Mental Health Foundations and Mind in Camden.

We also run a successful Arts & Science Festival event on perceptions of climate change in March 2017 and a mini-workshop on affect and cognition with network members Matthew Broome and Maura Tumulty in June 2017.

My work on delusions and optimism bias appeared at the Hay Festival and in Radical Philosophy and Red Magazine. This year I have got a TEDxBrum talk to look forward to on 15th October. Wish me luck!

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph

Imperfect Cognitions

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