Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Anthony S. David , Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London. Here he talks about his new book, Into the Abyss: a neuropsychiatrist’s notes on troubled minds (Oneworld Publications, 2020). When I submitted a title for my first non-academic book I did so with some trepidation. Apart from sounding somewhat negative, wouldn’t people think it was something about mountaineering, a cautionary tale perhaps? As I explained to my concerned editor, the intended readership like those of this blog would be, “interested in themes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry” and would instantly pick up the reference to Jaspers, the early 20th Century philosopher-psychiatrist. Somehow he wasn’t reassured.  But the abyss metaphor is a powerful descriptor of the challenge of understanding the experience of the person who is mentally ill – to reach out across the abyss into what Jaspers called ‘an impenetrable country’, the...

Today's post is by Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) who is summarising the main argument in a recent paper co-authored with Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff) on the power of stories in debates about mental health, published in Diametros open access . Autobiographical stories do not merely offer insights into a person's experience but can be used as evidence for a controversial claim within a public debate. Although the function of stories is not typically to persuade your audience that something is the case, some engaging stories are likely to exercise a powerful influence on readers' thought and behaviour. One reason for their influence is that stories are vivid and concrete, more accessible than other forms of evidence which might require expertise or training to be fully understood or evaluated. Our main message in the paper is that, if stories are used as evidence and are influential in changing hearts and minds, then we should treat stories as we treat other forms of...

This post is the second in a series of posts featuring presentations that could not be delivered at Philosophy conferences due to the coronavirus outbreak. Today Nick Byrd, PhD Candidate at Florida State University, summarises his paper, "Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Individual Differences In Philosophers’ Trait Reflection, Education, & Philosophical Beliefs". Many philosophers accept that relying on unreflective intuition is standard fare in philosophy (e.g., Chalmers, 2014 ; De Cruz, 2014 ; Kornblith, 1998 ; Mallon, 2016 ). Many philosophers also consider reflection to be crucial for philosophical inquiry (e.g., Goodman, 1983 ; Hursthouse, 1999 ; Korsgaard, 1996 ; Rawls, 1971 ; Sosa 1991 ). Fortunately, cognitive scientists have developed measures of peoples’ reliable on unreflective and reflective reasoning (e.g., Evans, Barston, and Pollard, 1983 ; Frederick, 2005 ; Sirota, et al., 2018 ). In fact, among laypeople, individual differences in reflection ...

Today's post is by Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool, who presents his recent book,  A Manifesto for Mental Health   (Palgrave 2019). Nobody really believes that our mental health system is fit for purpose, but too many people persist in reinforcing that failed system. It is no longer good enough to call for better funding; we need genuinely radical change. My new book presents a new and distinctive perspective. One that challenges traditional approaches and vested interests of professionals, but one with surprisingly well-placed support . I argue that we need to change our ideas about what mental health actually is. Before setting out practically how our mental health system should change, A Manifesto for Mental Health critically examines the dominant ‘disease-model’ of mental health care. Using research into both biological neuroscience and the social determinants of psychological problems, the book offers ...

This post is the first in a series of posts featuring presentations that could not be delivered at Philosophy conferences due to the coronavirus outbreak. Today Susan Notess, PhD Candidate at Durham University, tells us about the Discourse Ecology Model. Susan Notess In a healthy democracy all voices should have participation in public discourse. This does not happen if one part of the population does not listen to another part—for example, if white people do not listen to people of colour in a given democratic society. We can try to address this kind of problem with political solutions, such as targeted town hall meetings and encouraging voter turnout. We can also approach it as a problem of epistemic injustice, highlighting the need to resist prejudices and avoid silencing of vulnerable voices. I argue that while both these approaches are needed, we still have a problem if the listening habits of the society as a whole do not change. What we need is a c...

Today's post is by Guy Axtell, professor of philosophy at Radford University, who writes about his new book on religious luck. If, after reading the post, you want to know more, you can listen to the author’s recent podcast interview with Robert Talisse for the New Books in Philosophy . Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement (Lexington Books, 2019) applies philosophy of luck and risk in critiquing religious fundamentalism, and in particular, the tendency towards ‘normalizing’ polarized and polemical religious apologetics. It may seem like quite a departure from the usual association of inductive risk with policy decisions regarding science and technology, but Axtell finds the concept of inductive risk portable, and indeed useful for discussion of ‘risky’ belief or acceptance more generally. Epistemic luck and risk are developed as closely connected concepts.  The book sketches an account of well and ill-founded nurtur...

Today's post is by Ali Boyle . Ali is a research associate in Kinds of Intelligence at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge and the Center for Science and Thought in Bonn. Her research focusses on non-human minds and the methods used to study them. In this post, she is going to summarise her recent paper,  The impure phenomenology of episodic memory , appeared in Mind & Language. One question under investigation in comparative psychology is whether nonhuman animals have episodic memory – the kind of memory involved in recollecting past experiences. A problem for this research is that on many accounts, the defining feature of episodic memory is that it involves an experience of ‘mentally reliving’ past events. But if that’s right, then asking whether animals have episodic memory amounts to asking whether they have this distinctive experience. Many researchers think this renders the question unanswerable, since we have no experimental way...