Loneliness as a closure of the affordance space: The case of COVID-19 pandemic

This post is by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She works in embodied cognitive science, the enactive approach, phenomenology, and habits. This post is about her recent paper on loneliness and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya

When social distancing measures were implemented to reduce the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many specialists were concerned about a potential dramatic upsurge in loneliness, which was particularly worrying given the wide range of physical and mental health problems associated with it (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use, cognitive decline, cardiovascular diseases, and suicide risk). However, the few longitudinal studies comparing loneliness levels before and during the social contact restrictions present inconsistent results, with many factors influencing whether the levels of loneliness increased, decreased, or remained constant.

These inconsistent findings underscore the fact that loneliness is not the same as social isolation, so one may feel lonely even among many other people or, conversely, may not experience loneliness even if socially isolated. Thus, the reduction in the number of face-to-face interactions during pandemic-related social restrictions is not a reliable indicator of people’s level of loneliness. In this regard, I propose that loneliness, unlike social isolation, arises not from a lack of social contacts but from a lack of connections, in the sense that, while experiencing loneliness, one lacks meaningful relationships not only with other living beings but also with oneself and aspects of the environment.

I explore this idea by conceiving of loneliness as resulting from a closure in one’s affordance space, i.e., a closure in the range of relevant possibilities for action and interaction that are open to a concrete individual with a particular repertoire of habits. Given a relational reading of the notion of affordances, this closure pertains to both individuals and the materiality of their environment, so the same aspects of the environment could show up as meaningful and solicit action for one person but not for another. Importantly, the relevant affordances missing in loneliness are those that a person would find enjoyable or attractive to engage with if they were present and she had the adequate skills to do so. Moreover, I argue that the lack of those affordances that are most central to our habitual identities, and therefore more meaningful to us, will have a greater impact on our experience of loneliness.

To support this proposal, I consider three possible ways in which the COVID-19 lockdown may have increased levels of loneliness in some people by suddenly contracting their affordance spaces, thus disrupting their habitual possibilities for (1) joint action, (2) affective regulation, and (3) embodied social interaction. I also present some examples from qualitative studies that suggest that some people managed to overcome this contraction ––and even expand their affordance spaces–– by engaging with new affordances or increasing the affective allure of existing ones. This reconfiguration of their affordance spaces may have prevented some people from experiencing the high levels of loneliness that were expected at the beginning of the pandemic. For them, this experience could have been an opportunity to connect or reconnect with others, themselves, and the wider community. However, this opportunity was not equally open to everyone, as is the case for older adults, whose levels of loneliness increased during the pandemic.

Anorexia Nervosa and Delusions – What Can We Learn?

Today’s post is from Kyle De Young and Lindsay Rettler on their recent paper, “Causal Connections between Anorexia Nervosa and Delusional Beliefs” (published in Review of Psychology and Philosophy in 2023). 

Kyle is a clinical psychologist specializing in eating and related behaviors, who oversees the Eating Behaviors Research Lab at the University of Wyoming. Lindsay is a philosopher at UW teaching ethics and philosophy of mental health, who oversees the ethics curriculum for Wyoming’s med school (Wyoming WWAMI Medical Education Program).

Lindsay and Kyle

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe mental disorder associated with mortality and functional impairment. It is complex, multi-systemic (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, endocrine, gastrointestinal), and requires multidisciplinary evidence-based treatment at various levels (e.g., outpatient, inpatient). Despite the availability and use of intense treatments, outcomes are poor, with only 1 in 3 individuals recovering within 9 years. 

Complicating matters is that although 10-30% of individuals with AN experience delusions, AN is not understood as a psychotic disorder nor conceptualized in terms of how delusions relate to its development or maintenance. Focusing on the connections between delusions and AN is a promising way to shed light on this complicated condition, possibly pointing researchers and clinicians in fruitful directions to improve outcomes for this terrible disorder.

Believing that eating a piece of chocolate will cause me to gain 5 lbs might not seem very similar to a psychotic delusion of persecution. But I may hold the belief in a way that floats free of evidence. Is the belief then delusional? The DSM-5 characterizes delusions in varied and sometimes inconsistent ways. These definitions focus on the content of delusions (are they false, unshared, bizarre, etc.?), the degree of conviction with which the delusional belief is held, whether a person has insight to the origins of their belief, whether the belief is irrational, and whether the belief is fixed. 

In our paper we sort through these characterizations and argue that fixedness is the core feature of delusions. When a belief is maintained in a way that’s insensitive to evidence or unresponsive to reasons, the belief is fixed. 

How are these delusions related to AN? We consider several possibilities and conclude that most likely the psychopathology of AN causes delusions, and delusions are likely reciprocally causal with AN. The content of delusions in AN is typically limited to eating, digestion, and body shape/weight, and the delusions function as explanations for behaviors that are otherwise hard to justify. 

Starving oneself to the point of emaciation, medical complications, and interpersonal and occupational impairment when food is readily available are hard to understand without the accompanying delusional belief that one’s body cannot process food, for instance. Delusions may help explain this extreme behavior and in so doing help subdue the fear brought about by AN. As the seriousness of the condition amplifies, the need to hold firmly to the delusion grows.

If delusions and AN are reciprocally causal, intervening on one should improve the other. Most promising is to add treatment components known for their efficacy in ameliorating delusions to existing evidence-based approaches for AN to test whether such additions improve outcomes. Antipsychotic medications that might increase cognitive flexibility could be tried. Some have been tested in AN, generally with underwhelming results, but no trials investigated whether individuals with delusions specifically benefit.

Other approaches include acceptance-based psychotherapies that help individuals change behavior despite their cognitions or specific variants of cognitive therapy developed for delusions. Although we can't estimate the impact on AN of intervening on delusions, even if it helps in only 10-30% of cases, the potential for improving outcomes is great. So, we hope that research will move in this direction!

Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition

The post today is by Evan Westra (Purdue University) on his recent paper "Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition" (Philosophical Perspectives, 2023).

 Evan Westra

If you go up to an ordinary person on the street and ask them to tell you about their beliefs, they’ll probably start telling you about their religious, moral, or ideological attitudes: Trans rights are human rights; God created the universe; Black lives matter; Abortion is wrong; Trump won 2020. These are generally interesting answers that tell you a lot about who that person is.  

If you ask a philosopher for an example of their beliefs, on the other hand, you’re likely to get something terribly boring: today is Wednesday; it’s raining outside, the cat is on the mat (or, if they’re feeling particularly boring: p). This makes perfect sense from the philosopher’s perspective: they simply are giving you examples of mental states that function as “the map by which we steer,” that is, states that aim at an accurate representation of the world, are generally coherent, responsive to evidence, and that the pursuit of our goals and desires.  

This doesn’t seem to be what the non-philosopher is doing when they’re telling you about their beliefs. Instead, they’re telling you about attitudes that matter to them, that express what they stand for. These are not the kind of attitudes that one readily updates in response to evidence; indeed, if we were presented with counterevidence to these beliefs, we’d probably do our best to explain it away. Unlike the philosopher’s mundane “beliefs,” these “beliefs” are the kind of attitude one might express to signal one’s identity and affirm one’s status as a member one’s community. They’re also the kind of attitude that we might look for when deciding whether or not a person belongs to one’s ingroup or outgroup, and perhaps even enforce as a criterion for group-membership.

The non-philosopher also has attitudes about whether today is Wednesday, or whether the cat is on the mat, of course. And they’d probably find the philosopher’s way of using the word belief perfectly sensible (albeit somewhat formalistic and weird – much like philosophers in general). Nevertheless, they’re much more likely to express such mundane attitudes using more common attitude verbs like think or know. But for some pragmatic or semantic reason, the term belief is much more likely to be used to express religious, moral, and ideological attitudes.  

Here's my question: in cases like these, are the philosopher and non-philosopher talking about the same type of mental state? That is, are they both employing the same basic folk psychological concept of belief?  

In my recent paper in Philosophical Perspectives, “Symbolic belief and social cognition,” I suggest that the answer to this question is no. Drawing on several different lines of evidence, I argue that in our day-to-day lives, we regularly employ two distinct concepts of belief, each with a distinct folk psychological profile and socio-cognitive function. The epistemic concept of belief corresponds roughly to what the philosopher means by “belief,” though it is more commonly expressed by the verb to think. This concept is used primarily for mindreading – that is, to keep track of what other people take to be true, and this informs how we predict and interpret their behaviors. The symbolic concept of belief is more commonly expressed by the verb to believe. It describes a very different kind of mental state, with a strong affective and volitional dimension, and well as preference-like characteristics and limited sensitivity to evidence or updating. I argue that the primary function of this concept is mindshaping: we express symbolic beliefs in order to signal our identities and thereby regulate how others behave towards us, and we also monitor and normatively enforce certain symbolic beliefs in others. Along the way, I touch on the ways that questions about the folk psychology of belief intersect with questions about the ontology of belief, and how each debate might inform the other.
 

Why Human Nature Matters

We celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) with a post by Matteo Mameli (King’s College London) on his new monograph, Why Human Nature Matters: Between Biology and Politics (Bloomsbury 2024). In the book, Mameli discusses Darwin’s views on mental faculties, human differences, and the transformative agency of organisms. 

My monograph addresses classic and contemporary perspectives on human nature and makes a novel proposal, one that stresses the biological and political significance of human diversity and mutability. Darwin’s ideas on variation and niche construction play an important role in my argument, which also draws on insights from Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Sylvia Wynter, and others. The cover image is a plate from one of Darwin’s books on barnacles. To discover why Darwin was so interested in barnacles, you will have to read the book!

Below are some excerpts from the introductory chapter:

Organisms inherit genetic material from their parents, but they also inherit the outcomes of the choices and activities of their conspecifics and non-conspecifics. […] In relation to changes in their conditions of life, both internal and external, corporeal and extracorporeal, organisms are both subjects and objects, agents and patients, sources as well as recipients of change. […] Human niche construction has profoundly transformed both humans and the rest of nature, with the pace of transformation continually accelerating. Finding the right way to grasp the similarities and differences between human niche construction and the niche-constructing processes of other species is of utmost importance. 

In the current epoch of genetic and molecular engineering, anthropogenic climate change, and ecological collapse, the human planetary footprint is becoming every day more evident. Will we destroy our conditions of life and cause our own extinction? Will we bio-engineer our bodies and those of other living organisms? Will we geo-engineer Planet Earth? Will we be able to remove the barriers that separate us and other terrestrial beings from better modes of life? Will we revolutionize our praxis? If so, in what ways? 

The elaboration, modification, and spread of ideas about human nature is a part of human praxis that shapes other parts of human praxis and that, by doing so, conditions the ways we live, including the ways we organize and reorganize our social systems and our interactions with the rest of nature. Symbols can be causally powerful, including those symbols with which we humans think about ourselves as members of a species. […] A view that draws attention to the ways in which human nature can mutate is better than an eliminativist approach. However, for a view of human nature as mutable through praxis to work, one needs to acknowledge not just the transformative impact of human praxis but also its concrete materiality. We need to avoid seeing human nature as something rigid and unchangeable; at the same time, we need to reject any “attenuation of materialism.” 

In Part One of this book, I explore various classic perspectives on human nature, featuring ideas from Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, and others. The discussion shows how debates about human nature are often debates concerning the ways humans can or cannot cooperate and the ways our nature enables or constrains the social production (and reproduction) of valuable human goods and relations. Ideas about human nature often have a profound influence on how we continuously recreate and govern our modes of life. 

In Part Two, I make an intervention in contemporary discussions on the concept (or notion, or conception) of human nature. This part of the book criticizes various proposals concerning how we should think about human nature in abstract terms, and it makes an alternative proposal—one that focuses on plasticity, diversity, and transformative processes. In today’s context, ideas about human nature cannot be isolated from evolutionary biology and the sciences of human biocultural differences, as long as these sciences are understood in fully niche-constructionist terms. At the same time, a good way of thinking about human nature needs to consider the role played by ideas about human nature in social conflict and in structuring our modes of life. 

In the Conclusions, I revisit Timpanaro’s critique of Gramsci’s attenuated materialism and the general issues concerning human nature, human modes of life, and the embeddedness of human praxis.

Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases

Today's post is by Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw) on his recent paper, Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases (Episteme, 2022).

Krzysztof Sękowski

According to the standard view, in thought experiments (or more specifically in the method of cases) the conclusion is justified by intuitions about the applicability of a given concept. For instance, in Gettier Cases our intuition that we can not say that the protagonist in a story KNOWS something justifies our conclusion that JTB theory of knowledge is false. According to this view, the method of cases enables us to establish some truths about that concept. Therefore, it is considered a descriptive method, as it helps discover truths about a given concept without revising, regulating or explicating its meaning.

The paper presents a different view on this method. According to it this method can be interpreted as a normative method, within which arguments for revising the meaning of a scrutinized concept are provided. Thus, the method of cases might be understood not only as a method used within conceptual analysis but also as part of the conceptual engineering enterprise.

The paper discusses two crucial distinctions. The first one distinguishes between intuitions of intension (intuitions about general properties that an object falling under a given concept has), and intuitions of extension (intuitions about the applicability of a given concept in particular situations). The second distinction distinguishes between concept-application arguments and concept-revision arguments. Concept-application arguments aim to provide reasons for a claim that a particular concept applies in a given case, while concept-revision arguments aim to provide reasons for why we should think about a given concept in a particular way. The paper argues that the method of cases might be interpreted as providing one of both of these kinds of arguments. The crucial difference between them is that concept-application arguments rely on the content of intuitions of extension, while concept-revision arguments rely on the content of intuitions of intension. The paper shows, on the example of Gettier Cases, that the crucial feature of the normative interpretation of the method of cases in which its conclusion is justified by concept-revision arguments, is that it provides reasons based on general expectations towards the concept for abandoning intuitions on whether it applies to a certain case or not. Thereby, this interpretation of the method of cases makes it a useful tool for conceptual engineering purposes.

In the last parts of the paper, it shows that the normative interpretation of the method of cases provides a defense from the critique of that method provided by the negative program of experimental philosophy. This critique aims to show that this method is unreliable as it relies on intuitions, which are, according to empirical findings, sensitive to philosophically irrelevant factors such as culture, gender, personality, etc.. However, the paper argues that the conceptual-engineering-friendly interpretation, according to which the method of cases is justified by concept-revision arguments and the content of intuitions of intension, can be defended with the help of some particular form of expertise defense. The paper argues that experts' intuitions, that is, intuitions of speakers who are immersed in philosophical discourse and who express their expectations about a target concept, can form a reliable source of evidence for revisionary arguments. This is because they do not serve as evidence for the method of cases' conclusions but they provide reasons for a particular conceptual change.