Imperfect Cognitions

This is a response to Phil Corlett's  contribution to the blog , posted on behalf of Max Coltheart.  Max Coltheart I think it would be helpful if at this stage the distinction between monothematic and polythematic delusions were introduced. A monothematic delusional condition is one where the patient has only a single delusional belief (or a small set of delusional beliefs related to a single theme). A polythematic delusional condition is one where the patient has many different and unrelated delusional beliefs. This distinction between monothematic and polythematic delusion was offered by Davies, Coltheart, Langdon and Breen (2001) and has been discussed by the philosopher Jennifer Radden in her book (Radden, 2010). As Coltheart (2013) noted “Well-known cases of polythematic delusion include Daniel Schreber, a judge in the German Supreme Court, who believed that he had the plague, that his brain was softening, that divine forces were preparing him for a sexual union wi...

On 17-18th March, The New Insights and Directions for Religious Epistemology project at the University of Oxford hosted a workshop on defeat and religious epistemology. Papers were given by Charity Anderson (Oxford), J. Adam Carter (Edinburgh), Maria Lasonon-Aarnio (Michigan), John Pittard (Yale Divinity School), Edward Wierenga (Rochester) and Michael Bergmann (Purdue). The workshop began with a discussion of Anderson’s paper on Defeat, Testimony and Miracles. Anderson considered the rationality of believing in a miracle report in Hume’s infamous essay of Miracles. Anderson discussed the role epistemic defeat plays in Hume’s argument and she claimed that Hume’s central claim is not, as is often thought, that testimony is a weak source of knowledge, but rather, that some kinds of testimony, namely testimony to the miraculous, are unreliable.

In this post I will suggest some reasons for thinking that at least some beliefs based on implicit bias are epistemically innocent. An implicit bias is a bias ‘of which we are not aware […] and can clash with our professed beliefs about members of social groups’, and which can ‘affect our judgments and decisions’ ( Crouch 2012 : 7). Empirical work has shown that such biases are held by ‘most people’, even those people who avow egalitarian positions, or are members of the targeted group ( Steinpreis et al. 1999 ).  As Lisa and I have said in previous posts , we understand the epistemic innocence of a cognition as that cognition's meeting two conditions. Here are the conditions a belief based on implicit bias would have to meet in order to be epistemically innocent: 1. Epistemic Benefit : The belief delivers some significant epistemic benefit to an agent at a time (e.g., it contributes to the acquisition, retention or good use of true beliefs of importance to that agent). 2...

Phil Corlett This is a response to Max Coltheart's  contribution to the blog , posted on behalf of Phil Corlett. Thank you Max. Your responses are enlightening. I do have a number of follow-up questions, if I may. Follow up to Q 1 – If prediction error is intact in people with delusions, how would we observe the patterns of prediction error disruption in our data? These patterns have been consistent across endogenous ( Corlett et al., 2007 ) and drug induced delusions ( Corlett et al., 2006 ) as well as in healthy people with delusion-like ideas (beliefs in telekinesis for example) ( Corlett & Fletcher, 2012 ). Importantly, these neural responses (aberrant prediction errors) correlated with delusion severity across subjects in these studies. On the other hand, if prediction error must be intact for 2-factor theory, do our data suggest that 2-factor theory not apply to delusions that occur in schizophreniform illnesses?

This is a response to Phil Corlett's  contribution to the blog ,  posted on behalf of Max Coltheart. Max Coltheart I thank Phil for his illuminating questions about my post, and will attempt to answer them, in Q&A format (Q is Phil, A is me). Q: Are you aligning prediction error with Factor 1 or Factor 2? It seems Factor 1, but I wanted to check – particularly since you align Factor 2 with the functioning of right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which, as you know, we’ve implicated in prediction error signaling with our functional imaging studies. A: In our account, what generates prediction error is Factor 1: for example, in Capgras delusion, the prediction is that an autonomic response will occur when the face of one’s spouse is seem, but that prediction is in error, since the predicted response does not occur. But detection of this prediction error would only occur if the system that detects such errors is intact. And the job of this system is to generate ...

Matthew Broome and Lisa Bortolotti On 17 March 2014 Kengo Miyazono organised a public engagement event as part of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham on 17 March 2014. The main theme of the event was a reflection on the importance of psychiatric diagnosis in establishing whether someone is responsible for committing a crime. The event consisted of several activities, a talk by Matthew Broome (Psychiatry, Oxford) on a case study he had written about, featuring a man with schizophrenia committing a crime; a brief commentary by Lisa Bortolotti (Philosophy, Birmingham) explaining how the considerations made about the case study could enlighten the debate on the recent Breivik case in Norway ; a questions and answers session with the audience; and a discussion session for which the audience split in two groups. Doctoral students Sarah-Louise Johnson, Rachel Gunn and Ben Costello also contributed to the discussion. Additional activities are planned this w...

Richard Dub My name is Richard Dub. I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Centre for the Affective Sciences, and I recently received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University. In my dissertation, I offered a model of delusions that attempted to answer two questions: What are delusions? How are they formed? Delusions, I argue, are pathological acceptances formed on the basis of pathological cognitive feelings. Neither 'acceptance' nor 'cognitive feeling' is an entirely mainstream concept.  A concern that motivates a lot of my work is that it is procrustean to try to explain all mental phenomena in terms of a select few propositional attitudes.  There is little reason to insist that belief and desire must take their traditional place of prominence.  The mind is lush, not sparse.  The ordinary concept of belief is likely what Ned Block calls a "mongrel concept": a concept that imperfectly picks out various dissimilar cognitive sta...