Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, I report on our third annual workshop, this year with a focus on confabulation, which took place last month at St Anne’s College, Oxford. We had an international programme of talks from both philosophers and psychologists, and talks addressed a range of topics, including exploration of both the varieties and boundaries of the phenomenon of confabulation; application of the notion to new areas of study; and how developments in conceptual models of confabulation influence new therapeutic interventions. Sarah Robins addressed the phenomenon of mnemonic confabulation, or confabulation in memory. In her talk, she demonstrated that although discussions of confabulation began with aspects of memory, mnemonic confabulation is importantly dissimilar from other confabulatory phenomena. In mnemonic confabulation, there is no relationship between the remembered event and an occurrence in the rememberer’s past. However, claiming to remember an event is generally considered ...

This post is a reply by Phil Corlett (Yale)  (pictured below) to Dan Williams's recent post on Hierarchical Bayesian Models of Delusions . Dan Williams has put forward a lucid and compelling critique of hierarchical Bayesian models of cognition and perception and, in particular, their application to delusions. I want to take the opportunity to respond to Dan’s two criticisms outlined so concisely on the blog (and in his excellent paper) and then comment on the paper more broadly. Dan is “ sceptical that beliefs—delusional or otherwise—exist at the higher levels of a unified inferential hierarchy in the neocortex . ” He says, “ every way of characterising this proposed hierarchy... is inadequate .” Stating that “ it can’t be true both that beliefs exist at the higher levels of the inferential hierarchy and that higher levels of the hierarchy represent phenomena at large spatiotemporal scales . There are no such content restrictions on beliefs, whether delusional ...

This post is by Olley Pearson who is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. Olley focuses on metaphysics, though he considers a number of topics from this perspective including the nature of rationality, the self, the emotions, time, and ontological fundamentality. In the post Olley describes some of the core themes of his recent book Rationality, Time, and Self. In this book I provide a new argument for the tensed theory of time and the emergence of the self: there is more to time and ourselves than some philosophers suggest. The basis of this argument is a concern that peculiarities of meaning alone are not enough to account for the special role that is played in our lives by tensed and first-personal utterances and the beliefs they express (here known as tensed and first-personal beliefs). Perry style cases in which a specific individual must perform an action at a specific time have made it clear that we sometimes need tensed ...

Today's post is by Dan Williams, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Cambridge. If you had to bet on it, what’s the probability that your loved ones have been replaced by visually indistinguishable imposters? That your body is overrun with tiny parasites? That you’re dead? As strange as these possibilities are, each of them captures the content of well-known delusional beliefs: Capgras delusion, delusional parasitosis, and Cotard delusion respectively. Delusional beliefs come in a wide variety of forms and arise from a comparably diverse range of underlying causes. One of the deepest challenges in the contemporary mind sciences is to explain them. Why do people form such delusions? And why on earth do they retain them in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence against them? My new paper “ Hierarchical Bayesian Models of Delusion ” presents a review and critique of a fascinating body of research in computational psychiatry that at...

This post is by  Fabrice Teroni , Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Geneva, and Christine Tappolet , Full Professor in philosophy at the University of Montreal. Try to name as many types of positive emotions as you can. Now do the same for negative emotions. You will probably agree with the often-heard claim that the vocabulary we have at our disposal is especially rich for negative emotions: we distinguish between sadness, fear, disgust, regret, remorse, despair, resentment, indignation, contempt, jealousy, hatred, etc. Many of our everyday discussions turn around these negative emotions, aiming at a better understanding of their causes and moderation of their sometimes devastating effects. That being said, we harbor ambivalent attitudes towards negative emotions; we do not always undergo them reluctantly, for instance. Not only do we think that some situations or objects merit negative emotions, but we also actively pursue them—the aim of many recr...

Lynn-Marie Harper participated in the Philosophy of Mind workshop series for people with various interests in, and experiences of, mental health that Project PERFECT ran in partnership with Mind in Camden in the autumn of 2017.  Here, she shares some of her poetry.  She has always written but started to share her poetry when taking workshops with the poet, novelist and confidence inspiring tutor Aoife Mannix in 2010. S ome of the poems below are a direct response to the philosophy workshops, and some address life-experience more generally. The two poems I presented at Conway Hall at the conference on our last meeting of the Philosophy of Mind course were both written during the workshop series. The first, ‘Rocking the Foundations” was written initially as a response to an assignment on metaphor set by a poetry class tutor, Poet Philosopher Alan Murray. It served a purpose beyond the assignment though in that I could express my feelings and reactions to a longsta...

This post is by Katja May, PhD candidate at the University of Kent. Emotional Politics – The Role of Affect in Social Movements and Organizing took place on 31 May 2018 at the University of Kent in Canterbury. The conference aimed to bring together academics, activists, policy-makers and practitioners to share current concerns and developments in the research and practice surrounding emotion, organizing and social movements. It was co-hosted by the Gender, Sexuality and Culture Research Cluster in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at Kent and kindly sponsored by the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies , the School of English and the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing . The organizers Katja May and Angela Matthews , are both PhD students at Kent, and their joint interest in affect, emotion and social transformation was the driving force behind this conference. Veteran activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis (2016) claims that in order...

Today's post is by Ben Tappin , graduate student in psychology at Royal Holloway at the University of London. In the post he introduces the paper "Do the folk actually hold folk-economic beliefs?" that he has co-authored with Robert Ross and Ryan McKay .   Ben Tappin (above) Robert Ross (above)  Ryan McKay (above) How do individuals arrive at their beliefs about the economic impact of immigration? More specifically, what are the psychological processes that underpin seemingly widespread beliefs like “immigrants steal jobs” or “immigrants abuse the welfare system?” Just how typical are these (and related) beliefs, and does their prevalence have implications for theorizing about the psychological processes that give rise to them? In the current political climate of Western Europe and the US, these questions seem as relevant now as any time before. Recently, psychologists Pascal Boyer and Michael Bang Peterse n suggested that negative beliefs abo...