Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Robert Noggle (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. Robert is interested in psychological conditions that appear to undermine or threaten personal autonomy. His other main interests are in normative and applied ethics. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Belief, Quasi-Belief, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder ’, published in Philosophical Psychology.  Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is fascinating because it can lead to a radical disconnect between professed belief on the one hand, and affect, motivation, and behaviour on the other. Someone with OCD might sincerely profess her disbelief in the idea, say, that flipping a light switch poses a significant fire hazard if you do not do it just right. Yet such a person might also feel anxiety when flipping a switch, and a strong urge to flip it repeatedly to get it just right. Of course, psychologists face the puzzle of how people get into such a state, a...

Richard Dub Most theories of delusion formation hold that delusions arise in response to an anomalous, unusual experience. For instance, the often-discussed Capgras delusion -- the conviction that a loved one has been replaced with an imposter -- is typically said to be formed in response to an extremely powerful feeling of unfamiliarity. We all intuitively understand what it is for a person or place to feel familiar or unfamiliar, and we have reasonably good cognitive models of how this feeling is formed. But what sort of state is this feeling? Sometimes the feeling of familiarity is listed alongside the "feeling of knowing" and other so-called "epistemic emotions." Is this a good term? Is the feeling of unfamiliarity an emotion? I recently had the opportunity to pose this question to an audience of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, roboticists, and philosophers at a workshop run by the Swiss Center for the Affective Sciences . Opinion varied widely....