Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Changsheng Lai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University).   Changsheng Lai You believe that you locked the door before you left your house, but do you really remember that? Your belief about the past episode might be true, but in what sense is the past episode genuinely remembered rather than being just accurately imagined or veridical confabulated? A popular view, which I refer to as ‘mnemic reliabilism’, suggests that the process of remembering is distinguished by its reliability condition. That is, successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process.  Prominent champions of this view include the simulationist Kourken Michaelian ( Michaelian 2016 ) and the causalist Markus Werning ( Werning 2020 ). Besides, you might also find mnemic reliabilism attractive if you are sympathetic to both the orthodox view that ‘remembering entails knowing’ and the idea that ‘knowledge requires reliability’. In my recent paper entitled ‘ Remembering requires no reliabili...

In this post, I report from our applied epistemology panel at the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference 2018, held in Utrecht from 29th June – 1st July. When you think about typically ‘applied’ sub-disciplines of philosophy, epistemology might not be the first area of study to cross your mind. But Boudewijn de Bruin and Lisa Warenski , two speakers from last year’s panel on Applied Epistemology in the Professions decided that an applied epistemology panel should be a fixture of the SAP annual conference, and together with Anneli Jefferson and myself, put together a proposal, looking at deepening understanding of the application of the concept of epistemic injustice to topics in both mental health and finance for this year. (Unfortunately Lisa couldn’t make it on the day, so I report on just the three talks, but do keep an eye out for her work in this area!) First Boudewijn explored epistemic injustice in consumer markets, starting from the observation that...

In this post I introduce a paper I wrote with Ema Sullivan-Bissett on the epistemic benefits of clinical memory distortions, which recently appeared open access in Mind and Language . It is one of the core outputs of two recent projects, the AHRC-funded Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions and the ERC-funded project PERFECT . The key message in the paper has received some coverage in the press ( Medicalxpress , India Blooms , Laboratory Equipment,  and Health Canal ).  In Keeping Mum , Marianne Talbot describes how her mother was a great storyteller before she had dementia. One of her best stories was how one day, when she was 14, she was late for school because her mother had just given birth to twins. The headmistress did not believe that that was the reason for being late and punished her, which she felt was a great injustice. When dementia advanced, the story about the twins’ birth ended up being merged with other stories (for instance, other sto...

This post is by  Anil Ananthaswamy , science journalist and author, and consultant for New Scientist magazine. He has previously worked as a staff writer and deputy news editor at New Scientist’s London offices. He teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, and has been a guest editor at the University of California Santa Cruz’s science writing program. In this post, Anil presents his new book, The Man Who Wasn't There. Many people have asked me why I wrote The Man Who Wasn’t There (which examines what neuropsychological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia tell us about the human sense of self), especially since neuroscience is far removed from the topic of my previous book, The Edge of Physics , which dealt with cosmology and astroparticle physics. Curiosity and a desire to write brought me to science journalism—and I went where they took me. The quest to understand the universe and ou...

The Mental Health Foundation has made available on its website a literature review on truth-telling in dementia that I found really interesting to read. The review is part of an inquiry into distressing symptoms of dementia funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The reviewer is Yulia Kartalova-O'Doherty. The upshot of the inquiry is supposed to consist in practical recommendations for carers and healthcare professionals who find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, challenging the patient's beliefs when they are delusional (e.g., the belief that a loved one is still alive when she has been dead for some time, or the belief that the spouse is a deceitful impostor) causes considerable distress to the patient; on the other hand, not challenging the beliefs seems wrong as it involves lying or implies disrespect towards the patient. One of the findings of the literature review is that current guidelines to healthcare professionals do not justify lying, but in practice...

Marco Canevelli The Imperfect Cognitions blog is launching a new feature, interviews with experts on topical issues. For Dementia Awareness Week (18-24 May 2014), I interviewed Marco Canevelli on Alzheimer's disease. Marco is a neurologist, working at the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry of the “Sapienza” University of Rome. He is currently attending a doctoral school in neuroscience in Rome and he is a visiting researcher at the Institute of Aging in the Gérontopôle of Toulouse. His main clinical and research interests are Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, subjective cognitive complaints, cognitive frailty, and dementia prevention. LB: What would you say are the main implications of Alzheimer’s disease for cognitive function? MC: "Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia. In its typical expression, AD is a slowly progressive disorder characterized by the insidious onset, usually after the age of 65 years, of a progressive impairm...

Departures from reality and self-enhancing distortions apply not just to beliefs about the present and to future predictions , but also to memories. People neglect evidence of bad performance, concentrating on evidence of good performance, and emphasising their contribution to successful enterprises. When one’s personal story takes an unexpected direction, there are two conflicting epistemic demands: one needs to impose some coherence between new and previous episodes in the story, but also guarantee as much correspondence as possible between the story and the experienced reality. These principles of coherence and correspondence apply to autobiographical memory ( Conway 2005 ): memories are sometimes altered to preserve a coherent self as the past is re-written to make sense of current goals and a new self-image.  Distortions exaggerating continuity between previous and present self may also be psychologically adaptive by enhancing self-appraisal and well-being. One ins...

Alessandro Blasimme  & Marco Canevelli The relationship between mental capacities and autonomy has long been a matter of dispute, but we can surmise that clinical judgments about one’s mental capacities may incorporate or support considerations about patients’ autonomy as well as value judgments bearing on the choice of different therapeutic options, on how and to which degree a patient should be involved in therapeutic decisions and, finally, on the role of caregivers. This has important consequences for patients affected by dementia. Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are defined as “a heterogeneous set of psychological reactions, psychiatric symptoms and anomalous behaviours that appear in patients with dementia, of any etiology” ( Finkel et al. 1996 ).