Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Katja Crone and Max Gab (TU Dortmund) present the Special Issue “Minimal Forms of Shared Intentionality,” which they recently guest-edited for  Philosophical Psychology . Max Gab Shared intentionality is a ubiquitous, fundamental, and multifaceted phenomenon. People act together, share thoughts, beliefs, and emotional states. It lies at the heart of basic human capacities like joint attention, communication, and social cognition. The concept is also used to explain higher-level forms of human organization, such as corporate agency, political communities, and even monetary systems. This has led to a sprawling field of research that combines ideas and methods from various disciplines, including developmental and evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, phenomenology, and classical analytical approaches in philosophy.  While debates about shared intentionality have been productive, established approaches to explain it also face problems that motivate an investigati...

This post is by Carme Isern-Mas and Ivar R. Hannikainen whose paper , "Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual Structure", was recently published open access in  Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Carme and Ivar In the first episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend , successful New York lawyer Rebecca Bloom bumps into her ex-boyfriend Josh Chan, who announces he is moving back to his hometown in California. Impulsively, Rebecca quits her job and follows him. Although she claims this is simply to live near the beach, it is clear to the audience that she is really hoping to win Josh back. Does Rebecca’s case count as self-deception? As with many other concepts in analytic philosophy, this hinges on how different features or conditions shape the concept of self-deception. Intentionalists argue that self-deception requires the agent to intend to deceive themselves, often starting from an unwelcome true belief. On this view, Rebecca must knowingly suppress her true motive and deli...

This post is by Chenwei Nie  (University of Warwick). In this post, Chenwei discusses a proposal detailed in his new chapter, "Why rational people obstinately hold onto irrational beliefs: A new approach", to appear in a book entitled Epistemic Dilemmas and Epistemic Normativity ( Routledge). Chenwei Nie In the middle of this brutal summer, with scorching heatwaves across Europe, Asia, and North America, it is poignant that so many believe that climate change is not real. Nearly 15% of Americans believe it is not real ( Gounaridis & Newell, 2024 ), and among the members of the 118th US Congress, almost a quarter share this belief, who are all Republicans ( So, 2024 ). Even more alarming, climate change denial is just one example in a much broader, unsettling set of irrational beliefs, including but not limited to cases of superstitious, religious, political, and conspiratorial beliefs. The burning question is: Why do people obstinately hold onto irrational beliefs in the ...

Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the American College of Greece and Visiting Professor of Parenting and Special Education at KU Leuven. His research regards the philosophy of psychiatry, particularly issues of evidence based diagnosis, as well as phenomenological psychiatry and the use of client expertise in psychotherapy. In this post, he discusses the themes of his recent BJPsych editorial . Themistoklis Pantazakos For seventy years psychiatry has hunted biological markers to anchor its diagnoses in hard science. From brain imaging to genomics, each new tool promised parity with the rest of medicine, yet no major mental disorder has a specific biomarker. This gap feeds two linked accusations: psychiatric categories don’t track real diseases, and, without biomarkers, psychiatrists wield excessive, culturally loaded authority, sometimes inflating pathology in step with pharmaceutical incentives. Critics imply that bioma...

On 17 June at the University of Birmingham, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies organised a workshop on conspiracy theories and storytelling with a stellar line-up. This post is a report of the event. The workshop is part of a project called "Film, Storytelling and Conspiracies" funded by a University of Birmingham Research Incubator Hub. Conspiracy theories online First talk was by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) and was entitled "Conspiratorial Beliefs and Conspiracy Fantasies: Engaging with Wu Ming 1". The premise for the talk was that many think that conspiracy beliefs are on the rise and affect our political choices ("vibes-based politics"). One idea by Napolitano (2021) is that attempts to debunk conspiratorial beliefs with facts, evidence, and rational arguments do not work. Catarina aimed to respond to Napolitano. Catarina Dutilh Novaes Wu Ming (in Mandarin, "No Name") is a collective originating in Bologna, a group of writers active in liter...

This post is by Manuel Almagro  (University of Valencia). Here he presents his new book, The Rise of Polarization (Routledge 2025). Book cover When I was young, I used to think that doing things you don’t like or that don’t represent you was always wrong. I also believed that all politicians were cut from the same cloth. If asked, I could give reasons for those beliefs. But I hadn’t arrived at them by carefully considering arguments or evidence; they just felt perfectly natural and obviously true, given my experiences and environment at the time. Today, I wouldn’t hold such beliefs. Is that because I’ve been exposed to arguments against them? Not really. I’ve changed through living, talking, and sharing experiences with people who see things differently. Friction with others, especially those who care about us, is essential for reflecting on what’s right, how we should live, and what we should believe. The experiences I’ve gone through have made me more receptive to the pull of ce...

Perri Sriwannawit recently defended her PhD thesis in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. This blog post is an adapted version of the discussion on romantic love in her PhD thesis. Perri Sriwannawit Harry Frankfurt (2004, p. 80) argues that love happens outside of our immediate control; we cannot control who we love or stop loving them on a whim. However, Frankfurt still suggests that love is free in an important sense. In this article, I will propose that love is only somewhat involuntary in the sense that he suggests, and that his notion of freedom is not the only way to explain freedom in love. In Frankfurt’s (1971) earlier work , he argues that freedom of the will is grounded in the alignment of first-order desire (the desire that motivates us to act) and second-order volition (what we truly endorse as our desire). Frankfurt’s conception of freedom is not to do with whether we have voluntary control, but more to do with whether our volitional structure is aligned as such. ...

The first ever academic event in Chile completely devoted to the philosophy of psychiatry took place on the 16th April in Valparaíso. The I Workshop in Philosophy of Psychiatry was led by Professor Pablo López-Silva and organized by the Universidad de Valparaíso School of Psychology and the Valparaíso Institute of Complex Systems.  Poster of the event The event gathered an interdisciplinary audience of 60 people around the work of 8 local and international researchers in the field. The Keynote Speech was given by Dr Renato Matoso, Director of the Department of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In his talk, "Psychotic, Psychedelic, and Religious Experiences: What Can We Learn from Their Joint Study?", Matoso discussed a number of phenomenological and mechanistic similarities found in psychotic, psychedelic, and religious experiences. Matoso proposed to understand these three types of experiences as a continuum where differences can be ...

This post is by Lina Lissia. Lina's research focuses on formal epistemology, philosophy of action, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari within the PRIN PNRR project Metaphor and Epistemic Injustice in Mental Illness: The Case of Schizophrenia . In addition to her academic work, she practices as a psychoanalyst in Paris. Lina Lissia Miranda Fricker introduced the concept of hermeneutical injustice , a type of epistemic injustice in which individuals or groups lack the conceptual tools to articulate their experiences. This absence of language prevents recognition and understanding, leaving certain realities invisible. In recent years, this phenomenon has become especially evident in the world of dating, where a surge of neologisms— ghosting , breadcrumbing , orbiting , zombieing , and many more—has emerged as an attempt to give shape to experiences that were previously unrecognized. The rising of dating neol...

In this post, Joe Pierre, professor of psychology at UC San Francisco, discusses his recently published book, False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True (OUP, 2025) False As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs. In psychiatry, false beliefs like cognitive distortions or delusions are typically chalked up to psychopathology. People have cognitive distortions because they have major depressive disorderand people are delusional because they have schizophrenia. And although research might tell us that delusional thinking can be attributed to anomalous subjective experiences or a “jumping to conclus...

Today's post is by Simon Barker (University of Tartu) on his recent paper, "Epistemic health, epistemic self-trust, and bipolar disorder: a case study " ( Synthese 2025). Simon Barker Four years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (and later, ADHD). My mind soon after returned to the point when my PhD studies were violently derailed by what I now see as a mix of depression and mania. Then, it took an extended break and inordinate support from my partner, supervisors, and other staff in the Sheffield philosophy department to get me over the line. Now, from my post-diagnosis vantage, I saw that those struggles fit a pattern. My bipolar disorder (and ADHD) and intellectual life have always fluctuated together – as if the same thing. My depressions comes with intellectual disinterest, crashing confidence, and an inability to think; my manias with an urgent flame of intellectual grandiosity yet thoughts racing too fast to make sense of. This entangled mental health an...

On the occasion of  #PhiloFortnight2025 , a period of two weeks in the UK dedicated to promoting philosophy, a webinar took place to demostrate some methods and resources that can be used to bring philosophical reflection and discussion in the classroom. Poster of the webinar The three panelists are all philosophers from the University of Birmingham and presented methods that they researched and practised and materials they designed: Laura D'Olimpio   (School of Education), author of Philosophy of Education (Palgrave 2025) and The Necessity of Aesthetic Education: the place of the arts on the curriculum (Bloomsbury 2024), and co-founding editor of the open access Journal of Philosophy in Schools . Henry Taylor (Department of Philosophy) works at the interface of philosophy and STEM subjects, with a special interest in consciousness, perception, and attention. Some of his recent research is on cultural robotics (e.g., see " A culture of their own ").   Li...