Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Susi Ferrarello , Francesca Brencio , Valeria Bizzari and Magnus Englander present a recent special issue of Frontiers in Psychology entitled: " Phenomenological Psychopathology: Who, What and How? An analysis of key figures, advancements and challenges ”.  Valeria Bizzari Phenomenology offers psychopathology a framework for understanding the patient’s lived experience without preconceptions, while psychopathology allows phenomenology to explore human plurality more deeply. In this special issue we aimed to gather papers focusing on the intersection of phenomenology and psychopathology, examining key concepts, contemporary challenges, and clinical applications.  Topics of interest include: the theoretical and practical advancements of phenomenological psychopathology the role of embodiment emotions like envy and melancholy in disorders  the use of phenomenological methodologies like interviews in clinical settings.  Key phenomenological concepts such ...

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...

This post is by Maja Kittel, formerly known as Maja Białek, a philosopher of psychiatry working at the Faculty of Philosophy and Cognitive Science of the University of Białystok. Maja focuses on the epistemic properties of delusions and is currently conducting empirical qualitative research on the content of delusions (for details, click here ). Maja recently published a paper entitled: “The epistemic innocence of elaborated delusions re-examined” in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Maja Kittel Epistemic innocence is the idea, put forth by Lisa Bortolotti and collaborators, that although certain beliefs seem epistemically costly, they sometimes bring more epistemic benefit than harm and thus deserve absolution. For example, a monothematic delusion that helps an individual understand their difficult and frightening experiences may be judged as epistemically innocent because, although it is false and fixed, it serves as an imperfect, temporary crutch, helping the person remain a...

In this post, Pablo López–Silva and Tom McClelland present their new edited book, Intruders in the Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion (OUP 2023). Thought insertion is a rare delusion most often found among those suffering from schizophrenia. It is characterised by subjects reporting that entities have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. Although the structure of these reports shows similarities, the external agents that subjects identify are highly variable: some identify individuals such as celebrities or relatives; some identify groups such as aliens or the government; others identify objects like radios, houses or trees. In an oft-cited case, one patient reports ‘…thoughts are put into my mind like “Kill God”, it’s just like my mind working, but it isn’t. They come from this chap, Chris. They are his thoughts’ (Frith, 1992, p. 66).  This delusion raises a host of philosophical questions about the phenomenology of thought, our sense of ownership...

This blog post is by Alexandre Billon who presents his argument in a paper recently published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . This paper is a commentary on Kammerer and Frankish's article on what forms introspection could take. Alexandre Billon A couple of authors have suggested that schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder (DD) involve an enhancement of introspective abilities regarding certain important features of our experiences --- call that the Superintrospectionitis Thesis. The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Schizophrenia In the phenomenological tradition, Blankenburg argued that reports of some people with schizophrenia ‘reveal, in a kind of immediacy the conditions of possibility of our existence that otherwise remain concealed’ ( Blankenburg, 2001 , p. 308). Likewise, Kimura (2001 , p. 335) suggested that schizophrenia might render manifest, through introspection, the ‘innate structure of all human beings that happens to be hidden in healthy people owin...

This post is by Darryl Mathieson, doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the Australian National University. In this post, Darryl writes about thought insertion and self-experience in schizophrenia, which is the object of a paper recently published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Darryl Mathieson The Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that when he introspected, he found various mental states like thoughts and perceptions, but no extra subject of experiences that we might call ‘the self’. Hume’s denial has commanded widespread philosophical agreement and has led to the thesis that the self is at best elusive, and at worst does not appear in experience at all.  However, a different path to self-experience that we might take is to look at what happens when consciousness breaks. Just as the deafening silence left in the wake of an air conditioner shutting off makes its constant hum more salient, so too certain experiences pervade everyday consciousness and appear el...

This post is by Cherise Rosen . Cherise is a faculty member in the Departments of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a co-investigator in the Chicago Longitudinal Study (PI: Martin Harrow) and has conducted extensive research in the phenomenological construct of psychosis, with particular emphasis on auditory verbal hallucinations and delusions.    Cherise Rosen Cherise summarizes her recent paper (co-authored with Martin Harrow, Clara Humpston, Liping Tong, Thomas H. Jobe, and Helen Harrow) entitled  ‘An experience of meanings’: A 20-year prospective analysis of delusional realities in schizophrenia and affective psychoses , recently published in  Frontiers in Psychiatry . The authors would like to thank all the individuals who participated in the Chicago Longitudinal Study as their contributions over the 20 years of follow-up made this research possible. This work was supported in part by USPHS Grants MH-...

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks about a recent paper she co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, “ Do delusions have and give meaning? ”, recently published in  Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  (open access).  Rosa Ritunnano For many people living with psychosis, delusional experiences are hugely distressing. They are not only harmful because of the negative emotions they often carry along, but they are also dysfunctional ( Miyazono, 2015 ). Someone who believes, for example, that everyone in their workplace is reading their thoughts and controlling their movements through a mysterious influencing machine, may feel extremely nervous, gradually withdraw from their friends and family, and give up their job. This can lead to a disruption in good functioning and may be accompanied by a constellation of symptoms attracting...

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 Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) and Mads Gram Henriksen (University of Copenhagen) on their new paper “ Disturbances of Shared Intentionality in Schizophrenia and Autism ” (published in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychiatry). Alessandro Salice In the past decades, shared intentionality (i.e., the capacity to share mental states like beliefs, intentions or emotions) has attracted intense attention in several disciplines. These include various theoretical disciplines (e.g., philosophy and game theory), empirical sciences of the mind (e.g., developmental psychology, social psychology, and cognitive sciences), and social sciences (e.g., anthropology, economics, and sociology). By now, the idea that shared intentionality pervasively characterizes human psychology and, therefore, human forms of social life has become fairly uncontroversial in the literature. However, the large body of insights secured by this burgeoning line of research has, so far, remained la...

This post is by Laura Roklicer. Laura is an MA student in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham, alongside which she is attending the Expansions of Quantum Theory Towards Consciousness course organized by ECR-Institute (Berlin) and hosted by the Dev Sanskriti University (Haridvar). She holds a First-Class Honours bachelor’s degree in Psychology and in Media Production, and she is looking to pursue a PhD next year through which she hopes to continue exploring the mind. Laura Roklicer How the world actually is beyond our apparent understanding matters greatly in defining our views on many important topics. If consciousness were seen as a mere illusion, a great trick played by an unintentional Nature, then we would all be deluded in thinking that we’re thinking. Similarly, if the whole of existence were a single, unified mind, we would again be deluded in thinking we exist apart from each other, in our own private heads on our own two shoulders, and wit...

Today's post is by Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter) and it is the third in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Sam Wilkinson This series of posts has sought to show how there has been a “social turn” in thinking about delusions. The excellent posts by Kengo Miyazono and Dan Williams on their respective co-authored papers ( Miyazono and Salice 2020 ; Williams and Montagnese preprint ) are testament to the fruitfulness of going beyond individual cognition and individualistic epistemology when theorising about delusion. In this post I draw inspiration from their work to reflect on precisely what we might mean by delusions being social. Let’s draw a distinction between delusions being social in their formation (call this “the social formation claim”), and in their evaluation (call this “the social evaluation claim”). In other words, social factors (deficits in social cognition, social epistemology) may play a role in generating those things that we end up calling delusi...

Today's post is by Daniel Williams and Marcella Montagnese and it is the second in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Daniel is an Early Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, and Marcella is a doctoral student in the Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, at King’s College London. Here Daniel and Marcella talk about their new paper “ Bayesian Psychiatry and the Social Focus of Delusions ”.   Daniel Williams As with many other areas of psychology and philosophy, the study of delusions is taking a social turn. This has different manifestations. For example, in an extremely interesting article , Sam Wilkinson argues that the very attribution of delusional status to certain beliefs is wrapped up in social practices of folk-epistemic approval and disapproval. To call something a delusion, Wilkinson argues, is not to describe – or at least not only to describe – reality but to express a certa...