Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She works in embodied cognitive science, the enactive approach, phenomenology, and habits. This post is about her recent paper on loneliness and the COVID-19 pandemic.  Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya When social distancing measures were implemented to reduce the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many specialists were concerned about a potential dramatic upsurge in loneliness, which was particularly worrying given the wide range of physical and mental health problems associated with it (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use, cognitive decline, cardiovascular diseases, and suicide risk). However, the few longitudinal studies comparing loneliness levels before and during the social contact restrictions present inconsistent results, with many factors influencing whether the levels of loneliness increased, decreased, or remained co...

On 18th May 2022, the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham hosted a public engagement event organised by Francesco Antilici and sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy on Loneliness and Mental Health. Ian Kidd The event featured three talks and a question and answer session with the audience. In this brief report, I summarise the main contributions of the speakers. What is the difference that makes a difference to loneliness? Michael Larkin (Psychology, Aston University) described how our conception of loneliness is moving away from concerns about an isolated self and is reconfiguring loneliness as a social problem that needs to be solved. Rather than focusing on a deficit that affects the lonely individual, we are now much more interested in loneliness as a disruptive social force—acknowledging the importance of social relationships for health and for wellbeing.  Data driving this new focus includes the proven link between social isolation and mortality: ...

This post originally appeared as a Birmingham Perspective on the  University of Birmingham website , authored by Valeria Motta. In the post, Valeria summarises her view of loneliness on which she was also recently interviewed by Radical Philosophy's host, Beth Matthews (podcast available,  part 1  and  part 2 ), for Melbourne 3CR Community Radio. Valeria Motta How is loneliness defined? And what do these definitions say about what we understand of the phenomenon? Over the last few decades, an increasing amount of empirical research has involved a range of definitions of loneliness. Distinctions have been made between loneliness and social isolation, and between loneliness and solitude. Many researchers acknowledge that loneliness and social isolation (a state of no physical contact with other people) are different constructs. However, this theoretical distinction is not always fully reflected in research on loneliness, let alone in interventions to lessen it. Interve...

A month from the end of project PERFECT, Michael Larkin (Co-Investigator) and Valeria Motta (Doctoral Research Fellow) reflect on what the project meant for them. One helpful way to think about being involved in a project as expansive as PERFECT is to reflect on where it is sending you next. In this post, we discuss some of the things they have learned from our interdisciplinary work together. Michael Larkin Michael : One of the most interesting aspects of PERFECT for me has arisen from the opportunity to work with you on your PhD. It’s going to be a really innovative combination of philosophical argument and phenomenological-psychological investigation. I’m aware that – coming into it – you were already very well-read on the phenomenological philosophy. I’m curious to know what has struck you most about getting to grips with qualitative methods in psychology? Valeria Motta Valeria : Thank you Michael. It was very interesting for me working with you too. I was s...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin and William Day (both at the University of Aston). They are reporting on the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships conference, which was sponsored by project PERFECT and held at the University of Aston on 22-23 May 2019. We're both participants in the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships group at Aston University. In planning our inaugural  conference , the group initially considered a narrower focus on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is a regular (more-or-less annual) IPA Conference, and we had agreed to host it. Eventually we settled on a broader theme (Creativity and Affect). IPA is one approach which many of us use in our work, but it is not the only one, and methods are not the sole focus of our meetings. When we meet as a group, we do discuss creative innovations in methodology, but we also read phenomenology, and explore studies which offer experiential insights on health and relationships. We hop...

Hello! This is a post in a series where we are reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , offer an overview of our activities, and look at the future! So it's me first. Research Yesterday the project officially ended, after five intense and wonderful years. We did achieve the goals that we set for ourselves, investigating what we call the epistemic innocence of beliefs that are irrational and often false. Epistemic innocence is the capacity some beliefs have to support epistemic agency despite their obvious epistemic costs. In other words, it is good for us to have those beliefs in some respects, even if the beliefs themselves are not well-supported by, or responsive to, evidence. Our main focus was on those belief-like states that can be at the same time common in the non-clinical population and symptomatic of mental health issues: delusional beliefs, distorted memory beliefs, and confabulatory explanations. Indeed, we investigated these three cases in some d...

The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network organized a workshop last June 20th at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. The theme was Phenomenology and Qualitative Health Research. The aim of the workshop was to explore different ways in which philosophical phenomenology is applied in qualitative research and address issues that arise from the increasingly collaborative nature of these fields. The organizers were Anthony Fernandez , Marcin Moskalewicz and Dan Zahavi . I was very glad to be included among the speakers and have the chance to present some of my work. This report includes a detailed summary of everyone’s talks. I thank everyone for sharing their notes to make this report. The first talk was Applied Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (University of Copenhaghen and University of Oxford) Zahavi a...

In September 2018, a team of Birmingham philosophers, comprising Kathy Puddifoot , Valeria Motta , Matilde Aliffi , EmaSullivan-Bissett and myself , were in sunny Rijeka, Croatia, to talk a whole lot of Epistemic Innocence at the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology . Epistemic innocence is the idea at the heart of our research at Project PERFECT . A cognition is epistemically innocent if it is irrational or inaccurate and operates in ways that could increase the chance of acquiring knowledge or understanding, where alternative, less costly cognitions that bring the same benefits are unavailable. Over the last few years, researchers on the project and beyond have investigated the implications of epistemic innocence in a range of domains (see a list of relevant work here ). Our epistemic innocence symposium at ESPP2018 was a mark of the relative maturity of the concept, and the opportunity for us to start expanding its applications. I went first, exploring the ...

Today's post is provided by Project PERFECT 's Co-investigator Michael Larkin from Aston University. In the post he outlines his plans for the coming months of the project. We’ve had a good start to this final block already, with Rachel Gunn and Magdalena Antrobus both successfully defending their theses at viva before Christmas, and subsequently being awarded their doctorates. I’ve really enjoyed working with Lisa Bortolotti and these two brilliant, creative and insightful researchers. It has been really exciting to see the interdisciplinary nature of their work take on such a distinctive character: I hope that we will see the the benefits of this in future work, post-PERFECT, too.  In Magdalena’s work, the interdisciplinary quality has taken the form of a very rigorous engagement with existing psychological evidence about the nature and context of low mood. In Rachel’s thesis, it involved conducting interviews, and engaging with phenomenological data, about th...

The workshop Challenges To Wellbeing: The Experience of Loneliness and Epistemic Injustice in the Clinical Encounter originated from a multi-disciplinary conversation about wellbeing and happiness. Exploring the theme of challenges to wellbeing, this conversation brought together academics from across the University, practitioners, and campaigners. The workshop was hosted by Lisa Bortolotti and Sophie Stammers  for project PERFECT , and co-organised and funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies  (IAS). It was held at the Centre for Professional Development (CPD) in the Medical School on the 22nd of November 2017. This is a detailed report on the talks given that day. The workshop was divided in three sessions. Session One was dedicated to Themes from Project PERFECT . Kathy Puddifoot started with an Introduction to Epistemic Injustice. She defined epistemic injustice and spoke about the different types that have been identified. Kathy explained that since th...

This post is by Christopher Mole , Chair of the programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia . He is the author of Attention is Cognitive Unison (OUP, 2010), and The Unexplained Intellect (Routledge, 2016). This post outlines the argument of his recent article, “ Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question ” (Philosophical Psychology, 8(3): 557-571). Discussions of autism are often euphemistic: We speak of ‘service users’ rather than patients; and ‘atypicality’ rather than illness. By avoiding the rhetoric of disease we avoid the implication that the autistic point of view is a defective one, which would be gone from a world in which everything was operating correctly. Those who do use the vocabulary of disease might reject such motivations, while congratulating themselves on their straight-talking, no-nonsense approach. This would, I think, be a mistake. According to one tradition, the mistake would be that of applying a ‘medical mod...

Today's post is by project  PERFECT Doctoral Researcher Valeria N. Motta 2018 is my second year as a doctoral researcher on project PERFECT . During my first year, I’ve been investigating loneliness and solitude. For that I did research on existing literature from different philosophical traditions and on the outcomes of empirical research. The existing literature on loneliness has focused on identifying its characteristics and has utilised different approaches. The idea behind finding common features (such as boredom or passivity) is that if we are able to identify them, a specific treatment can be developed in order to alleviate the problem. But documented in the literature I have also found an array of different ways of experiencing loneliness (such as those that emerge from failure to remember traumatic events, or which are masqueraded as connectedness via social media). These cases require a more fine grained approach. I have the privilege to get the support and mult...

I’m really looking forward to this next phase of PERFECT. Lots of things are now developing which tie in really well with work that I have been doing with some of our network members, with our PhD students, and with my wider research. One important theme for me is ‘relatedness’, and I’ll focus on that aspect here, because it connects several areas. This Thursday, network member Dr Zoë Boden will say more in her post about the ISRF ‘Relationships and Mental Health’ project which we have been developing. Zoë and I are involved in a number of research projects exploring people’s experiences of relationships and mental health. Some of these are exploring individuals’ perspectives on their own relational networks (asking, ‘who talks to whom about what?’ and ‘who does what with whom?’) and others are focused on understanding a shared difficulty (such as psychosis) from the perspectives of several members of the same family or system. Through the ISRF network events, we’ve been s...

In this post I interview Steve Cole Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine . VM: Loneliness has been characterized in reference to feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a mismatch between a person’s desired and achieved levels of social relations. In some of your latest papers you suggest that the experience of loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon but that, as any other adaptive predispositions, it can be found across phylogeny. In what sense can we say that animals desire social relations and experience loneliness?  SC: We begin by assuming that certain experiences are privileged to human beings but the more we understand about how human experience arises from the way the brain works, the more we find that there are small or vestigial versions of even the most esoteric human experiences in other animals. Most animals, for example monkeys and mammals, broadly speaking, are to some extent, ...

I am excited to join project PERFECT group of brilliant researchers and the stimulating research community at the Philosophy department of the University of Birmingham. My contribution to project PERFECT will come from my research on the experience of loneliness. I am also interested in crowd emotions and in exploring up to what extent we can talk about shared emotions. This year I will focus on investigating the possibility of talking about ‘inaccurate emotions’ and whether these could carry any epistemic value. Emotions may be the result of an embodied engagement with others and the world and cognition may play a fundamental role in this interaction. A preliminary hypothesis is that just as cognitions, emotions can be erroneous or 'inaccurate'. The experience of loneliness is especially relevant because it has been defined as depending on a particular individual’s perception of the social environment and the world. Researchers have argued that it would not make a differe...