Imperfect Cognitions

As part of a British Academy project on Conspiratorial Ideation and Pathological Beliefs, Ema Sullivan-Bissett (University of Birmingham) and Anna Ichino (University of Milan) organised a workshop in Birmingham with speakers from philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. In this post, I summarise the workshop talks on day one, 24th April 2023. Workshop poster Psychologist  Karen Douglas kicked off the workshop talking about the psychology of conspiracy theories, asking why people believe in conspiracy theories and what the consequences are of believing conspiracy beliefs. Douglas started with a psychologist's definition of a conspiracy theory: "A belief that two or more actors have coordinated in secret to achieve an outcome. It is a conspiracy that the public should know about." For Douglas, conspiracy beliefs respond to three types of needs: Epistemic needs: finding meaning and explanation, addressing uncertainty, seeing patterns, wanting closure. People more likely to ...

Today's post is by Eugenia Lancellotta (University of Birmingham). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Delusions in the two-factor theory: pathological or adaptive? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on  Bounds of Rationality . Eugenia Lancellotta Are delusions pathological, adaptive, or both? I investigated this issue with Lisa Bortolotti. We framed the question in the context of one of the most popular theories of delusion formation and maintenance: the two-factor theory. Two-factor theories hold that the formation and maintenance of delusions involve two factors. Factor 1 is usually a neuropsychological impairment, while Factor 2 is a cognitive deficit or bias. While two-factor theorists agree on the broad two-factor architecture involved in the formation and maintenance of delusions, they disagree on some aspects of it. Coltheart and McKay are among the most prominent two factor theorists....

Today I want to share some thoughts on last week's interesting post  on de-rationalising delusions. In the  pre-print  of their thought provoking paper, Vaughan Bell has argued, with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson, for the view that models of delusions need to include "alterations to coalitional cognition" and to depart from the dominant views that characterise delusions primarily as irrational beliefs. Here I am not going to discuss their positive proposal, which sounds plausible, but just comment on how the so-called 'dominant account' the authors object to in the paper groups together heterogeneous views of what makes delusions distinctive and pathological. Some of the cognitive accounts Bell and colleagues have as their polemical target hold that: (1) the irrationality of delusions is distinctive from (more radical than) the irrationality of other beliefs; and (2) the irrationality of delusions is the main source (if not the only source) of their ...

On 15th October at Hornton Grange Matthew Broome , director of the Institute for Mental Health  in Birmingham, chaired the book launch of Delusions in Context (Palgrave Pivot, 2018), a collection of four new papers on delusions. The book is truly interdisciplinary, featuring authors with a background in psychiatry, lived experience, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy, and is available open access on the Springer website . I edited the book. At the launch, I explained how the book fits with the work we have been doing as part of project PERFECT . In the project one of the objectives is to examine whether beliefs that we consider as epistemically irrational (either not supported by existing evidence, or resistant to new counter-evidence) can nonetheless have some benefits for the person who adopts such beliefs. Benefits could be cashed out in terms of increased wellbeing or reduced anxiety, enhanced motivation to pursue epistemic goals, or better performance i...

My name is Valentina Petrolini and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati. I work in philosophy of psychiatry, where my research focuses on the nature of mental disorders and on pathologies of belief such as delusions. In my paper “ What Makes Delusions Pathological? ” I draw on Lisa Bortolotti ’s work to suggest that delusional beliefs are irrational in a particular way. I accept the Continuity Thesis that Bortolotti proposes, namely the idea that beliefs lie on a continuum of rationality with delusions at the most irrational end. Yet, this formulation leaves an important problem unsolved. If delusions cannot be distinguished from other irrational beliefs by their failure to live up to rational norms, what makes delusions distinctively pathological? My solution consists in fine-tuning the notion of rationality to explore the influence that processes like emotions and relevance detection have on belief formation.

This post is by Eisuke Sakakibara (pictured above), psychiatrist working at The University of Tokyo Hospital and a graduate student of Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Japan. In this post he writes about recently published paper entitled “irrationality and pathology of beliefs” published online in Neuroethics, and its significance for his long-term project in philosophy of psychiatry. Delusions are an oft discussed theme in philosophy of psychiatry. The most cited work on delusions is Lisa Bortolotti’s Delusions and other irrational beliefs , in which she discussed whether delusions are appropriately construed as a kind of belief. I assume delusions are beliefs in order to concentrate on another problems about delusions: psychiatrists ponder on whether delusions indicate underlying grave illness, because irrational beliefs (or belief-like mental states) are not always symptoms of illness. Those with pathological delusions do not recognize their delusions a...

On 16th and 17th of April, the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham held a two day conference on the Neurocognition of Aberrant Experience and Belief to celebrate the launch of the Aberrant Experience and Belief research theme . The conference was organized by Jason Braithwaite and Hayley Dewe , and featured nineteen talks across two days by researchers from different disciplines interested in aberrant experience and belief. In this post I will report on just a handful of these talks (see delegates' reactions by heading over to Twitter with #AEBConference ). In his talk ‘Things that Make you go Weird’, Roger Newport reported on findings using the MIRAGE  machine, which he demonstrated over lunch on the first day. I was lucky enough to have a go and experienced the illusion of an elongated index finger and a missing right hand! Newport suggested that not having these so-called ‘aberrant’ experiences is abnormal, and that future research might look t...

This is the sixth in our  series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Kengo Miyazono summarises his paper ' Delusions as Harmful Malfunctioning Beliefs '. Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is not the same as being false or being irrational. A woman might falsely believe that Istanbul is the capital of Turkey but it might just be a simple mistake. A man might believe without good evidence that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the other hand, when a patient with brain damage caused by a car accident believes that his father was replaced by an imposter, or when another patient with schizophrenia believes that 'The Organization' painted the doors of the houses on a street to send a message to him, these beliefs are not merely false or irrational. They are pathological. What makes...