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...

On 26th and 27th September in Berlin, the Human Abilities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities organised a workshop on conspiracy beliefs and delusions. This is a report of the workshop. Logo of the Human Abilities centre The first speaker was Romy Jaster (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) presented a talk on self-immunization in conspiracy theories. Romy thinks about conspiracy theories from an epistemological and philosophy of science perspective and she started her presentation with the conceptual distinction between "conspiracy theories" as a neutral term (an explanation that involves a conspiracy) and "conspiracy theories" as a negatively-valued term (an explanation that is epistemically deficient). What the epistemic deficit is is open to debate and controversy.  Romy focused on the idea that conspiracy theories and delusions are both deficient because they are not responsive to counter-evidence. The idea is that conspiracy theories are built in such a...

In today's post Harriet Stuart (MRes student in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham) reports on the Deluded by Experience  workshop on delusion formation, held online on 12th and 13th July 2021. This was the first workshop of the AHRC funded Project Deluded by Experience  and was organised by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett and Paul Noordhof . Poster of the event Day one started with Kengo Miyazono who presented ‘Salience and Affordance in Schizophrenia’. Kengo proposed a revision of the Aberrant Salience Hypothesis ( Kapur, 2003 ). He claimed that “salience” can be analysed in terms of affordance; an object X is “salient” if and only if X “affords” attention. The altered experience in schizophrenia involves some aberrant salience which is caused by relatively strengthened attentional affordances owing to damage to top-down suppression mechanisms. Kengo Miyazono Then Sam Wilkinson presented ‘Agent Representations as Generative Models: The case of Delusional Misident...

Today blog post is by Clara Humpston , a Research Fellow at the Institute for Mental Health, University of Birmingham. She summarises her most recent paper co-authored with Matthew Broome in The Lancet Psychiatry . This paper is freely accessible upon registration on the Lancet’s website. Clara Humpston We aimed to discuss the history and concepts of self-disturbance in relation to the pathophysiology and subjective experience of schizophrenia in terms of three approaches: 1. The perceptual anomalies approach of the Early Heidelberg School of Psychiatry (with the kind help from Professor Aaron Mishara); 2. The more recent ipseity model by Louis Sass and Josef Parnas; and 3. The predictive coding framework rooted in computational psychiatry. Despite their importance, there has been a notable absence of efforts to compare them and to consider how they might indeed work together. Self-disturbances are transformations of basic self that form the inseparable background agai...

Today's post is by Dan Williams, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Cambridge. If you had to bet on it, what’s the probability that your loved ones have been replaced by visually indistinguishable imposters? That your body is overrun with tiny parasites? That you’re dead? As strange as these possibilities are, each of them captures the content of well-known delusional beliefs: Capgras delusion, delusional parasitosis, and Cotard delusion respectively. Delusional beliefs come in a wide variety of forms and arise from a comparably diverse range of underlying causes. One of the deepest challenges in the contemporary mind sciences is to explain them. Why do people form such delusions? And why on earth do they retain them in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence against them? My new paper “ Hierarchical Bayesian Models of Delusion ” presents a review and critique of a fascinating body of research in computational psychiatry that at...