Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Umut Baysan. Umut teaches philosophy at the University of Oxford and works in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Most of his published work is available on his website . Umut Baysan I am grateful to the Imperfect Cognitions blog for inviting me to write a post on my recent publication “Are propositional attitudes mental states?” , forthcoming in Minds and Machines . In the paper, I explore some implications of the view that some group entities (e.g., clubs, governments, companies) can have beliefs and desires. I argue that if group entities can have beliefs and desires, this would show that beliefs and desires are not mental states. I am not entirely convinced that group entities can really have beliefs and desires---though I think there are some reasons to take this possibility seriously, as I discuss in the paper. What I really want to achieve in the paper is to show that if you are prepared to accept this position, you should be prepared to accept the somewh...

This is the last in a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. Today, Rachel Temple , Public Involvement in Research Manager at the McPin Foundation , and members of the Young Person Advisory Group [YPAG] tell us about how the project impacted them.  In the course of the project, YPAG members provided detailed feedback on the application for funding, shaping research questions and outputs; contributed to the research, analysing videos of interactions between practitioners and young people struggling with their mental health; participated in public engagement events and prepared resources for schools on agency and youth mental health; shared their valuable insights, knowledge, and experience on blog posts and podcasts; and co-authored some of the project publications with the other members of the team.    Prior to working on the Agency project, I held a lot of shame and secrecy around my me...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team provided some evidence of epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and Lisa Bortolotti discuss a new approach to protecting the sense of agency of young people meeting a crisis team for mental health problems. Clara Bergen Lisa Bortolotti In our project, we wanted to ask: How can practitioners avoid undermining a young person’s sense of agency in a mental healthcare encounter? We adopted an absolutely unique analytic approach to find out the answer. “We” are a group of six experts in philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, clinical communication, clinical practice, and public involvement in research (Interdisciplinary Academic Researchers), and five young people aged 17-25 with experience of accessing mental health services for diagnoses including post-traumatic stress disorder, ma...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team explained why young people may have heightened risks of experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and  Rose McCabe  provide evidence that young people's sense of agency is sometimes undermined in such encounters. By analysing video recordings of police interactions, courtroom cross-examinations, and political news interviews, researchers have learned a lot about how institutional figures challenge what other people have felt or experienced.  For example, police and lawyers use subtle practices like asking questions that imply inconsistency or implausibility ( Stokoe et al 2020 ), anticipate a compromising response ( Drew 1992) , or imply disagreement ( Jol & van der Houwen 2014 ). Lawyers and political interviewers may take an adversa...

This is the first in a series of posts reporting outcomes from a  project on Agency in Youth Mental Health,  led by  Rose McCabe  at City University. Today Joe Houlders, Matthew Broome and Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham) talk about the risks of young people with unusual experiences and beliefs experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters.  Joe Houlders Epistemic injustice occurs when a person is not given authority and credibility as a knower in an exchange, due to negative stereotypes associated with the person's identity (age, gender, ethnicity, social class, education, sexual orientation, health). Young people with unusual experiences and beliefs are particularly at risk of being on the receiving end of epistemic injustice, and when their agency is undermined the effects are likely to be pervasive and impact negatively on their health outcomes.  Why is this population more vulnerable? In the mental health context, the...

Today's post is by Harriet Fagerberg at King’s College London & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on her recent paper “ Why mental disorders are not like software bugs ” (forthcoming, Philosophy of Science ). What, if anything, is the difference between mental disorders and brain disorders? Are mental disorders brain disorders? If not, are they disorders at all? According to one prominent view in the philosophy of psychiatry, mental dysfunction does not entail brain dysfunction just as software dysfunction does not entail hardware dysfunction in a classical computer. Wakefield writes:  It is true that every software malfunction has some hardware description; that is not at issue. Rather, the point is that a software malfunction need not be a physical hardware malfunction. Analogously, even if all mental states are physical states, it does not follow that a mental dysfunction is a physical dysfunction. (p. 129, Wakefield, 2006 ; see also Papineau, 1994 ) Nevertheless, because dysf...

In today's post, Federico Bongiorno gives an overview of his paper " Spinozan Doxasticism about Delusions " which is forthcoming in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Federico is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford funded by an award from the Mind Association, working at the interface of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the philosophy of psychiatry. Federico Bongiorno There are normative standards that are widely held to be required for the practice of belief ascription. At a minimum, beliefs are to appropriately respond to the relevant evidence (epistemic rationality), to cohere with other beliefs (procedural rationality), and to drive consequential behaviour in the right conditions (agential rationality). We adult humans ascribe beliefs to ourselves, and to one another, in reliance of these standards, but belief ascription can be a tricky undertaking. It is especially tricky in cases of delusion, a clinical symptom observed across a variety ...