Imperfect Cognitions

The second day of the workshop on Conspiratorial Ideation and Psychopathology (Birmingham, 25th April 2023) opened up with a talk by the organisers, Anna Ichino from the University of Milan and Ema Sullivan-Bissett from the University of Birmingham. The talk addressed heads-on the theme of the workshop: does the overlap between conspiracy beliefs and delusions mean that conspiracy beliefs are pathological? Anna Ichino and  Ema Sullivan-Bissett Why do we think that delusions are pathological? They flout epistemic norms, but many other (non delusional) beliefs do the same, so this is not a promising criterion for pathology. Another option is that delusions have strange content, but again other beliefs also have strange content such as paranormal beliefs or QAnon beliefs. A more promising criterion of pathology for beliefs is an etiological one: pathological beliefs involve a malfunction. Monothematic delusions can be considered as pathological because they may arise out of anomalo...

Today's post is by Quinn Hiroshi Gibson and Adam Bradley , on how to understand monothematic delusions. Quinn Hiroshi Gibson Subjects with Capgras delusion form the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter: The day after her arrival at home, [her] father could not open the front door because YY had locked it from the inside. He rang the bell and YY called the police because ‘there was an impostor outside the house who was picking the lock and pretending to be her father’. (Brighetti at al. 2007, p. 191)   Capgras is a monothematic delusion, a delusion whose content is restricted to a single topic, in this case the identity of YY's father. In ‘ Monothematic Delusions and the Limits of Rationality ’ (published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 2021), we put forward a new account of such delusions. Our view is a version of the two-factor model according to which two factors are responsible for monothematic delusions ( Davies et al. 2001 )...

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...

Today’s post is by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Here she overviews her paper ‘ Unimpaired Abduction to Alien Abduction: Lessons on Delusion Formation ’, recently published in Philosophical Psychology. Last year, when millions of people had marked themselves as attending a storming of Area 51, Ema also wrote about her research for the Birmingham Perspective . In the academic year 2013–14, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Lisa Bortolotti’s AHRC project on the Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions . Towards the end of the Project, I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to be a Visiting Researcher at Macquarie University’s ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders. Professor John Sutton hosted me for that month, but I was also lucky to spend some time with Professor Max Coltheart , and interviewed him for this blog. In the first part of the interview we talked about delusion for...

Today’s post is written by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham . Here she overviews her paper ‘ Monothematic Delusion: A case of innocence from experience '. Before taking up my current post as Lecturer in Philosophy, I was a Postdoc on Lisa Bortolotti’s AHRC project on the Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions (2013-14). In that year we worked together in developing the notion of epistemic innocence, which we thought could be of use in thinking about the epistemic status of faulty cognitions. We understood a cognition as epistemically innocent when it (1) endows some significant epistemic benefit onto the subject (Epistemic Benefit Condition), which could not otherwise be had, because (2) alternative, less epistemically faulty cognitions are in some sense unavailable to her at that time (No Alternatives Condition). As part of that project, we wrote two papers in which we put that notion to use in discussion of exp...

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...

Max Coltheart This is the first in a series of posts on the papers published in an issue of AVANT on Delusions. Here  Max Coltheart  summarises his paper  ' From the Internal Lexicon to Delusional Belief '. Ten years ago, in an article on the two-factor theory of delusion, I wrote:  'Suppose that as we go about everyday life we use an internal model of the world (Gray  1995 ;  Sokolov  1963 ) to continuously predict what we will experience next. These predictions will normally be fulfilled, but occasionally not: occasionally something not predicted by the internal model occurs. That event indicates that there is something wrong with the database of beliefs that the model uses to predict what will happen next in the world. So the database needs to be fixed (by modifying e xisting beliefs or adopting new ones) so that it becomes compatible with the unexpected event' (Coltheart 2005 ). As I emphasize in my Avant  article, this is th...