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,...