Imperfect Cognitions

Colin Klein We are philosophers working on various topics that intersect with delusions. Colin Klein works on the philosophy of neuroscience and the application of interventionist accounts of causation to this area, and has also discussed the relation between psychopathologies like somatoparaphenia and his theory of pain . Stephen Gadsby works on distorted body representations and false body size beliefs in anorexia nervosa . And Peter Clutton has defended the doxastic status of delusions—offering a cognitive phenomenological account of delusions (forthcoming)—and explored the status of delusions on the harmful dysfunction account . Peter Clutton Any discussion of delusions needs some criteria by which patients are grouped together as having the same delusion. In our paper, ‘ Taxonomising Delusions: content or aetiology? ’, we compare content-based and aetiological taxonomies of delusions, arguing in favour of the latter. Stephen Gadsby Most authors ta...

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He specializes in general issues in the philosophy of science (especially, natural kinds and reductionism) and philosophy of cognitive science (especially, innateness, concepts, and domain specificity). His book, Natural Categories and Human Kinds, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, and he has recently been working on cognitive and social ontology. If a sudden interest in taxonomy is indicative of a crisis in a scientific field, then the cognitive sciences may be in a current state of crisis. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and researchers in related disciplines have recently devoted increasing attention to the ways in which their respective disciplines classify and categorize their objects of study. Many of these researchers consider themselves--rightly in my opinion--engaged in the effort to uncover our “cognitive ontology”. Ever since ...