Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Joe Pierre, professor of psychology at UC San Francisco, discusses his recently published book, False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren’t True (OUP, 2025) False As a psychiatrist, my clinical work as a psychiatrist through the years has focused on the treatment of people with psychotic disorders. But in my academic work, I’ve been drawn to the grey area between psychopathology and normality and especially the continuum of delusion-like beliefs and full-blown delusions that includes religious, ideological, and conspiracy theory beliefs. In psychiatry, false beliefs like cognitive distortions or delusions are typically chalked up to psychopathology. People have cognitive distortions because they have major depressive disorderand people are delusional because they have schizophrenia. And although research might tell us that delusional thinking can be attributed to anomalous subjective experiences or a “jumping to conclus...

In this post, Amelia Gangemi and Valentina Cardella introduce their new book, Reasoning in Psychopathology  (Routledge 2024). Reasoning in Psychopathology Rationality can be broadly categorized into two types: rationality of action, which concerns behavior appropriate to achieving one’s goals, and theoretical rationality, which involves conformity to norms, such as logical or social norms. Many philosophers and psychologists argue that a key aspect of mental disorder is a deficiency in rational control over one’s behavior. This notion is consistent with the common view that mental illness involves a lack of discipline or self-control. Contrary to this view, individuals with mental disorders do not necessarily exhibit impaired rationality. In our book, we present studies of schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders that suggest that individuals with these conditions can reason logically within their symptomatic domains and may even outperform unaffected individuals on certain...

Today's post is by Elmar Unnsteinsson  (University College Dublin). Here Unnsteinsson asks why we talk to ourselves. The other day I saw someone enjoying a walk while deeply engaged in conversation but I couldn’t see the other person. The ledge between us was too high. When I turned the corner I saw that the person was alone and actually talking to no one. Well, no one else I should say. It’s unremarkable that I had assumed that there was a pair of people, dancing conversational tango, but, it does raise the question why we think of conversation as, essentially, a multi-player game? As a matter of fact, many of us thoroughly enjoy having conversations. We seek them out to achieve catharsis, form strong social bonds of trust and friendship, learn surprising new things, and obviously the list could be endless. So, it never even occurs to us to ask why we would spend our time talking to others. We couldn’t even list half of the good reasons to do so. Why is it then so surp...

In today's post Harriet Stuart (MRes student in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham) reports on the Deluded by Experience  workshop on delusion formation, held online on 12th and 13th July 2021. This was the first workshop of the AHRC funded Project Deluded by Experience  and was organised by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett and Paul Noordhof . Poster of the event Day one started with Kengo Miyazono who presented ‘Salience and Affordance in Schizophrenia’. Kengo proposed a revision of the Aberrant Salience Hypothesis ( Kapur, 2003 ). He claimed that “salience” can be analysed in terms of affordance; an object X is “salient” if and only if X “affords” attention. The altered experience in schizophrenia involves some aberrant salience which is caused by relatively strengthened attentional affordances owing to damage to top-down suppression mechanisms. Kengo Miyazono Then Sam Wilkinson presented ‘Agent Representations as Generative Models: The case of Delusional Misident...

Today's post is by Stephen Gadsby , from the Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University, Melbourne. Stephen Gadsby It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, ‘Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved’ — Emma Watson Emma Watson’s confession represents a characteristic feature of imposter syndrome, a condition suffered by many intelligent, driven, and successful individuals—Maya Angelou, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, to name a few. People with imposter syndrome feel like frauds because they believe themselves to be less able (e.g., talented, knowledgeable, intelligent) than their peers. The truth of the matter is just the opposite: they are just as, if not more, able. They also have ample evidence in support of this, in the form of achievements, accolades, awards, and the like. A puzzling feature of the phenomenon is the way in which ...

This post is by Jasper Feyaerts, who is discussing a paper he co-authored with Mads G Henriksen, Stijn Vanheule, Inez Myin-Germeys, and Louis A Sass, entitled "Delusions beyond Beliefs", and published in The Lancet Psychiatry . With this link, there will be free access to the article for a few weeks. Jasper Feyaerts Delusions are commonly conceived as false beliefs that result from epistemic failures to represent reality correctly. This view has been dominant throughout the history of psychiatry, and continues to inform contemporary research and practice. In explanatory research, it underlies (neuro)cognitive attempts to explain delusions in terms of impairments or biases in cognitive reasoning. In clinical practice, it motivates cognitive-behavioral strategies focusing on the rational evaluation of delusional appraisals. Yet despite being the standard view of delusion in psychosis research, this conception has not gone entirely unchallenged. Most notably in the tradition ...

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's post is by Valentina Cardella (Università di Messina). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Rationality in Mental Disorder: Too little or too much? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Valentina Cardella Are people with mental disorders irrational? At first sight, this seems to be a trivial question: madness is the realm of non-sense. When someone tells you that her neighbour installed a tracking device in her abdomen, or that her internal organs are decomposing, you can’t help to wonder: how can she believe such impossible things? Where has her rationality gone? The common conceptualization of madness, which dates back to the Enlightenment, reflects this common-sense intuition: in people with mental disorders emotions are abnormal and unrestrained, and, on the other side, reason is severely affected. People with mental disorders can’t reason properly, healthy people can....

This post is by Peter Langland-Hassan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who is presenting his new book, Explaining Imagination (OUP 2020). The book is available as a free open access download , thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati. Peter Langland-Hassan  We won’t understand what imagination is—we won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination , is a compendium of such recipes. What ingredients do they feature? On my telling, they are other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts, they constitute cases of imagining. The idea that imagination can be reduced to other kinds of mental states in this way is at odds with what most (maybe all) other philosophers have had to say about imagination. According to the orthodox view, if we list a person’...

This post is the second in a series of posts featuring presentations that could not be delivered at Philosophy conferences due to the coronavirus outbreak. Today Nick Byrd, PhD Candidate at Florida State University, summarises his paper, "Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Individual Differences In Philosophers’ Trait Reflection, Education, & Philosophical Beliefs". Many philosophers accept that relying on unreflective intuition is standard fare in philosophy (e.g., Chalmers, 2014 ; De Cruz, 2014 ; Kornblith, 1998 ; Mallon, 2016 ). Many philosophers also consider reflection to be crucial for philosophical inquiry (e.g., Goodman, 1983 ; Hursthouse, 1999 ; Korsgaard, 1996 ; Rawls, 1971 ; Sosa 1991 ). Fortunately, cognitive scientists have developed measures of peoples’ reliable on unreflective and reflective reasoning (e.g., Evans, Barston, and Pollard, 1983 ; Frederick, 2005 ; Sirota, et al., 2018 ). In fact, among laypeople, individual differences in reflection ...

Today's post is by Selene Arfini , post doctoral researcher in the Computational Philosophy Laboratory at the Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section at the University of Pavia. She presents her recently published book, Ignorant Cognition: A Philosophical Investigation of the Cognitive Features of Not-Knowing  (Springer 2019). Ignorance, considered without further specifications, is a broad and strange concept. In a way, it is easy to analyze ignorance as something that does not really affect the agent's knowledge: we know A and we are ignorant of B, but the two things are not necessarily related. In another way, we need to face phenomena as misinformation, a highly recognizable form of ignorance that cannot be represented as unaffecting the knowledge of the agent since it has an impact on her/his belief system and understanding. On the one hand, we instinctively frown upon ignorance if we believe it is purposefully cultivated. On the other hand, we know...

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...

This post is by Josh May , Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He presents his book, Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind  (OUP, 2018). May’s research lies primarily at the intersection of ethics and science. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011. Before taking a position at UAB, he spent 2 years teaching at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. My book is a scientifically-informed examination of moral judgment and moral motivation that ultimately argues for what I call optimistic rationalism, which contains empirical and normative theses. The empirical thesis is a form of (psychological) rationalism, which asserts that moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally driven by reasoning or inference. The normative thesis is cautiously optimistic, claiming that moral cognition and motivation are, in light of the science, in pretty good shape---at least, the empirical ev...

We often say things like “you shouldn’t believe that the Earth is flat” or “just look at the evidence, you really ought to believe that vaccinations save lives”. Just as one might think that we have particular obligations to behavemorally, one might suspect that this sort of talk reveals that we have obligations to believeparticular things, or perhaps, to believe in a particular way. Is that right? And if so, what do those obligations consist in? On 30th – 31st May, a workshop investigating issues related to these questions was held at St. Thomas University , Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Organised by Scott Stapleford , Professor of Philosophy at St Thomas University, and Kevin McCain , Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the workshop comprised eight talks over the course of two days. Here, I summarize just a few of them. Sharon Ryan was interested in the question of whether we have an epistemic obligation to be open-minded. She ...

Johannes Mahr (pictured above) is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science at Central European University in Budapest. His work centers on the question of how the capacity for complex forms of communication has shaped higher cognition in humans. During his PhD he developed a novel account of the nature and function of episodic memory, which focuses on its role in communication. You can read about it here . We usually think that when we remember the past, we form beliefs based on whatever we remember. When you remember that you went to the supermarket and bought a bottle of champagne yesterday, you take yourself to believe that this is indeed what you did because you remember it. Similar to perception, it seems to us that remembering provides us with evidence on the basis of which we form our beliefs. In the case of perception it has been widely argued that the processes by which we perceive our environment are encapsulated from what we already believe. Th...

My name is Andrea Polonioli and I recently joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow. I am extremely excited to be working under the mentorship of Lisa Bortolotti and on this fantastic project exploring the Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts ( PERFECT ). Until now, most of my research has focused on the following two questions: What does it mean to be rational? To what extent are we rational? During my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, I explored these questions mainly considering literature on judgment and decision-making in nonclinical populations. As it turns out, researchers in the field of judgment and decision-making often claim that to be rational means to reason according to formal principles based on logic, probability theory, and decision theory. In a few papers of mine, I defended the claim that formal principles of rationality are too narrow and abstract, and that behaviour sh...