Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, I interview Federico Bongiorno who recently completed a doctoral project on delusion formation at the University of Birmingham. Federico Bongiorno LB: Philosophers are intrigued by delusions. What interests you about them? FB: There are several things that interest me about delusions, which is part of the reason why I decided to write a PhD thesis comprising of self-standing papers rather a single book-like package. I will focus on just one, the question of whether delusions can be beliefs despite being only marginally belief-like. Participants in this debate are typically non-committal as to what beliefs are over and beyond our folk-psychological practices. So, when they ask whether delusions are or aren’t belief-like, what they want to know are things such as whether delusions play the same role as beliefs in predicting intentional behaviour, or whether they conform to the stereotypical cluster of attributes (cognitive, behavioural, phenomenal) that we would normally e...

This post is by Jasper Feyaerts, who is discussing a paper he co-authored with Mads G Henriksen, Stijn Vanheule, Inez Myin-Germeys, and Louis A Sass, entitled "Delusions beyond Beliefs", and published in The Lancet Psychiatry . With this link, there will be free access to the article for a few weeks. Jasper Feyaerts Delusions are commonly conceived as false beliefs that result from epistemic failures to represent reality correctly. This view has been dominant throughout the history of psychiatry, and continues to inform contemporary research and practice. In explanatory research, it underlies (neuro)cognitive attempts to explain delusions in terms of impairments or biases in cognitive reasoning. In clinical practice, it motivates cognitive-behavioral strategies focusing on the rational evaluation of delusional appraisals. Yet despite being the standard view of delusion in psychosis research, this conception has not gone entirely unchallenged. Most notably in the tradition ...

Today's post is by Josh May (University of Alabama, Birmingham). In this post, he talks about one of his papers published in Synthese and entitled " Bias in Science ". Josh May Much discussion of the replication crisis in science has focused on the social sciences, particularly psychology. A common narrative is that the social sciences are particularly susceptible to powerful biases, such as moral and political ideology. I argue instead for a parity thesis: all areas of science are subject to bias, through the general psychological mechanism of motivated reasoning . This provides a unified framework for understanding how values influence the entire scientific enterprise. The scientific process involves numerous decisions that can be influenced by one's values--including moral, political, and prudential values--which manifest as goals or motivations. A researcher wants badly, say, to publish in a prestigious journal in order to either advance her career or maintain ...

Today's blog is by Matteo Fiorani (University of Rome, Tor Vergata) and it is the last in a series of posts associated with the special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Matteo's paper (open access) is entitled: " Rationality, Irrationality and Irrationalism in the Anti-institutional Debate in Psychiatry around the Second-Half of the 1970s in Italy ". Matteo Fiorani The 1968 movements overwhelmed psychiatry with anti-authoritarian and anti-institutional criticism. The young protesters demanded, first of all, the rights of madness and, provocatively, of unreason. At the same time, they dismissed the dominant normality, represented by bourgeois common sense. They also affirmed the need not to repress contradictions and suffering. Emotions and affectivity were indeed part of the social and political world. From these premises it was possible to develop a deep political and cultural reflection on the boundary between reason a...