Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Stephen Gadsby . Stephen is a Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) postdoctoral fellow, based at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology , Antwerp University. His research employs theoretical and empirical methods to explore a broad range of topics within philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. These include eating disorders, delusions, self-deception, imposter syndrome, and body representation. Stephen Gadsby Sufferers of anorexia and bulimia often believe that their bodies are larger than reality. This appears undeniably irrational. Given that their bodies are not as large as they claim, such beliefs appear untethered to evidence. In my recent paper , I suggest that those who suffer from these disorders are not as irrational as they appear. The first clue comes from first-person reports. These individuals often report experiencing changes in the physical size of their body, as if their stomach and legs were extended, expanding, or blown-up. Taking these repor...

Today's post is by Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien. Anne-Marie is a postdoctoral fellow at the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University and also affiliated with the École normale supérieure (ENS). She works on philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, social epistemology and epistemic injustice. Here, she discusses her recent paper on dysfunction and the definition of mental disorder.  Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien One big question in North-American psychiatry (at least) is the meaning of “mental disorder”. This is an issue that goes back to the 1960s-1970s when the discipline was the subject of heated debate. At that time psychiatry was under attack from all sides, but one of the most important criticisms was to show problems with one of its central concepts, “mental disorder”. One of the arguments was that the concept of mental disorder was not based on anything scientific or empirical and was therefore only a tool of social control to regulate social deviance (e.g., depression would not be a...

Today's post is by Grace Hibshman at University of Notre Dame on her recent paper “ Narrative, Second-Person Experience, and Self-Perception: A Reason it is Good to Conceive of One’s Life Narratively ” ( The Philosophical Quarterly 2022). Grace Hibshman In the  Lord of the Rings  trilogy, when Frodo and Sam are struggling to persevere on their quest, they turn to remembering the tales of old and wondering whether their journey will one day be put into songs and tales and told by the firesides of their people. Conceiving of their life narratively in this way as part of a great web of stories helps the hobbits find meaning and courage, and it seems that it can be similarly helpful for people in general as well. But why might this be? Why might conceiving of one’s life narratively be conducive to one’s flourishing? In my paper, I argue that conceiving of one’s life narratively as a part of the songs and tales of old can prompt one to imagine how an audience might experience hear...

On 18th May 2022, the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham hosted a public engagement event organised by Francesco Antilici and sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy on Loneliness and Mental Health. Ian Kidd The event featured three talks and a question and answer session with the audience. In this brief report, I summarise the main contributions of the speakers. What is the difference that makes a difference to loneliness? Michael Larkin (Psychology, Aston University) described how our conception of loneliness is moving away from concerns about an isolated self and is reconfiguring loneliness as a social problem that needs to be solved. Rather than focusing on a deficit that affects the lonely individual, we are now much more interested in loneliness as a disruptive social force—acknowledging the importance of social relationships for health and for wellbeing.  Data driving this new focus includes the proven link between social isolation and mortality: ...

Today's post is by Justin Garson . Justin is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He writes on the philosophy of madness, the evolution of mind, and purpose in nature. He also contributes to PsychologyToday.com . Today he writes about his new book, " Madness: A Philosophical Exploration ". Since the 1970s, Western psychiatry has been locked into a disease paradigm of madness. This paradigm has such an ironclad grip on our thinking that it’s sometimes hard to see outside of it. I call this paradigm madness-as-dysfunction. In essence, it sees the forms of madness – delusions, dissociative episodes, depression – as so many different ways that the mind can break down, or fail to function as it should. We all know the slogans. “Depression is like diabetes.” “Schizophrenia is like cancer.” These give voice to madness-as-dysfunction while investing it with the force of an ethical imperative. Justin Garson But what if mad...

This post is by Jakob Ohlhorst (University of Cologne) on his recent paper " Dual processes, dual virtues " (2021,  Philosophical Studies ). Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow has been unabatedly popular in the last decade. It illustratively presents one of the dominant psychological theories of cognition, how we process information: dual process theory. The theory distinguishes two types of cognition:  Type 1 processes happen automatically, they requires little effort, they are specific to domains, and they use reliable heuristics. This roughly corresponds to the common notion of intuition. A nice example for it is the great amount of information that we gain from simply looking at faces: we can read a person’s mood, recognise the person, estimate their age, and so on.  Type 2 cognition on the other hand is executed with voluntary control, it requires cognitive effort, it can be applied to any topic, and it operates by explicit inference. For example, solving a ...

In today's post, Anneli Jefferson discusses her new book , Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge 2022) .  She is a lecturer at Cardiff University who works in the philosophy of psychology, moral philosophy, and at the intersection of the two.  In the last 20 years or so, neuroscience and psychiatry have increasingly been researching what brain differences can be found in people suffering from mental distress, and how these might help to explain and treat mental disorders. There is a long-standing belief that mental disorders must be brain disorders, because whatever psychological dysfunction we find must have some basis in the brain. However, many psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and philosophers strongly resist this idea, and debates about this issue can get quite heated. In my book  I set out to get to the bottom of what makes this debate so intractable and provide a way forward in the debate. I argue that resistance to calling mental disorders brain di...