Imperfect Cognitions

Today’s post is contributed by Víctor Verdejo. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has recently published the article “ On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments ”, now featuring in a special collection on delusions in Philosophical Psychology . Víctor Verdejo is currently a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a member of Logos Research Group. Víctor Verdejo We often think of delusional experience as not particularly revealing with respect to a subject’s rationality. In this paper, I explore a different—some might say daring—approach: what if delusional experience were to illuminate the rational grounds associated with our judgments and concepts? In this work, I focus on the experience of thought-insertion and the first-person concept. Consider what I term the “rationality hypothesis”: this hypothesis holds that when subjects with schizophrenia report thought insertion, they may be expressing fully rational judgments about the ownership ...

Today's post is by Patrizia Pedrini (University of Florence). Here she summarises her recent paper, “Rescuing the ‘Loss-of-Agency’ Account of Thought Insertion”, which appeared in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2015. Every day we think hundreds of thoughts. We form opinions, hold beliefs, develop intentions, feel desires, emotions, sensations, entertain fantasies. All this thinking activity typically comes to our consciousness with a fundamental feature that seems as natural as the thinking it accompanies: our capacity for self-ascription of it. When we think a thought, we also self-ascribe that thought, and such capacity for self-ascription is routine, immediate, unproblematic. However, this is a capacity that can break down. There is a disorder, known as thought insertion , that occurs in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and related forms of mental illness, the puzzling feature of which appears to amount to the impairment of such capacity. The subject aff...

This post is by David Miguel Gray (pictured above), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University and in the Spring of 2017 will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. David’s research interests are in the philosophy of cognitive psychology (in particular cognitive psychopathology), as well as philosophy of mind, and philosophy of race and racism. In this post David will address some theoretical issues with n-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. This post, and his previous one , will draw on his recent paper ‘ Failing to self-ascribe thought and motion: towards a three-factor account of passivity symptoms in schizophrenia ’, published in Schizophrenia Research. Cognitive-level theories of monothematic delusions have become heavily discussed, significantly in part to the work of Max Coltheart, Robyn Langdon, and Martin Davies (e.g. see Davies and Coltheart 2000 , Davies et al. 2001 , Coltheart et al. 2007 , Coltheart 2013 ). T...

This post is by Cherise Rosen (pictured above). Cherise is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has conducted extensive research on issues involving the symptoms and longitudinal course of psychosis.  Her research has focused on the phenomenological aspects of psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, metacognition, and self-disturbances. Much of her research follows mixed-methods research designs to elucidate findings that include the subjective experience.  Additionally, her research investigates the underlying epigenetic mechanisms of psychosis. In this post, Cherise summarises her recent paper (co-authored with Nev Jones, Kayla A. Chase, Hannah Gin, Linda S. Grossman, and Rajiv P. Sharma) ' The Intrasubjectivity of Self, Voices, and Delusions: A Phenomenological Analysis ', published in Psychosis.  In our recent study, we focused on the phenomenologically complex and nuanced inte...

This post is by David Miguel Gray (pictured above), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University and in the Spring of 2017 will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. David’s research interests are in the philosophy of cognitive psychology (in particular cognitive psychopathology), as well as philosophy of mind, and philosophy of race and racism.  I n this post David provides an explanation of abnormal experiences and the inferential processes involved in delusions of thought insertion and alien control. Next week, he will address some theoretical issues with n-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. Both posts will be drawing from his recent paper ‘ Failing to self-ascribe thought and motion: towards a three-factor account of passivity symptoms in schizophrenia ’, published in Schizophrenia Research. In my article I focus on two commonly known passivity symptoms of schizophrenia: thought insertion and alien ...

This post is by Cristina Borgoni (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Graz. Here she summarises her recent paper ' On Knowing One's Own Resistant Beliefs ', published in Philosophical Explorations.  I have two lines of research in philosophy: one is on self-knowledge and the other is on beliefs. In self-knowledge, I am part of a research trend that tries to expand the philosophical agenda in order to incorporate human concerns on the topic. Everybody knows that knowing oneself (e.g., one’s values or one’s deep desires) can be very difficult. However, philosophy has not been concerned with such difficulties. Philosophy has rather traditionally focused on a different issue, namely, on explaining how we know some of our thoughts in an apparently immediate and almost infallible way (e.g., if someone asks whether you believe it is raining now, you will have no problems in knowing immediately what you believe). Howev...

This post is by  Shaun Gallagher  (pictured above). He is Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. In this post he summarizes his recent article ' Relations between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion ', published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. In a recent paper I offer a response to some philosophers who have raised objections to the idea that in schizophrenic delusions of control and thought insertion the problem is primarily with the sense of agency. Instead, they argue, it concerns the sense of ownership. Let me start by clarifying the distinction, because in fact it is a double distinction, or a distinction made on two levels. On the level of first-order, pre-reflective experience the distinction between sense of agency (SA) and sense of ownership (SO) can be seen in the contrast between voluntary and involuntary movement. In the latter case, for example, if some one pushes me from ...

This post is by Clara Humpston  (in the picture above), PhD student in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopts a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach; by incorporating behavioural, neuroimaging, and phenomenological investigations, she aims to further contribute to a unified account of delusions and hallucinations.  Here she summarises her recent paper, co-written with Matthew Broome  (in the picture below), ' The Spectra of Soundless Voices and Audible Thoughts: Towards an Integrative Model of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Thought insertion is currently described as a delusion and a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia, i.e. a false belief that the subject receives inserted, whereas auditory-verbal hallucinations (voices) are aberrant sensory perceptions in the absence of any external stimulus. Our paper s...

This post is by Gottfried Vosgerau  (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dusseldorf. Gottfried's research interests are in the philosophy and metaphysics of mind, neurophilosophy, and cognitive science. Here he summarises his recent paper, co-authored with Martin Voss , ' Authorship and Control over Thoughts ', published in Mind and Language.  While there is a considerable consensus that ownership and agency should be sharply distinguished for motor actions, the according distinction for thoughts (thinking actions) is much less agreed on. In our paper we argue that a distinction is needed between the mere occurrence of a thought in my stream of consciousness (thought ownership) and my being the 'source' of a thought (authorship). While it is a conceptual truth that all of my thoughts are mine in the sense of ownership, there are already many examples from (non-pathological) everyday life that this is not the case for authorship. How...

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from The Cognitive Futures conference which took place on 13-15 April at Worcester College, University of Oxford (in the picture). Cognitive Futures in the Humanities is a multidisciplinary conference which aims to bring together literary disciplines, linguistics, theater and the arts, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience for our mutual benefit. The three day conference was held at Worcester College, Oxford and is in its third year, the first being held at Bangor and last year's being at Durham. There were a variety of panels on such diverse topics as narrative, imagination, mirroring and reflexiveness, kinesthetics, memory, embodied cognition, perception and hallucination. In the ‘clinical’ panel I (pictured above) presented a paper on thought insertion ('On thought insertion', forthcoming in a special issue of  Review of Philosophy and Psychology  on Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis) where I used first person narrativ...

Caitrin Donovan I am a student in the Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney . In my recently completed honours dissertation, I argued that the delusional phenomenon of thought insertion problematises certain aspects of the 'minimal model' of self. Many philosophers now believe that the self is in some way constructed by narrative; through socio-linguistically mediated story-telling, we achieve diachronic unity by taking a reflective stance on our experiences. According to the strong formulation of this thesis, conscious beings only develop selves once they acquire the higher-order linguistic and reflective capacities required for autobiographical self-understanding. 

This post is by Rachel Gunn, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, working on delusion and thought insertion. After introducing the phenomenon of thought insertion in my previous post , here I discuss ownership of thoughts. The impossibility of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) is an established notion in relation to the self. If I have something to say about my experience it is self-evident that I am the one undergoing the experience. I cannot be mistaken.  A subject experiencing thought insertion cannot be mistaken about who is experiencing the thought. Whilst this is true it does not explain what the experience is like. The thought is observed or witnessed by the subject, they have access to the content and have some sort of first-person experience of it. It is not, however, the same kind of experience that they ‘normally’ have. It differs from other thoughts – but in what sense?