Imperfect Cognitions

This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcased a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue on the Philosophy of Medicine was guest-edited by Anke Bueter and Saana Jukola . In this third and final post, the guest editors of the issue Anke and Saana give a summary of the special issue and the other papers included in it. Anke is an associate professor at Aarhus University. Her main research interests lie within feminist philosophy of science and philosophy of psychiatry. Saana is a post-doctoral researcher at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She is interested in the philosophy of medicine, social epistemology, and values in science. Anke Bueter Philosophy of medicine has become established as a distinct branch of philosophy relatively recently. Of course, philosophical questions concerning, for instance, the nature of disease or the ethical responsibilities of physicians are not new. Ho...

 This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcase a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue is on the  Philosophy of Medicine  with guest editors Saana Jukola and Anke Bueter.  Today's post is the second post of the series. Kathleen Murphy-Hollies discusses her paper in the special issue, which you can read  here . Kathleen is a philosophy PhD student and teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, working primarily on confabulation and its effects for embodying virtuous traits.  Kathleen Murphy-Hollies In my paper, I discuss whether Wakefield’s hybrid account of disorder helps clarify the thorny issue of whether Gender Dysphoria (GD) should be included in the DSM as a disordered state or left out as merely a socially disvalued state. In the DSM-5, GD is described in individuals as “a marked incongruence between the gender they have been assigned to...

This week on Imperfect Cognitions, we showcase a couple of posts by authors with papers published in a special issue from the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy ( EuJAP ). The special issue is on the Philosophy of Medicine  with guest editors Saana Jukola and Anke Bueter.  In today's post, Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien discusses her paper in the special issue, which you can read here . Anne-Marie is a postdoctoral fellow at the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and also affiliated with the École normale supérieure (ENS). She works on philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, social epistemology, and epistemic innocence.  Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien Medicalization is the process through which nonmedical problems are conceptualized and treated as medical problems ( Conrad and Slodden 2013 ). It has become a controversial topic both within and outside psychiatry, especially since the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disord...

Today's post is by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic (University of Copenhagen). Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic A wave of influential voices in philosophy and psychology have argued that negative affective states like stress, discomfort, and anxiety are not necessarily detrimental for mental health, but that they can, under certain conditions, take productive forms that may broaden our epistemic horizons (Kurth 2018; Applebaum 2017; Harbin 2016; Bailey 2017; Medina 2013; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018; Jamieson, Mendes, and Nock 2013) and even contribute to social mobility (Munch-Jurisic 2020a).  In my new article for the Synthese topical collection "Worry and Wellbeing: Understanding Anxiety", I identify one epistemic problem which has not been properly addressed by this new wave of research; to benefit from a surge of negative affect, agents need to be able to conceptualize and make sense of their internal, physiological states (Berntson, Gianaros, and Tsakiris 2018). Whether agents wi...

Today's post is by Quinn Hiroshi Gibson and Adam Bradley , on how to understand monothematic delusions. Quinn Hiroshi Gibson Subjects with Capgras delusion form the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter: The day after her arrival at home, [her] father could not open the front door because YY had locked it from the inside. He rang the bell and YY called the police because ‘there was an impostor outside the house who was picking the lock and pretending to be her father’. (Brighetti at al. 2007, p. 191)   Capgras is a monothematic delusion, a delusion whose content is restricted to a single topic, in this case the identity of YY's father. In ‘ Monothematic Delusions and the Limits of Rationality ’ (published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 2021), we put forward a new account of such delusions. Our view is a version of the two-factor model according to which two factors are responsible for monothematic delusions ( Davies et al. 2001 )...

Today's post is by Alex Gregory , University of Southampton. In this post, Gregory presents his new book, Desire-as-Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality , published by OUP in July 2021. You can read some chapter summaries here . And here is a link to chapter 1, which the publisher has kindly agreed to make available for free as a sample.  What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? I endorse desire-as-belief, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs. More specifically, I say that to desire P is to believe you have normative reason to bring about P. This view is in one respect highly unorthodox, since many – e.g. Plato, Hume – hold that our desires are really quite different from our beliefs. The view is also unorthodox for suggesting that all our desires can be evaluated for whether they are correct or not. But despite being unorthodox in these ways, I argue that the view is nonetheless attractive. Some ort...