Imperfect Cognitions

This post is written by Dr Victoria Goodyear.  Victoria Goodyear is a Lecturer in Pedagogy of Sport, Physical Activity and Health in the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences , University of Birmingham UK. Victoria's research focuses on understanding and enhancing young people's health and wellbeing through research on pedagogy.  Her recent work has focused on pedagogy in the context of digital technologies, and how young people's engagement with social media, apps, and/or wearable devices shapes health-related knowledge and behaviours. Victoria can be found on Twitter . An example of her research can be found here . Here Victoria presents her new book Young People, Social Media and Health. Young People, Social Media and Health adopts a novel approach to understanding, explaining and communicating young people's experiences of health-related social media, and the impacts young people report on their health, wellbeing, and levels of physical...

In this post,  Catherine Bortolon ,  Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology  at University Grenoble Alpes, France, and  Stéphane Raffard , Professor of Clinical Psychology at University Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, discuss their paper “ The contribution of optimism and hallucinations to grandiose delusions in individuals with schizophrenia ” recently published in Schizophrenia Research. We are interested in the psychological mechanisms that might contribute to psychotic experiences (e.g., delusional ideas) in individuals with and without a mental disorder. Recently, we become more interested in grandiose ideas (or delusions), which are defined as false beliefs about inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, and which are firmly held despite evidence of the contrary ( APA, 2013 ). It might include the belief of having a special power such as mind reading, a special identity such as being a king or related to Kurt Cobain, and in terms of knowledg...

Today's post is written by Hichem Naar and Fabrice Teroni.  In this post, Hichem and Fabrice present their new edited volume  The Ontology of Emotions , recently published by Cambridge University Press. Hichem Naar is Assistant Professor in philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen, a member of the Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics Research Group , and an associate member of the Thumos research group, the Genevan research group on emotions, values and norms hosted by the CISA , the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. Hichem currently works on the nature, value, and normative significance of various attitudes, including emotions. Fabrice Teroni is Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Geneva and co-director of Thumos . He works in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. He is also interested in the nature of emotions elicited by fiction, in the involvement of the self in emotions as well as in the phenomenology of memory.  What kin...

Today's post is by Krystyna Bielecka (pictured above), assistant professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. For her PhD, Krystyna investigated the concept of mental representation and its use in philosophy and cognitive sciences. Her PhD thesis entitled, Błądzę, więc myślę. Co to jest błędna reprezentacja? (in English, “I err, therefore I think. What is misrepresentation?”), was awarded the Jerzy Perzanowski Prize by Jagellonian University (Poland) for the best PhD Thesis in Cognitive Science in 2016. Recently Krystyna has obtained a research grant from the the National Science Centre (Poland) to pursue her research interests in the application of the concept of mental representation to certain psychopathologies. In the project, she asks whether certain mental illnesses, such as OCD, psychoses, or certain symptoms of mental disorders, such as confabulations or cognitive and emotional impairments of empathy, are necessarily representational and when ...

                 Today's post is written by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall . In this post, they present their new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread , published by Yale University Press. Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine.  James Owen Weatherall is a philosopher of physics and philosopher of science. He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science.    Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformatio...

In this post, Katherine Puddifoot , Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University, discusses her paper “ Re-evaluating the credibility of eyewitness testimony: the misinformation effect and the overcritical juror ,” recently published in Episteme. Should we trust eyewitnesses of crimes? Are jurors inclined to trust eyewitnesses more than they should? People tend to adopt a default position of trust towards eyewitness testimony, finding it highly convincing. However, as has now been widely acknowledged, eyewitnesses are subject to memory errors, which make them susceptible to error. These two observations have pointed many researchers towards the conclusion that jurors do trust eyewitnesses more than they should. However, in a recent paper, I argue that jurors are susceptible to being over critical, assigning too little credence to eyewitness testimony, due to the presence of memory errors. How can this be so? Jurors might adopt a default posit...

Today I have the pleasure to post an interview with my colleague  Heather Widdows , John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham, who talks to us about her research interest in beauty and her very successful monograph, Perfect Me : Beauty as an Ethical Ideal . LB: Your project examines beauty from a new angle. How did you first become interested in beauty as an ethical ideal? HW: That’s a difficult question to answer as my passion for researching beauty crept up on me. Before working on beauty I was a fairly typical moral philosopher working in global ethics and justice. My main topic was defining global ethics as an multidisciplinary approach to philosophy, taking the real world and empirical evidence seriously. More broadly, I have worked on areas such as women’s rights, reproductive rights, genetic ethics and bioethics. I guess my interest in beauty emerged from this long standing interest in gender justice. I recognised that something w...

This post is by Alex Miller Tate , who works in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Birmingham. Here, he summarises his paper " Contributory Injustice in Psychiatry " recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Significant service user involvement in the provision of and decisions surrounding psychiatric care (both for themselves as individuals and in the formation of policy and best practice) is, generally-speaking, officially supported by members of the medical profession (see e.g. Newman et al 2015 ; Tait & Lester 2005 ). Service user advocacy organisations and others, however, note that the experience of service users (especially in primary care) is of having their beliefs about, feelings regarding, and perspectives on their conditions ignored or otherwise thoughtlessly invalidated. Some deleterious consequences of this have been noted before, including impoverished clinical kn...