Imperfect Cognitions

The British Library hosts an exhibition on fairy tales, which brings to the fore the common elements of folk tales across cultures, such as the fable as a way of advising the reader about how to live their lives, the plot as the battle between good and evil, magical powers as a way to transcend the limitations of human agency, and transformations as a reflection on identity. The Beast, Belle and her father in the classic tale of The Beauty and the Beast The exhibition starts with editions of the works by Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered many folk tales from friends and family and put them in writing, preparing versions for adults and for children. Stories include Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Perrault lived in France over 300 years ago and he is attributed Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Edition of Brothers Grimm fairy tales One section of the exhibition concerns villains, and features prominently giants, goblins, stepmothers, ...

This post is by Marta Jorba and Pablo Lopez Silva, who have recently guest edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology entitled Mind in Action: Expanding the concept of affordance. Marta Jorba Organisms relate to their environment through action. Human behavior is guided by the perception of certain opportunities for action that specific objects invite. For example, when playing football, one does not only perceive the ball as round, moving, having certain shades of color, etc. One also perceives the ball as kickable . The perception of the ball as kickable is constitutive of our visual experience of the ball. J.J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, captures this phenomenon with the notion of affordances.  Perceiving a ball as kickable is, then, the perception of an opportunity for a certain action, namely, to kick the ball. For Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950), perceptual affordances directly relate organisms to their environments through oppor...

This post is by Elliot Porter. Elliot is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is interested in personal autonomy, the philosophy of madness and mental health, and broader themes in social and political philosophy. Elliot Porter Autonomy is not much of a folk concept: few people commiserate with their friends over how their autonomy has been disrespected, in quite those terms. Still, it’s something that everyone cares about. We take it as a slight when our view of what is good or reasonable is overlooked.  Mill has something like autonomy in mind when he tells us that someone’s mode of living is the best “not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode”. At the heart of our interest in autonomy, lies an interest in our perspectives – what seems good or worthy to us. But not every perspective gets a hearing. Mill’s principle is conditional on our possessing “any tolerable amount of common sense and experience”. We mustn’t abandon a...

Today's post is by Anneli Jefferson and Katrina Sifferd. Anneli is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and the intersection of the two. Katrina is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. In this post they discuss their recent paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice . Anneli Jefferson Accounts of responsibility often underestimate the importance of the social environment. Other people are vital to the development and maintenance of moral agency: As social beings, we calibrate our moral compass to our moral audience. When deciding whether it is acceptable to eat the last piece of cake, not to disclose extra earnings on a tax return or spank our children as a form of punishment, we do this with an eye to what’s considered acceptable by our social environment. The reactions of others highlight the existence and importance of moral norms by providing us with feedback, directly and indirectly. Katrina Sifferd On...

In this post, Kathleen reports from the 'Experiences of Loss' Conference which took place on the 26th and 27th October 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The conference was organised and ran by Sabrina Coninx (VU Amsterdam). The selection of talks over two days all spoke to the theme of loss in different contexts, addressing self, illness, and memory.  Day 1 Regina Fabry Regina Fabry (Macquarie University): Sharing experiences of loss through self-narration: possibilities and limitations. (online) Regina first clarified the concept of a self-narrative. Individuals might also draw on master narratives, which are widely shared in a socio-cultural community or society. These are value-laden, usually reflecting systems of power and oppression in play. Individuals might push back against these master narratives with alternative narratives, as a form of resistance. In cases of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), there is a sense of loss or absence which is very much felt by the...

On 5th and 6th January 2023, Alex Grzankowski hosted a hybrid two-day workshop at the University of Birkbeck entitled,  Happiness: Emotion, Mood, or Character Trait.    In the first talk, “Can we be delusional and happy?”, I (Lisa Bortolotti, University of Birmingham) focused on the relationship between being happy and having delusional beliefs. We tend to assume that living in a delusional world is bad epistemically because we lack contact with reality. And it is bad psychologically because believing the delusions can make us feel disconnected and excluded, and depending on the content of the delusion, also stressed and anxious. But things are more complicated than this: delusions can be a response to a crisis that bring about a paralysis of agency, and can help us overcome overwhelming negative emotions, so believing a delusion may lead to temporary happiness. However, the temporary happiness is a stepping stone towards a more permanent state of happiness where con...

This post is by Elliot Porter. Elliot is a lecturer in bioethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and is finishing his PhD at the University of Kent. His research focuses on personal autonomy and mental disorder.  His research involves themes in metaethics, moral epistemology, and epistemic justice. Elliot Porter We have largely, but not entirely, moved past the intuition that significant mental disorder constitutes, ipso facto , an injury to an agent’s autonomy. Part of this shift stems from increasingly multidimensional approaches to autonomy that allow us to track, in finer detail, where injuries to autonomy do and do not lie. We can identify autonomy-threatening influences at a higher resolution than simple ‘mental disorder’ language offers. The movement has also been pushed by the significant and growing literature that articulates the substantive normative and identity claims made by the neurodiversity movement. The status of minority minds as test cases, to sharpen...

Today's post is by Pablo López-Silva who is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Psychology and Research Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile. He is Young Research Fellow at the Millenium Institute for Research in Depression and Personality (Chile).  Pablo's areas of research are Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology, Psychopathology, and Neuroethics and he's director of the Project FONDECYT 1221058 'The architecture of psychotic delusions'. Here, he discusses his new book, Protecting the Mind: Challenges in Law, Neuroprotection, and Neurorights (Springer 2022, edited by Pablo López-Silva & Luca Valera). In John Milton’s Comus , the British poet writes “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind”. With this, the author depicts the human mind as the last bastion of privacy, freedom, and agency. For a long time, this idea remained unchallenged. However, the rapid progress of neurotechnologies with direct access to ou...

In this post, Jessica Sutherland (University of Birmingham), Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (University of Birmingham), and Sean Shields (University of Nottingham) report on their two-day conference “Philosophy at the Intersection of Moral Responsibility, Agency, and Regulation”. This conference was held in-person (with online provisions) at the University of Birmingham on 9th-10th May 2022. The conference brought together graduate students and early-career researchers working in the areas of moral responsibility, agency and regulation of behaviour broadly construed.   Day 1 The first keynote talk of the conference was given by Dr Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff University) on “What’s the Point of Blaming the Dead?”. Jefferson offered some reflections on how current discussions of the role of blame do not seem to capture the ways in which we blame the dead. Jefferson offered a prototype theory of blame and argued that blaming the dead is not a paradigmatic case as it does not include some of ...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team provided some evidence of epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and Lisa Bortolotti discuss a new approach to protecting the sense of agency of young people meeting a crisis team for mental health problems. Clara Bergen Lisa Bortolotti In our project, we wanted to ask: How can practitioners avoid undermining a young person’s sense of agency in a mental healthcare encounter? We adopted an absolutely unique analytic approach to find out the answer. “We” are a group of six experts in philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, clinical communication, clinical practice, and public involvement in research (Interdisciplinary Academic Researchers), and five young people aged 17-25 with experience of accessing mental health services for diagnoses including post-traumatic stress disorder, ma...