Function, Dysfunction, and Mental Disorders

In this post, Harriet Fagerberg and Justin Garson discuss their new paper, “Proper Functions are Proximal Functions,” forthcoming in The British Journal for Philosophy of Science (preprint here).

Harriet Fagerberg

What makes something a mental disorder? Why are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression mental disorders, but not jealousy, grief, or racism? This is philosophy of medicine’s famous “demarcation problem.”

We think that what makes something a mental disorder, rather than an ordinary response to the problems of life, or run-of-the-mill social deviance, is that there’s a dysfunction. Something in the person’s brain isn’t working as designed. The same is true of the rest of medicine. What makes diabetes or leukemia diseases, rather than just unpleasant things to have (like being short), is that they involve dysfunctions.

Justin Garson

But what are functions? By ‘function’ we just mean effects that were favored by natural selection. The function of the heart is to pump blood, rather than make beating sounds that you can hear through a stethoscope, because that’s why natural selection put it there. Part of the job of science is to identify the functions of the parts of our bodies and minds. Part of the job of medicine is to fix them when they go wrong.

In short, we think that diseases (or disorders) involve dysfunctions, and dysfunctions happen when something can’t do whatever evolution put it there to do. One benefit of this point of view is that it makes it an objective fact of the matter whether a trait is functioning correctly, and thus whether it is or isn’t diseased or disordered. But this simple and elegant picture has a serious problem. This is the “problem of function indeterminacy”. This is the problem we attempt to solve in our paper.

The function of any given trait, like the heart, is associated with a whole sequence of activities. Hearts pump (contract and expand). By doing that, they move blood around the body. By doing that, they bring oxygen to cells and get rid of waste products. And by doing that, they keep us alive. So, which one of those activities is the heart’s real function? Are all of those activities its functions? Or only one? And if so, which one?

One point of view is that our question is misguided. Any of those activities can be its “function,” depending on where your interests lie. A cardiologist might say that the function of the heart is to pump, because that’s what they are interested in. A pulmonologist might say the function of the heart is to bring oxygen to cells, because that’s what they care about.

We disagree with this view. That’s because, if function is relative to your goals and values, then dysfunction is relative to your goals and values, too. And that would defeat the whole point of introducing functions into conversations about disease and disorder. After all, if dysfunctions are relative to goals and values, then they cannot serve as an objective break on what is and isn’t a disease.

Fortunately, we think there is a principled answer to the question of which of the heart’s activities is its real function: a trait’s proper function is its most proximal function. It’s the very first activity in the sequence of activities. We think the function of the heart is just to pump. It’s not to move blood around. Nor is it to bring oxygen to cells. Those are functions of larger systems of which the heart is a part.

We have several reasons for thinking that proper functions are “proximal.” It explains some commonsense features of functions, such as the fact that different parts of the body have different functions. It also makes sense of our conventional practices of intervention, for example, doctors generally only intervene on the heart when it can’t perform its most proximal function. Finally, it preserves the attractive, naturalistic idea that diseases involve dysfunctions, and functions depend only on objective facts about the world, rather than our personal or collective value judgements.

The idea that proper functions are proximal might actually have interesting implications for how we think about mental illness. That’s because it suggests that sometimes, traits or conditions we think of as dysfunctional really aren’t – even if they appear strange or maladaptive at first glance.

Suppose Riad has Capgras delusion, and he thinks that his wife has been replaced by a perfect impostor. It’s easy to think that in this case, there must have been a terrible dysfunction within Riad’s “belief-forming” mechanism. But that depends on what, exactly, Riad’s belief-forming system is supposed to do.

If the function of the belief-forming system is to form true beliefs, then Capgras delusion would seem to involve a dysfunction. But if the function of the belief-forming system is to form beliefs that hang together with perceptual data, then it could be performing its function just fine.

Judgements about function and dysfunction aren’t just theoretical. They are practical. They guide our choices about whether and how to intervene. In Riad’s case, they might influence a doctor’s choice about whether to prescribe antipsychotic drugs that could have dangerous side effects. That’s why we think it’s so important to be precise and careful about how we describe something’s function.

Resilient Beliefs, Religion and Beyond

On 11th and 12th April in beautiful Trento, the Foundation Bruno Kessler hosted the final conference of the two-year research project on Resilient Beliefs, organised by Eugenia Lancellotta and featuring a number of international speakers interested in conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, delusions, and similar phenomena.

Programme of the conference

The first speaker was Scott Hill (University of Innsbruck), highlighting problems for a prominent study on the use of "conspiracy theory". Hill started discussing Miranda Fricker's account of testimonial injustice and then argued that conspiracy theorists do not suffer from a credibility deficit. That is because the credibility they are assigned matches the credibility they deserve.

Scott Hill

The second speaker was Anna-Maria Asunta Eder (University of Cologne), also working in social epistemology, who discussed the phenomenon of learning from others and resisting the evidence of others. Eder aims to bring some issues widely discussed in the philosophy of science to bear on the complexity of testimony in epistemology, especially the role of non-epistemic values in how we respond to the evidence gathered by others.

 

Anna-Maria Asunta Eder

The third speaker was Gerhard Ernst (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen) whose presentation was entitled "Epistemology without hinges" and concerned the relationship of justification and knowledge. In particular, Ernst rejects the idea that justification needs to have a structure where there is a foundation. Instead of thinking about justification as a building with secure foundations, we should think of it as a journey which cannot take place without constraints and for which the question, "Where does your journey begin?" makes no sense.

Gerhard Ernst

After the lunch break, Eugenia Lancellotta (Foundation Bruno Kessler) discussed the resilience of extravagant beliefs. Lancellotta summarised the main results of the Resilient Beliefs project, considering three options: 

1. Religion is a form of mass delusion.
2. Religion is a form of adaptive wishful thinking.
3. Religion is not only psychologically adaptive but also epistemically legitimate.

Lancellotta argues that religion is not pathological but it can be epistemically problematic, when it separates us from truth and reality. However, religious beliefs can be epistemically legitimate because they may favour contact with reality by pushing us to pursue possible realities.

Eugenia Lancellotta

Next on the programme, Naomi Kloosterboer (VU Amsterdam) addressed the problem of how to take people with extreme beliefs seriously. What does taking seriously involve? There is an aim that is about advancing truth and keeping an open mind. But there is also another aim: understanding the other person's perspective, filling in gaps in empathy and imagination. Is it possible to pursue the second aim without engaging with the first? Kloosterboer recommends a situated form of listening as a possible solution, which requires an understanding of our own situatedness: 

1. What is our reaction to the other and how can we explain it?
2. What are the implications of the discourse we use? Is it othering?
3. How can I relate to the other? 

We move from learning from and learning about to learning with.

Naomi Kloosterboer

Last talk of the day was by Rick Peels (VU Amsterdam) on the resilience of extreme beliefs. Peels defined extreme beliefs as the beliefs that characterise fundamentalism, extremism, and conspiracist thinking. We tend to think of such beliefs as resilient to evidence in a way that makes them irrational or unjustified. But faith is considered as a virtue and it is resilient to evidence too. Why are some beliefs resilient to evidence and good, and other beliefs are resilient to evidence and bad?

Faith has multiple dimensions: a cognitive and affective one, but also a dimension of commitment. It promotes stability, integrity, and other good values but what does its resilience amount to? Peels argues that it sometimes involves resilience to evidence but it also involves resilience against extreme beliefs.

Rik Peels

In my own presentation (Lisa Bortolotti, Birmingham), I explored some reasons for the resilience of conspiracy beliefs and delusional beliefs. arguing that it is connected to their being identity beliefs that are insulated from counter-evidence and counter-argument due to the speaker having a different epistemological framework from the interpreter's, for instance a different conception of what counts as good evidence and who counts as an expert in the domain of the belief.

Summary slide from Bortolotti's presentation

The second day opened with Veronika Hoffman (Freiburg) who addressed the issue of precarious faith, when faith is warranted notwithstanding serious doubt. Can we have faith that something is the case when we have such serious doubts that it might not be the case that belief is impossible? One idea is that faith is possible if hope replaces beliefs: hope can function when there is doubt. But does hope warrant as well as motivate faith? Another idea is that faith is about assuming or desiring rather than believing, reflecting the fact that faith involves cognitive and affective dimensions, and action too.

Veronika Hoffman

In the online presentation by Bernard Nitsche (Münster) the topic was the relationship between God and the World in different forms of theism, from relational theism to pan-en-theism. 

Bernard Nitsche

Last talk of the conference was by Gloria Dell'Eva (PTH Brixen) who discussed varieties of belief in God. Dell'Eva compared the ideas of the divinity in Jacobi and Spinoza, where Jacobi believes in a personal cause of the world (God as a person) whereas Spinoza rejects theism. Dell'Eva also introduced Von Sass's anti-theistic stance, according to which God shouldn't be anthropomorphised and shouldn't be seen as omnipotent but he is loving activity.

Gloria Dell'Eva

The conference was a great success in bringing together philosophers of psychology, theologians, historians of philosophy, and epistemologists and drawing attention to attitudes that seem to be resistant or insensitive to evidence.

Inquiry Under Bounds

Today's post is by David Thorstad on his new book Inquiry Under Bounds (2024 OUP). 

Herbert Simon held that human cognition is shaped by a pair of scissors. The blades of the scissors are our internal and external bounds.

Internally, we are bounded by our limited cognitive abilities and the costs of exercising them. We cannot execute arbitrarily complex cognitive operations, and the operations we do execute compete with others for scarce resources. 

Externally, we are bounded by our environment. The environment determines the cognitive problems we are likely to face and the results that cognitive strategies will have when applied to those problems. 

The study of bounded rationality asks what rationality requires of agents who are both internally and externally bounded.  

Simon also held that the fundamental turn in the study of bounded rationality is the turn from substantive to procedural rationality. Many of our most important cognitive bounds are felt most strongly as bounds on cognitive processes, rather than the attitudes that they produce. As a result, theories of bounded rationality should spend less time asking normative questions about attitudes such as belief and preference, and more time asking normative questions about the processes of theoretical and practical inquiry that produce them.

If that is right, then the fundamental task for a theory of bounded rationality is to develop a theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. We need, that is, a theory of inquiry under bounds.

Inquiry under bounds sets out to motivate, develop, defend and apply a theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents. The book proceeds in four parts.

Part 1, Rationality at the crossroads, situates bounded rationality against a competing Standard Picture on which rationality is a matter of consistency or coherence.  Part 1 develops five characteristic claims of the bounded approach: that bounds matter normatively; that rationality is heuristic, procedural, and environment-relative; and that the right theory of bounded rationality should vindicate many seeming irrationalities as the results of boundedly rational cognition.

Part 2, Norms of inquiry, develops a theory of rational inquiry to clarify, defend and apply these and other claims made by the bounded tradition. This theory, the reason-responsive consequentialist view, combines three elements: a consequentialist theory of rightness, a reason-responsiveness theory of rationality, and an information-sensitive reading of deontic modals.

Part 3, Justifying the account, gives three arguments for the reason-responsive consequentialist view. The argument from minimal criteria holds that the view is our best hope for meeting three minimal criteria on an account of bounded rationality. The explanatory argument shows how the view recovers plausible explanations of normative data that have troubled other theories. The argument from vindicatory epistemology holds that the view is our best hope for recovering a range of compelling vindicatory explanations for the rationality of seemingly irrational thoughts and actions.

Part 4, Applying the account, uses the reason-responsive consequentialist view to clarify and defend the characteristic claims about bounded rationality made in Part 1. It also explores a concessive reconciliation between bounded rationality and the Standard Picture.  The book concludes by considering applications to the epistemology of inquiry, as well as generalizations to practical philosophy.

The book is available open access from Oxford University Press here (LINK). 

Agency and the Manic Point of View

This post is by Elliot Porter. Elliot is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is interested in personal autonomy, the philosophy of madness and mental health, and broader themes in social and political philosophy.

Elliot Porter

Autonomy is not much of a folk concept: few people commiserate with their friends over how their autonomy has been disrespected, in quite those terms. Still, it’s something that everyone cares about. We take it as a slight when our view of what is good or reasonable is overlooked. 

Mill has something like autonomy in mind when he tells us that someone’s mode of living is the best “not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode”. At the heart of our interest in autonomy, lies an interest in our perspectives – what seems good or worthy to us.

But not every perspective gets a hearing. Mill’s principle is conditional on our possessing “any tolerable amount of common sense and experience”. We mustn’t abandon anyone to their freedoms, of course, but qualifications like this can hide a multitude of sins. Mad Studies is rich with discussions of what it takes to get taken seriously. 

Mania, in particular, is a fascinating case. Occasionally, mania sees us cast as visionaries, whose words should be hung upon (and sometimes, who should be discouraged from seeking treatment). More often, the manic point of view gets lost, seen as symptom when it is trying to be testimony. What makes perfect sense from an insider perspective can seem disjointed and unintelligible from the outside.

My recent paper, Mania, Urgency, and the Structure of Agency, identifies something distinctive in manic points of view that could help secure recognition. Close attention to the reports of people who experience mania reveals something distinctive in the way our reasons look to us when we are manic. Normally, reasons are facts that tell us something about what we should do. They pile up, for or against, some action or attitude, and we can carefully sift through them and weigh up what we should do. But sometimes we don’t get to deliberate, sometimes, matters are urgent.

I suggest that the phenomenology of mania turns, in large part, on a pervasive sense of urgency. This sense changes the way we see and handle our practical reasons. Even if we have all the time in the world, some things are morally urgent, or even artistically urgent, in a way that tells us to act, now. Urgent reasons pre-empt others. If matters are urgent, we don’t get to deliberate further. It’s not only superfluous, it’s an inadequate response to urgent reasons.

This, I suggest, is the view of practical reasons revealed by testimonies and observations of mania. When we’re manic, the same facts that normally speak in favour of writing a novel or buying an outfit become demanding in the way urgent reasons are. Manic points of view can seem disjointed or arbitrary from outside, but once we understand the way considerations can pre-empt each other, an intelligible picture of the moral world comes into sharp focus.

Understanding the perspectives of people with minority minds can be desirable in its own right. We can all see each other straight in a way we might not otherwise, and perhaps we will all feel more at home in the social world. But more hangs on perspective recognition than inclusion.  

If we are to enjoy any tolerable degree of autonomy, we must be seen by our peers as someone with a perspective, whose view of reasons sets a standard against which our own actions can be judged. Without this recognition, we can’t raise an idea, remonstrate with others, or even recommend a good book.

Post-Self-Deception Judgements

This post is by Martina Orlandi who is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trent University Durham, Canada. Her research focuses on moral psychology, philosophy of mind (including philosophy of artificial intelligence), and philosophy of action. She has a specific interest in practical irrationality and particularly self-deception, self-control, and resilience.

Martina Orlandi

Suppose you’re having a conversation with your old friend Sasha. She casually tells you how her husband has been behaving lately: he’s getting calls at weird times of the day, he’s getting home later than usual, and last week Sasha saw a flirty text message show up on his phone. In spite of all this, Sasha insists that things are good between them and that her husband is faithful. You know that Sasha is self-deceived about this. Her self-deceit lasts for a few months until one day Sasha tells you that she left her husband after he admitted to having an affair. While this news doesn’t surprise you, what comes next is striking: Sasha’s confesses to have known the truth all along.

What should you make of Sasha’s post-self-deception confession? On the one hand, maybe she did know all along that her husband was unfaithful. On the other hand, Sasha has been self-deceived for months, so maybe she isn’t the best judge of her own mental states. These kinds of post-self-deception confessions are common in formerly self-deceived individuals, and they are the topic I explore in my paper “I Knew All Along: Making Sense of Post-Self-Deception Judgments” (published in Synthese in 2024).

Post-self-deception judgments are philosophically interesting because they can pose challenges for accounts of what self-deception is in the first place. Some theories say that self-deceived people only truly believe their own lies, while others say that they may suspect the unwelcome truth. But Sasha’s post-self-deception confession seems ill-suited to the former theories. That is, if Sasha didn’t believe the unwelcome truth, then why would she later confess otherwise?

I think this challenge can be resolved if we argue that, like the beliefs of self-deceived individuals, post-self-deception judgments may also not be reliable. This is the argument that I provide in my paper. I show that those theories of self-deception according to which the self-deceived does not believe the unwelcome truth can say that post-self-deception judgments are themselves an instance of self-deception. In particular, they are caused by the kind of hindsight bias known as “foreseeability”. This is where the individual believes that a past event could easily have been predicted. 

I argue that hindsight bias fits the structure of self-deception because self-deceived people believe against evidence that they would normally take as compelling. This is why Sasha would think, post-self-deception, that her husband’s unfaithfulness could have been easily predicted. It also shows why post-self-deception judgments are not reliable: hindsight bias, by definition, does not accurately track past experiences.

However, characterizing post-self-deception judgments as hindsight bias is bad news for the self-deceived in another way: it poses a threat to their ongoing epistemic practices. This is because psychological research suggests that hindsight bias can impair learning. When we (wrongly) think of the past as easily predictable, we don’t spend time trying to figure out exactly where and how we erred. 

As a result, this can lead us to repeat the same epistemic missteps over and over again. In light of this, I conclude that while coming out of self-deception is typically viewed as a good thing, when formerly self-deceived individuals confess to having ‘known all along’ they might actually be more vulnerable to future instances of self-deception.

"I forgot that you existed": Making people responsible for their memories

This post is Marina Trakas, a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past.

Marina Trakas

In a recent empirical study published in the American Psychologist, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (Yan et al. 2024) investigated a novel and relatively unexplored factor possibly contributing to the gender gap in science, particularly in citation practices: memory mechanisms. They found that during a free recall task, wherein professors were asked to remember the names of experts and rising stars in their field, male professors (but not their female counterparts) underrepresented women researchers compared to a set of baselines. 

One possible explanation for this finding could be that male professors either did not remember female names or recalled fewer of them due to a lack of memory traces of these names. If they never encoded this information, they cannot remember it, given that this information is not available for retrieval. This explanation seems straightforward, but it is unlikely to be the right kind of explanation. 

Why is it unlikely? Everyone would probably agree that nowadays, it is highly improbable that these male professors never meet or hear about a tenured female colleague working on similar topics. It might occasionally occur in tightly knit inner circles within certain fields where there are only a handful of people working on the topic. However, such instances are quite rare when considering the broader field to which this subfield may belong. But there are more than just intuitive reasons to doubt this initial potential explanation. 

The same researchers conducted a series of additional tests to ensure that the tendency to remember more male names was not simply due to availability. First, they examined the order in which names were recalled: while male professors were unlikely to recall a woman’s name near the beginning of the list, the likelihood of recalling female experts increased as the list progressed, suggesting that female names were indeed available but took more time to come to mind. 

Secondly, to further explore this possibility, they included a recognition task where lists of famous researchers’ names were presented for later recall. Male names were not recognized more frequently than female names, as would have been expected under the availability hypothesis, indicating that female names were just as available as male names. All of this points to an accessibility bias (for a distinction between availability and accessibility, see Tulving & Pearlstone 1966): existing stereotypes, as well as less exposure to female researchers and greater social closeness with male researchers, may make female names less accessible to men when considering whom to cite and whom to invite.

Then the question that arises is: what should we do to remember better and have more inclusive memories in academia? Let’s revisit the availability hypothesis and the accessibility hypothesis, as they both suggest different approaches.

A strong interpretation of the availability hypothesis would suggest that when women and people from underrepresented groups in academia are not cited or invited to participate in academic activities, it is simply because their names are not available to those making decisions, who are often men. Their names do not come to their mind because there is no trace of them at all. Perhaps an initial stereotype influenced perception, attention, or encoding processes, resulting in the information about a less frequently encountered female researcher not being retained for later recall. 

However, it is not the male professor’s fault for not remembering that female researcher. Although the male professor could have made more effort to pay attention to her, there is nothing else he could have done after that initial stage. He has no control over memory processes after that stage, as consolidation processes are mostly unconscious and involuntary. Therefore, male researchers cannot be held responsible for these non-inclusive memories that overlook female researchers. 

This holds true in two ways: these memories cannot be properly attributed to them as expressions of their agency, much less as expression of their values; and these men cannot be held accountable for their memories, as it would not be reasonable for others to have specific expectations and demands regarding what they should remember when they have no control over it (for the distinction between attributability and accountability, see Zheng 2016). In conclusion, a strong interpretation of the availability hypothesis suggests that people cannot be held even minimally responsible for their memories: who we remember or forget, and how we remember the past, are largely beyond our control.

A strong interpretation of the accessibility hypothesis paints a completely different picture of the responsibility for our memories, suggesting that we bear some level of responsibility. Thus, male researchers can be blamed for misremembering or forgetting the names of female researchers when considering citations or invitations. Since many of these names have been encoded and are indeed accessible, albeit at a slower rate than those of their male counterparts, failing to remember them or remembering them only as a last resort indicates a form of vice. But what kind of vice? To address this question, it would be useful to examine the actions that these male researchers could have taken to exhibit greater virtue in remembering.

Firstly, they could have exercised more caution and refrained from blindly trusting the first names that came to mind. Blindly trusting the first memories that come to mind in all circumstances can be pernicious, both to others and oneself (for instance, when influenced by a negative mood, only recalling negative aspects of a past experience that reinforce that mood). We do not always have to believe the first memory that pops up in our mind; we can adopt various epistemic attitudes toward memory, including skepticism toward spontaneously recalled memories (Trakas 2021). When such memories have the potential to cause harm and there are no time constraints, consciously and voluntarily exercising our metacognitive abilities to better control and monitor our memories can help prevent or mitigate their potential negative effects.

For example, deliberately focusing on and examining a past experience that initially appears entirely negative can lead to the recollection of more neutral or even positive aspects of that experience. Similarly, concentrating on and thoroughly searching for experts’ names in their field can enable male researchers to remember a more diverse range of names and avoid solely focusing on their socially close male colleagues who come to mind first. These processes of monitoring and control can involve conscious, voluntary mental actions, where one attempts to enhance one’s own memories by searching within one’s own mind, or conscious, voluntary pragmatic actions that entail interaction with the external world and others, such as consulting other colleagues or conducting online literature searches, an option also highlighted by the authors of the aforementioned empirical study (Trakas 2019).

The issue is that these actions do not happen automatically. Engaging in them first requires certain kinds of knowledge. Understanding our own memory capabilities and limitations is crucial to determine when these additional actions are needed. For instance, knowing if one struggles to recall the names of female colleagues when organizing an event, or often tends to automatically endorse the first memories that come to one’s mind, is essential for recognizing when extra effort is necessary to have better memories. However, it is not just knowledge about our individual memory abilities that is important; understanding the general workings of memory may also be crucial. 

Preliminary findings from an ongoing study I am conducting with psychologist Ryan Daley (Gordon College, US) and philosopher Kate Finley (Hope College, US), as part of a project supported by the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (Duke University/Templeton World Charity Foundation), suggest that certain metaphors used to conceptualize memory may lead to misconceptions about how memory functions. 

The more people consider memory as akin to a hard drive, recording device, or mental time travel, the less likely they are to believe that memory can be biased and influence our decisions and actions towards others, potentially causing harm. While we are still researching whether these memory metaphors also impact memory performance, it is plausible that socially circulating concepts and beliefs about memory, internalized by individuals, also shape their processes of memory monitoring and control, as well as their beliefs and evaluations of their own memory abilities.

But knowledge alone is clearly insufficient. Engaging in mental or pragmatic actions to form better memories also requires certain virtues. Not only the epistemic virtue of seeking knowledge about one’s own memory and memory in general, but also, and more importantly, other epistemic virtues such as avoiding overconfidence in one’s memories, being open to revising one’s own memories, and being receptive to others’ perspectives on a shared past, among others. These virtues, which can collectively be termed mnemonic humility, as they all relate to recognizing the limitations and fallibility of memory, are essential for motivating mental and pragmatic actions in our pursuit of better memories.

Virtue and knowledge appear to be deeply intertwined in memory enhancement. Neither is alone sufficient, but both are indispensable. As they enable us to exert some degree of control over our memory processes after encoding, we can be held responsible for misremembering and forgetting, in a twofold sense. Memories can be attributed to individuals since they are, at least in part, reflections of their agency and values, and thus, of their selves. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that individuals would be held accountable for their erroneous, distorted memories, and memory omissions.

This is certainly an imperfect duty, meaning that “we cannot simply ignore it, but we are not obliged to dedicate all our time and resources to it” (Zheng 2016, p. 73). It also ultimately relies on people’s good intentions, which are grounded in moral values such as equality, justice, and inclusion, and perhaps even a sense of caring towards others, including strangers. A person who is racist, misogynistic, or narcissistic will never engage in these additional metacognitive actions because they lack the inherent motivation: to be fair, inclusive, and compassionate towards others. They may even deliberately suppress a memory if a female name spontaneously comes to mind (see this). Fortunately, there are individuals out there, including within academia, who possess good intentions. As I have attempted to demonstrate, these individuals are also morally responsible for remembering better and more inclusively.

Responsible Agency and the Importance of Moral Audience

Today's post is by Anneli Jefferson and Katrina Sifferd. Anneli is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and the intersection of the two. Katrina is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. In this post they discuss their recent paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

Anneli Jefferson

Accounts of responsibility often underestimate the importance of the social environment. Other people are vital to the development and maintenance of moral agency: As social beings, we calibrate our moral compass to our moral audience. When deciding whether it is acceptable to eat the last piece of cake, not to disclose extra earnings on a tax return or spank our children as a form of punishment, we do this with an eye to what’s considered acceptable by our social environment. The reactions of others highlight the existence and importance of moral norms by providing us with feedback, directly and indirectly.

Katrina Sifferd

One account that does take an ecological approach is Victoria McGeer’s scaffolded reasons-responsive view; she argues that what makes us morally responsible agents is precisely that we are susceptible to being held to account and to adjust our moral judgment and actions in the light of moral feedback. However, this view faces certain challenges. First, some agents (e.g. autistic people) seem less attuned to the reaction of their (neurotypical) social environments but are generally no less moral and law abiding. Second, in some cases moral audiences can give morally bad feedback: for example, they can encourage misogynistic or racist behaviour. In a recent article we advocate for an ecological approach to responsibility that recognises the importance of moral audiences and attempt to answer these two concerns.

We argue that audience feedback in the form of blame and praise, reward and punishment plays both an informational and a motivational role in moral agency. The informational role – where we are given information about what is right and wrong – is more central in moral development and when facing new moral challenges. The motivational role remains relevant throughout our lives and keeps us in alignment with our social environment. 

Autistic persons form social attachments and are motivated to align themselves with moral expectations. They also make use of the informational role in development, although sometimes moral feedback will have to be more explicit than it might otherwise be. Autistic individuals may however be less reliant on social feedback for ongoing calibration of behavior and rely more on moral rules and principles. As we have discussed elsewhere, this may not be a weakness, and can in some cases be a strength, especially when it comes to avoiding the human tendency for moral slippage and making exceptions to moral rules (e.g., “Half the people I know lied on their tax forms, why shouldn’t I?”).

The human tendency for moral slippage is well illustrated in scenarios where societal sub-groups justify behavior that is in tension with their professed values, or when new problematic values are acquired from one’s social environment. This is the second challenge to ecological accounts: moral audiences can shape us in problematic ways. Think about the way people’s moral views can shift to accommodate current interests. One prominent example is the disconnect between climate commitments and actual behaviour. 

Flying is socially acceptable despite our keen awareness of climate change. More extreme examples are those where societies or subgroups of society adopt norms that justify oppression. A historical example was the widespread acceptance of slavery; current day examples include the views of Incels, who create a self-reinforcing social environment that justifies misogyny and violence towards women. Being a social creature that calibrates their moral compass to what is being reinforced in one’s immediate social environment is a risky business.

This doesn’t mean that ecological views of responsibility are psychologically incorrect. Our moral agency is dependent on societal audiences, for better or worse and to varying degrees. Given this, it is important to be aware that moral audiences are limited in their outlook, and that one good place to look for possible sources of those limitations is self-interest. We also ought to evaluate our moral norms for consistency, and to seek out new moral audiences, especially audiences comprising of those who may be negatively impacted by our behaviour.

Intruders in the Mind

In this post, Pablo López–Silva and Tom McClelland present their new edited book, Intruders in the Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion (OUP 2023).

Thought insertion is a rare delusion most often found among those suffering from schizophrenia. It is characterised by subjects reporting that entities have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. Although the structure of these reports shows similarities, the external agents that subjects identify are highly variable: some identify individuals such as celebrities or relatives; some identify groups such as aliens or the government; others identify objects like radios, houses or trees. In an oft-cited case, one patient reports ‘…thoughts are put into my mind like “Kill God”, it’s just like my mind working, but it isn’t. They come from this chap, Chris. They are his thoughts’ (Frith, 1992, p. 66). 

This delusion raises a host of philosophical questions about the phenomenology of thought, our sense of ownership and agency over our own thinking and the boundary between self and world. This then feeds into more concrete questions about what causes these delusions and how they can be effectively treated. Intruders in the Mind is the first edited collection dedicated to this under-explored phenomenon and brings together work from philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists. The collection is divided into four sections that deal with different aspects of thought insertion.

The first section - ‘Characterizing Alien Thoughts’ - considers how best to describe and define thought insertion. Roberta Payne offers a revealing personal account of her own experience of schizophrenia, anchoring the collection in the lived-experience of those suffering from the delusion. Clara Humpston & Matthew Broome draw on patient experiences to shed new light on the question of whether delusions of thought insertion are best characterized as beliefs. Following a phenomenological approach, Aaron Mishara, Pablo López–Silva, Cherise Rose & Andreas Heinz explores the often-neglected physicality of inserted thoughts i.e. patients’ describing thoughts as inserted into their minds as having physical properties. 

Pablo López-Silva

In Chapter 4 Michelle Maisse draws on ecological psychology, enactivism and phenomenology in her account of thought insertion as a disruption to how affordances for mental action are disclosed to the subject. In the fifth chapter Sam Wilkinson explores the contrast between inserted thoughts and auditory-verbal hallucinations and, in Chapter 6, Jasper Feyaerts & Wouter Kusters propose that schizophrenia is characterised by an attitude of preoccupation with and reflection on the world that is deeply akin to the attitude to the world adopted by philosophers.

The second section - ‘Explaining Thought Insertion’ - targets the problem about the aetiology of thought insertion. Catherine Cazimir & Al Powers explore the mechanistic and neural commonalities between thought insertion and auditory-verbal hallucination. Pablo López–Silva & Álvaro Cavieres then look at the merits and limitations of a predictive-processing approach to thought-insertion. In Chapter 9 Kengo Miyazono proposes a two-factor account according to which thought-insertion involves both experiential alterations and cognitive alterations. 

In the tenth chapter, Emilia Vilatta also proposes a multi-factorial model. Synthesising a deficit approach and motivational approach, she offers a nuanced account of the causal role played by different elements in the production of inserted thoughts. Finally, Peter Langland–Hassan offers an alternative account of thought insertion. He characterizes the delusion as a form of persecutory delusion that requires a distinctive form of clinical intervention.

The third section - ‘Experimental and Therapeutic Approaches to TI’ - begins with a chapter by Elisa Brann, Eamonn Walsh, Mitul A. Mehta, David A. Oakley & Quinton Deeley who propose experiments that might be able to produce relevant alterations in experience under controlled conditions. In Chapter 13 Alice Pailhès, Jay Olson & Gustav Kuhn suggest that experimental research can draw lessons from the practice of magic, including how magicians putting thoughts into people’s minds. 

Kentaro Hiromitsu & Tomohisa Asai shed light on the neurobiological underpinnings of thought insertion by focusing on the role played by the cerebellum. Working at the interface of theory and therapeutic practice, Susana Ochoa’s chapter argues that schizophrenia involves metacognitive dysfunction and explores what this means for therapeutic interventions. 

Tom McClelland

The fourth and final section - ‘Beyond the Phenomenon’ - focuses on how thought insertion challenges entrenched assumptions regarding the ontology of thought. Jordi Fernández argues that the experience of owning one’s conscious state is the experience of being committed to the content of that state, suggesting that thought insertion is a disruption to that sense of commitment. 

In the the final chapter of the edited book, Johannes Roessler challenges the common ‘no-subject’ interpretation of thought insertion according to which subjects are aware of thoughts without being aware of themselves as the thinker of that thought. 

Taken as a whole, the collection yields much-needed insights into the perplexing phenomenon of thought insertion. Beyond this, it serves as a valuable example of how disciplinary boundaries can be broken down in the pursuit of a greater understanding of the mind.

Transparency and mindfulness

Today's post is by Victor Lange (University of Copenhagen) and Thor Grünbaum (University of Copenhagen) on their recent paper, "Transparency and the mindfulness opacity hypothesis" (The Philosophical Quarterly, 2023) 

Victor Lange

Imagine that you are standing in front of Delacroix’s famous painting, Liberty Leading the People. In one situation, you might perceive the lines and colours as objects and properties of objects. The yellowness appear as the woman’s dress and the thin light blueness appear as the sky above her. In such a case, we say that these properties appear as representational properties. 

In another situation, you might perceive the lines and colours as merely paint on the canvas. Say that you are interested in Delacroix’s technique, so you move closer to examine his brush strokes. Here, the yellowness and light blue do not appear as objects or properties of objects. Instead, they appear as features of the painting itself. In such case, we say that the properties appear as non-representational properties.  

Thor Grünbaum

Philosophers disagree about whether our own experiences are like paintings in the sense that the properties of our experiences can appear both as representational and as non-representational properties. For example, can the redness of the apple in front of me appear both as a representational property (i.e., a property of the apple) and a non-representational property (i.e., not as a property of the apple but as a property of something else, e.g., my mental state). 

Many philosophers have argued that the properties of our experience can only appear as representational properties. That is, when we introspect our own experience of the apple, we ‘look right through’ our experience. We simply become more aware of the apple and its properties. Philosophers sometimes call this view the Transparency thesis (TT). 

Although TT has been popular, it is controversial. In our paper, ‘Transparency and the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis’, we investigate an idea that is prominent in the scientific mindfulness literature. This is the idea that mindfulness meditation enables states of introspective awareness where some properties of our experience genuinely appear as non-representational properties. Call this the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis (MOH). Even though MOH is widespread among researchers, it has remained philosophically underdeveloped. 

Building upon a review of relevant mindfulness literature, we argue that (i) mindfulness meditation involves a shift in experiential perspective; (ii) individuals differ in the scope of how many properties shift from appearing as representational to non-representational properties; (iii) this scope depends upon an individual’s skill in mindfulness meditation. 

TT-fans and strong representationalists will most like not be persuaded. They might object that we build (i)-(iii) upon a dubious philosophical interpretation of the current mindfulness literature. We reply that future work in experimental philosophy is relevant in investigating whether there is any force in this objection. 

They might also object that MOH and (i)-(iii) make controversial assumptions about the nature of introspection. We argue that this is not the case. We assume nothing that is controversial or outrageous. In fact, trusting the science of mindfulness, philosophical theories of self-awareness and introspection leave plenty of room to develop MOH in terms of various forms of introspective dynamics. 

In conclusion, MOH is a novel and well-grounded objection to TT.

Inclusive Language in Perinatal and Postnatal Care

In this post, Kathleen interviews Matthew Cull (University of Edinburgh), Jules Holroyd (University of Sheffield), and Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton) on their funded exchange project 'Inclusive Language in Perinatal and Postnatal Care'. 

Poster from
https://engagedphilosophy.org/inclusive/

Hello! Can you tell us a little bit about your recent project?

The project is a knowledge exchange project, about how to make language gender inclusive in perinatal and postnatal care. We’ve recently written a paper, which we’re nearly ready to submit for publication, about how standard approaches to inclusive language tend to be ‘monistic’: they aim to use one strategy, either making language gender-neutral (e.g. replacing ‘pregnant women’ with ‘pregnant people’) or gender additive (e.g. writing ‘pregnant women, trans men and nonbinary people’).

Working through a number of case studies, we find that no single strategy can meet the moral and communicative goals in all contexts. And, in fact, when attempts at using inclusive language are not done as well as they might be, this can fuel backlash and resistance to inclusion. Instead, a ‘pluralistic’ approach, which uses a range of linguistic devices, is needed. This means that reforms have to be done on a case by case basis, with careful eye on those goals in the particular context. But this is quite labour and time intensive, and there are a lot of potential cases! So we applied for knowledge exchange funds to support work with particular practitioners and policy makers on how to improve inclusive language.


How did the members of your group become interested in these issues?

My (Jules) experiences of pregnancy and childbirth were fraught with discomfort at the highly gendered aspects of it (e.g. being called ‘mum’ at every midwife appointment, having to sign up to taking ‘maternity’ leave). Shortly after having my first child, I worked with Matthew on a paper that applied Dembroff and Wodak’s work on gender-neutral pronouns to parenting labels, and we argued that using gender-neutral parenting labels (‘parent’ rather than ‘mother’ or ‘father’; ‘parental’ rather than ‘maternal’ or ‘paternal’) were both supported by Dembroff & Wodak’s arguments, and easily implementable in (e.g.) higher education parental leave policies. (The paper is forthcoming here. We’re still working on persuading our institutions to make those changes though!!).

Matthew themselves came to these issues through trans philosophy, and especially thinking about how we can use language to reshape our social practices to make the world a better place to be transgender. Whilst their book (What Gender Should Be, available in all good bookshops next year) focused mainly on engineering our concepts of gender, they have recently been getting more and more annoyed with how trans healthcare is run.

Meanwhile, Fiona had argued that our expectations of mothers are over-demanding in a way that harms parents, causing guilt, shame and feelings of being judged and required to justify their parenting decisions partly around hot button topics like infant feeding. She had originally spoken about harm to mothers, because these expectations did seem to be specifically around motherhood. However, she met parents who were treated as mothers - and so directly affected by overdemanding expectations of mothers - but did not see themselves as mothers. 

She began exploring what makes a parent count as a mother, and how gender impacts our experiences of parental duties. Fiona became aware that arguments against inclusive language seemed to be influencing policy makers and activists in infant feeding, and thought that a philosophical response was needed, so got in touch. We started writing a response paper, and over the course of doing so, we came to the conclusion that none of the existing approaches to inclusion alone were adequate, and formulated our own pluralistic approach, as described above. Our project poster gives a snapshot of the approach we take.


What is important about the topic and what do you hope it will contribute to ongoing work/debates?

We think the heavily gendered language in and around perinatal care alienates a lot of people: lesbian, bisexual and gay couples, surrogate families, and even cisgender heterosexual people who dislike the connotations of being called ‘mums and dads’. However, we’re especially concerned with the effects of this kind of exclusive language on trans people who might want to access perinatal care. Over 1% of births in England are to people whose gender does not match that which they were assigned at birth (CQC Maternity Survey 2022, see also Pearce et al 2023). 

Recent reports on the experiences of trans and non-binary people accessing perinatal care indicate that “28% of trans and non-binary respondents [to a survey about perinatal care] said they were not treated with dignity and respect during labour and birth” (LGBT Foundation, 2022, 9). Interviewees in the report describe their experiences of exclusion, and the harms experienced as a result:

“I felt there was no framework of language that was inclusive of people who do not identify within the gender binary so it was consistently a triggering experience” (2022, 22).

Yet, the NHS handbooks commit to values of respect, equality, and dignity. Moreover, their style guide explicitly makes a commitment to using inclusive language where possible. Clearly, there is a gap between aspiration and reality. And, we acknowledge, using inclusive language can be hard and sometimes involves carefully navigating competing goals. It is worth making the time to have discussions about inclusive formulations, and how to balance those competing values.

As a bunch of philosophers with (collective) expertise in pregnancy and parenthood and trans philosophy, and with a range of relevant experiences in this area, it felt like we could really say something useful about it, with the hope of improving things! The aim is to equip people writing public facing documents with a ‘conceptual toolkit’ to approach future writings. Since language is evolving, no one phrasing will be adequate forever, but feeling comfortable with the competing goals and challenges can better equip people to communicate in an inclusive way.


What are the future plans for the project?

The aim is to run a couple of workshops over the course of the project. We’d like these to have a ‘troubleshooting’ style format, where people bring resources they’d like to make (more) inclusive, and that we can work through together with a ‘conceptual toolkit’ on hand. It is very much a knowledge exchange project, as the different examples people bring help us to formulate and finesse our understanding of what inclusive language involves. For example, in our paper, we work through 6 different examples, from different sources (e.g. NHS public facing materials, government advice pages), about care in a range of contexts - tests available if you’re pregnant; risks of covid vaccinations for those who are pregnant; support during childbirth; post-natal checks offered; support for infant feeding, and cervical screening. Each example we considered posed a different set of challenges that required careful thought: simply pressing Ctrl-F and replacing all instances of ‘women’ with ‘people’ doesn’t always cut it!

So we’d love to have as many conversations, about as many different perinatal and postnatal care contexts as possible. And our overarching hope is that collaborative work helps to make care more inclusive in future.

If you’d like to participate in the project - either through ongoing conversations or the upcoming workshops (scheduled for Spring & Summer 2024), please do get in touch with us! You can fill out this form to express interest in participation, or email us directly.

From Altered States to Metaphysics: The Epistemic Status of Psychedelic-induced Metaphysical Beliefs

Today's post is by Paweł Gładziejewski (Nicolaus Copernicus University) on his recent paper, "From Altered States to Metaphysics: The Epistemic Status of Psychedelic-induced Metaphysical Beliefs"  (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2023).

 Paweł Gładziejewski 

Psychedelic experiences sometimes lead people to revise their belief systems in far-reaching ways. My paper deals with the epistemic status of a particular class of beliefs that people sometimes acquire after a psychedelic session. These are the metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality itself. Imagine someone in a deep psychedelic state, where their usual sense of self dissolves into an all-encompassing unity lacking an subject-object distinction. Chances are that the experience will inspire this person to modify her beliefs about the existence of God or the relation between consciousness and the physical world. Is updating metaphysical beliefs in this manner epistemically irrational? Or can psychedelic states, at times, rationally lead to a new perspective on reality? If so, then how?

In my paper, I argue that psychedelic states can play a positive epistemic role in a person’s epistemic life, acting as a (fallible) source of evidence or reasons. I develop this view in three steps.

First, I propose a general account of psychedelic-induced metaphysical belief changes as stemming from an epistemically transformative experience (in a technical sense introduced by Laurie Paul in her seminal work). I point to certain epistemologically relevant aspects of such transformations. For example, they do not involve an impediment of a person’s normal critical/rational faculties (metaphysical beliefs usually crystallize and stabilize during the sober “integration” stage that follows the psychedelic trip itself). Also, such transformations are graded and often involve belief revisions that are much subtler and less epistemically risky than full-blown mystical-experience-based religious conversions.

Second, I propose that psychedelic states can be treated as forms of radical metaphysical imagination, whereby a person temporarily gains a capacity to enter conscious states that are usually unavailable for neurotypical human subjects. These exotic states disrupt the structures of normal experience - related to time, space, or self – that underpin the Sellarsian “manifest” image of the world. As such, psychedelic experiences act as a form of exploration of one’s representational repertoire. I argue that bursts of such exploration can be epistemically beneficial in the long run.

Third, I show how such exploration can yield results that are evidentially relevant for metaphysics. For example, I argue that acute psychedelic experiences can undermine appeals to normal experience made in certain metaphysical debates (e.g. about the passage of time) or that they can validate certain concepts in metaphysics that have previously been posited on purely theoretical grounds (e.g. the notion of non-dual consciousness in recent debates on cosmospychism).

My hope is that this perspective offers a nuanced alternative to other prevalent approaches to the issue at hand. These alternatives include (1) treating psychedelic-induced metaphysical beliefs as ideations lacking any rational foundation or (2) treating such beliefs as directly, non-inferentially justified by their underlying experiences. While the first option might appear preferable to philosophical naturalists, the second tends to be favored by religiously minded authors. But there is an alternative on the table, one that treats non-ordinary experiences as epistemically relevant for metaphysics but evaluates whatever evidence they provide against a broader backdrop that includes other lines of inquiry, including science and philosophical reasoning.

Interview on the journal 'Passion'

On the blog today, Kathleen speaks to Alfred Archer and Heidi Maibom about the journal 'Passion', which was launched relatively recently. Alfred and Heidi are editors-in-chief of the journal.
 

Alfred Archer

 KMH: Could you tell us a little bit about Passion, and its links to EPSSE?

AA & HM: Certainly. 2014, The European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE) has been going for ten years now and has grown into a wonderful, lively and welcoming group of scholars working on philosophical issues related to emotions. Several years ago, it was suggested that the society could look into starting its own journal . The main reason for this was that while EPSSE’s members were publishing their work in a range of philosophical and interdisciplinary journals, there was no academic journal dedicated to publishing the kinds of papers that EPSSE members were writing. Between 2017 and 2020 the executive board, then led by Achim Stephan, explored various options for starting an open access journal with commercial publishers.

When we took up our positions on the executive committee of the society (together with Joel Krueger), we decided that it would be better to look for a non-commercial publisher, as this would give a better financial deal for both the society and to the authors, as well as allowing the society to decide for itself how it wants the journal to be run. By happy coincidence, Tilburg University (where Alfred works) was just starting an initiative to encourage open science which included the start of an open access publisher, Open Press TiU. By working with Open Press TiU we are able to publish a completely open access journal that is free for both the reader and the author, and with only minimal costs for EPSSE. 

Heidi Maibom

KMH: What inspired you to start the journal?

AA & HM: We both felt that EPSSE was an inspiring group of philosophers, which every year would have a conference full of some of the most interesting philosophical work on emotions and that it was a real pity that there was no journal committed to publishing this kind of research. Having a journal would both be a major boost to the society and help draw attention to the valuable work being done by its members and others doing similarly exciting, cutting-edge, and engaged philosophical work on emotions. This feeling was shared by the other members of the executive board at the time (Max Gatyas, Joel Krueger and Lucy Osler) who are now the journal’s associate editors and who have been crucial in getting the journal started. 

KMH: What kind of topics do you hope to publish about in the journal?

AA & HM: As the title suggests, we are looking for original work on emotions. This could be papers on the nature of emotions generally or on specific emotions, such as guilt, anger, or joy. We are also interested in work on the connection between emotions and human welfare, politics, or art. We publish papers in both the philosophical traditions: analytic and continental. And although this is a philosophical journal, we are pretty ecumenical about what we take a philosophically interesting paper to be. We embrace interdisciplinarity and our own work is heavily influenced by work in fields traditionally external to philosophy, such as psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and so on. One does not have to be a card-carrying philosopher to publish in Passion, but the paper should be philosophical in nature. 

KMH: Are there any events or special issues coming up which we should keep an eye out for? 

AA & HM: At this time, we publish two issues a year. One with papers received during the normal course of events, and another which is a special issue. The special issue has historically been connected with a workshop organized in connection with the yearly meeting of EPSSE. Last year, that issue was about co-experienced emotions (which you can read here), and this year it will be on the nature of emotions, and is guest edited by Heidy Meriste. We strongly encourage anybody philosophically inclined to submit their papers to the next issue Passion, which will appear this summer..

Why it’s important to ask what forms introspection could take

In today's post, François Kammerer and Keith Frankish write about their recent special issue 'What Forms Could Introspective Systems Take?'. François is a philosopher of mind. He holds a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris (France) and currently works as a postdoc researcher at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany). His work focuses on consciousness and introspection. 

Keith is Honorary Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University, UK, and Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme in Neurosciences at the University of Crete, Greece. He works mainly in the area of philosophy of mind and is well known for his 'illusionist' theory of consciousness. 

François Kammerer

Human beings can introspect. They can look inwards, as it were, at their own minds and tell what thoughts, experiences, and feelings they have. That is, they can form representations of their own current mental states. And they can put these representations to use, flexibly modifying their behaviour in response to information about their own current mental state. For example, on a shopping trip to the supermarket I might suddenly notice that I am extremely hungry. And since I intend to follow a strict diet and know that I am weak-willed, I decide to avoid the confectionery section of the store.

Human introspection has some unusual psychological and epistemological features, especially when contrasted with perception, and philosophers have devoted much time to speculating about it. How exactly does human introspection work? What sort of knowledge does it provide? However, there is a more general question that has been underexplored: What could introspection be? What are the possible ways in which cognitive systems — human or non-human, natural or artificial — could come to represent their own current mental states in a manner that allows them to use the information obtained for flexible behavioural control?

Keith Frankish

It is important to ask this question. If we don’t, we might assume that the human form of introspection is the only possible one, and that if introspection occurs in nonhuman animals, or ever develops in artificial intelligences, it will take the same basic form as our own, with some simplifications or variations. And this assumption might be wrong. For this reason, we have just edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted to exploring the neglected question of what introspection could be.

The issue opens with an article we coauthored, titled ‘What forms could introspective systems take? A research programme’, which serves as a target for the rest of the issue. In it, we argue that the question of what forms introspection could take is an important and fruitful one, and we give a precise, workable formulation of it. The central portion of the article then seeks to provide a preliminary map of the space of possible introspective systems. 

We focus on what we call ‘introspective devices’ — possible mechanisms for producing introspective representations. We propose that such devices can be classified along several dimensions, including, (a) how direct their processing is, (b) how conceptualized their output is, and (c) how flexible their functioning is. We define an introspective system as a set of one or more introspective devices, and we propose that such systems can be ranked in terms of how unified their component devices are.

We then use these dimensions to describe a possibility space, in which one could locate the introspective devices that various theorists have ascribed to humans, as well as a huge range of possible introspective devices that other creatures might employ.

To further refine the space of possible forms of introspection, we also examine what we call ‘introspective repertoires’. An introspective repertoire is a way of grouping and characterizing the mental states that an introspective device targets. For example, human introspection arguably groups together states on the basis of what direction of fit they have, whether they are perceptual or cognitive, and whether or not they possess intentional content, and it characterizes (conceptualizes) each group as such. However, there is no reason to think that all introspective systems would employ the same groupings and characterizations as our own, and we propose a provisional way of mapping other possible introspective repertoires.

Finally, the article proposes a research programme on possible introspective systems. We identify two routes for the exploration of introspective possibilities, one focusing on cases, the other on theories. The former looks at specific cases of introspection, either real or imaginary. Adopting this route, we might examine how different groups of humans introspect, considering differences due to culture, neurodivergence, meditative practice, and so on. We might also look how various non-human animals introspect (if they do) and ask whether and how current AI systems introspect. Finally, we might consider merely possible cases, imagining the forms introspection might take in beings such as aliens and future AIs, which have radically different forms of mentality from our own and different introspective needs.

The theory route, by contrast, involves looking at different theoretical models of introspection and of the mental states that introspection targets. By varying the parameters in these models, we should then be able to identify new introspective possibilities.

In both forms of exploration, the aim is to identify interesting possible forms of introspection — that is, ones that allow for efficient and flexible control of behaviour but are nevertheless different from the familiar human form. All this should give us insight into possible interesting ways in which a mind can introspect.

The special issue also includes fifteen contributions by philosophers and cognitive scientists, each responding in some way to our proposal.

Some contributors make direct comments on, or criticisms of, our research programme (Peter Carruthers & Christopher Masciari, Maja Spener, Daniel Stoljar). Others (Krzysztof Dołęga, Adriana Renero, Wayne Wu) discuss particular models or theories of human introspection in the context of our programme, testing and evaluating the conceptual tools we offer.

Most contributors, however, focus on some particular aspect of our research question. One looks at introspective variation among humans (Stephen Fleming). Others focus on introspection in neurodivergent individuals (Alexandre Billon) and in meditators as conceived in the Buddhist tradition (Bryce Huebner & Sonam Kachru). 

At least three pieces look at introspection in nonhuman animals (Heather Browning & Walter Veit, Maisy Englund & Michael Beran, Jennifer Mather & Michaella Andrade). One piece is devoted to introspection in current AI systems, asking whether Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, could introspect (Robert Long), and AI introspection is also touched upon in other pieces (Heather Browning & Walter Veit, Krzysztof Dołęga, Stephen Fleming).

Finally, two contributions take a radically speculative perspective. They discuss introspection in imaginary minds very different from ours. One focuses on technologically enhanced humans (Pete Mandik). Another analyzes ‘ancillary’ artificial minds, which are intermediate between singular unified minds and group minds (Eric Schwitzgebel & Sophie Nelson).

This exciting multidisciplinary symposium is followed by a lengthy response paper in which we address the contributors’ arguments and proposals and draw some lessons for our project.

We hope that this special issue succeeds in making the case for the value of research on possible ways in which cognitive systems can introspect and that other researchers will pursue this research — ideally in unexpected directions!