Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Dan Degerman  on his recent paper, " Epistemic injustice, naturalism, and mental disorder: on the epistemic benefits of obscuring social factors " ( Synthese , 2023). Dan Degerman is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.  Dan Degerman Naturalistic understandings that frame human experiences and differences as biological dysfunctions constitute a major source of epistemic injustice in disease and disability, according to many philosophers. Epistemic injustice refers to injustices committed against people in their capacity as knowers. This occurs, for example, when someone is disbelieved because of their social identity or when a lack of suitable interpretive resources means that someone cannot make their experiences intelligible to themselves or others. Critics have argued that naturalistic understandings of human experiences and differences can lead to both kinds of epistemic injustice because they tend t...

The Royal College of Psychiatrists hosted its  Faculty of Neuropsychiatry Annual Conference on 13-14 September 2018 in London. I was fortunate to attend the first day and I am going to report on some of the interesting talks I listened to. In the first session speakers focused on neuroscience for psychiatrists, and Paul Johns, author of Clinical Neuroscience , addressed the functional anatomy of the human amygdala. The amygdala is constantly looking out for dangers and helps us evaluate the emotional significance of events. It facilitates social interactions as it enables us to read other people's minds. Further, the amygdala is involved in learning and episodic memory for important events. It is responsible for an implicit emotional memory of negative events to help us avoid adverse stimuli. The amygdala is for assessing environmental cues to determine the adequate response to threats. So patients without the amygdala are fearless but it is possible to experimentall...