Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Joseph Masotti (University of California San Diego) and Paul Conway (University of Southampton) on their recent paper, " When Do People Have an Obligation Not to Tic? Blame, Free Will, and Moral Character Judgments of People with Tourette’s Syndrome " ( Neuroethics 2024). Joseph Masotti Imagine being in a public space when suddenly you feel an uncontrollable urge to shout a word or sound. You know others may judge you, and you want to resist, but the urge is overpowering. If you shout, you may explain to others that the urge was just too powerful to resist. But then, others may see you acting mechanistically, lacking the control needed to be responsible for your actions. On the other hand, you can’t take responsibility for your shouting, as you know it’s not intentional. This is the reality for many with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS), a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary tics.  Paul Conway Our study investigates how people perceive blame, f...

This post is Marina Trakas , a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past. Marina Trakas In a recent empirical study published in the American Psychologist , researchers from the University of Texas at Austin  (Yan et al. 2024) investigated a novel and relatively unexplored factor possibly contributing to the gender gap in science, particularly in citation practices: memory mechanisms. They found that during a free recall task, wherein professors were asked to remember the names of experts and rising stars in their field, male professors (but not their female counterparts) underrepresented women researchers compared to a set of baselines.  One possible explanation for this finding could be that male professors either did not remember female names or recalled fewer of them due to a lack of memory traces of these names. If they never encoded this information, they cannot remember it, given that ...

This post is by Olivia Siegfried, currently studying for a Master’s degree in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Olivia is interested in youth mental health, personality disorders, and forensic psychology, and adopts a social constructionist perspective to understand these issues. This is part of a series of posts by students of the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module at the Institute for Mental Health. They share some of their views on key topics discussed in the module. Olivia Siegfried Responsibility without blame As personality disorders are notoriously hard to treat, Hannah Pickard has put forward the ‘responsibility without blame’ approach ( Pickard, 2011 ) for clinicians to adopt to foster the best clinical outcomes. Although sounding inherently paradoxical, we can hold people responsible without blaming them by segregating responsibility from morality and instead defining it through a person’s agency.  Taking responsibility for...

Today's post is by Jen Garbett, a part-time Mental Health MSc student at the University of Birmingham. Jen is interested in all aspects of mental health in psychology, especially in moral responsibility in psychopathy and the nature of delusions in psychosis and other psychiatric disorders.  This is part of a series of posts by students of the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module at the Institute for Mental Health. They share some of their views on key topics discussed in the module. Jen Garbett The concepts of responsibility and blame naturally go hand in hand for many of us. For real blame to be executed and appropriate consequences to follow, such as a prison sentence, one must be considered responsible for their actions. However, if one is to take responsibility for their actions, does this undoubtedly mean they should be blamed for them too? In 2011,  Hanna Pickard  created a framework that separates responsibility and blame, based on her exper...

This post is by Kelly Saunders. Kelly did an undergrad degree three decades ago. She completed a Bachelor of General Studies at Simon Fraser University in greater Vancouver. Philosophy was by far her favourite. After her degree she worked at a few jobs, including as a mental health worker, before ultimately deciding to open a small business.  During all the years of running her business, she never quite lost the feeling of wishing she had pursued philosophy to a greater extent. When she came to a "fork in the road" a year ago, she discovered the M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at Birmingham. Her hope is to use her M.A. to work as a philosophical counsellor. When it comes to the issue of responsibility and psychopathology, Hanna Pickard's contributions are immensely valuable for the subject of addiction. She helpfully differentiates between responsibility and blameworthiness in addiction. That is, she maintains that while it may be unhelpful, and morally q...

Our ( Kengo Miyazono and Lisa Bortolotti 's) new Philosophy of Psychology textbook is out! Today it is the worldwide publication date for the book but in the UK it has been available since 14th May.  If you want to participate in the book launch, please visit this page and enjoy two conversations on the themes of the book, one with Nevia Dolcini and Jules Holroyd on rationality, self-knowledge, and implicit bias; and one with Katrina Sifferd and Pablo López-Silva on autism, psychopathy, delusion, and confabulation. In the book, we defend a particular view of human cognition and agency as imperfect . In this post, we say a little more about the sense in which human agents fail to meet ideal standards of cognition and agency, such as criteria for rationality and self-knowledge.    Rosa wants to pass her ballet exam tomorrow and she knows that she needs to rehearse the opening routine to make sure she remembers all the steps. Passing the exam is important to her, and she ...

Today's post is by Arlie Loughnan who is Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Law Theory and Co-Director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Manifest Madness: Mental Incapacity in Criminal Law (OUP 2012). Criminal responsibility – the basis on which individuals are called to account for criminal conduct, and the form or structure of the criminal law – is now central to criminal law, but it is in need of re-examination. In the context of Australian criminal laws, my book, Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility reassesses the general assumptions made about the rise to prominence of criminal responsibility in the period since around the turn of the twentieth century. In my account, I pay close and careful attention to the intricacies of developments in criminal responsibility, and reconsider the role and significance of criminal responsibility in criminal law. I argue that criminal responsibility is sign...

Today’s post is by  Dorothea Debus , Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York. Together with Kirk Michaelian and Denis Perrin I've recently edited a collection of newly commissioned papers in the philosophy of memory ( New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory , Routledge 2018 ), and I've been invited to say something about my own contribution to that collection here. My paper bears the title " Handle with Care: Activity, Passivity, and the Epistemological Role of Recollective Memories ", and it is concerned with one particular type of memory, namely with memories that have experiential characteristics. The paper starts from the observation that such experiential or 'recollective' memories (here: 'R-memories') have characteristic features of activity as well as characteristic features of passivity :  A subject who experiences an R-memory is characteristically passive with respect to the occurrence of the R-m...

In this post, David Hunter , Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada summarizes his paper titled “The metaphysics of responsible believing”, recently published in the Brazilian journal Manuscrito. An important task in the philosophy of mind and action is to understand what it is for a person to be responsible for their mental states and their actions. It is natural to think that a person is responsible for their actions only if they act freely or voluntarily. But most philosophers agree that we cannot believe, desire or intend at will. But then how can we really be responsible for these mental states? In the case of belief, this is called the problem of epistemic agency. My essay is about this problem. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that the standard conception of action tends to obscure our practical agency. It holds that an action is (typically, anyway) a bodily movement caused in certain ways by the person’s mental states. This ...

Today's post is by Lisa Osbeck. Lisa is a Professor of Psychology with interest in the Philosophy of Science. Her work explores the psychological dimensions of science practice and considers how they can help us better understand both science and persons. In this post, Lisa presents her new book  Values in Psychological Science: Re-imagining Epistemic Priorities at a New Frontier, published by Cambrige University Press. In previous work, I collaborated with  Nancy Nersessian  and colleagues in an ethnographic study of four bioengineering laboratories. We analysed how emotional expression and social positioning are integrated with cognitive processes in innovative problem solving with these settings. One aspect of this work was a study of disciplinary identities and associated epistemic values, with an analysis of the ways these identities facilitate or impede creative innovation in collaborations ( Osbeck, Nersessian, Malone, and Newstetter 2011 ;  Osbeck ...

Luca Malatesti (left in the picture below) and Filip Čeč (right) collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are  based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia).  Luca  is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry.  Filip  is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter ‘Identification and self-knowledge’, that is contained in the collection edited by Patrizia Pedrini and Julie Kirsch,  Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpre...

Wesley Buckwalter is an incoming Presidential Fellow and permanent faculty member at the University of Manchester. In this post, he discusses his paper “ Mind-Brain Dichotomy, Mental Disorder, and Theory of Mind ” recently published in Erkenntnis. Stigmatization of mental illness is widespread . Misunderstanding, bias, and discrimination associated with mental health concerns pervade even our closest interpersonal relationships, continue despite educational background or medical training, and create major obstacles to treatment and recovery within our health care system. It is essential to understand this stigma and its origins to prevent these negative outcomes. As surprising at it may at first sound, some misconceptions about mental health are thought to stem from a centuries-old philosophical theory about the mind. According to this theory, often labeled the “dualist approach” to psychiatry, the mind is essentially distinct in kind from other physical systems. If it is ...

Today's post is provided by Robin Zheng. In this post she introduces her paper " Bias, Structure and Injustice: A reply to Haslangar ", published in Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. Robin Zheng is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. Her research focuses on issues of moral responsibility and structural injustice, along with other topics in ethics, moral psychology, feminist and social philosophy, and philosophy of race.  Some of her other works on topics related to this post include “ Attributability, Accountability, and Implicit Bias ” in Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Volume 2 (eds. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul), “ A Job for Philosophers: Causality, Responsibility, and Explaining Social Inequality ” in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, and “ What is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice ” (forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice). For more information, ...

Quinn Hiroshi Gibson is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Global Perspectives on Society program at New York University Shanghai. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. He works on the moral psychology of self-deception, addiction, delusion, and other psychiatric disorders. His personal website can be found here . In my recent article ‘ Self-deception in and out of Illness: Are some subjects responsible for their delusions ?’ I argue that there is significant overlap between self-deception and delusion. Obviously, whether this is true depends on how we think about self-deception. So, in this paper I offer an account of self-deception, which I call Self-deception as Omission. According to my view, self-deception that p occurs if an agent `intentionally omits to seek, recognize, or appreciate externally available evidence for not- p , for reasons which ultimately derive from her desire that that p be true...

Today's post is by Michelle Maiese , Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and moral psychology. There has been debate among philosophers about how to address issues of responsibility in cases where subjects suffer from dissociative identity disorder (DID). If one personality commits a wrongful act of which another was unaware, should we regard this individual as responsible for her actions? If we regard DID as a case in which multiple persons inhabit a single body, it may seem natural to conclude that each alter is a separate agent and that one alter is not responsible for the actions of another. However, in “Dissociative Identity Disorder, Ambivalence, and Responsibility", I argue that even once we acknowledge that a subject with DID is a single person, there are still serious reasons to question the extent to which she is responsible for her actio...

My name is Jonathan Phillips and   I earned my Ph.D. in Philosophy and Psychology at Yale in 2015. I am now a postdoc in the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. My research falls in the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, and has focused on the psychological representation of modality, or the way our minds represent possibilities. One incredibly important aspect of human cognition is that we are able to think not only about what is, but also what could be. This ability to represent and reason about non-actual possibilities plays a critical role in many of the judgments that have long interested philosophers and psychologists: it is essential, for example, in how we determine the causes of past events, decide whether a person acted freely, or figure out whether someone is morally responsible. One interesting, though often overlooked, feature of these kinds of judgments is that humans seems to able to make them quickly and effortlessly. So, to the...

On June 7th, Ken Richman (MCPHS University, Boston) and Julian Savulescu (Oxford) hosted a small workshop on autism and moral responsibility at the University of Oxford. Some philosophers have argued that impaired cognitive empathy prevents autistic individuals from being fully morally responsible. Neuropsychologists working on autism, philosophers working on moral responsibility and psychiatric illness, autistic adults, and students and postdocs at the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics came together to discuss autism and responsibility. Throughout the discussion, we focused on autistic individuals with average or higher intelligence, rather than those who also experience intellectual disability. One of the first issues addressed was that questioning the moral responsibility of a certain group is extremely sensitive, as exempting individuals from responsibility entails doubting their moral agency, either in a specific situation or more generally. Such considerations...

My name is Emilie Caspar and I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences at Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. My work is mostly dedicated to understand what guides people’s decisions to perform actions that are morally acceptable or not. My current research focuses on the extent to which coercion influences the experience of being the author of one’s own actions and how this affects immoral behaviours. To achieve this goal, I combine techniques from both experimental psychology and cognitive neurosciences. Most of us consider that we have “free will”, the power to make our own choices and to control our actions. This experience stems in part from the fact that our conscious experience of intention precedes the moment we act. Feeling ‘free’ greatly influences one’s own perception of individual responsibility: We say we are responsible for our actions if we “could have done otherwise”. Does this perception of responsibility inf...