Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos and Gert-Jan Vanaken. Themistoklis (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Psychiatry at The American College of Greece and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He works on phenomenological psychiatry, focusing on treatment methods that make sense of the point of view of client users and their communities.  Gert-Jan (he/him) is a post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp. He works at the intersections of bioethics, disability studies and clinical autism research. His work focuses on developing neurodiversity-affirming autism care practices. Here, they argue that interventions for autism should address autistic mental health directly, and that a first-person approach is key for adapting psychotherapy to the needs of the autistic population. The full article is here , available open access. Themistoklis Pantazakos "[R]ight from the start, from the time someone came up with the ...

Today’s post is by Pablo Hubacher Haerle on his recent paper “ Is OCD Epistemically Irrational? ” (Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 2023). Pablo Hubacher Haerle is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is on the epistemology and metaphysics of the mind. He is particularly interested in desire, inquiry and the philosophy of psychiatry. Pablo Hubacher Haerle On the mainstream picture of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), people experiencing OCD have intrusive thoughts which lead them to form epistemically irrational beliefs. Consider this classic example:  Amelia is driving in their car. Suddenly, she hears a weird noise which she can’t identify. She forms the belief that she’s run someone over and spends hours looking for the supposed victim. But it is true that Amelia must have a belief that she’s run someone over? Following recent advances in the literature ( Kampa 2020 ; Taylor 2021 ), I consider it much more plausible to construe Amelia’s recurrent th...

This blog post is by Alexandre Billon who presents his argument in a paper recently published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . This paper is a commentary on Kammerer and Frankish's article on what forms introspection could take. Alexandre Billon A couple of authors have suggested that schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder (DD) involve an enhancement of introspective abilities regarding certain important features of our experiences --- call that the Superintrospectionitis Thesis. The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Schizophrenia In the phenomenological tradition, Blankenburg argued that reports of some people with schizophrenia ‘reveal, in a kind of immediacy the conditions of possibility of our existence that otherwise remain concealed’ ( Blankenburg, 2001 , p. 308). Likewise, Kimura (2001 , p. 335) suggested that schizophrenia might render manifest, through introspection, the ‘innate structure of all human beings that happens to be hidden in healthy people owin...

This post is by Dan Degerman, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, soon to join the new project EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award. (A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog on 15th September 2023.) Some members of team EPIC: Matthew Broome, Ian Kidd, Dan Degerman, Havi Carel, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, and Fred Cooper. Silence is an important phenomenon in mental health. But while philosophers have had much to say about the social silencing of people with psychiatric diagnoses, other ways in which silence can feature in psychopathology have been underexplored. In a recent workshop at the University of Bristol, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we sought to begin to address this neglect by exploring the different faces of silence in psychopathology. Ian Kidd opened the workshop with a talk that explored painful silences common in bereavement grief. In particular, he focused on four silences, ea...

This post is by Changsheng Lai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University).   Changsheng Lai You believe that you locked the door before you left your house, but do you really remember that? Your belief about the past episode might be true, but in what sense is the past episode genuinely remembered rather than being just accurately imagined or veridical confabulated? A popular view, which I refer to as ‘mnemic reliabilism’, suggests that the process of remembering is distinguished by its reliability condition. That is, successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process.  Prominent champions of this view include the simulationist Kourken Michaelian ( Michaelian 2016 ) and the causalist Markus Werning ( Werning 2020 ). Besides, you might also find mnemic reliabilism attractive if you are sympathetic to both the orthodox view that ‘remembering entails knowing’ and the idea that ‘knowledge requires reliability’. In my recent paper entitled ‘ Remembering requires no reliabili...

In today's post I report on the Summer School in Reichenau   which I had the pleasure to attend on 25th and 26th August 2023. The theme was Belief, meaning, knowledge: how we deal with uncertainty . Delusions was a topic often discussed in the presentations, from philosophical, phenomenological, and clinical perspectives. Organisers of the event were Johannes Rusch, Daniel Nischk, Dorothea Debus, and Thomas Müller. Rathaus Reichenau (front) Rathaus Reichenau (courtyard) The first speaker was Rico Gutschmidt (Konstanz) with a presentation on Mysticism and Delusions . Fundamental uncertainties are limitations of knowledge and experience and three questions arise: (1) Where do we come from? (2) Why there is anything at all rather than nothing? (3) Who are we? Although such questions are not easy to answer or possible to answer they can evoke transformative experiences. Philosophical experiences such as struggling with these questions can be transformative because they change the type...

This blog post is by Zsuzsanna Chappell. Zsuzsanna is an independent scholar and research associate at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics. She currently writes on the social philosophy and ethics of mental illness, and the role of researchers with subject-relevant lived experience in the human sciences. Previously, she held academic positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester and is the author of Deliberative Democracy: A Critical Introduction , Palgrave 2012. Zsuzsanna reports from the third annual Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience workshop . The workshop was held on 17-18 April 2023, online (hosted by the University of Umeå). The aim of these workshops has been to bring together  philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference, and are also writing on these topics.  Zsuzsanna Chappell Our first post d...

This blog post is by Zsuzsanna Chappell. Zsuzsanna is an independent scholar and research associate at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics. She currently writes on the social philosophy and ethics of mental illness, and the role of researchers with subject-relevant lived experience in the human sciences. Previously, she held academic positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester and is the author of  Deliberative Democracy: A Critical Introduction , Palgrave 2012. Zsuzsanna reports from the third annual  Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience workshop . The workshop was held on 17-18 April 2023, online (hosted by the University of Umeå). The aim of these workshops has been to bring together  philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference, and are also writing on these topics.  University of Umeå Zsuzs...

This post was published on the EPIC blog in July 2023. It is by Richard Hassall, a qualified clinical psychologist, now retired. After retirement, Richard enrolled at the University of Sheffield to do an MA in philosophy, followed by a PhD which was completed in 2022. At the time of writing, Richard is an affiliate researcher attached to the Department of Philosophy at Sheffield. Richard Hassall My area of interest is philosophy of psychiatry, with a particular interest in the nature of psychiatric diagnostic categories and the effect these have on the individuals who receive them. I argue in my PhD thesis that a psychiatric diagnosis may, in some cases, lead the recipient to becoming a victim of epistemic injustice, and specifically of hermeneutical injustice. I argue that this effect can be understood in terms of narrative theory and the self-narratives that individuals construct for themselves. People gain meaning in their lives through their self-narratives, but such narratives can...

Today's post is by  Chenwei Nie  on his recent paper, " Revisiting Maher’s one-factor theory of delusion " ( Neuroethics , 2023). Currently, he is a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. Chenwei Nie Suppose your friend, Ava, is suffering from a delusional belief that her partner is replaced by an imposter. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary - such as the supposed imposter's identical appearance to her partner and knowledge of intimate details, and reassurances from you and her other friends - Ava steadfastly maintains this belief. In this unfortunate circumstance, it is obvious that something must have gone wrong in the formation and maintenance of Ava’s belief. It is likely that Ava would be diagnosed with the Capgras delusion. Unravelling what exactly has gone wrong, however, has proven challenging. According to a classic one-factor theory of delusion developed by Brendan Arnold Maher (1924-2009), the only factor, i.e. departure ...

Today's post is by Dan Degerman  on his recent paper, " Epistemic injustice, naturalism, and mental disorder: on the epistemic benefits of obscuring social factors " ( Synthese , 2023). Dan Degerman is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.  Dan Degerman Naturalistic understandings that frame human experiences and differences as biological dysfunctions constitute a major source of epistemic injustice in disease and disability, according to many philosophers. Epistemic injustice refers to injustices committed against people in their capacity as knowers. This occurs, for example, when someone is disbelieved because of their social identity or when a lack of suitable interpretive resources means that someone cannot make their experiences intelligible to themselves or others. Critics have argued that naturalistic understandings of human experiences and differences can lead to both kinds of epistemic injustice because they tend t...

Today's post is by Carlota Serrahima on her recent paper, " The experience of dysmenorrhea " ( Synthese,   2023). She is a postdoctoral fellow within the ERC funded project " Rethinking Conscious Agency ", based at the Universitat de Barcelona. Carlota Serrahima My main research topic is the philosophy of bodily awareness, and Manolo Martínez has worked on the philosophy of pain. We were both surprised that, in the literature our work overlaps on, menstrual pain — technically, “dysmenorrhea” — is rarely mentioned. For one of us, dysmenorrhea is the pain most often experienced, and we suspected that this was so for many people. Indeed, according to conservative estimates almost half of menstruators experience dysmenorrhea. That’s probably close to a billion people. Our paper highlights an important tension: various assumptions operative in the philosophical literature about pain are actually doubtful, or maybe even false, of dysmenorrhea. In the paper we critici...

Today's post is by  Aliosha Barranco Lopez (Bowdoin College) on her recent paper  " Hinge commitments as arational beliefs " ( Synthese , 2023). Aliosha Barranco Lopez We all have a worldview— an understanding of the world. Our beliefs shape this worldview allowing us to perceive the world as inhabited by mind-independent objects, where concepts like love hold value, gravity governs, etc. One important claim I argue for is that some of our beliefs, which I call hinge commitments, inform our worldview at a fundamental level by providing meaning to the rest of our beliefs in a particular realm. Let me explain, we all share the belief that there is an external world populated by mind-independent physical objects, which causally produce our experience in much the way we normally suppose. Let’s abbreviate this belief as ‘there is an external world’. This belief is a hinge commitment because it gives meaning to all our perceptual beliefs.  When I believe that there is a...

Today's post is by  Juliette Vazard on her recent paper " Losing the light at the end of the tunnel: Depression, future thinking, and hope " ( Mind & Language 2023). Juliette Vazard is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and she works at the intersection of philosophy of mind (particularly emotion), epistemology, and cognitive science. Juliette Vazard Patients with clinical depression show a significant decrease in their ability to entertain thoughts of future positive events that could happen as part of their lives (MacLeod et al., 1996; Bjärehed et al., 2010; Thimm et al., 2013; Anderson & Evans, 2015; Szőllősi et al., 2015). Understanding the mechanisms which sustain this change in prospective cognition is of major clinical import, since developing a perspective on the future is key in the recovery of these patients (Cooper, Darmody, & Dolan, 2003).  Although the connection between lack of hope and depression is well established in the l...