Imperfect Cognitions

On 9th January at the Royal Society of Medicine an event took place, Global Mental Health: Children in Crisis . The first speaker, Vikram Patel  (Harvard Medical School), presented a lecture on how to prevent mental health problems in children. He highlighted the importance of linking epidemiological and neuroscientific data. From en epidemiological perspective, deprivation is a very significant risk factor for mental health problems, comparable to what smoking is for lung cancer. And most mental health probelms begin before the age of 24. From a neuroscientific perspective, the brain is very plastic in young adulthood. The prefrontal region of the brain (linked to executive decision making) matures 5-8 years later than the limbic region (linked to basic emotional reactions). Adversities associated with poor developmental outcomes include: Malnutrition Stressors Infections War and displacement Parental ill-health Abuse The need for responsive parents ...

Today's post introduces Guillermo Del Pinal and Shannon Spaulding's paper, " Conceptual Centrality and Implicit Bias ", published in Mind and Language. Guillermo Del Pinal is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor , and Leibniz-ZAS, Berlin . He works in the philosophy of language, mind and cognitive science. His main area of research is the relation between language and general cognition, focusing on topics such as the degree of modularity of language, and the role of natural logic within the language system. Shannon Spaulding is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University . Her general philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of science. The principal goal of her research is to construct a philosophically and empirically plausible account of social cognition. She also has research interests in imagination, pretense, and action theory. How ...

This post is by Rick Furtak .  Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College, where he has taught for over twelve years. In addition to the philosophy of emotions, his other main area of focus is existential thought. He is also a poet and translator who is interested in the literary aspects of philosophy and the philosophical significance of literature. In this post, he talks about his new book Knowing Emotions . This book investigates the question of how our emotions can enable us to know.  It claims that human emotions are not just feelings of physiological disturbance: rather, they are experiences in which we apprehend significant matters of concern.  When Pascal noted that the heart has its own reasons, he indicated that our dispassionate rational faculty alone cannot grasp what is revealed in our affective experience.  Knowing Emotions seeks to explain why human emotions are indeed capable of making us aware of significant ...

In December 2016 an exciting volume entitled Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture has been published by Legenda. The book, edited by Ita McCarthy, Kirsty Sellevold and Olivia Smith, contains a chapter authored by Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Rachel Gunn and myself on the challenges we face when we want to tell delusional beliefs apart from other beliefs. We start with the standard DSM definition of delusions, and explain that clinical delusions are characterised by surface features of two kinds, epistemic (fixity, implausibility) and psychological (negative impact on functioning). Then we ask whether we can decide whether a type of belief is delusional by using those criteria. We consider three cases of belief that match at least some of the criteria: the belief that some thoughts have been inserted in one's mind by a third party; the belief that one has been abducted by aliens; and the belief that one is better than average at just about ...

This post is by Bart Streumer . Bart Streumer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. In this post he introduces his book Unbelievable Error s, which has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Widespread beliefs can be systematically mistaken. Take religious beliefs: if God does not exist, these beliefs are all mistaken. But you may think that some widespread beliefs cannot be mistaken in this way. For example, consider normative judgements: our beliefs about what is right or wrong, or about what there is reason to do or to believe. Could these beliefs be systematically mistaken? In my book Unbelievable Errors, I argue that they are. I argue that normative judgements ascribe normative properties, but that these properties do not exist. This means that all normative judgements are false. For example, the belief that stealing is wrong ascribes the property of being wrong to stealing, but this property does not exist, which means that this belief is...

Today's post is by Clara Humpston. Clara is a Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Not long ago I completed my PhD from Cardiff University and this paper was first written a couple of years ago when I was a PhD student there . My PhD research focused on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopted a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach by incorporating behavioural and phenomenological investigations. In my second post for Imperfect Cognitions, I summarise my most recent theoretical paper on the paradoxical nature of self-awareness in schizophrenia, published in Philosophical Psychology . The primary manifestations of schizophrenia in my opinion, are basic self-disturbances leading to the adoption of a solipsistic lifeworld that provides fertile ground for the development of psychotic phenomena such as first-rank symptoms. First-rank symptoms are often disruptions of one’s ego-boundary: that is,...

This post is by Matthew Ratcliffe , Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria.  Ratcliffe also leads the  Phenomenological Psychopathology and Philosophy of Psychiatry  research group.  Most of his recent work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychiatry. He is the author of: Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Palgrave, 2007), Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015). In this post Ratcliffe presents a review of his most recent book Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality and the Interpersonal World. When we perceive something, we seldom wonder whether we are actually perceiving it rather than imagining or remembering it. Perceptual experience ordinarily incorporates...

Colin Klein We are philosophers working on various topics that intersect with delusions. Colin Klein works on the philosophy of neuroscience and the application of interventionist accounts of causation to this area, and has also discussed the relation between psychopathologies like somatoparaphenia and his theory of pain . Stephen Gadsby works on distorted body representations and false body size beliefs in anorexia nervosa . And Peter Clutton has defended the doxastic status of delusions—offering a cognitive phenomenological account of delusions (forthcoming)—and explored the status of delusions on the harmful dysfunction account . Peter Clutton Any discussion of delusions needs some criteria by which patients are grouped together as having the same delusion. In our paper, ‘ Taxonomising Delusions: content or aetiology? ’, we compare content-based and aetiological taxonomies of delusions, arguing in favour of the latter. Stephen Gadsby Most authors ta...

Does philosophy have a purpose outside academia? What does philosophy look like when it’s done beyond the walls of the lecture theatre and the seminar room? And who should get to do it? I got to think quite a bit about these questions recently. It was back at the start of 2017 that I travelled to London to meet some of the senior team from mental health charity Mind in Camden to discuss the possibility of developing a series of philosophy workshops, based on project PERFECT ’s research, and running them at Mind in Camden, for people with lived experience of unusual beliefs and experiences, and mental distress, as well as for service providers and mental health advocates. Mind in Camden runs training, support and capacity building services to benefit people who are struggling with mental distress, and I saw commonalities between its values and the sorts of conceptions of mental health and rationality that we’re arguing for through PERFECT. So, the organisation was a natural partn...