Imperfect Cognitions

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....

This post is by  Marijana Vujošević  (pictured above), who is working on a project on Immanuel Kant’s moral psychology at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). In this post Marijana summarises her approach in a new paper 'Conscience as the Rational Deficit of Psychopaths'.  While writing my paper on Kant’s theory of conscience (' Kant on Conscience: The Judge in the Mirror '), I had become very interested in issues regarding lack of conscience and immorality in psychopathy. Psychopaths are commonly described as individuals without conscience. Even if we weaken this claim by stating that they possess an underdeveloped conscience (which I propose we do), we still need to explain whether this impairment affects their competence in judging moral issues and in being motivated to act morally, and if so how. In spite of the usual portrayal of psychopaths, moral psychologists do not find the link between psychopaths’ impaired conscience and their moral dys...

Being Amoral by Thomas Schramme This post is by Thomas Schramme . Thomas introduces his new edited collection,  Being Amoral: Psychopathy and Moral Incapacity (MIT Press) . It would be useful to know what kind of capacities human beings require in order to be moral. This piece of information would have tremendous practical significance, as we could try to organize institutions, such as education, to provide an environment where these capacities can develop and flourish. It would also be an interesting theoretical piece of information, as philosophers have for a long time quarrelled over the issue whether moral capacities are mainly due to reason or emotion. One way of making progress in this debate on the necessary faculties in becoming a moral person is to study people who apparently lack morality; who are, in philosophical parlance, amoral persons. There seem to be indeed real-life exemplars of such amoral persons, and to study them might lead us exactly in the de...

Matthew Parrott Schizophrenia and delusion are typically described as involving some kind of impairment in a subject's ability to reason (e.g., Coltheart et. al., 2011 ; Coltheart, 2007 ; Davies and Egan 2013 ; Garety and Freeman, 1999 ). Yet, although there is evidence indicating that subjects diagnosed with these psychiatric conditions reason in anomalous ways, in many cases the pattern of reasoning they exhibit looks to be more optimal than the one exhibited by non-psychiatric controls. Most famously, we have known for a number of years that both schizophrenic and delusional subjects 'jump to conclusions' on probabilistic reasoning tasks ( Fine, et. al., 2007 ) but their performance on these tasks is very close to a Bayesian model of ideal rationality. Secondly, there is some recent evidence that suggests schizophrenic subjects may be better at reasoning with conditionals. According to one study, they seem to be less susceptible to believability biases ( O...