Imperfect Cognitions

On 20th March 2026, at the Exchange in Birmingham, we held a workshop on Hearing Voices, Suicidality and AI psychosis, during Philosophy Fortnight. It was supported by University of Birmingham QR funding, the EPIC project, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and the Birmingham network for Phenomenology and Mental Health.  Here we report here from the morning talks, which were all on philosophical perspectives on the phenomenon of AI psychosis. Speakers and organisers To begin the session, the first presenter,  Elisabetta Lalumera  (University of Bologna), discussed the use of the concept "AI psychosis". Instead of asking whether AI psychosis is a real thing, she asked whether we should introduce "AI psychosis" as a medical concept, and she carefully reviewed reasons for and against adopting this concept. The use of concepts can be evaluated on the basis of need, relevance, evidence, alternatives and trade-off. Elisabetta argued convincingly that there is no good reas...

This post is by Nathália de Ávila (University of Cologne). Nathália de Ávila Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. […]  The spirits won’t starve, but we will perish. (Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská) In 2025, the journal Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience reported the case of a 26-year-old woman with no prior history of psychosis or mania who believed she was communicating with her deceased brother through an AI chatbot. A review of her chat logs showed that the system consistently validated her delusions. After hospitalization and treatment with antipsychotic medication, her symptoms resolved. Three months later, however, she continued her immersive interactions with ChatGPT. How does Artificial Intelligence transform the culture of grief?  Whatever ghost is believed to be hiding in ChatGPT, it is a very specific type that differs from ...

This week's post is by Floriane Brunet (Service de pédopsychiatrie, CH de Saint Nazaire) and Christophe Gauld (Service de Psychopathologie du Développement de l’Enfant et de l’Adolescent, Hôpital Femme Mère Enfant – Hospices Civils de Lyon).  Floriane Brunet  Christophe Gauld Today, growing attention is being directed toward self-diagnostic practices among teenagers, a trend that may legitimately be related to the notions of childism and epistemic injustice within adolescent psychiatry. These two notions provide insight into the multiple processes through which adolescents’ testimonies are silenced within Western societies. Becoming aware of this systemic invisibilization of singular adolescent experiences, as well as of the continuum of violence directed toward them, calls for renewed forms of adult engagement. How does this bundle of domination shape the way clinicians listen to adolescents lived experiences? How can the reception of self-diagnostic practices at this ag...

In this blog post, Lisa Bortolotti presents a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on Daniel Dennett's philosophy. Daniel Dennett It is difficult to think of a philosopher whose influence has been so pervasive as Daniel Dennett's. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that the terms he coined, the metaphors he created, and the thought experiments he devised have become instant classics, are part of everyone’s philosophical vocabulary, and still attract controversy and inspire new work. I have an enormous intellectual debt to Dennett. He was one of the main characters in my PhD dissertation, at the same time a villain (as I was arguing against a system's rationality being a constraint on the application of the intentional stance to the prediction of the system's behaviour) and a superhero (as I blindingly accepted his methodological rejection of philosophical exceptionalism).  It is a privilege, then, to be the editor of an issue of Philosophical Psychology dedica...

This post is by  Martina Rosola . Martina is a researcher in Philosophy of Language. Her main interest is the role of language in systems of injustice and how it can serve to either perpetuate or dismantle them. Within this perspective, she specialized in gender-fair language. Martina Rosola Evaluating gender-fair strategies in Italian Do you want to avoid the masculine generic and struggle to choose among the many gender-fair alternatives? This post is for you. Gender-fair language strategies abound and greatly differ from one another: some are hard for the reader, others for the writer; some aim to better represent women, others focus on non-binary people. But which one is “the best”? Being a philosopher, I cannot but reply “it depends”. If you have a word limit, visibility strategies, which repeat the masculine words in the feminine too (e.g., “lui o lei”, he or she), are counter-suggested. Innovative neutrality strategies substitute masculine words with neologisms (e.g., “lai”,...

This post is by Grace Lockrobin, Co-director of Thoughtful. Resources for Philosophy for Children Over the past few years, the charity established in 1992 as SAPERE, has undergone a metamorphosis. Our members and stakeholders agreed that we needed a new name that captures our commitment to the kind of dialogue that takes ideas seriously and treats interlocutors sensitively. In short, thoughtful dialogue. It turns out that our new name was staring us in the face. We are pleased to share Thoughtful’s  new website , a refreshed digital space that we hope better articulates (and facilitates) our work in Philosophy for Children and Communities (P4C).  Thoughtful new website Thoughtful has spent more than three decades supporting philosophical enquiry in schools and communities across the United Kingdom. The new site offers a clearer and more welcoming way to explore that work, while expressing the same mission and vision. At the centre of Thoughtful’s approach is a simple but strik...

This week's post is by Enara Garcia,  Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at Department of Psychology, University of Southern Denmark.    Enara Garcia  In recent years, psychotherapy has become a central cultural reference point for understanding ourselves and regulating our distress. Yet the more therapy saturates public discourse, the more urgent it becomes to ask what kind of psychotherapy we actually need. I have been investigating therapeutic relationships from embodied perspectives for some years. What follows is a personal reflection on why psychotherapy needs a more critical, relational, and process‐sensitive orientation. A first step is rethinking what we mean by mental health . Rather than treating mental conditions as cognitive dysfunctions or biomedical pathologies, I understand mental health as our capacity to create not only meaningful worlds, but also worlds that are significant for us. This requires distinguishing meaning —the content o...

This week's post is by Shao-Pu Kang, a n assistant professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Graduate Institute of Philosophy,  his recent publication Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness in Review of Philosophy and Psychology .    Shao-Pu Kang  Suppose you see a sunrise. You are thrilled, feel a chill in the air, hear your inner voice saying “that’s magnificent,” imagine enjoying the view with your best friend, and think about your loved one. As you undergo these mental states, do you experience them as yours, even be fore you turn your attention to and reflect on them? This question lies at the heart of live debates about whether experiences come with a built-in sense of ownership, often called mineness: a pre-reflective awareness of one’s experiences as one’s own. In “Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness,” I critically examine Marie Guillot’s novel attempt to defend typicalism, the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness.  Guillot star...

This post is by Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) and Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada). It is based on their chapter “ Embodied, embedded, enactive, extended… and exclusionary? Toward an inclusive E-Cognition for cognitive diversity, ” published in Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition , which explores how 4E approaches can be made more inclusive of neurodiversity.  Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) If, following Alice Crary and the political turn in analytic philosophy, one takes the conceptual and methodological to be political, then 4E Mental Health concepts express a range of political commitments. Some of these merit special attention in debates about how cognitive diversity and disability should be understood and recognized. In our chapter at Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition , this is exactly our goal: to critically examine 4E Mental Health from the lens of the Neurodiversity movement and its academic branch, the neurodiver...

This post is by Pablo Andrés López Silva (University of Valparaíso) and Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada). It draws on their paper “A Roadmap to 4E Mental Health,” published in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, where they develop a 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) framework for understanding mental health and psychopathology.  Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo  (University of Granada)       As a teenager, I (Miguel) spent a significant amount of my weekend nights compulsively collecting all the trash left in the parks where I used to get trashed with my friends. Back home, I would then spend some more time aligning all the stuff in my massively misaligned desk in straight angles. And I did so out of fear that a nasty, omnipotent Karmic force—whose existence I deemed almost certainly impossible—could hurt my then-partner in retaliation for my past misbehavior. Fortunately, I eventually escaped the grip of my Karmic ob...

This post is by Charlotte Gauvry and Uwe Peters. Introducing themes of their recent paper "Epistemic Challenges Faced by Non-native English Speakers in Philosophy: Evidence from an International Survey"   published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Charlotte is a teaching and research associate at Univerity of Bonn and Uwe is an assistant professor at Utrecht University.    Charlotte Gauvry The English language now dominates analytic philosophy. This has extensive benefits for international collaboration and communication. But does it also create unfair inequalities for non-native English speakers in the field? Things could be relatively fair if non-native English speakers with university-level English proficiency needed roughly the same amount of time to read, write, and prepare talks in English as native English speakers do. After all, in student essay grading, hiring decisions, journal reviewing, and so on, it is widely implicitly assumed that both groups face c...

This post is by Michael Cholbi and Paolo Stellino. Michael Cholbi is Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of Suicide: The Philosophical Dimension and Grief: A Philosophical Guide . Paolo Stellino is a researcher at the NOVA University of Lisbon, and author of Philosophical Perspectives on Suicide: Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein . They have recently published The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide   with Oxford University Press.  Michael Cholbi According to the World Health Organization (2023), suicide results in nearly eight hundred thousand deaths per year globally, nearly twice the number who die due to homicide. Global rates of suicide have declined in most parts of the world over the past generation, but there are some notable outliers where rates have increased. Some governments and health authorities have developed smartphone apps or partnered with social media platforms such as Facebook to...

This weeks post is by Dr. Lena Wimmer, University of Würzburg. Presenting her recent paper Why Disinformation, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories are not Fiction: A View From Philosophical Aesthetics and Literary Studies   published in  Review of Philosophy and Psychology Lena Wimmer    Not just in everyday conversations, but also in academic discussions, unreliable information – like misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories – is often compared to fiction. I want to question whether that comparison really holds up. First, let us clarify what we mean by these different kinds of unreliable information. All of them operate at the level of individual claims or statements. Misinformation is the broadest category: it simply refers to false information, no matter whether the person sharing it means to mislead or not. Disinformation is more specific – it is false information shared deliberately to deceive. Fake news is a form of disinformation that ...

This post is by Víctor Verdejo, one of the editors – together with José Luis Bermúdez and Matheus Valente – of the collection Sharing Thoughts: Philosophical Perspectives on Intersubjectivity and Communication , recently published with Oxford University Press. He is a philosopher of mind and language, Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and currently leads a number of research projects on communication, intersubjectivity and the self. More information can be found here . Cover of Sharing Thoughts Are you thinking what I am thinking? Well, it might be hard for you to know without further context, and in particular, without me telling you what that could be. But this way of talking certainly illustrates how natural and easy it is to consider the possibility of shared thoughts. We are all used to the idea that thoughts, ideas and experiences can be talked about, expressed and ultimately shared with our peers. And the force of this idea not only sits deeply with...