Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Amelia Gangemi and Valentina Cardella introduce their new book, Reasoning in Psychopathology  (Routledge 2024). Reasoning in Psychopathology Rationality can be broadly categorized into two types: rationality of action, which concerns behavior appropriate to achieving one’s goals, and theoretical rationality, which involves conformity to norms, such as logical or social norms. Many philosophers and psychologists argue that a key aspect of mental disorder is a deficiency in rational control over one’s behavior. This notion is consistent with the common view that mental illness involves a lack of discipline or self-control. Contrary to this view, individuals with mental disorders do not necessarily exhibit impaired rationality. In our book, we present studies of schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders that suggest that individuals with these conditions can reason logically within their symptomatic domains and may even outperform unaffected individuals on certain tas

Here  Martino Belvederi Murri (University of Ferrara) discusses research on epistemic justice and dignity for people with psychosis. A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog in July 2024. Martino Belvederi Murri Individuals experiencing acute psychosis in inpatient psychiatric settings face unique challenges. Consider the case of Jake, a student who is struggling between familial conflicts and economic difficulties, as well as choices related to his life career. Auditory hallucinations may take the form of “voices” that comment on his everyday actions, and may lead Jake to think that people spy on him with malevolent intent. These symptoms can lead to angst and withdrawal from social activities, possibly culminating into severe anxiety and agitation. The grave societal stigma that is attached to mental illness exacerbates feelings of isolation and diminishes help-seeking. The promotion of patient empowerment is a key component of recovery, and is increasingly seen as a duty o

Today's post is by Vanessa Schipani  (University of Pennsylvania) who discusses a recent open access  paper on journalism and public trust in science published in Synthese . A version of this post has appeared on the LSE blog on 2 September 2024. Vanessa Schipani During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I was hired as a journalist to report on politicians’ claims about science for FactCheck.org . Coming off of finishing a master’s in the history and philosophy of science, my eye for stories was a bit more philosophical than most.  Starting with my first article on whether climate science was pseudoscience (spoiler: it’s not), I noticed a trend in how politicians misunderstood the scientific process, especially when arguing for policy inaction: They set the bar for action at certain results, and condemned researchers when they offered their opinions about policies. Now on the cusp of finishing a dissertation on trust in science, I see more clearly the trick these politicians

This post is by Rabih Chattat . Rabih is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna. He works on psychosocial interventions in dementia and the clinical psychology of ageing. This post was originally published on the EPIC blog on 3rd July 2024. Rabih Chattat Dementia is an umbrella term used to indicate a variety of conditions characterised by neuronal damage. The most prevalent type of dementia is Alzheimer's disease which accounts for around 62% of all types of dementia followed by vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and Lewy body dementia as the most frequent. Dementia is characterised by a progressive decline in several domains of cognitive abilities such as executive functions, learning and memory, language, perceptual and motor functions, complex attention and social cognition (DSM-5). The duration is up to 12-15 years.  Cognitive decline has an impact on the person’s capacity to retain information and also to recall memories, communicate

Today's post is by Dan Cavedon-Taylor who is the author of a paper to appear in Synthese entitled " Must depression be irrational? " Dan Cavedon-Taylor From Capgras syndrome to schizophrenia, anorexia to obsessive-compulsive disorders, mental health conditions are thought to entail failures of epistemic rationality. This includes depression, which is often conceptualised by philosophers as necessarily involving mental states that are ‘unwarranted by’ or ‘disproportionate to’ events in one’s life ( Davies 2016; Wakefield & Demazeux 2016 ; Tully 2019 ). Call this view of depression, the ‘Irrationality View’. For some of us, the Irrationality View seems plainly incorrect. There appears to be a clear difference, in rational terms, between depression caused by change in season versus depression caused by, e.g., homelessness, refuge experience, serious assault, and perhaps even gaslighting ( Abrahams 2024 ). For that reason, I think we ought to prefer a Mixed View of depr

Katherine Puddifoot has recently edited a special issue of  Philosophical Psychology  on bias . In last week's post  Katherine considered new ways of conceptualising bias. In this post, Katherine introduces some of the methods for understanding and mitigating bias discussed by the contributors. James Chamberlain, Jules Holroyd, Ben Jenkins and Robin Scaife  examine empirical work that they argue fails to distinguish intersectional bias from non-binary categories, does not reflect the heterogeneity of bias, and assumes that when people harbor intersectional biases (e.g., the intersectional implicit bias associating traits with Black Women), these will be a complex compound of simple concepts associated with both of the intersecting identities (e.g., White women and Black men).  For Chamberlain and colleagues, it is crucial to do justice to the varying different experiences that members of a social group may have, and how these may change qualitatively based on their membership of mu

Katherine Puddifoot has recently edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on bias . In this post, she introduces some of the conceptions of bias and discrimination discussed by the contributors. In next week's post Katherine will summarise the authors' ideas about how to mitigate bias. Katherine Puddifoot Ema Sullivan-Bissett provides a defence of her view that implicit biases are unconscious imaginings, by drawing on studies of the impact of the use of virtual reality on people’s biases. Sullivan-Bissett argues that implicit biases are not necessarily propositional, but may instead be characterized by being imagistic, explaining how sometimes, but not always, immersion in an imagistic virtual reality is effective in shifting bias. Felipe de Carvalho and Joel Krueger adopt a conception of implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits. They argue that conceived in this way implicit bias can explain certain injustices experienced by children with Down syndrome and auti

Today's post is by Daniel Jolley, Lee Shepherd and Anna Maughan. Here they talk about their interesting research on vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, based on their recent paper in Psychology and Health . Daniel Jolley There are different conspiracy theories about vaccines. For example, some conspiracy theories suggest vaccines may be unsafe or ineffective. However, this is being hidden by pharmaceutical companies for profit. Other vaccine conspiracy theories suggest vaccines may be being used to control the population. In our latest research , we looked at what influences these conspiracy beliefs.  In three experimental studies, we explored how fear may influence people’s willingness to receive a vaccine. We also looked at how fear influences anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs. We initially thought that fear would increase conspiracy beliefs, leading to people being less willing to receive a vaccine. However, the results from the first two studies (Studies 1a an

This post is by Maja Kittel, formerly known as Maja Białek, a philosopher of psychiatry working at the Faculty of Philosophy and Cognitive Science of the University of Białystok. Maja focuses on the epistemic properties of delusions and is currently conducting empirical qualitative research on the content of delusions (for details, click here ). Maja recently published a paper entitled: “The epistemic innocence of elaborated delusions re-examined” in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Maja Kittel Epistemic innocence is the idea, put forth by Lisa Bortolotti and collaborators, that although certain beliefs seem epistemically costly, they sometimes bring more epistemic benefit than harm and thus deserve absolution. For example, a monothematic delusion that helps an individual understand their difficult and frightening experiences may be judged as epistemically innocent because, although it is false and fixed, it serves as an imperfect, temporary crutch, helping the person remain a

Today's post is by  Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.  We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph

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

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 wid

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