Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Eugenia Lancellotta, who has recently completed her doctoral project at the University of Birmingham, on the adaptiveness of delusions and delusions in OCD. Here Eugenia presents some ideas from an article she published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology in 2021, entitled: "Is the biological adaptiveness of delusions doomed? ". Eugenia also discussed some themes from her research in this video interview . Eugenia Lancellotta How likely is it that you father has been replaced by an imposter? Or that you are the Emperor of Antarctica? These beliefs are instances of delusions: fixed, irrational beliefs that are not amenable to change in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. In popular culture, delusions are considered to be the mark of madness, while psychiatry usually takes them to be the symptoms of a serious mental illness. However, in countertendency to the narrative that sees delusions as pathological, some researchers working in the f...

Today's post is by Eugenia Lancellotta (University of Birmingham). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Delusions in the two-factor theory: pathological or adaptive? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on  Bounds of Rationality . Eugenia Lancellotta Are delusions pathological, adaptive, or both? I investigated this issue with Lisa Bortolotti. We framed the question in the context of one of the most popular theories of delusion formation and maintenance: the two-factor theory. Two-factor theories hold that the formation and maintenance of delusions involve two factors. Factor 1 is usually a neuropsychological impairment, while Factor 2 is a cognitive deficit or bias. While two-factor theorists agree on the broad two-factor architecture involved in the formation and maintenance of delusions, they disagree on some aspects of it. Coltheart and McKay are among the most prominent two factor theorists....

Eugenia Lancellotta is a PhD student in Philosophy of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Under the supervision of Lisa Bortolotti , she works on the adaptiveness of delusions, especially outside schizophrenia spectrum disorder. In this post, she discusses her paper “ Are clinical delusions adaptive ?” co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, that recently appeared in WIREs. In popular culture, and even in part of the scientific culture, delusions are still considered as the mark of madness. It would then seem to be counterintuitive to ask whether such bizarre, irrational and often harmful beliefs can be biologically or psychologically adaptive.  A trait or mechanism is considered to be biologically adaptive when it favours the reproductive success and survival of the organism it belongs to (Wakefield 1992). By analogy with biological adaptiveness, a trait is deemed to be psychologically adaptive when it delivers psychological benefits which support the wellbeing and ...

This post is authored by Juliette Vazard, a PhD candidate at the  Center for Affective Sciences  at the University of Geneva, and at the  Institut Jean Nicod  at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.  In this post she discusses her paper “ Epistemic Anxiety, Adaptive Cognition, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ” recently published in Discipline Filosofiche. I am curious about what certain types of dysfunctional epistemic reasoning present in affective disorders might reveal about the role that emotions play in guiding our epistemic activities. Recently, my interest was drawn to the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety has often been understood as belonging to the domain of psychopathology, and the role of this emotion in the everyday lives of healthy individuals has long remained understudied. In this article I argue that anxiety plays an important role in guiding our everyday epistemic activities, and that when it is ill-calibrated, this is likely to result in ...

Today's post is provided by Professor Nancy Snow. My name is Nancy Snow and I am a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma (see here for more information). My paper, “ Adaptive Misbeliefs, Value Trade-Offs, and Epistemic Consequentialism ,” was recently published in the volume Epistemic Consequentialism, edited by Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij and Jeffrey Dunn (Oxford University Press, 2018). As the book’s title suggests, the collection is about various aspects of epistemic consequentialism. This is a view in the theory of knowledge (epistemology), according to which the production of epistemic value is the end at which beliefs or belief-producing processes aim. Epistemic consequentialism parallels ethical consequentialism in structure. I.e., just as ethical consequentialism tells us we should maximize happiness or utility in our actions, so epistemic consequentialism tells us we should maximize...

In this post I interview Steve Cole Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine . VM: Loneliness has been characterized in reference to feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a mismatch between a person’s desired and achieved levels of social relations. In some of your latest papers you suggest that the experience of loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon but that, as any other adaptive predispositions, it can be found across phylogeny. In what sense can we say that animals desire social relations and experience loneliness?  SC: We begin by assuming that certain experiences are privileged to human beings but the more we understand about how human experience arises from the way the brain works, the more we find that there are small or vestigial versions of even the most esoteric human experiences in other animals. Most animals, for example monkeys and mammals, broadly speaking, are to some extent, ...

In this post Andrea Polonioli interviews Ralph Hertwig (pictured below), director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality  at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. AP: According to popular accounts offered in the field of judgment and decision-making, people are prone to cognitive biases, and such biases are conducive to maladaptive behaviour. Based on your research, to what extent the claim that cognitive biases are costly is warranted by available evidence? If you had to identify one particular bias that is especially worrisome, because it typically results in negative real life outcomes, which one would this be? RH: This is a hotly debated topic in research on behavioral decision making and beyond. Many cognitive biases have been defined as such because they violate coherence norms, under the assumption that a single syntactical rule such as consistency, transitivity, the conjunction rule, or Bayes’ rule suffices to evaluate behavior. I believe that s...

The Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Cardiff Business School (pictured below), on 7th and 8th July 2016. The conference featured four keynote lectures and several papers in parallel sessions. Here I am briefly reporting from the two keynote lectures delivered on the second day of the conference. Samir Okasha (University of Bristol), pictured below, discussed in his keynote lecture the use of intentional language in describing the work of evolution. For instance, sometimes we say that the gene “knows” that it was inherited, or that an organism has a preference for a certain outcome to be selected. How should we understand the use of intentional language in this context? Is the intentionality of the language of biology something we can dispense with if we choose to, is it just a shorthand? Samir argues that it is more than a shorthand and delivers insights into evolution. Darwinian evolution is described in ter...

Here I am reporting from "Optimism – Its Nature, Causes, and Effects" (#optimismbias2016), an interdisciplinary workshop organised by Anneli Jefferson and myself as part of the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project . It took place in Senate House, London, on 25-26th February 2016, and featured both philosophers and psychologists as speakers and participants. We wanted to investigate whether the notion of unrealistic optimism is coherent and how its different manifestations relate to one another. For instance, does the disposition to discount evidence against the success of one’s performance lead to the acquisition of positive illusions about the self? In addition, we wanted experts to comment on the empirical evidence suggesting that unrealistic optimism has both costs and benefits. On day 1, Tali Sharot (UCL) kicked off the workshop. Tali (pictured above) asked how the human brain forms optimistic beliefs and reported recent findings from her lab. She focused o...

On 4 th  and 5 th  February project  PERFECT  hosted their first major event, PERFECT 2016, a two day workshop on  False but Useful Beliefs . The workshop was held in the Herringham Hall at Regent’s Conferences and Events (pictured above) in London. In this post I give a brief overview of the ten papers presented at the workshop.  Anandi Hattiangadi  (Stockholm), pictured above, opened the workshop with a paper entitled: ‘Radical Interpretation and Implicit Cognition’. Anandi considered the prospects for the possibility of Lewisian radical interpretation which requires an entailment from the physical truths about some subject to intentional truths about her. In light of recent work in experimental psychology, in particular, work on heuristics which lead to irrational actions from the point of view of decision theory, she concluded that radical interpretation is impossible.  In discussion time, there was an opportunity for Anandi to clari...

This post is by Aleea Devitt (pictured above), a recent PhD student in the School of Psychology at the University of Aukland. In this post Aleea summarises her paper ' Factors That Influence the Generation of Autobiographical Memory Conjunction Errors ',  co-written with Edwin Monk-Fromont, Daniel L. Schacter, and Donna Rose Addis,  published in Memory. When remembering a past event, we typically cannot pluck a whole memory neatly from our brains, as we would a folder from a filing cabinet. The individual features comprising a memory are distributed throughout our brains, so remembering a past experience is more similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle; all the pieces must be located and assembled correctly to construct a coherent memory. This constructive memory system provides a flexibility that is generally adaptive (Schacter, Guerin, and St Jacques 2011 ), in that we can update memories with new information (Lee 2009 ), and assemble memory fragments in ...

This is the first in a series of two posts by Phil Corlett (pictured above) and Sarah Fineberg (pictured below). Phil and Sarah are both based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. In this post and the next they discuss the adaptive value of delusional beliefs via their predictive coding model of the mind, and the potential delusions have for epistemic benefits (see their recent paper ' The Doxastic Shear Pin: Delusions as Errors of Learning and Memory ', in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry). Phil presented a version of the arguments below at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 2015, as part of a session on delusions sponsored by project PERFECT . The predictive coding model of mind and brain function and dysfunction seems to be committed to veracity; at its heart is an error correcting, plastic, learning mechanism that ought to maximize future rewards, and minimize future punishments like the agents of traditional microec...

This post is by Alex Tillas and James Trafford . Alex is a a Research Fellow at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany. He holds a PhD from University of Bristol and is mainly working on philosophy of psychology and cognitive science, broadly construed. James is a Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies at the University of the Creative Arts in London. He completed a PhD in philosophy of mind at the University of East London, and his primary research interests lie in reasoning, rationality, and logical inferentialism.   This post is based on their co-authored papers ' Intuition and Reason: Re-assessing Dual-Process Theories with Representational Sub-Activation ', forthcoming in Teorema, and 'The Fear Factor: Reconsidering the Roles of Emotion in Reasoning', currently under review. Emotionally responding to environmental cues is crucial for adaptive human behaviour. For instance, in the presence of a predator, fear can be a good advisor since it can sha...

This post is by Pablo López-Silva , a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Pablo (pictured above) works on philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia, and is supervised by Joel Smith and Tim Bayne . Here Pablo summarises his recent paper ' Schizophrenia and the Place of Egodystonic States in the Aetiology of Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.  Paradigmatic cases of thought insertion involve the delusional belief with the content [someone/something is placing a thought with the content […] into my mind/head] (Mellor 1970 ; Mullins and Spence 2003 ). Despite the diagnostic relevance of this phenomenon, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. In this context, two projects can be distinguished. On the one hand, the motivational project characterizes thought insertion as resulting from the mind’s attempt to deal with highly stressing psychological conflicts. On the other hand, the ...

This is the second in our series of posts on the papers published in a  special  issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Maarten Boudry summarises his paper (co-written with  Michael   Vlerick  and Ryan McKay ) ' Can Evolution get us off the Hook? Evaluating the Ecological Defence of Human Rationality '. In the opening lines of his essay ' An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish ', Bertrand Russell wrote that 'Man is a rational animal  –  so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it'. Russell’s cry of despair is echoed by many writers. There is a cottage industry of books purporting to show that man is anything but a rational animal. Human reason, or so we are told, is a paltry and botched device, riddled with bias and error. Humans are foolish, obstinate, supersti...

Will McNeill This post is by Will McNeill , currently a teaching fellow at King's College London. He researches the epistemology of perception and recognition. The main focus of  PERFECT  is on finding the epistemically valuable within mental pathologies of varying seriousness; of identifying pathological beliefs which are at least epistemically innocent. But in this post I want to bring our attention back to the cognitive processes of those with no serious cognitive impairments. It would not surprise me if many of our cognitive processes turn out to be epistemically innocent in a particularly  direct  way. They may turn out to be reliable, and to produce justified beliefs, while not being capable of  explaining  why the beliefs they produce are justified. Justified beliefs which are the direct products of such epistemically innocent processes are – I believe – foundational. Suppose that we had good reason to think that someone was good at spot...

In this post, Ezio Di Nucci presents his book Mindlessness (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Di Nucci is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Universität Duisburg-Essen . His latest book is Ethics Without Intention . Philosophy is still hanging on to an over-intellectualistic picture of human judgement and agency – or Mindlessness by Ezio Di Nucci so I contend in my book. Our ability for thought is a useful resource, but one that we use less frequently than philosophers often assume – and that’s a good thing. Deliberation is not always the best way to deal with life’s challenges; on the contrary, we are often better off not thinking; other times we are just not worse off and it is therefore more efficient not to think. The book begins by looking at data which has been accumulating in behavioural and social psychology over the last few decades, especially with relation to habits, skilled performances and priming. Expert golfers, for example, perform better when under time pressur...

I am posting this on behalf of Andrea Polonioli, PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Andrea Polonioli My PhD project analyzes some recent developments in the ‘rationality debate’, which originated as a reaction to the body of research that has followed Kahneman and Tversky’s work within the Heuristics-and-Biases project. Empirical evidence suggested that people are prone to widespread and systematic reasoning errors, and pessimistic views of human rationality have been quite popular in the psychological literature. However, this picture has also attracted fierce criticisms, and several researchers have recently questioned pessimistic assessments of human rationality by emphasizing the central importance of evolutionary considerations in our understanding of rationality.  In a paper I recently published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences I present some steps already taken in my project. In particular, I critically discuss some research that has come togeth...

Our project logo. My research so far has been on belief, and this is an area I will continue to focus on. I am interested in researching two main areas: first, how best to think about delusional beliefs when we look to the biological function of belief, and second, accounts of delusion formation. In my PhD I defended a biological account of belief according to which our mechanisms of belief-production have (at least) two biological functions proper to them. The first is the function to produce true beliefs, and the second is the function to produce useful beliefs. When I say ‘useful’, I do not mean useful an approximation to truth, but rather useful with respect to facilitating the effective functioning of the believer. I was mainly concerned with explaining the connection between belief and truth, and so much of the work was done by appeal to the function of producing true beliefs. However, towards the end of my thesis, I gestured towards the kind of explanatory work which m...

In this post I would like to introduce our new project, PERFECT , which started a week ago and will last for five years. The next few weeks on the blog are dedicated to an initial exploration of the project themes, with posts by team members and interviews with people who have inspired us. (I interviewed Martin Davies, who was my PhD supervisor and introduced me to the psychological literature on delusions. The first part of the interview appeared here , and the second part will be published on Thursday). The project is funded by a European Research Council Consolidator grant awarded to me last December. The funding allows me to explore a novel idea and provides the resources for building a team. Currently, the PERFECT team includes Ema Sullivan-Bissett (post-doc) and Magdalena Antrobus (PhD student) who are based in the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham. Other two post-doctoral researchers and another PhD student will join the team at a later stage....