Imperfect Cognitions

Today I interview Rik Peels (Amsterdam) on a new exciting project he is leading, addressing extremism and fundamentalism. The project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and is named, "Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism" (2020-2025).  Rik Peels LB: How did you become interested in fundamentalism? RP: It was a combination of two things. On the one hand, ever since the start of my PhD in 2008, I’ve been working on the ethics of belief. In times of polarization and misinformation, I think the issue of how people form their beliefs and how they should form them has become even more important. On the other hand, especially since 9/11, the so-called new atheists have severely critiqued religious faith on both moral and epistemic grounds, but it has always struck me, as a religious person myself, that they seem to target only fundamentalist and other extreme versions of religion. I felt it was only natural to combine the two interests and the rise of terr...

Today's post is by Joe Pierre , Acting Chief at the Mental Health Community Care Systems, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, and Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The blurry line separating psychopathology and normality, in the real world and the DSM, has been a longtime interest. Twenty years ago, I attempted to disentangle religious and delusional beliefs using the “continuum” model of delusional thinking based on cognitive dimensions. More recently, I’ve tried to understand other “delusion-like beliefs” (DLBs) including conspiracy theories, a frequent topic of my blog, Psych Unseen . A forthcoming paper models belief in conspiracy theories as a “two component, socio-epistemic” process involving epistemic mistrust and biased misinformation processing. Delusions and DLBs remain challenging to distinguish in clinical practice and in the internet ...