Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Valentina Cardella (Università di Messina). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Rationality in Mental Disorder: Too little or too much? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Valentina Cardella Are people with mental disorders irrational? At first sight, this seems to be a trivial question: madness is the realm of non-sense. When someone tells you that her neighbour installed a tracking device in her abdomen, or that her internal organs are decomposing, you can’t help to wonder: how can she believe such impossible things? Where has her rationality gone? The common conceptualization of madness, which dates back to the Enlightenment, reflects this common-sense intuition: in people with mental disorders emotions are abnormal and unrestrained, and, on the other side, reason is severely affected. People with mental disorders can’t reason properly, healthy people can....

In today's post I am going to present an argument I developed in an article for the Supplementary Volume of the Aristotelian Society , Doctors without 'Disorders'. The paper was recently listed among the best articles in Philosophy published by Oxford University Press in 2020 (and thus it is available open access at the moment). I also presented this idea at the Joint Session last summer in  a symposium on the concept of disorder and a video of the presentation is available (click below to watch). How do we decide whether the problems we experience deserve the attention of medical professionals? Many believe that the answer hangs on whether the problem we have is caused by a disorder: if it is caused by a disorder, then medical attention is appropriate. If it is not caused by a disorder, then it is still a problem, but not a medical problem. It is a problem in living , a problem we need to try and solve by some other means. I argue that the dichotomy between medical pr...

This post is by Meghan Griffith  (Davidson College). Meghan Griffith In “ Narrative Capacity and Moral Responsibility ”, I argue that our ability to understand and tell stories plays a role in moral responsibility. One standard approach to moral responsibility involves “reasons-responsiveness.” If we can recognize and react to reasons for acting, then it seems that we are in control of our behavior, and therefore responsible (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998 for an influential account). I think “narrative capacity” enhances our sensitivity to reasons. Narrative capacity is a way of making sense of the world (Velleman 2003, 1) and involves understanding the “meaning-affecting” relation between events (Rosati 2013, 34). In other words, we come to understand and interpret the events in our lives within the context of a story. Each event is not interpreted on its own. Instead, its meaning is “conditioned by” its relation to other events (Schechtman 2007, 162). For example, an event might b...

Today's post is by Jeroen de Ridder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Michael Hannon (University of Nottingham). Their post is based on their chapter ‘The Point of Political Belief’ to appear in the Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology (forthcoming in 2021), which they edited together. About a week after CNN and most other major news outlets had called the 2020 US election for Joe Biden, secretary of state Mike Pompeo stated in a press conference : “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” This is just one example of a political belief that seems, shall we say, slightly out of touch with reality. There are others: one out of seven survey respondents agree with the statement “Barack Obama is the antichrist” and one out of seven Trump supporters maintain that the half-empty photo of Trump’s 2017 inauguration has more people than a photo of Obama’s packed 2009 inauguration. Do people really believe these things, in the same way they believe, s...

Today's post is by Wouter Kusters , a philosopher, linguist and independent writer, teacher and consultant living in the Netherlands. In 2014 his comprehensive and transgressive book Philosophy of Madness was published in the Netherlands, and later this month the English translation will appear at MIT Press . Here you find an excerpt from the Preface to the English Edition (there is also a video presentation you can watch). Wouter Kusters Madness as I discuss it in this book is the imperfect translation of the Dutch waanzin , with which I focus on the range of experiences of all those who are deemed in medical jargon to be psychotic, as I myself was twice. Its first thematic line is a philosophical examination of the experience of being psychotic. I examine what happens in the various phases of the psychotic experience. What happens to the experience of time and space? What happens to reality? How are other persons perceived, and what happens to thought? It was this highlighting,...

Today's post is by Elly Vintiadis . She introduces her new book, Philosophy by Women: 22 Philosophers Reflect on Philosophy and Its Value (Routledge, 2020) . A couple of summers ago I was reading something (I don’t remember what) and it struck me that most people have no idea what philosophy is and that they only think of old white guys when they think about philosophers. So I decided that I would put together a book of essays on the nature and value of philosophy written exclusively by women in the field of philosophy. I wanted it to be a book about philosophy so that readers can get a better idea of what it is we do and why it is important, while at the same time, without making a fuss about it (I didn’t even want the word “women” in the title), registering in peoples’ minds that there are women doing philosophy and doing it well. At a time when the usefulness of philosophy, and the humanities in general, is being questioned and when the voices of women are being increasingly he...

Today's post is by Luke Brunning (University of Birmingham). He presents his new book, Does Monogamy Work? (Thames & Hudson 2020). Luke Brunning Monogamy, where someone has one romantic partner at a time, is the dominant form of romantic life in our society, and most others. But why is this the case? Has monogamy always been dominant? Are there realistic alternatives to monogamy? What will the future of romantic life be different? I explore some of the questions in Does Monogamy Work?  a short book for a general audience. People often suppose monogamy is the ‘natural’ result of our biological constitution. Human babies require extensive care, so we might think we are hardwired to form monogamous ‘pair bonds.’ But the evidence for this is not conclusive. Different strategies can aid the survival of our genes, and two may favour nonmonogamous social dynamics: group care and kin support, or the prioritisation of offspring quantity over quality.   Monogamy is better tho...

This post is by Peter Langland-Hassan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who is presenting his new book, Explaining Imagination (OUP 2020). The book is available as a free open access download , thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati. Peter Langland-Hassan  We won’t understand what imagination is—we won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination , is a compendium of such recipes. What ingredients do they feature? On my telling, they are other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts, they constitute cases of imagining. The idea that imagination can be reduced to other kinds of mental states in this way is at odds with what most (maybe all) other philosophers have had to say about imagination. According to the orthodox view, if we list a person’...

This post is by Awais Aftab (Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA). In this blog post he introduces and summarizes the article “ Mental Disorder and Social Deviance ”, co-written with Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed (Philosophy, Birkbeck College), and published in International Review of Psychiatry . Aftab also leads the interview series ‘ Conversations in Critical Psychiatry ’ for Psychiatric Times which is likely to be of great interest to the readers of this blog. Awais Aftab   I have been fascinated by the problem of distinguishing between “mental disorder” and “social deviance” since the early days of my psychiatric training. My exposure to the antipsychiatry philosophical literature had left me with a lingering, nagging doubt that unless there was some valid way of making this distinction, the legitimacy of psychiatry as a profession would stand on precarious and perilous ground.   Social deviance refers to actions or behaviors that ...

Today's post is by Melissa M. Shew and Kimberly K. Garchar . They present their new book, Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought  (OUP 2020). Despite social and institutional improvements, women and girls are routinely discouraged from full participation in intellectual and civic life. Kamala Harris’s recent refrain of “I’m speaking, I’m speaking” in a debate against Vice President Mike Pence evidences the ongoing challenge that women face in having their voices--and therefore their ideas--truly heard. This disrespect of women’s intellectual expertise occurs in nearly all aspects of our lives, so academic philosophy is no different. The chronic erasure of women’s voices in content, meager representation in philosophy syllabi, persistence of all-male panels in philosophy, and dominance in faculty meetings evidence the gender disparity in education. Melissa M. Shew This gap is harmful not just to women who are unable to fulfill their philosophical potential as a ...

This post is by Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam. They present their new book, Vice Epistemology , which was published by Routledge five days ago. Ian Kidd Study of the human epistemic failings has been a staple theme of philosophy since antiquity. Ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophers were all concerned with ignorance, stupidity, and prejudiced and biased ways of thinking – ones opposed to such high-fidelity philosophical goods as wisdom, certain knowledge, or rationality. Attempted amelioration of those epistemic failings has been an aim of ethics, logic, and the more overtly ‘therapeutic’ forms of philosophical practice, too. Obviously, our world remains populated by human beings with very many epistemic failings, a glum fact reiterated by contemporary research in empirical psychology, philosophy of mind and epistemology. Such work offers a whole range of conceptual tools for the study of those failings and one of the newest is that of an epistemic ...

This post originally appeared as a Birmingham Perspective on the  University of Birmingham website , authored by Valeria Motta. In the post, Valeria summarises her view of loneliness on which she was also recently interviewed by Radical Philosophy's host, Beth Matthews (podcast available,  part 1  and  part 2 ), for Melbourne 3CR Community Radio. Valeria Motta How is loneliness defined? And what do these definitions say about what we understand of the phenomenon? Over the last few decades, an increasing amount of empirical research has involved a range of definitions of loneliness. Distinctions have been made between loneliness and social isolation, and between loneliness and solitude. Many researchers acknowledge that loneliness and social isolation (a state of no physical contact with other people) are different constructs. However, this theoretical distinction is not always fully reflected in research on loneliness, let alone in interventions to lessen it. Interve...

This post is by me ( Lisa Bortolotti ), summarising a paper I wrote with Matthew Broome on how affective instability may be a causal factor in paranoia. It was published in a special issue of  Discipline Filosofiche on Philosophical Perspectives on Affective Experience and Psychopathology, edited by Anna Bortolan and Alessandro Salice. Matthew Broome Most accounts of paranoia rely on cognitive biases and perceptual anomalies. However, recent empirical research has shown that affective instability may play an important role.  What is affective instability? Unexpected changes of mood include emotional dysregulation, lability, impulsiveness, and swings. Collating the main overlapping dimensions, definitions, and their measurement scales, a recent systematic review proposed that affective instability is “rapid oscillations of intense affect, with a difficulty in regulating these oscillations or their behavioural consequences” ( Marwaha et al. 2013 ).  How does affecti...

Today's post is by Em Walsh (McGill University). Em Walsh The following is a real-life case study of a woman referred to as Mrs Black (Sokolowski 2018, 45-83). Mrs Black received a diagnosis of mid-stage dementia at the age of eighty-five. Mrs Black’s dementia impacted her ability to recall both the names and faces of her family members. Nevertheless, Mrs Black was noted by nurses who cared for her as always being an exceptionally happy woman, who took great pleasure in her daily activities in the residential care home in which she lived. Whilst in care, however, Mrs Black developed a serious bacterial infection, which posed a risk to her life if left untreated. Mrs Black’s primary caregivers wanted to treat the infection, but Mrs Black’s son noted that she had an advance directive stipulating that if she ever developed a condition which resulted in her inability to recognize her family members, she would not wish to receive any medical treatment to prolong her life. Her advance di...

Today's post is by Matteo Colombo, Kevin Strangmann, Lieke Houkes, Zhasmina Kostadinova and Mark J. Brandt. Matteo How does intellectual humility relate to prejudice? If I am more intellectually humble than you are, will I also be less prejudiced? Some would say yes. In much of the early monastic Christian tradition, for example, humility is understood as a virtuous form of abasement grounded in self-knowledge and self-appraisal. In his Demonstrations , Aphrahat the Persian Sage —a Syriac Christian author of the third-fourth century—writes that “humility is the dwelling place of righteousness. Instruction is found with the humble, and their lips pour forth knowledge. Humility brings forth wisdom and understanding.” Aphrahat’s suggestion that intellectual humility is the antidote to vanity, pride, and prejudice, is representative of one traditional way of understanding this character trait. Mark Some would say no. The idea is that the self-abnegation and abasement constituting humil...