Imperfect Cognitions

The blog post today is by Joel Krueger (University of Exeter) on his recent paper " Home as Mind: AI Extenders and Affective Ecologies in Dementia Care " ( Synthese 2025).   Joel Krueger AI is everywhere. Admittedly, much of the hype is overblown (AI fatigue is real; I feel it, too). Still, AI can do impressive things—and it’s already impacting our lives in many ways. Discussions in philosophy and beyond often focus on big issues like the looming possibility of artificial consciousness (very unlikely) and artificial general intelligence (also unlikely, despite what Sam Altman and other techbros keep insisting), or more immediate practical and ethical worries about job displacement, bias, privacy, environmental costs, and the potential for misuse. Critical discussions like these are important. They help tamp down relentless hype cycles that get in the way of clear-eyed discussions about how AI-powered technology should fit into our lives. But while scepticism is warranted, i...

This post is by Rabih Chattat . Rabih is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna. He works on psychosocial interventions in dementia and the clinical psychology of ageing. This post was originally published on the EPIC blog on 3rd July 2024. Rabih Chattat Dementia is an umbrella term used to indicate a variety of conditions characterised by neuronal damage. The most prevalent type of dementia is Alzheimer's disease which accounts for around 62% of all types of dementia followed by vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and Lewy body dementia as the most frequent. Dementia is characterised by a progressive decline in several domains of cognitive abilities such as executive functions, learning and memory, language, perceptual and motor functions, complex attention and social cognition (DSM-5). The duration is up to 12-15 years.  Cognitive decline has an impact on the person’s capacity to retain information and also to recall memories, communicate ...

Today’s post is by  Giovanni Boniolo , Professor of Philosophy of Science and Medical Humanities in the Department of Neuroscience and Rehabilitation at the University of Ferrara, Italy. Giovanni Boniolo Since 2018, I have been appointed as Scientific Director of the Civitas Vitae Research Centre ( CVRC ). This is a new department of the Fondazione OIC onlus (Padova, Italy) devoted to seeking, implementing and disseminating sociological and ethical innovative procedures and strategies aimed to improve the quality of life of people who are vulnerable and fragile due to age or disability.  The Fondazione OIC onlus  is an innovative nursing home with about 1500 guests (from about 65 to about 100 years old) and 1700 operators, where the values of longevity as a resource, intergenerationality, positive culture of the limit, and fragility are intended as opportunities for social networking. Since its establishment, the CVRC has been realizing several initiatives and research p...

Today's post is by Em Walsh (McGill University). Em Walsh The following is a real-life case study of a woman referred to as Mrs Black (Sokolowski 2018, 45-83). Mrs Black received a diagnosis of mid-stage dementia at the age of eighty-five. Mrs Black’s dementia impacted her ability to recall both the names and faces of her family members. Nevertheless, Mrs Black was noted by nurses who cared for her as always being an exceptionally happy woman, who took great pleasure in her daily activities in the residential care home in which she lived. Whilst in care, however, Mrs Black developed a serious bacterial infection, which posed a risk to her life if left untreated. Mrs Black’s primary caregivers wanted to treat the infection, but Mrs Black’s son noted that she had an advance directive stipulating that if she ever developed a condition which resulted in her inability to recognize her family members, she would not wish to receive any medical treatment to prolong her life. Her advance di...

We’re continuing our series of post s on “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation” - our special issue in the journal Topoi this week. In today’s post,  Sarah Robins , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, introduces her paper “ Mnemonic Confabulation ”. The motivation for this paper was the following question: How are discussions of confabulation in the philosophy of memory related to discussions of confabulation in empirical and clinical work? At first pass, it’s easy to suppose that they’re closely related. After all, both focus on confabulatory remembering. For philosophers of memory, confabulation is one of many memory errors (alongside misremembering, forgetting, relearning, etc.) that needs to be distinguished from successful remembering.  In clinical work, interest in confabulation began with Korsakoff (1885) and Wernicke’s (1906) observations of bizarre false memory reports in patients with amnesia and dementia. Despite the s...

The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology formed in 2017, with the aim to “promote interaction in Australasia among philosophers and psychologists, broadly construed to include anyone interested in scientific study of the mind”. The ASPP held their inaugural conference at Macquarie University in December 2018, and I was lucky enough to go along. Here’s a little of what I learned there... If you’ve ever been perplexed by the prevalence of a viewpoint or political stance that you don’t share, then you might be wondering: how do we step outside of the epistemic echo chambers in which we find ourselves in our increasingly online world? Kate Devitt and her team at Queensland University of Technology are on the case.  Inspired by the finding that increasing the number and diversity of hypotheses considered can improve decision making, particularly in an organisational and strategic setting, Kate and her team have built an interactive platform which encourag...

In this post I introduce a paper I wrote with Ema Sullivan-Bissett on the epistemic benefits of clinical memory distortions, which recently appeared open access in Mind and Language . It is one of the core outputs of two recent projects, the AHRC-funded Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions and the ERC-funded project PERFECT . The key message in the paper has received some coverage in the press ( Medicalxpress , India Blooms , Laboratory Equipment,  and Health Canal ).  In Keeping Mum , Marianne Talbot describes how her mother was a great storyteller before she had dementia. One of her best stories was how one day, when she was 14, she was late for school because her mother had just given birth to twins. The headmistress did not believe that that was the reason for being late and punished her, which she felt was a great injustice. When dementia advanced, the story about the twins’ birth ended up being merged with other stories (for instance, other sto...

PERFECT 2017 Memory Workshop We are very excited that on 5th May 2017 Project PERFECT will be holding its second annual workshop , at Jesus College, Cambridge. The workshop will feature leading experts in the field of philosophy of memory. The talks will focus on a wide-range of fascinating issues that dominate contemporary research on memory. The talks will be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology, epistemologists and psychologists, as well as other cognitive scientists interested in how we remember the past. Issues to be covered in the talks include how memory can generate knowledge; how false and distorted memories can be useful features of ordinary cognition; the nature of experiential memories; whether we can be immune from error due to misidentifying ourselves in a memory; and the role of shared memories in relationships. Many of the talks will have an interdisciplinary angle, highlighting how recent psychological research—...

In this post, Valeria Motta reports from the workshop Cognitive Decline: Presentations and Representations . The event took place at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum , and was jointly organized by students from Biomedical and Natural Sciences and students from Liberal Arts of the University of Birmingham. The event was offered under the initiative called Café Culturel . This initiative proposes multidisciplinary discussions on topics of current interest from the arts and the sciences which emerge from the cultural offerings in and around the area of Birmingham. Expert panellists are invited to give 10 minute presentations after which there is room for questions and discussion with the audience. The events are open not only for students but also for the general public; and the talks are meant to reach such wide audience. In October, the Royal Shakespeare Company presented King Lear on Stratford-upon-Avon. On the occasion of this visit, the event Cognitive Decline: Pre...

This post is by Oliver Sensen  (pictured above), Associate Professor in Philosophy at Tulane University in New Orleans. Oliver is interested in the question of how one should treat others, and, more particularly, in the notion of respect for persons. Much of his work is on Kant – since he is the one who thought most deeply about these issues – including his notions of dignity ,  autonomy , and respect. In this post Oliver summarises his recent article ' Respect Towards Elderly Demented Patients ', published in Diametros. As part of a more systematic project on respect, I have started to think about the regard that is owed to people with imperfect cognitions. The paper I summarise in this post focuses on respect for elderly demented patients. Imagine that you are a caregiver for a patient who does not remember what happened yesterday. If, for instance, her husband died years ago, she still might ask you when he will come back to see her. Telling her the trut...

This post is by Michela Summa (pictured above), who works on the Body Memory project at the University of Heidelberg. Here she summarises her paper ‘ The Disoriented Self. Layers and Dynamics of Self-Experience in Dementia and Schizophrenia ’, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. In recent years, several authors have defended a stratified or hierarchical account of the self and self-experience. Some of these accounts have proved to play an important role in the interpretation of psychiatric diseases. In this paper, I addressed the cases of dementia and of schizophrenia in light of the hierarchical model of self and self-experience. Thereby, I set myself two main aims: first, to investigate the potentialities and the limits of applying the hierarchical understanding of the self to dementia and schizophrenia; secondly, to reassess the model itself on the basis of some characteristic traits of both pathologies and possibly to propose some modifications. The paper ...

On 10th November 2015 the Royal Society of Medicine hosted a very interesting conference, entitled "Mind, Body and Soul: An update on psychiatric, philosophical and legal aspects of care nearing the end of life". Here is a report of the sessions I attended on the day. In Session 1,  Matthew Hotopf (King's College London) talked about his experience of treating people with depression in palliative care. Anti-depressants are effective with respect to placebos. People with strong suicidal ideas are in a difficult situation as they cannot be easily moved to psychiatric wards due to the special care they need. The important factor is to be able to contain risk of death by suicide and self-harm. Hotopf concluded by saying that it is normal to have extreme emotions near the end of life, and this does not mean that one suffers from a mental disorder. Annabel Price , Consultant Psychiatrist at the Cambridge and Peterborough Foundation Mental Trust, pictured above, foc...

‘ Dementia and Imagination ’ is a project aimed at investigating how art can improve the life of people with dementia and their carers. To know more about the project, I interviewed Dr Victoria Tischler (in the picture below) who is one of the lead investigators. Victoria's research interests span social psychology theory, adolescent and maternal mental health, medical education, and creativity and mental illness. She facilitates creative activities in mental health settings and is a public engagement ambassador for the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). LB: What interests you about the Dementia and Imagination project?  VT: It is an opportunity to thoroughly interrogate the potential for both the therapeutic use of art with people who have dementia, and to explore public engagement with the condition through creative products and processes. We have a large multidisciplinary project team so there are lots of opportunities to develop ...

Joseph McCaffrey In honour of Dementia Awareness Week 2015 (17th-23rd May), we have a post by  Joseph McCaffrey , a graduate student in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of  History and Philosophy of Science . Here Joseph summarises his recent article ' Reconceiving Conceptual Vehicles: Lessons from Semantic Dementia ', published in  Philosophical Psychology . We take our concepts for granted. When you explore the world, you automatically categorize the objects around you, tapping into a bewildering array of information. You see (or hear) a sheep and instantaneously know it is is a mammal, an animal, a provider-of-wool, a white fluffy thing that bleats, and much more. As a philosopher of cognitive science, I am interested in how the mind stores, accesses, and manipulates this conceptual knowledge. In semantic dementia, a rare variant of frontotemporal dementia , patients lose concept knowledge in a progressive and debilitating fashion. Early on, ...

The Mental Health Foundation has made available on its website a literature review on truth-telling in dementia that I found really interesting to read. The review is part of an inquiry into distressing symptoms of dementia funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The reviewer is Yulia Kartalova-O'Doherty. The upshot of the inquiry is supposed to consist in practical recommendations for carers and healthcare professionals who find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, challenging the patient's beliefs when they are delusional (e.g., the belief that a loved one is still alive when she has been dead for some time, or the belief that the spouse is a deceitful impostor) causes considerable distress to the patient; on the other hand, not challenging the beliefs seems wrong as it involves lying or implies disrespect towards the patient. One of the findings of the literature review is that current guidelines to healthcare professionals do not justify lying, but in practice...

I interviewed John Sutton , Professor of Cognitive Science at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University, Sydney. John is interested in memory, skill, and distributed cognition, and in his work he seeks to integrate philosophical, psychological, and historical ideas and methods. This is the first in a series of three posts. ES-B: Do you think that distorted autobiographical memories might have pragmatic benefits insofar as they may function to fill gaps in a person’s recollection of the past, or are distorted in a self-enhancing way? JS: "I think that’s a very difficult question, and it’s probably going to pan out differently for different kinds of memory pathology. In general, yes, for sure, the mechanisms which give rise to distortions can be adaptive mechanisms, distortions might just be a by-product of mechanisms that work well enough most of the time. I am uneasy about pushing the line that specific distortions themselves ...

Marco Canevelli The Imperfect Cognitions blog is launching a new feature, interviews with experts on topical issues. For Dementia Awareness Week (18-24 May 2014), I interviewed Marco Canevelli on Alzheimer's disease. Marco is a neurologist, working at the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry of the “Sapienza” University of Rome. He is currently attending a doctoral school in neuroscience in Rome and he is a visiting researcher at the Institute of Aging in the Gérontopôle of Toulouse. His main clinical and research interests are Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, subjective cognitive complaints, cognitive frailty, and dementia prevention. LB: What would you say are the main implications of Alzheimer’s disease for cognitive function? MC: "Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia. In its typical expression, AD is a slowly progressive disorder characterized by the insidious onset, usually after the age of 65 years, of a progressive impairm...

This is the last in a series of posts on epistemic innocence, and it is about memory. In the context of dementia and other psychiatric disorders featuring serious memory impairments, some distorted memories seem to present us with a trade-off between accuracy and wellbeing. Autobiographical memories are often distorted to fill gaps in knowledge about the past, or are distorted in a self-enhancing way, and thus such memory reports may increase one's self-confidence and ultimately one's wellbeing if they go unchallenged. However, the price to pay is that memory reports lack correspondence with reality, and this compromises the person’s knowledge of her past. In the project, we argue that it is too simplistic to embrace the trade-off view, because distorted memories can carry significant epistemic benefits that would be unattainable without such memories. To characterise the status of cognitions that are inaccurate, but also epistemically beneficial, we are developing the no...

I was awarded an AHRC Fellowship to develop and test the notion of epistemic innocence , and this blog is part of that project. Since she joined the project, Ema has helped me work out a sensible set of conditions for the notion, and Kengo has also provided a number of helpful suggestions and constructive objections. The process of defining the notion and applying it to different cognitions has just started, and we still have some problems to solve, but I thought I would update you on my own progress with it (and Ema will do the same in posts to follow this one). My initial questions were the following: In what circumstances do delusional beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations contribute to the acquisition and preservation of relevant truths? Do delusional beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations have benefits that are genuinely epistemic? Are people epistemically blameworthy for having "imperfect cognitions"? What are the consequ...

Departures from reality and self-enhancing distortions apply not just to beliefs about the present and to future predictions , but also to memories. People neglect evidence of bad performance, concentrating on evidence of good performance, and emphasising their contribution to successful enterprises. When one’s personal story takes an unexpected direction, there are two conflicting epistemic demands: one needs to impose some coherence between new and previous episodes in the story, but also guarantee as much correspondence as possible between the story and the experienced reality. These principles of coherence and correspondence apply to autobiographical memory ( Conway 2005 ): memories are sometimes altered to preserve a coherent self as the past is re-written to make sense of current goals and a new self-image.  Distortions exaggerating continuity between previous and present self may also be psychologically adaptive by enhancing self-appraisal and well-being. One ins...