Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic (University of Copenhagen). Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic A wave of influential voices in philosophy and psychology have argued that negative affective states like stress, discomfort, and anxiety are not necessarily detrimental for mental health, but that they can, under certain conditions, take productive forms that may broaden our epistemic horizons (Kurth 2018; Applebaum 2017; Harbin 2016; Bailey 2017; Medina 2013; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018; Jamieson, Mendes, and Nock 2013) and even contribute to social mobility (Munch-Jurisic 2020a).  In my new article for the Synthese topical collection "Worry and Wellbeing: Understanding Anxiety", I identify one epistemic problem which has not been properly addressed by this new wave of research; to benefit from a surge of negative affect, agents need to be able to conceptualize and make sense of their internal, physiological states (Berntson, Gianaros, and Tsakiris 2018). Whether agents wi...

Today's post is by Derek Bolton . He is Professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology at King’s College London. His latest book co-authored with Grant Gillett  is The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: Philosophical and Scientific Developments  (Springer Palgrave, 2019, Open Access). Imagine how odd this would be: You or the family were attending clinic (say neurology, orthopedic, pediatric or psychiatric), enquired about causes and cures, and the reply referred to complexity and the Biopsychosocial Model. You go home and look this up, and happen upon criticism by many authoritative commentators to the effect that the Biopsychosocial Model, popular though it is, is scientifically, clinically, and philosophically useless. This is actually where we are and this is the problem we diagnose and address in our book. We propose a formulation of the problem along the following lines: The 1960s and ‘70s saw the beginnings of systems theory approaches in biology, ...

My name is Magdalena Antrobus, I am a PhD student working on Project PERFECT, researching psychological and epistemic benefits of depression. Together with Lisa Bortolotti I wrote a paper entitled Depressive Delusions , exploring the nature of delusions in severe forms of depression as well as the process of their formation. Here we present a summary of the article, which was published in 2016 in the Filosofia Unisinos journal. It is common to define delusions as implausible beliefs that are held with conviction but for which there is little empirical support. The vast majority of delusions appearing in severe depression are mood-congruent, which means that their content matches the mood experienced by the person ( Hales and Yudofsky, 2003 ). Common themes of depressive delusions are persecution, guilt, punishment, personal inadequacy, or disease, with half of the affected people experiencing delusions with more than one theme. Stanghellini and Raballo (2015) point to several d...

In this post I interview Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton) about her work in the philosophy of early motherhood. LB: How did you become interested in the philosophy of pregnancy and early motherhood? Can you describe your research interests in this area? FW: I’ve been interested in the ethics of abortion since I was an undergraduate. In fact, it was probably my interest in this issue that lead me to a career in philosophy. But once I became pregnant myself, I felt a strange kind of dissatisfaction with most of the existing literature on abortion. With a few notable exceptions – for example, the wonderful work of Margaret Little – the philosophical literature on abortion failed to engage at all with the messy reality of pregnancy: the blood and guts, the stretch marks and vomiting. Imagine that you were a little green alien from alpha centauri trying to learn about human reproduction from the most popular papers on abortion by analytical philosophers. What kind...

In this post I summarise my talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Congress in July 2015, where with Richard Bentall and Phil Corlett I participated in a symposium on "the function of delusions" sponsored by project PERFECT. The main argument I defended in the symposium has now appeared in an open access paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science . Can elaborated and systematized delusions emerging in the context of schizophrenia have a useful function? This is a provocative question, of course, as we know how disruptive delusions can be in the context of schizophrenia. But a serious consideration of the circumstances in which delusional beliefs are adopted can reveal that the delusion is playing a role, admittedly one that has beneficial effects only in a critical situation and whose beneficial effects are short-lived. As philosophers have long recognised, elaborated and systematized delusions in schizophrenia are typically false and ...

This is the second in a series of two posts by Phil Corlett (pictured above) and Sarah Fineberg (pictured below). Phil and Sarah are both based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. In a post published last week, and this post they discuss the adaptive value of delusional beliefs via their predictive coding model of the mind, and the potential delusions have for epistemic innocence  (see their recent paper ' The Doxastic Shear Pin: Delusions as Errors of Learning and Memory ', in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry) .  Phil presented a version of the arguments below at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 2015, as part of a session on delusions sponsored by project PERFECT.  Our analysis depends on two distinct systems for instrumental learning, one goal-directed, the other habitual (Daw et al., 2005 ). The goal-directed system involves learning flexible relationships between actions and outcomes instantiated in the more...

Today's post is by Jonny Ward who tweets as the Anxious Fireman  and has also blogged for the Stigma Fighters.   Hello to all reading this. My name is Jonny Ward. I’m 31, male, straight, white and a firefighter with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service. I can grout the shower, chop logs, I have an anxiety disorder, I have travelled a lot of the world and I enjoy mountain biking. If you had to ask me about any one of my interests or traits from that list, which would it be? And why? If this had been someone else and it was three years ago, I would have picked the anxiety disorder part. Because back then I was just as naive to mental ill health as most men. I would consider it unusual, a strange thing to say or admit too. But over the last two years my mind-set has changed tremendously. I suffered with anxiety and panic attacks. It happened after a long period of stress. I was doing too much work, too many projects, trying to please too many people. All of which meant...