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!
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Anna Ichino on imagination |
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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). If the mental state can be directly formed or revised on the basis of conditioning, then it is not a belief (Conditioning). In the second part of her talk, Archer considered two objections to her conditions for belief. One is that the conditions are not really distinct, and the other is that the picture sketched is one that is not psychologically realistic.
Garry Young (Melbourne) addressed the revisionist model of the Capgras delusion in his talk: what causes the delusion, why the belief is accepted, and why it is maintained. Capgras is the delusion that a significant other has been replaced by an impostor. The traditional model of the delusion combines an anomalous experience that then is either explained by or endorsed as a belief. In a later revised model, the anomaly is not a conscious experience (we can call it abnormal data) and the belief is the first conscious component of the delusion.
One problem with the revised model is that by making the belief the first conscious step, it is not clear why the person does not talk about the acquired belief as an unbidden thought. In Capgras there is a mismatch between physical recognition (she looks like my wife) and lack of arousal (she doesn’t feel like my wife). So, the content of the delusions would be: “This person looks like my wife and claims to be my wife is not my wife”. This has a strong explanatory power because it makes sense of what the person experiences.
Another problem is that it is not clear what the second factor in the formation of the delusion is given that the reasoning is abductively good, providing an explanation for an unusual experience. This is highlighted by the fact that people who recover from the delusion seem to be able to check the delusion for plausibility, which makes it strange to say that previously the person lacked that capacity.
Young proposed that there are a co-occurrence and an interaction between the experience of unfamiliarity and the belief about the impostor. He describes his model as interactionist. He rejects the idea that what first enters consciousness is a fully formed belief. There is a more gradual process. For instance, the person could be considering the content of Capgras as a contender for the truth (appealing to indicative imagination). The belief has two functions, then: (a) it interprets the experience, but also (b) it gives meaning to the perceptual data. There is a mutual effect between belief and perception.
After the lunch break, it was
Lucy O’Brien’s (UCL) turn. Her talk was entitled: “Delusions of Every Day Life: Death, Self-love, and Love of Another”, written with Doug Lavin. We have a sense of our own significance, a form of self love, which makes us think that our own death would be a terrible thing. When we are in the grip of self love, what can we reply to the objectivity response, that our life does not have the significance we attribute to it?
We can try and think about which property makes us value our own lives so much, but no property seems quite enough. It is more that we have lived this life with ourselves, a particular life with projects and achievements that we care about. Is this an in-built response, a kind of inevitable irrationality? Or is the response actually rational for agents like us? As in the self love case, also in the case of loving another, their death is a terrible thing for us. That is because we value them: (a) we value some character or stereotype that the loved person embodies; (b) we value the peculiarity and specificity of the loved person.
Another common ‘justification’ of love (and self love) is history: I love them because we have a history together. But also this attempt to justify assigning significance to others we love or to ourselves fails on the grounds of contingency and inefficiency (it just happens to be the case that this is the person I have lived with, another person might have pursued my projects better than I did). We could see self love and love for others as an a-rational drive but they are not so, because they do not work without the participation of our rational agency.
Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway) presented his paper next, entitled “Belief Formation in a Post-Truth World”. McKay started with a list of famous cases where people were made to believe in events that never occurred. What are the ramifications of fake news? For individuals, serious failures of judgements. But for society at large, even more serious outcomes (e.g. indifference to climate change, anti-vax propaganda). How do false beliefs get traction in human minds?
There are many factors affecting belief consumption: truth is not the only relevant consideration. In terms of content-specific reasons to adopt a belief, one reason is that a belief matches your experience. But experience can be misleading (in clinical cases, an unusual experience can generate a very implausible, delusional, belief).
Another factor affecting the adoption of beliefs is the presence of preferences for which there can be good evolutionary reasons. We assume that there is agency in everything we experience (e.g. supernatural beliefs or conspiracy theories) even if there is no agency. A third reason for adopting some beliefs for which there is no (good) evidence is the presence of motivational factors: McKay discussed the case of positive illusions in this context.
One very interesting finding McKay discussed in the context of explaining how we maintain positive illusions is the fact that more knowledge does not protect from desirability effects and excessively polarised positions in public debates. That is because we asymmetrically update our beliefs, taking on board evidence for desirable outcomes, but dismissing evidence for undesirable outcomes. Such biases in belief evaluation and belief revision underpin self-deception in deflationary accounts such as Mele’s.
There are also content-neutral factors (such as jumping to conclusion and other biases) why we adopt certain beliefs. One important issue is signalling: people use beliefs as identity markers, sending a strong signal as to what views you are committed to and which groups you belong to.
Anna Ichino (Milan) gave the final paper of the day, investigating how imagining differs from belief. She maintained that imaginings and beliefs differ only with respect to their cognitive inputs, or, in other words, that whilst beliefs are formed in response to real-world evidence, imaginings are not. She then argued against a position that has become standard in the imagination literature, defending the view that imaginings and beliefs do not differ as regards their behavioural outputs.
She took it that the relationship between beliefs and behavioural outputs is such that our beliefs cause us to act in ways that would promote the satisfaction of our desires, if they were true. Ichino then suggested that in many cases, imaginings cause us to act in ways that would promote the satisfaction of our desires, if they were true.
But, surely we can imagine all sorts of things, and not thereby act upon them? Acknowledging this thought, Ichino brought up O’Brien’s example: Lucy can imagine being an elephant, but this does not entail all of the behavioural outputs that believing that she was an elephant would promote (for instance, resigning from her job, and withdrawing from interactions because she is no longer able to comply with human social norms; buying a new bed because elephants do not fit in human beds… etc). But imaginings like these are not similarly integrated into a network of cognitions as the equivalent beliefs are. Ichino's challenge to us and to you: Find a case where an imagining does not motivate, where, all else being equal, a belief with the same content would. Can you think of one?
The second day of the conference started with a talk by
Kathleen Stock (Sussex). The question guiding the talk was whether some delusions are also imaginings or involve imaginings.
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Kathleen Stock on imagination and delusion |
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Jakob Ohlhorst on delusions as certainties |