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.
Then Sam Wilkinson presented āAgent Representations as Generative Models: The case of Delusional Misidentificationā. Sam suggested that delusional misidentification can be explained by errors in the management of mental files whereby mental files are a metaphor for singular (agent) representations. Management of files is to be thought of as a generative model whereby hypotheses are hierarchically arranged and selected based on how well they minimise prediction error.
Day two started with Paul Noordhof and Ema Sullivan-Bissett with their talk āThe Everyday Irrationality of Monothematic Delusionsā. Ema argued that the examination of non-clinical paranormal beliefs and monothematic delusions shows no significant difference that would warrant positing a second irrationality (in addition to the anomalous experience) to explain the latter. Paul went on to claim that monothematic delusions can display features of everyday motivated irrationalities like wishful thinking/weak self-deception and strong self-deception, supporting their claim that delusions are closer to everyday irrationalities than typically thought.
Next up was Clara Humpston presenting āIsolated by Oneself: Solipsistic Delusions in Schizophreniaā. Clara argued that self-disturbance characterised by paradoxical states of thought is the central background to āontologically impossibleā experiences, which sometimes lead to solipsistic delusions, in schizophrenia. Solipsistic delusions retain the centrality of the self during grave self-disturbance; it is the delusion that āadoptsā the patient rather than the other way around, what Clara called āautophagy of the selfā or āself-eating-selfā.
Lastly, Dan Williams spoke on āComputational Psychiatry and the Social Focus of Delusionsā. Dan argued that insights from a predictive coding account and a social account of delusions were possible to integrate without positing the social element as an extra, clinically significant factor. He claimed that the domain-specific content of delusions result from the interaction of a global information-processing dysfunction with various social factors, therefore explaining why delusions tend to cluster around a small number of themes.
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Poster of the event |
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Kengo Miyazono |
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Sam Wilkinson |
Closing day one was Carolina Flores, speaking on āThe Intelligibility of Schizophreniaā. Carolina introduced her notion of epistemic styles: a unified way of interacting with evidence that express (aspects of) a set of epistemic parameters. The central claim was that the cognitive biases implicated in delusion formation in schizophrenia constitute a distinctive epistemic style. Everyone ordinarily adopts an epistemic style but subjects with schizophrenia can set up their parameters in one specific, extreme way. However, this is not qualitatively different from everyday reasoning. Importantly, the view suggests that intelligibility and rationality should be separated.
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Carolina Flores |
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Ema Sullivan-Bissett |
Next up was Clara Humpston presenting āIsolated by Oneself: Solipsistic Delusions in Schizophreniaā. Clara argued that self-disturbance characterised by paradoxical states of thought is the central background to āontologically impossibleā experiences, which sometimes lead to solipsistic delusions, in schizophrenia. Solipsistic delusions retain the centrality of the self during grave self-disturbance; it is the delusion that āadoptsā the patient rather than the other way around, what Clara called āautophagy of the selfā or āself-eating-selfā.
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Clara Humpston |
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Dan Williams |