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 Eugenia Lancellotta How likely is it that you father has been replaced by an imposter?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...

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...

This week we feature the AHRC Project Deluded by Experience , led by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. In today's post she overviews the first of the Project’s outputs, co-authored with Paul Noordhof (Co-I): ‘ The Clinical Significance of Anomalous Experience in the Explanation of Monothematic Delusions ’, recently published in Synthese (open access).  Subjects with monothematic delusions often undergo some highly anomalous experiences. For example, in Capgras delusion, the strange experience has been understood as one of absence of something expected, the subject has reduced affective response to familiar faces traceable to ventromedial prefrontal damage (Tranel, Damasio, and Damasio 1995, Coltheart 2007), or right lateral temporal lesions and dorsolateral prefrontal damage (Wilkinson 2015, Corlett 2019). Empiricists about delusion formation take it that these experiences play an explanatory role in the formation and maintenan...

In this post, I interview Federico Bongiorno who recently completed a doctoral project on delusion formation at the University of Birmingham. Federico Bongiorno LB: Philosophers are intrigued by delusions. What interests you about them? FB: There are several things that interest me about delusions, which is part of the reason why I decided to write a PhD thesis comprising of self-standing papers rather a single book-like package. I will focus on just one, the question of whether delusions can be beliefs despite being only marginally belief-like. Participants in this debate are typically non-committal as to what beliefs are over and beyond our folk-psychological practices. So, when they ask whether delusions are or aren’t belief-like, what they want to know are things such as whether delusions play the same role as beliefs in predicting intentional behaviour, or whether they conform to the stereotypical cluster of attributes (cognitive, behavioural, phenomenal) that we would normally e...

This post is by Rachel Gunn summarising an article co-authored with Michael Larkin and published in Psychosis . The article is based on Rachel's PhD work at Birmingham. The research findings and conclusions, framed in terms of the Enactive Approach, are a move towards a need for understanding the phenomenology of a person’s experience in terms of sense-making within a person-environment system. Rachel Gunn A person ordinarily understands and negotiates the world based on familiar patterns derived from her cultural and historical experience. She is born into a family, the family consists of particular relationships and the family lives within a relatively circumscribed culture. Humans are flexible and adaptive. The difference between the lived experience of a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon Rainforest and an investment banker in the City of London highlights this flexibility.  There might be circumstances under which an alteration in a person’s lived experience would be so radical th...

In this post, Phil Corlett replies to Ryan McKay 's summary of his paper " Measles, Magic and Misidentifications: A Defence of the Two-Factor Theory of Delusions ", itself a response to Phil's earlier post on his paper " Factor one, familiarity and frontal cortex: a challenge to the two-factor theory of delusions ". See also Amanda Barnier 's important commentary on the debate, and Phil's reply . Got all that? Right, on with the post! I am grateful to Ryan for his careful and collegial rebuttal of my critique. I am grateful too for the opportunity to respond. Ryan’s response does mollify some of my points. However, I am sure no one will be surprised that I have not updated my beliefs about 2-factor theory. First, Ryan suggests that 2-factor theorists knew about the breadth of the deficits of vmPFC cases, since they were described in Langdon and Coltheart’s ( 2000 ) paper. They were indeed described. Why then, 19 years (and hundreds...

On 4th–5th June, Arché at the University of St. Andrews held a workshop on  Sensing Strange Things , organized by  Patrick Greenough . In this post I summarise the seven papers given at the workshop.  Fiona Macpherson  (Glasgow) opened the workshop with her paper, co-authored with  Clare Batty  (Kentucky), ‘Redefining Illusion and Hallucination in Light of New Cases’. Fiona and Clare identified several new cases which put pressure on traditional accounts of illusion and hallucination. They suggested that such cases ought to be accounted for by theories of experience and perception. In light of these hitherto unidentified instances of illusion and hallucinations, Fiona and Clare offered new definitions of these notions.  Next was  Jennifer Corns  (Lancaster) giving a talk entitled ‘Hedonic Qualities, Independence, and Heterogeneity’. Jennifer defended a version of hedonic internalism, the claim that the hedonic is best acc...

This post is by David Miguel Gray (pictured above), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University and in the Spring of 2017 will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. David’s research interests are in the philosophy of cognitive psychology (in particular cognitive psychopathology), as well as philosophy of mind, and philosophy of race and racism. In this post David will address some theoretical issues with n-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. This post, and his previous one , will draw on his recent paper ‘ Failing to self-ascribe thought and motion: towards a three-factor account of passivity symptoms in schizophrenia ’, published in Schizophrenia Research. Cognitive-level theories of monothematic delusions have become heavily discussed, significantly in part to the work of Max Coltheart, Robyn Langdon, and Martin Davies (e.g. see Davies and Coltheart 2000 , Davies et al. 2001 , Coltheart et al. 2007 , Coltheart 2013 ). T...

This post is by David Miguel Gray (pictured above), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University and in the Spring of 2017 will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. David’s research interests are in the philosophy of cognitive psychology (in particular cognitive psychopathology), as well as philosophy of mind, and philosophy of race and racism.  I n this post David provides an explanation of abnormal experiences and the inferential processes involved in delusions of thought insertion and alien control. Next week, he will address some theoretical issues with n-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. Both posts will be drawing from his recent paper ‘ Failing to self-ascribe thought and motion: towards a three-factor account of passivity symptoms in schizophrenia ’, published in Schizophrenia Research. In my article I focus on two commonly known passivity symptoms of schizophrenia: thought insertion and alien ...

This post is by Matthew Parrott and Philipp Koralus. In a previous post they summarised their recent paper ‘ The Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking ’, published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Ryan McKay, in a post the following week, summarised his recent paper responding to Matthew and Philipp, ' Bayesian Accounts and Black Swans: Questioning the Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking '. In this post, Matthew and Philipp respond to Ryan. We are very grateful to Ryan McKay for taking the time to read our paper, and for formulating helpful questions in response to it. We hope that by addressing these questions, we can clarify any aspects of our theory that might be puzzling. 1) How can we reliably distinguish exogenous and endogenous question raising? As we said in our original post, we propose that patients ‘entertain roughly the same default questions that most people strongly associate with various external stimuli, but that they either envisage fewer alternative ...

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. Here she reports on two recently published papers, co-written with  Kengo Miyazono .  Kengo and I have recently been interested in how the considerations raised in the philosophy of belief apply to delusions. In our review paper on Philosophy Compass  (open access) we argue that the delusions literature has helped us focus on some key issues concerning the nature and development of beliefs. What conditions does a report need to satisfy in order to qualify as the report of a belief? What is the interaction between experience and inference in the process by which beliefs are formed? Kengo and I also have a joint research paper that recently appeared in Erkenntnis   (open access), where we ask what the ethics of belief can tell us about delusions. In this post I shall sum up our arguments in the paper, hoping for some feedback from our blog readers. There are several ways we can think of an ethics for belief. For instance, ...

In this post Ryan McKay, summarises his recent paper 'Bayesian Accounts and Black Swans: Questioning the Erotetic Theory of Delusional Thinking'. Matthew Parrott and Philipp Koralus (hereafter P&K) offer a fresh take on 'imperfect cognitions'. In their recent post they outline how their 'erotetic theory' can account for certain instances of fallible human reasoning. They illustrate this with an example about a fridge containing either beer or wine and cheese (I confess that I fell for the fallacy here; I presume my critical faculties were disarmed by my stomach). My purpose in this brief post is not to contest their analysis of such examples, but to summarise my evaluation of their erotetic approach to delusional thinking , raising my own questions about their theory in the process. The Core Claim P&K’s core claim is that deluded individuals are less inquisitive than healthy individuals; in particular, deluded individuals are selectively d...

Ema Sullivan-Bissett In this post I give an overview of what I did as a Research Fellow in the first year of project PERFECT , as well as my plans for the coming year. My research for the duration of my time working on PERFECT will focus on belief. Last year, Lisa and I worked together on three papers. The first, together with Matthew Broome and Matteo Mameli , was on the moral and legal implications of the continuity between delusional and non-delusional beliefs. The second, together with Rachel Gunn , was on what makes a belief a delusional belief. The third paper was on the status of beliefs from fiction and the teleological account of belief. My main focus this year though was on defending the one-factor account of monothematic delusion formation. According to this view, the only abnormality we need to appeal to in order to explain why a subject comes to hold a delusional belief, is the anomalous experience she has. We do not need to appeal to any abnormal deficit or bi...

This post is by Clara Humpston  (in the picture above), PhD student in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopts a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach; by incorporating behavioural, neuroimaging, and phenomenological investigations, she aims to further contribute to a unified account of delusions and hallucinations.  Here she summarises her recent paper, co-written with Matthew Broome  (in the picture below), ' The Spectra of Soundless Voices and Audible Thoughts: Towards an Integrative Model of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Thought insertion is currently described as a delusion and a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia, i.e. a false belief that the subject receives inserted, whereas auditory-verbal hallucinations (voices) are aberrant sensory perceptions in the absence of any external stimulus. Our paper s...

In this post I summarise the four papers presented in the Irrationality session of the Open Sessions at the 89th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association , held at the University of Warwick (pictured above) on 10th-12th July this year. The session began with Cristina Borgoni  (Graz) with her paper ‘Pluralism about Dissonance Cases and the Contradictory-Belief View’. Cristina started by identifying the structural features of what she identified as dissonance cases , in brief: an individual sincerely assents to p , but her behavior suggests that she believes not- p . She considered unified views of dissonance cases which have it that all such cases exemplify the same psychological phenomenon. She offered three examples of dissonance cases and suggested that unified views would struggle to accommodate them. She proposed a pluralist interpretational principle according to which what underlies explicit dissonance is what identifies the psychology of the ...

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 fifth and final post in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here Glenn Carruthers (pictured above) summarises his paper ' Difficulties for Extending Wegner and Colleagues' Model of the Sense of Agency to Deficits in Delusions of Alien Control '. One of Christopher Frith's (e.g.  1992 ) ideas that has really taken hold is that part of the problem in delusions of alien control is a deficit in the sense of agency. Given that the sense of agency is the feeling that one controls one's actions we can see how a deficit in this feeling could lead to people saying things like: When I reach my hand for the comb it is my hand and arm which move, and my fingers pick up the pen, but I don’t control them… I sit there watching them move, and they are quite independent, what they do is nothing to do with me… I am just a puppet who is manipulated by cosmic strings. When the strings are pulled my body moves and I cannot p...

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here Garry Young summarises his paper ' Amending the Revisionist Model of the Capgras Delusion: A Further Argument for the Role of Patient Experience in Delusional Belief Formation '. I currently work as a senior lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, although my postgraduate studies were in philosophy. My research interests cover three distinct areas. First, I am interested in embodied cognition, particularly the relationship between consciousness and procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something, rather than knowledge of facts). I have argued, using cases of visual pathology (e.g. blindsight and visual agnosia), that a form of knowledge-how (knowing how to do something) can occur in the absence of conscious accompaniment.  I am also interested in the ethics underlying the virtual enactment of real-world taboos, such as murder or physical/sexual assault...

This is our third of a series of posts in the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here  Rick Adams  summarises his paper (co-written with Harriet R. Brown and Karl J. Friston ) ' Bayesian Inference, Predictive Coding and Delusions '. I am in training to become a psychiatrist. I have also recently completed a PhD at UCL under Prof Karl Friston , a renowned computational neuroscientist. I am part of a new field known as Computational Psychiatry (CP). CP tries to explain how various phenomena in psychiatry could be understood in terms of brain computations (see also Corlett and Fletcher 2014 , Montague et al.,  2012 , and Adams et al. forthcoming in JNNP ). One phenomenon that ought to be amenable to a computational understanding is the formation of both ‘normal’ beliefs (i.e. beliefs which are generally agreed to be reasonable) and delusions. There are strong theoretical reasons to suppose that we (and other organisms) form beliefs in a Bayesi...

This is the second in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of Avant on Delusions. Here Kengo Miyazono summarises his paper (co-written with Lisa Bortolotti ) ' The Causal Role Argument Against Doxasticism About Delusions '. Doxasticism about delusion is the claim that delusions are beliefs. Delusions are usually regarded as beliefs in psychiatry. For instance, in the DSM-5 delusion is defined as a 'false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary' (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 819). Moreover, cognitive scientists working on theories of delusion formation assume that the mechanisms responsible for the formation of delusions are also the mechanisms responsible for the formation of beliefs ( Coltheart 2007 ; Corlett et al. 2010 ). However, doxasticism is not very...