Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is an interview with Paolo Costa, who is a researcher at the Center for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation and leads the Resilient Beliefs project, and Eugenia Lancellotta, who is a postdoctoral researcher on the project. We talked about the Resilient Beliefs project.  Paolo Costa KMH: What is the 'Resilient Beliefs' project all about? PC & EL: It is a collaborative program involving 9 researchers in philosophy and theology and three different institutions: the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, in Italy, and the Universities of Innsbruck and Brixen in Austria. It is about hyper-robust beliefs, so to speak. By “hyper-robust beliefs” I mean beliefs that are especially resistant to criticism and change induced by counterargument and counterevidence. Now, these beliefs are often seen as irrational, because we tend to link rationality with revisability, flexibility, adaptability, etc.  But, of course, people who change their mind too ea...

This post is by Lucienne Spencer (University of Birmingham). In this post she is reporting on the launch of a new project, Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology .   The project aims to apply interdisciplinary approaches to phenomenological psychopathology and diversify the field more broadly. It is funded by a Wellcome Trust International Exchange Award and will run from April 2022 to April 2024. The project leads are Matthew Broome and Giovanni Stanghellini . Lucienne Spencer is the post-doctoral researcher on the project, and Roxana Baiasu is research fellow and network convener.  Organisers Lucienne Spencer, Matthew Broome, and Roxana Baiasu Thanks to the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology project was formally launched last week at the University of Birmingham and via Zoom. This was a one-day hybrid event, with online and in-person panels running simultaneously. Through this launch event, we invited critical reflection...

Today's post is by Veronica Valle, philosopher of perception and of the cognitive sciences, who recently completed a doctoral project at the University of Macau. Here she discusses some of her work on the Moral Roots of Quarantine project . Veronica Valle The war metaphor has been largely dominating the public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemics worldwide, with many voices having highlighted the potential and factual negative effects of such a rhetoric. Our paper focuses on one aspect that has been overlooked: the interplay between deeply rooted gender stereotypes and the use of the war metaphor. We carried out an investigation of the embedded use of gender-specific images in the war narrative that characterized the anti-pandemic public discourse in Italy during the first wave. By employing textual semiotics and theories in pragmatics, we analyze a relevant selection of texts (e.g., social advertising ads, newspaper articles, statements made by politicians, etc.). The results o...

In today's post, I interview Nevia Dolcini , philosopher of mind based at the University of Macau, on the project The Moral Roots of Quarantine. Nevia Dolcini Lisa Bortolotti: What did you set out to investigate in the project The Moral Roots of Quarantine? Nevia Dolcini: The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic prompted a series of unprecedented events worldwide. As an Italian living in Macau, I first witnessed the effects of the Wuhan outbreak, and I later experienced the first wave and consequent lockdown in Italy. I was bewildered by my observations of the wide-ranging public reactions to the same emergency. For instance, while masks in Macau were accepted since the first day into the pandemic, in Italy their efficacy was questioned at length. Interestingly, the pandemic discourses across East and West were highly ‘moralized’. These observations inspired the project “ The Moral Roots of Quarantine ”, funded by the Macau S.A.R. Government Higher Education Fund, which sets out to carry ...

This is the last in a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. Today, Rachel Temple , Public Involvement in Research Manager at the McPin Foundation , and members of the Young Person Advisory Group [YPAG] tell us about how the project impacted them.  In the course of the project, YPAG members provided detailed feedback on the application for funding, shaping research questions and outputs; contributed to the research, analysing videos of interactions between practitioners and young people struggling with their mental health; participated in public engagement events and prepared resources for schools on agency and youth mental health; shared their valuable insights, knowledge, and experience on blog posts and podcasts; and co-authored some of the project publications with the other members of the team.    Prior to working on the Agency project, I held a lot of shame and secrecy around my me...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team provided some evidence of epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and Lisa Bortolotti discuss a new approach to protecting the sense of agency of young people meeting a crisis team for mental health problems. Clara Bergen Lisa Bortolotti In our project, we wanted to ask: How can practitioners avoid undermining a young person’s sense of agency in a mental healthcare encounter? We adopted an absolutely unique analytic approach to find out the answer. “We” are a group of six experts in philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, clinical communication, clinical practice, and public involvement in research (Interdisciplinary Academic Researchers), and five young people aged 17-25 with experience of accessing mental health services for diagnoses including post-traumatic stress disorder, ma...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team explained why young people may have heightened risks of experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and  Rose McCabe  provide evidence that young people's sense of agency is sometimes undermined in such encounters. By analysing video recordings of police interactions, courtroom cross-examinations, and political news interviews, researchers have learned a lot about how institutional figures challenge what other people have felt or experienced.  For example, police and lawyers use subtle practices like asking questions that imply inconsistency or implausibility ( Stokoe et al 2020 ), anticipate a compromising response ( Drew 1992) , or imply disagreement ( Jol & van der Houwen 2014 ). Lawyers and political interviewers may take an adversa...

This is the first in a series of posts reporting outcomes from a  project on Agency in Youth Mental Health,  led by  Rose McCabe  at City University. Today Joe Houlders, Matthew Broome and Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham) talk about the risks of young people with unusual experiences and beliefs experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters.  Joe Houlders Epistemic injustice occurs when a person is not given authority and credibility as a knower in an exchange, due to negative stereotypes associated with the person's identity (age, gender, ethnicity, social class, education, sexual orientation, health). Young people with unusual experiences and beliefs are particularly at risk of being on the receiving end of epistemic injustice, and when their agency is undermined the effects are likely to be pervasive and impact negatively on their health outcomes.  Why is this population more vulnerable? In the mental health context, the...

Today I interview Rik Peels (Amsterdam) on a new exciting project he is leading, addressing extremism and fundamentalism. The project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and is named, "Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism" (2020-2025).  Rik Peels LB: How did you become interested in fundamentalism? RP: It was a combination of two things. On the one hand, ever since the start of my PhD in 2008, I’ve been working on the ethics of belief. In times of polarization and misinformation, I think the issue of how people form their beliefs and how they should form them has become even more important. On the other hand, especially since 9/11, the so-called new atheists have severely critiqued religious faith on both moral and epistemic grounds, but it has always struck me, as a religious person myself, that they seem to target only fundamentalist and other extreme versions of religion. I felt it was only natural to combine the two interests and the rise of terr...

This week we feature the project  Deluded by Experience , led by  Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. The project will last 30 months (January 2021–June 2023) and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with Ema as PI and  Paul Noordhof  as Co-I. You can follow the Project on twitter  @del_by_ex .  In today's blog, I ask Ema about the project. LB: What is  Deluded by Experience  about?  ESB:  Deluded by Experience  is focused on three main areas. The first is monothematic delusion formation. Philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists have argued that subjects with monothematic delusions have anomalous experiences in which delusions are rooted. However, few take anomalous experience to be the only clinically relevant factor. This is the one-factor approach. The current orthodoxy has it that a second clinical factor (cognitive deficit, bias...

This post is the fourth in a series of posts on a project on agency and youth mental health  funded by a MRC/AHRC/ESRC Adolescence, Mental Health and the Developing Mind: Engagement Award and led by Rose McCabe at City University. The research team members were asked the same four questions and today it is Michael Larkin's turn to answer. Michael Larkin Michael is a Reader in Psychology at Aston University. He is interested in related and connectedness and is an expert in the co-production and co-design of psychosocial services. In 2019, he was awarded the Mid-Career Research Prize by the Qualitative Methods Section of the British Psychological Society. What interests you about clinical encounters with young people in the mental health context? Over the years I’ve been involved in lots of studies about people’s experiences of mental health services, and of course, read a lot of other’s people’s work in this area too. It’s really striking how frequently certain key themes...

This post is the third in a series of posts on a project on  agency and youth mental health  funded by a MRC/AHRC/ESRC Adolescence, Mental Health and the Developing Mind: Engagement Award and led by Rose McCabe at City University. The research team members were asked the same four questions and today it is Rose McCabe's turn to answer. Rose McCabe Rose is a psychologist specialising in professional-patient communication in mental health care. She records professional-patient encounters and micro-analyses verbal and nonverbal communication. She also works on translating these findings into novel interventions to improve communication and patient outcomes in mental healthcare.  What interests you about clinical encounters with young people in the mental health context? I am fascinated by communication between people and how it has the potential to impact us in a good or bad way. In a mental health context, when someone is distressed and vulnerable, this becomes even m...