Imperfect Cognitions

In this post  Kengo Miyazono  (Hiroshima) and  Ryan McKay  (Royal Holloway) summarise their new paper “ Explaining delusional beliefs: a hybrid model ”, in which they present and defend a hybrid theory of the development of delusions that incorporates the central ideas of two influential (yet sometimes bitterly opposing) theoretical approaches to delusions—the two-factor theory and the prediction error theory.  There are at least two influential candidates for a global theory of delusions (i.e., a theory that explains many kinds of delusions, rather than particular kinds of delusions such as persecutory delusions) in the recent literature: the two-factor theory (Coltheart, 2007 ; Coltheart, Menzies, & Sutton, 2010 ; Coltheart, Langdon, & McKay, 2011 ), according to which delusions are explained by two distinct neurocognitive factors with different explanatory roles, and the prediction error theory (Corlett et al., 2010 ; Corlett, Honey, & Fle...

This post is by Phil Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett . It is a reply to the post we published on Tuesday on Metaethics and Mental Time Travel . In Metaethics and Mental Time Travel , Fileva and Tresan (F&T) fairly and accurately reconstructed (improved?) and intricately dissected our paper. We cannot follow every twist and turn in a short blog post so concentrate on the key issue. They partially agree with us that semantic knowledge detached from diachronic self-awareness is insufficient for moral agency but disagree (i) whether that awareness needs to be "richly experiential" and (ii) the nature of diachronic deficits in the cases we discuss (see their discussion of these cases which is deeper than ours). As they say, Representations with past- or future-oriented, autobiographical content, crucially, awareness of one’s past actions or future options as consistent or inconsistent with one’s principles do seem necessary : but MTT involves experiential repres...

We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid fi...

In this post I reflect on what the Disney film Frozen can tell us about youth mental health. (This is a slightly expanded version of a post that appeared on the University of Birmingham website on 16th December 2019.) When it was released in 2013, Frozen was praised for having a leading female character who was different: a guest at Elsa’s coronation calls her a monster when she loses control; Elsa isolates herself from the people she loves for fear of harming them; and she is distressed because she does not fully comprehend what is happening to her. Elsa does not ‘fit in’, and often makes those around her feel uncomfortable. When Elsa celebrates her liberation from her stuffy conventional life with the song “Let it go”, some critics talked about Disney’s ‘gay agenda’ and Elsa was welcomed in some circles as a queer icon. Some were hoping that she would get a girlfriend in Frozen II . But there is another form of diversity that Elsa embodies just as convincingly, that...

Today's post is by Natalie Ashton (University of Stirling). She is reporting on a workshop held at the University of Warwick on 19th of September as part of the AHRC-project Norms for the New Public Sphere . It was the first of a series of workshops planned to take place over the next two years. These workshops are designed to bring together academic philosophers with media scholars, professionals, and activists in order to investigate the opportunities and challenges that new social media pose for the public sphere. This first workshop focused on the epistemic norms that can foster a public sphere in which democracy can flourish. Alessandra Tanesini kicked the event off with a talk titled “Bellicose Debates: Arrogant and Liberatory Anger On and Off-line”. Her main claims were that anger can be divided into different kinds: status anger, which is typically arrogant , and liberatory anger, which she says can offer distinctive motivational, epistemic and communicative b...

For today's post I interviewed Fabienne Peter , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, specializing in political philosophy, moral philosophy, and social epistemology. She talks about her research interests, a new exciting project she is participating in, and the role of philosophers in public life. LB: How did you become interested in the norms that govern political debate? FP: I’ve been doing research on the question of what makes political decisions legitimate for some time now. This research has led me to see that an inclusive and fair political debate is an important condition for legitimate political decision-making. Inclusive and fair political debate of political issues matters in a number of ways. It helps to gather relevant considerations that bear on the decision-making, for example in relation to the implications of possible political decisions for different people. It also helps to weigh the importance of those considerations. Political debate...

In today's post Quassim Cassam  (Warwick) is presenting his new book, Conspiracy Theories (Polity, 2019). See also his post on the Polity Books blog on why we should not ignore conspiracy theories, and the  interview on the New Books Network on conspiracy theories as a form of propaganda. In my book, I address four questions: What is a conspiracy theory? Why do people believe them? What is the problem with conspiracy theories? How should we respond to them? The take home message of the book is that conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. This is, in a technical sense, their function , and also what makes them dangerous. The deeper meaning of conspiracy theories is political, and these theories are as pernicious as the political causes they promote. In practice, these causes have often been extremist causes. Anti-Semitism is part of the DNA of conspiracy theories, and even seemingly apolitical theories are a gateway to more overtly political theo...

Today I want to share some thoughts on last week's interesting post  on de-rationalising delusions. In the  pre-print  of their thought provoking paper, Vaughan Bell has argued, with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson, for the view that models of delusions need to include "alterations to coalitional cognition" and to depart from the dominant views that characterise delusions primarily as irrational beliefs. Here I am not going to discuss their positive proposal, which sounds plausible, but just comment on how the so-called 'dominant account' the authors object to in the paper groups together heterogeneous views of what makes delusions distinctive and pathological. Some of the cognitive accounts Bell and colleagues have as their polemical target hold that: (1) the irrationality of delusions is distinctive from (more radical than) the irrationality of other beliefs; and (2) the irrationality of delusions is the main source (if not the only source) of their ...

This is a post by Vaughan Bell and gives a summary of a new pre-printed paper called ‘ De-Rationalising Delusions ’ co-authored with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson .  Vaughan is an Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at University College London, and also works in the Psychological Interventions Clinic for outpatients with Psychosis (PICuP), in South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Nichola Raihani is a Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at University College London, and Sam Wilkinson is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Exeter University.   Historically, delusions have been understood as pathological beliefs that are characterised by their irrationality. Someone who believes, for example, that a camera has been implanted in their tooth and is taking pictures of their mind, would seem, on face value, to have problems in reasoning rationally about the world. This has motivated researchers to look for problems in domain-general reasoning to e...

Today's post is by Eva Jablonka (right) and Simona Ginzburg (left).  Jablonka (Tel-Aviv University) is the coauthor of Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life and the coeditor of Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, both published by MIT Press.  Ginsburg is a neurobiologist who retired from the Open University of Israel, where she headed the MA Program in Biological Thought. Her recent work focuses on the evolution of early nervous systems and the evolutionary transitions to consciousness in the animal world. In this post they introduce their new book, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2019). The gap between third-person, scientific, publically shared investigations, such as the neuroscience of echolocation, and first-person subjective experiencing such as echolocation-based subjective ...

A month from the end of project PERFECT, Michael Larkin (Co-Investigator) and Valeria Motta (Doctoral Research Fellow) reflect on what the project meant for them. One helpful way to think about being involved in a project as expansive as PERFECT is to reflect on where it is sending you next. In this post, we discuss some of the things they have learned from our interdisciplinary work together. Michael Larkin Michael : One of the most interesting aspects of PERFECT for me has arisen from the opportunity to work with you on your PhD. It’s going to be a really innovative combination of philosophical argument and phenomenological-psychological investigation. I’m aware that – coming into it – you were already very well-read on the phenomenological philosophy. I’m curious to know what has struck you most about getting to grips with qualitative methods in psychology? Valeria Motta Valeria : Thank you Michael. It was very interesting for me working with you too. I was s...

Here is the second post in our series reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , this week from postdoc Sophie Stammers . Whilst we’ve all focused on something slightly different, PERFECT researchers were united in using philosophical and psychological tools to dismantle the assumptions that give rise to mental health stigma, and to change the narrative on what counts as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cognition. A big focus of my work on the project has been the issue of confabulation. We confabulate when we give an account of an event or an action that is not grounded in evidence, but which is given sincerely. Originally, researchers were interested in confabulation as it arose in cases of mental distress or cognitive disfunction, but it turns out that confabulation arises commonly and frequently in all of us, from explanations of mundane consumer choices, to accounting for our moral and political beliefs. Maybe you’ll have been engaged in an explanation of an event, or an experience...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin and William Day (both at the University of Aston). They are reporting on the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships conference, which was sponsored by project PERFECT and held at the University of Aston on 22-23 May 2019. We're both participants in the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships group at Aston University. In planning our inaugural  conference , the group initially considered a narrower focus on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is a regular (more-or-less annual) IPA Conference, and we had agreed to host it. Eventually we settled on a broader theme (Creativity and Affect). IPA is one approach which many of us use in our work, but it is not the only one, and methods are not the sole focus of our meetings. When we meet as a group, we do discuss creative innovations in methodology, but we also read phenomenology, and explore studies which offer experiential insights on health and relationships. We hop...

There’s a lovely little church in Blackberry Hill, Bristol, nestled in the grounds of what was once the old psychiatric hospital. Step inside, and you’ll find a curious assemblage of artefacts, writings, recordings, drawings, and sculptures, telling the stories of the many mental health patients and practitioners of Bristol’s past. Welcome to Glenside Hospital Museum , which I’ll tell you a bit about now, before encouraging you to take a look for yourself if you’re ever over that way. (In terms of the content, I do discuss patient accounts of treatments, some that are quite upsetting.) At the start of the exhibition, we see the shift from dominant attitudes in 1600s Britain of seeing mental illness and distress as a punishment from the Christian god, or a mark of demonic possession, to the idea that the afflicted are sufferers for whom there might be a cure, and the birth of modern psychiatry as a medical field in the 1800s. You can peruse a detailed timeline developed by t...