Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks her recent paper which has been awarded the 2021 Wolfe Mays Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers by The British Society for Phenomenology (BSP) and the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JBSP).  Rosa Ritunnano In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance may improve conditions of hermeneutical marginalisation as experienced by individuals who have attracted a diagnosis of psychosis (although I believe that the suggested approach can be transferrable to other conditions). In cases of hermeneutical injustice , one is unable to understand their own experience or effectively communicate it to others because they lack an adequate conceptual framework for making sense of this experience. The classic example used in the literature on hermeneutical injust...

In today's post I interview Åsa Wikforss about her Knowledge Resistance  program. Åsa is a professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University, whose research sits at the intersection of philosophy of mind, language and epistemology. Åsa Wikforss Kathleen Murphy-Hollies : Hi Åsa. First of all, could you talk a little bit about what the knowledge resistance project is about and what kind of key questions it addresses? Åsa Wikforss : So it's a large cross disciplinary program with about 30 researchers involved. The full name is ‘Knowledge Resistance: Causes, Consequences and Cures’, and we investigate knowledge resistance from four different disciplinary angles. Philosophically, we do the foundational work of spelling out what we are even talking when we’re talking about knowledge resistance. At a first approximation, we say it's a kind of irrational resistance to evidence, but there's a lot to unpack there. What is the evidence? What kind of irrationality? What ...

In this post, Jessica Sutherland (University of Birmingham), Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (University of Birmingham), and Sean Shields (University of Nottingham) report on their two-day conference “Philosophy at the Intersection of Moral Responsibility, Agency, and Regulation”. This conference was held in-person (with online provisions) at the University of Birmingham on 9th-10th May 2022. The conference brought together graduate students and early-career researchers working in the areas of moral responsibility, agency and regulation of behaviour broadly construed.   Day 1 The first keynote talk of the conference was given by Dr Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff University) on “What’s the Point of Blaming the Dead?”. Jefferson offered some reflections on how current discussions of the role of blame do not seem to capture the ways in which we blame the dead. Jefferson offered a prototype theory of blame and argued that blaming the dead is not a paradigmatic case as it does not include some of ...

In recent months, conspiracy beliefs such as COVID-19 denialism have often been described as delusional. Psychologists have suggested a correlation between the acceptance of conspiracy theories and schizotypal traits, that is, traits characterized by psychotic symptoms ( Douglas et al. 2017 ).  Anna Ichino In this post, I ( Lisa Bortolotti ) discuss some of the similarities and differences between conspiracy beliefs and delusions—this is the topic of a paper co-authored with  Anna Ichino  and  Matteo Mameli  for  Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi . Surface features   Both conspiracy beliefs and delusions of persecution involve attributing evil intentions or responsibility for adverse events to an individual or a group that the person does not trust. Conspiracy beliefs, but not delusions, are typically developed as an alternative to an official, authoritative version of the events ( Ichino and Räikkä 2020 ). Both types of belief are regarded as implausible by tho...

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori and Kengo Miyazono at Hokkaido University on their recent paper “ Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification ” (2021, Frontiers in Psychology ). Kiichi Inarimori Empathy causes helping behavior. When your best friend in the same college is in financial trouble and has been evicted from her apartment, for example, you might empathize with her (e.g., feel sorry for her) and decide to let her stay in your apartment for a while (e.g., Batson et al., 1981 ).  Is empathy-induced helping behavior altruistic? Are you genuinely altruistic when your empathy causes you to let your friend stay in your apartment? According to “the empathy altruism hypothesis” (Batson 1991 , 2011 , 2018 ), empathy causes genuinely altruistic motivation for helping others. According to “the self-other merging hypothesis” ( Cialdini et al. 1997 ), in contrast, empathic helping is due to the “merging” between the helping agent and the helped agent. When the helping agent ...