Imperfect Cognitions

In today's post Paul Noordhof discusses the possibility of imagining pain, summarising a paper, Explaining impossible and possible imaginings of pain , that appears open access in a forum dedicated to responses to Jennifer Radden's article, Imagined and Delusional Pain , in Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia. Noordhof's paper is an output of the AHRC Project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett  at the University of Birmingham.  Paul Noordhof One form of imagining has a content that is like our sensory experiences and bodily sensations. For example, if I’m asked how many windows the front of my mother’s house has, I might answer by imagining the house as if I am looking at it. Equally, we can imagine our hand being warmed by a close-by fire. In a recent paper, inspired and responding to a paper by Jennifer Radden entitled ‘Imagined and Delusional Pain’, I considered the question of whether it is possible to imagine a pain in the same wa...

In today's post Harriet Stuart (MRes student in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham) reports on the Deluded by Experience  workshop on delusion formation, held online on 12th and 13th July 2021. This was the first workshop of the AHRC funded Project Deluded by Experience  and was organised by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett and Paul Noordhof . Poster of the event Day one started with Kengo Miyazono who presented ‘Salience and Affordance in Schizophrenia’. Kengo proposed a revision of the Aberrant Salience Hypothesis ( Kapur, 2003 ). He claimed that “salience” can be analysed in terms of affordance; an object X is “salient” if and only if X “affords” attention. The altered experience in schizophrenia involves some aberrant salience which is caused by relatively strengthened attentional affordances owing to damage to top-down suppression mechanisms. Kengo Miyazono Then Sam Wilkinson presented ‘Agent Representations as Generative Models: The case of Delusional Misident...

This week we feature the AHRC Project Deluded by Experience , led by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. In today's post she overviews the first of the Project’s outputs, co-authored with Paul Noordhof (Co-I): ‘ The Clinical Significance of Anomalous Experience in the Explanation of Monothematic Delusions ’, recently published in Synthese (open access).  Subjects with monothematic delusions often undergo some highly anomalous experiences. For example, in Capgras delusion, the strange experience has been understood as one of absence of something expected, the subject has reduced affective response to familiar faces traceable to ventromedial prefrontal damage (Tranel, Damasio, and Damasio 1995, Coltheart 2007), or right lateral temporal lesions and dorsolateral prefrontal damage (Wilkinson 2015, Corlett 2019). Empiricists about delusion formation take it that these experiences play an explanatory role in the formation and maintenan...

This week we feature the project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. The project will last 30 months (January 2021–June 2023) and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with Ema as PI and  Paul Noordhof  as Co-I. You can follow the Project on twitter  @del_by_ex .  In today's blog, I ask Ema about the project. LB: What is  Deluded by Experience  about?  ESB:  Deluded by Experience  is focused on three main areas. The first is monothematic delusion formation. Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists have argued that subjects with monothematic delusions have anomalous experiences in which delusions are rooted. However, few take anomalous experience to be the only clinically relevant factor. This is the one-factor approach. The current orthodoxy has it that a second clinical factor (cognitive deficit, bias...

Today's post is by Uku Tooming (Hokkaido University) on his new paper “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ” (2020, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly ). Uku Tooming In my paper, “ Being Familiar with What One Wants ”, I argue that there are two kinds of self-ascription of desire. First, there are easy cases where a sincere self-ascription seems to be immediately expressive of self-knowledge. For example, if I believe that I want to eat ice cream then, given the person I am, my self-ascription is true and there is no room for doubt. Second, there are hard cases which lack this kind of immediacy and where one could have easily been wrong about one’s self-ascription. For example, when I believe that I want to have a child then, given the person I am, this self-ascription is not immediately expressive of self-knowledge and can be put under question. How to explain the difference between easy and hard cases? In particular, what makes a self-ascription of a desire an easy case? Since in t...

Today's post is by Christopher Badura (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College) on the new collection on the epistemic role of imagination  Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge, 2021).  In recent years, philosophical interest in the epistemic role of imagination has blossomed.  Although there are a number of philosophers who remain skeptical, there is now considerable agreement that imagination has an important role to play in the epistemic domain.  But when it comes to the question of how best to articulate that role, or to the related question of what explains the ability of imagination to play that role, there is considerably less agreement.  These are the kinds of issues explored in the 15 contributions to our recently released volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge). The idea for the volume was born in Bochum during summer 2019 when we co-organized a conference on Fiction, Imagination, and Epistemology at Ruhr Un...

Today's post is by Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) and Mads Gram Henriksen (University of Copenhagen) on their new paper “ Disturbances of Shared Intentionality in Schizophrenia and Autism ” (published in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychiatry). Alessandro Salice In the past decades, shared intentionality (i.e., the capacity to share mental states like beliefs, intentions or emotions) has attracted intense attention in several disciplines. These include various theoretical disciplines (e.g., philosophy and game theory), empirical sciences of the mind (e.g., developmental psychology, social psychology, and cognitive sciences), and social sciences (e.g., anthropology, economics, and sociology). By now, the idea that shared intentionality pervasively characterizes human psychology and, therefore, human forms of social life has become fairly uncontroversial in the literature. However, the large body of insights secured by this burgeoning line of research has, so far, remained la...