Imperfect Cognitions

In today's blog post, Mark Blagrove and Julia Lockheart present The Science and Art of Dreaming (Routledge 2023). Mark Blagrove is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Sleep Laboratory at Swansea University. Julia Lockheart is Associate Professor at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. They undertake public discussions and painting of dreams in the DreamsID.com science art collaboration.   Julia Lockheart Mark had become interested in investigating the memory sources of dreams through discussing individual dreams at length with the dreamer: this utilised the free association method of Sigmund Freud in which the putative mechanisms of dream formation during the night are followed back in reverse through free associations to the dream when awake.  This interest had resulted in studies that investigated gains of personal insight to the individual through the open-ended group discussion of dreams and their relationship to the recent waking l...

Today's post is by  Anne Meylan (University of Zurich) and Sebastian Schmidt  (University of Zurich) on their recent paper, " Refusing the COVID-19 vaccine: What’s wrong with that ?" ( Philosophical Psychology, 2023 ) . Anne is the director of the Zurich Epistemology Group on Rationality ( ZEGRa ) and Sebastian is a postdoc at ZEGRa. Anne Meylan This article analyses the cognitive attitudes of people who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine. We argue that vaccine refusers are responsible for their belief that they should not get vaccinated and that they are rational (although mistaken) in holding this belief. We support this conclusion by building on recent philosophical theories of responsibility for belief and of the rationality of attitudes. Our conclusion has further implications for public health policy: there is a reason not to use non-argumentative means, such as mandatory vaccination or certain kinds of nudging, to make rational vaccine refusers comply with vaccination re...

This post is by Darryl Mathieson, doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the Australian National University. In this post, Darryl writes about thought insertion and self-experience in schizophrenia, which is the object of a paper recently published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Darryl Mathieson The Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that when he introspected, he found various mental states like thoughts and perceptions, but no extra subject of experiences that we might call ‘the self’. Hume’s denial has commanded widespread philosophical agreement and has led to the thesis that the self is at best elusive, and at worst does not appear in experience at all.  However, a different path to self-experience that we might take is to look at what happens when consciousness breaks. Just as the deafening silence left in the wake of an air conditioner shutting off makes its constant hum more salient, so too certain experiences pervade everyday consciousness and appear el...

Today's post is by Janko Nešić at Institute of Social Sciences, on his recent paper " Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder " (Synthese, 2023). Janko Nešić Autism (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, with restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. It is still mostly understood from a cognitivist perspective (“mindblindness”). Phenomenological and enactive theories which view it as a lack of affective attunement, pre-reflective understanding and engagement and are all recently gaining traction. I think that an integrative account of autism is much needed at this point. It will bring all the diverse aspects of ASD together and do justice to the lived experience of autism. In my paper “Ecological-enactive account of autism spectrum disorder”, I develop a novel approach that connects two aspects of autism (two core types of deficits) found in the current DSM-5 ...