Imperfect Cognitions

  Today's post is written by Peter Langland-Hassan and Agustin Vicente.  Peter Langland-Hassan  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the  University of Cincinnati .  Agustin Vicente  is  Ikerbasque Research Professor  at the  University of the Basque Country , Linguistics Department. In this post, they present their new edited volume" Inner Speech: New Voices ".  Our new anthology, Inner Speech: New Voices (OUP, 2018), is the first in philosophy to focus on inner speech—a phenomenon known, colloquially, as “talking to yourself silently” or “the little voice in the head.” The book is interdisciplinary in spirit and practice, bringing together philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to discuss the multiple controversies surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Readers of this blog may be most familiar with theoretical work on inner speech as it occurs in the context of explaining Auditory Verba...

This post is by Katrina Sifferd , Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College regarding her recent paper ‘ Are Psychopaths Legally Insane? ’ co-authored with Anneli Jefferson , Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Philosophy department at the University of Birmingham. Exploring the nature of psychopathy has become an interdisciplinary project: psychologists and neuroscientists are working to understand whether psychopathy constitutes a mental disorder or illness, and if yes, of what sort; and moral philosophers and legal scholars are using theories of psychopathy to understand the mental capacities necessary for culpable action and whether psychopaths are morally and legally responsible. In our recent paper , Anneli Jefferson and I argue that a diagnosis of psychopathy is generally irrelevant to a legal insanity plea. It isn’t clear that psychopathy constitutes a true mental disorder; but even if it is a disorder, tests for legal insanity require that specific mental defi...

On 6th and 7th November, Ema Sullivan Bissett organised a conference on  Belief, Imagination, and Delusion  at the University of Birmingham. The PERFECT team attended the event and this report is the result of their collective effort! Anna Ichino on imagination Paul Noordhof on aim of belief Sophie Archer (Cardiff University) started the conference with a discussion of delusion and belief, inviting us to learn some lessons from the implicit bias literature. When the avowed anti-racist says all races are equal but does not behave in ways consistent to this belief, then we assume that there is an additional mental state (not open to consciousness) that is responsible for those behaviours. Is this additional mental state a belief? Archer argues that it is not. On the background, there is a thesis about belief. Even if a mental state responds directly to epistemic reasons, this is necessary but not sufficient for the mental state to be a belief (Epistemic Reasons). ...

In this post, David Hunter , Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada summarizes his paper titled “The metaphysics of responsible believing”, recently published in the Brazilian journal Manuscrito. An important task in the philosophy of mind and action is to understand what it is for a person to be responsible for their mental states and their actions. It is natural to think that a person is responsible for their actions only if they act freely or voluntarily. But most philosophers agree that we cannot believe, desire or intend at will. But then how can we really be responsible for these mental states? In the case of belief, this is called the problem of epistemic agency. My essay is about this problem. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that the standard conception of action tends to obscure our practical agency. It holds that an action is (typically, anyway) a bodily movement caused in certain ways by the person’s mental states. This ...

Today's post is by Lisa Osbeck. Lisa is a Professor of Psychology with interest in the Philosophy of Science. Her work explores the psychological dimensions of science practice and considers how they can help us better understand both science and persons. In this post, Lisa presents her new book  Values in Psychological Science: Re-imagining Epistemic Priorities at a New Frontier, published by Cambrige University Press. In previous work, I collaborated with  Nancy Nersessian  and colleagues in an ethnographic study of four bioengineering laboratories. We analysed how emotional expression and social positioning are integrated with cognitive processes in innovative problem solving with these settings. One aspect of this work was a study of disciplinary identities and associated epistemic values, with an analysis of the ways these identities facilitate or impede creative innovation in collaborations ( Osbeck, Nersessian, Malone, and Newstetter 2011 ;  Osbeck ...

Today's post is by Neil Van Leeuwen who talks about his recent research with Larisa Heiphetz on the differences in meanings between "think" and "believe". For related research by Heiphetz and Van Leeuwen, see  here ,  here , and  here .  Neil Van Leeuwen Do “think” and “believe” mean the same thing? Consider two sentences: Jill believes that God exists. Jill thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists. Both sentences attribute mental states to Jill. And each breaks down into an  attitude  (thinks/ believes) and a  content  (that God… / that a lake…). So we can sharpen our question: if we set the contents aside, do the words “thinks” and “believes” convey the same attitude type (or manner of processing)? Many philosophers and cognitive scientists talk and write as if the answer were  yes —as if the words “think” and “believe” were interchangeable, at least in propositional attitude reports (i.e., as if “thinks that...

This post is written by Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm. Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published widely in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and medical ethics. Robyn Bluhm is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. She has published widely in philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. In this post,  Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm present their new edited volume "The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry". Although there has long been a close link between philosophy and psychiatry, it is only in the past few decades that philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a field in its own right, with its specific set of questions and themes generating interest from both traditional philosophers, and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, ps...

Luca Malatesti (left in the picture below) and Filip Čeč (right) collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are  based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia).  Luca  is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry.  Filip  is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter ‘Identification and self-knowledge’, that is contained in the collection edited by Patrizia Pedrini and Julie Kirsch,  Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpre...

This post was co-authored by Matteo Colombo , an Assistant Professor in the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics and Philosophy of Science , at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, and Mark Sprevak , Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh .  They share research interests in philosophy of the cognitive sciences and philosophy of science in general. Here they write about their new co-edited volume “The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind” . The book aims to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the history, foundations, challenges, applications, and prospects for computational ideas regarding mind, brain, and behaviour. There are thirty-five chapters from contributors across philosophy and the sciences. It is organized into four parts: 1.     History and future prospects of computational approaches 2.     Types of computational approach 3.     ...

Today's post is by Huw Green. Green is a psychologist who recently moved back to the UK after finishing a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a clinical postdoctoral fellowship at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program at Mt Sinai Hospital New York. He is currently full time dad to a toddler and new baby while waiting to become HCPC registered and start clinical work . Various scholars have suggested that psychiatric disorders vary across time, especially in terms of their phenomenology. In a recent paper  appeared in the  Psychiatric Bulletin I offer an account of how this sort of change might come about. I start with the suggestion that changes in psychiatric terminology through history – and in particular the shift toward more homogenous descriptions of psychotic symptoms in formal documents like the DSM – have had an impact on the very experiences that terminology tries to describe. This is not my sugg...