Imperfect Cognitions

The blog post today is by Arthur Krieger (Temple University) on his recent paper " Torturous withdrawal: Emotional compulsion in addiction " ( European Journal of Philosophy , 2024). Arthur Krieger   We’ve all heard addiction described as a “compulsion.” People with addictions (here I’ll just say ‘addicts’) often act in ways that are so out of character, so self-destructive, and so contrary to their own stated aims, that we feel the need for a special explanation. Compulsion is the main concept used to explain addictive behavior, particularly in health sciences like medicine and psychology. What exactly is compulsion? That’s a surprisingly difficult question. It is sometimes glossed as continuing to do something despite being aware of its serious negative consequences. But that includes far too much, like using a chair instead of a standing desk at work, or eating an eclair every night despite a recent high cholesterol reading. One traditional view is that compulsion is a c...

Today's post is by Federico Burdman , based in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who summarises his paper entitled "Recalcitrant Desires in Addiction", forthcoming in volume 8 of the Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility . Federico Burdman This piece of research is on the psychology of addiction. Being addicted to something —say, psychoactive drugs, including alcohol— is not just about enjoying drugs and using them frequently. It is also more than just wanting to use drugs very much. Plainly, not all forms of wanting something very much and doing it a lot amount to addiction. Consider the analogy: a student may be determined and highly motivated to graduate from school, spend long hours studying and training for that purpose, even neglect other activities on that account, and still not be ‘addicted’ to studying in any sensible sense. One key difference between addiction and other forms of behavior issuing from powerful motiva...

Today's post is by Reinier Schuur, who is a PhD candidate in philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His primary research interest is in philosophy of medicine. Reinier won the 2022 Peter Sowerby Prize for his essay ‘The Puzzle of Addiction: Knowledge of the Good as an Achievement’. This is a short version of his essay for a wider audience.  Reinier Schuur The puzzle of addiction refers to the problem of explaining how addictive behaviour appears to be both voluntary and destructive. This puzzle arises when we assume that people will stop engaging in a voluntary behaviour if the costs outweigh the benefits, all else being equal. The main solution to the puzzle had been to argue that addictive behaviour is in fact involuntary. This solution, however, has come under criticism over the last few decades, with both empirical data and theoretical analysis arguing that addictive behaviour is voluntary in some significant sense. But this raises again th...

This post is by Kelly Saunders. Kelly did an undergrad degree three decades ago. She completed a Bachelor of General Studies at Simon Fraser University in greater Vancouver. Philosophy was by far her favourite. After her degree she worked at a few jobs, including as a mental health worker, before ultimately deciding to open a small business.  During all the years of running her business, she never quite lost the feeling of wishing she had pursued philosophy to a greater extent. When she came to a "fork in the road" a year ago, she discovered the M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at Birmingham. Her hope is to use her M.A. to work as a philosophical counsellor. When it comes to the issue of responsibility and psychopathology, Hanna Pickard's contributions are immensely valuable for the subject of addiction. She helpfully differentiates between responsibility and blameworthiness in addiction. That is, she maintains that while it may be unhelpful, and morally q...

Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio . Her research program in philosophy of science and mind aims to enhance psychiatric epistemology by developing methods for supplementing the existing scientific literature with a philosophical study of the first-person accounts of those with mental illness.  She draws on the scientific literature on mental illness, philosophical literature on the self, and the ethics literature on what contributes to human flourishing to facilitate the expansion of psychiatric knowledge that will ultimately yield to effective treatments of mental illness. Here she discusses her article, “Brain Mechanisms and the Disease Model of Addiction: Is it the Whole Story of the Addicted Self? A Philosophical-Skeptical Perspective,” which recently appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction . In my chapter in this anthology, which brings together cutting-edge work on the sc...

This post is by Christopher Mole , Chair of the programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia . He is the author of Attention is Cognitive Unison (OUP, 2010), and The Unexplained Intellect (Routledge, 2016). This post outlines the argument of his recent article, “ Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question ” (Philosophical Psychology, 8(3): 557-571). Discussions of autism are often euphemistic: We speak of ‘service users’ rather than patients; and ‘atypicality’ rather than illness. By avoiding the rhetoric of disease we avoid the implication that the autistic point of view is a defective one, which would be gone from a world in which everything was operating correctly. Those who do use the vocabulary of disease might reject such motivations, while congratulating themselves on their straight-talking, no-nonsense approach. This would, I think, be a mistake. According to one tradition, the mistake would be that of applying a ‘medical mod...

Sometimes, agents should not be held responsible for what they have done, for example because they lacked relevant information when acting, their reasoning was impaired or because they had insufficient control over their actions. However, it is controversial under which conditions we should refrain from attributing full responsibility. On May 18, we looked at some such hard cases in a one day workshop. In the morning, speakers focused on non-clinical cases, in the afternoon, the focus was on impaired responsibility in individuals suffering from mental disorders. In the first talk of the day, Philip Robichaud asked whether the presence of behavioural nudges make the nudged agent less praise- or blameworthy for what she has done under the influence of nudging. He argued that the extent to which agents' decisions are influenced does not differ fundamentally from other familiar cases where situational factors affect agents’ decisions. The main problem Philip identified for...

Today's post is by Candice Shelby on her new book Addiction: A Philosophical Perspective . Candice Shelby is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. She has published in the history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of addiction. She regularly speaks around the U.S. and Europe on the complex problem of addiction, and has recently completed a month teaching on the topic in Beijing, China. In my new book I argue that most analyses of addiction get off on the wrong foot from the start, by assuming a simple linear cause-and-effect understanding the world. Very little about human beings can be understood in such a straightforward way, and certainly nothing having to do with mind or experience. Like other human phenomena, including mind itself, I believe that addiction is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system. It is better understood as a process than as a disease, a moral proble...

Today's post is by Nick Heather and Gabriel Segal on their new edited collection Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the Relationship . Nick Heather (pictured below) is a clinical psychologist by training and is now Emeritus Professor of Alcohol and Other Drug Studies at Northumbria University. He has over 500 publications, mostly in the area of addictions, with an emphasis on treatment and brief intervention for alcohol problems. Gabriel Segal (pictured below) is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at King’s College, London. He has published extensively in philosophy of psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of language. In 1997, Nick Heather, together with Ian Robertson, published the 3rd edition of a book called ‘Problem Drinking’. It argued that there is no such thing as ‘alcoholism’ in the sense of a discontinuous form of drinking problem and that it was not helpful to see problem drinking as a disease. Rather, people drink in problematic ways for a ...

The Helsinki Network for Philosophy of Psychiatry organized the symposium ”Culture, Extended and Embodied Cognition and Mental Disorders” on June 30-July 1, 2016, in Helsinki. The symposium was dedicated to cultural issues related to diagnostics, definitions and classifications of mental disorders, as well as phenomenological questions of experience, affectivity and embodiment. The symposium took place in Lapinlahti Hospital that was one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in Northern Europe when it first opened its doors 175 years ago (on 1st of July 1841) - and now is a cultural venue. Culture-Bound Syndromes and Mechanisms Several talks focused on the ways culture affects disorders and their classification. In his introduction, Tuomas Vesterinen argued that definitions of mental disorders are inalienably value-laden, and that socio-cultural forces should be taken into account in explanations and classifications in order not to spread the diagnostic categori...

Today's post is by Polly Mertens (pictured below) who talks about her experience with bulimia, and her recovery. Polly's website is Get Busy Thriving . I started binging and purging when I was 14 after I had been restricting food to lose weight. I felt like I was missing out on foods I enjoyed. When I tried to stop my binging and purging cycles a year later, I couldn’t control the urges. I later learned I had bulimia. Over the next 20 years I could manage stopping the binging for a few weeks or months, but the urges always came back and I felt helpless to stop them. At my worst I would binge and purge 10 times a day. On the outside I seemed like a healthy and normal person. I went to the gym, ate pretty healthy and had an average body weight. With friends I only ate normally, but alone I was completely out of control around food. I felt ashamed and extremely frustrated with my addiction. Bulimia is a hidden habit and most people wouldn’t know someone was bulimi...

The Mind, Value and Mental Health International Conference in Philosophy and Psychiatry took place on 25 July 2015 at the picturesque St. Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford. It attracted philosophers, psychiatrists and psychologists both from the UK and from abroad. Below I summarise four of the papers presented on that immensely fascinating day. The first talk was given by Rachel Cooper, Lancaster University (pictured below with Matthew Parrott) and was entitled ‘DSM-5: Stasis and Change’. Cooper argued that classifications like the DSM can be thought of as forming part of the infrastructure of science, and have much in common with material infrastructure. The implications are, Cooper suggested, are that as with material technologies it becomes possible for ‘path dependent’ development to cause a sub-optimal classification to get ‘locked in’ and hard to replace. Cooper argued that the DSM has become locked-in and as a consequence any changes to the diagnostic criteria have...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in sessions 2 and 3, emphasising those themes that have already been discussed in the blog. (If interested in session 1 of the conference, I reported on it last week). Session 2: Genetics, Neuroscience and Mental Disorder Neuroscientist  Pamela Sklar  asked "How may genetics change our understanding of mental illness?" and she focused on schizophrenia as a "mystery", that is a disorder that is both inherited and very common. Thousands of DNA alleles are involved in the risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The difficulty in identifying the genetic bases of such disorders made some people think that research in this area was doomed to failure. But both for bipolar disorder and for schizophrenia some regions that increase risk have been discovered s...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in session 1, emphasising those themes that are close to our blog readers' hearts. Session 1: Genetics and Neuroscience of Mind, Self and Behaviour Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux  (pictured above) kicked off the conference with a presentation entitled: "What neuroscience can tell us about mind and behaviour?" He presented the brain as a very complex physico-chemical system about which we know a lot already but not everything. This is because the brain is the product of the integration of different types of evolution occurred in millions of years (evolution of species in terms of variability of genome, ontogenetic development in terms of variability of connections, evolution of thought in terms of variability of spontaneous activity and synaptic efficacies, and soc...

Salpetriere Hospital, Paris The 18th Meeting of the Psychopathology Section of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) and the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) took place on the 5th and 6th December 2014 at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France. Over two days those invited to speak presented their talks related to the meeting’s leading theme – Nature and Narratives of Depression: Philosophical and Psychopathological Aspects , followed by plenary discussion. The meeting was chaired by Michael Musalek and the list of presenters included: Femi Oyebode, Pedro Varandas, Maria Luisa Figueira, Luis Madeira, Norbert Andersch, Raimo Salokangas and Gilberto Di Petta.

Future-Minded by Magda Osman I am Senior Lecturer in Experimental Cognitive Psychology in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. I am interested in developing an understanding of the underlying mechanisms involved in learning, decision making, and problem solving in complex dynamic environments. Recently, I participated in a panel discussion at the LSE , hosted by the Forum of European Philosophy and the LSE Choice Group, on wise choices . There, I discussed some ideas from my new book, Future-Minded: The Psychology of Agency and Control (Palgrave 2014). In the book I ask what drives us to do what we do. To answer this, I introduce the latest psychological research on agency, control, causality and the unconscious, and along the way challenge our folk psychological ideas on a wide range of phenomena (consciousness, subliminal priming, illusion of control, addiction). I discuss new theoretical approaches to understanding agency...

Addiction and Weakness of Will By Lubomira Radoilska Mental conflict not always amounts to weakness of will. Irresistible motives not always speak of addiction. This book proposes an integrated account of what singles out these phenomena: addiction and weakness of will are both forms of secondary akrasia. By integrating these two phenomena into a classical conception of akrasia as poor resolution of an unnecessary conflict – valuing without intending while intending without valuing – the book makes an original contribution to central issues in moral psychology and philosophy of action, including the relationship between responsibility and intentional agency, and the nature and scope of moral appraisal. In particular, the proposed integrated account is grounded in a general theory of responsibility and a related model of action as actualisation bringing together insights from both volitional and non-volitional conceptions, such as the intuition that it is unfair to hold a person r...