Imperfect Cognitions

Today’s post is contributed by Víctor Verdejo. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has recently published the article “ On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments ”, now featuring in a special collection on delusions in Philosophical Psychology . Víctor Verdejo is currently a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a member of Logos Research Group. Víctor Verdejo We often think of delusional experience as not particularly revealing with respect to a subject’s rationality. In this paper, I explore a different—some might say daring—approach: what if delusional experience were to illuminate the rational grounds associated with our judgments and concepts? In this work, I focus on the experience of thought-insertion and the first-person concept. Consider what I term the “rationality hypothesis”: this hypothesis holds that when subjects with schizophrenia report thought insertion, they may be expressing fully rational judgments about the ownership ...

In this post, Pablo López–Silva and Tom McClelland present their new edited book, Intruders in the Mind: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Thought Insertion (OUP 2023). Thought insertion is a rare delusion most often found among those suffering from schizophrenia. It is characterised by subjects reporting that entities have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. Although the structure of these reports shows similarities, the external agents that subjects identify are highly variable: some identify individuals such as celebrities or relatives; some identify groups such as aliens or the government; others identify objects like radios, houses or trees. In an oft-cited case, one patient reports ‘…thoughts are put into my mind like “Kill God”, it’s just like my mind working, but it isn’t. They come from this chap, Chris. They are his thoughts’ (Frith, 1992, p. 66).  This delusion raises a host of philosophical questions about the phenomenology of thought, our sense of ownership...

This post is by Darryl Mathieson, doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the Australian National University. In this post, Darryl writes about thought insertion and self-experience in schizophrenia, which is the object of a paper recently published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Darryl Mathieson The Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that when he introspected, he found various mental states like thoughts and perceptions, but no extra subject of experiences that we might call ‘the self’. Hume’s denial has commanded widespread philosophical agreement and has led to the thesis that the self is at best elusive, and at worst does not appear in experience at all.  However, a different path to self-experience that we might take is to look at what happens when consciousness breaks. Just as the deafening silence left in the wake of an air conditioner shutting off makes its constant hum more salient, so too certain experiences pervade everyday consciousness and appear el...

Pablo López-Silva is a Reader in Philosophical Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile . He is the leading researcher of the FONDECYT project ‘ The Agentive Architecture of Human Thought ’ granted by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of the Government of Chile.  His current research focuses on cognitive phenomenology, attributions of mental agency, and delusions. In this post, he summarizes his new paper titled ‘ Mapping the Psychotic Mind ’ recently published in the Psychiatric Quarterly. Thought insertion – TI henceforth – is regarded as one of the most complex symptoms of psychosis. People suffering from TI report that external human and non-human agents have inserted thoughts or ideas into their minds. Over the last years, the enigmatic nature of TI reports has become target of a number of phenomenological, empirical, and conceptual debates. In fact, TI has been used as a good excuse to de...

Vince Polito is is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University, and member of the Belief Formation Program at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. His work investigates alterations of agency and body representation associated with hypnosis, virtual reality, flow, meditation, and psychoactive drugs. You can find him on twitter here . Hypnosis is used clinically as a treatment for conditions such as chronic pain , and is also becoming more commonly used as a research tool in cognitive science. Despite growing levels of interest in hypnosis, the mechanisms that underlie hypnotic effects are still not agreed upon. A common view amongst researchers is that hypnosis can profoundly influence the way that individuals monitor and evaluate their experiences but that it is not able to influence behaviours that are normally outside of conscious control. A recent study we completed provides evidence that, in certain contexts, hypnosis may actually be...

In December 2016 an exciting volume entitled Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture has been published by Legenda. The book, edited by Ita McCarthy, Kirsty Sellevold and Olivia Smith, contains a chapter authored by Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Rachel Gunn and myself on the challenges we face when we want to tell delusional beliefs apart from other beliefs. We start with the standard DSM definition of delusions, and explain that clinical delusions are characterised by surface features of two kinds, epistemic (fixity, implausibility) and psychological (negative impact on functioning). Then we ask whether we can decide whether a type of belief is delusional by using those criteria. We consider three cases of belief that match at least some of the criteria: the belief that some thoughts have been inserted in one's mind by a third party; the belief that one has been abducted by aliens; and the belief that one is better than average at just about ...

Today's post is by  Dr Pablo López-Silva , who is Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. He is the director of the 3-years FONDECYT Research Project titled 'The Agentive Architecture of Human Thought ' granted by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research of the Government of Chile.  Pablo López-Silva currently works on the philosophy of mind, clinical psychiatry, and psychopathology with a special focus on the way mental pathologies and empirical research inform our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Self-awareness i.e. the awareness we have of being the subject of our own experience is, perhaps, one of the most elusive elements of human mind. A common idea within current philosophy of mind is that the awareness we have of different external and internal experiences might necessarily involve a degree of self-awareness. In other words, every time you reach a cup, read a boo...

This post is by Léa Salje (pictured above), who recently started a lectureship at the University of Leeds, where she was previously a postdoc on the AHRC-funded project Persons as Animals . Léa works in the philosophy of mind on questions about what thought is like, and in particular on questions about self-conscious thought about ourselves. Here she asks, what can the schizophrenic delusion of thought insertion tell us about how we ordinarily find out about ourselves through introspection? *** A lot of my work revolves around the notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM), and so does this paper. For those with more of a nodding acquaintance with IEM, I have a dim suspicion that it can come across as a slightly fussy notion that threatens to plunge those working on it into ever deepening levels of obscurity, and that refuses to wear its interest on its sleeve. So let me first say something why it’s important. Roughly speaking, your judgment is IEM when yo...

Today's post is by Patrizia Pedrini (University of Florence). Here she summarises her recent paper, “Rescuing the ‘Loss-of-Agency’ Account of Thought Insertion”, which appeared in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2015. Every day we think hundreds of thoughts. We form opinions, hold beliefs, develop intentions, feel desires, emotions, sensations, entertain fantasies. All this thinking activity typically comes to our consciousness with a fundamental feature that seems as natural as the thinking it accompanies: our capacity for self-ascription of it. When we think a thought, we also self-ascribe that thought, and such capacity for self-ascription is routine, immediate, unproblematic. However, this is a capacity that can break down. There is a disorder, known as thought insertion , that occurs in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and related forms of mental illness, the puzzling feature of which appears to amount to the impairment of such capacity. The subject aff...

In this post, Sam Wilkinson (below right) introduces a forthcoming Special Issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, that he co-edited with psychologist Ben Alderson-Day (below left), on “Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis”. If we experience thoughts in our head, how can they seem to not be our own? To understand this, we need to explore what thoughts are and how we know them in the first place. In his paper (“Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-awareness”) Johannes Roessler outlines two views about knowledge of our own thoughts, attributed to Gilbert Ryle. The first is that we are “alive to” our own thoughts in the “serial process” of thinking, and the second is that we can “eavesdrop” on our inner speech, and interpret our own utterances in much the same was as we interpret the utterances of others. Roessler suggests that the former account is the one that is relevant for understanding thought insertion. In her paper (“On Thought Insertion”) Rachel Gunn questions the o...

This post is by David Miguel Gray (pictured above), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University and in the Spring of 2017 will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. David’s research interests are in the philosophy of cognitive psychology (in particular cognitive psychopathology), as well as philosophy of mind, and philosophy of race and racism. In this post David will address some theoretical issues with n-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. This post, and his previous one , will draw on his recent paper ‘ Failing to self-ascribe thought and motion: towards a three-factor account of passivity symptoms in schizophrenia ’, published in Schizophrenia Research. Cognitive-level theories of monothematic delusions have become heavily discussed, significantly in part to the work of Max Coltheart, Robyn Langdon, and Martin Davies (e.g. see Davies and Coltheart 2000 , Davies et al. 2001 , Coltheart et al. 2007 , Coltheart 2013 ). T...

This post is by David Miguel Gray (pictured above), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University and in the Spring of 2017 will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. David’s research interests are in the philosophy of cognitive psychology (in particular cognitive psychopathology), as well as philosophy of mind, and philosophy of race and racism.  I n this post David provides an explanation of abnormal experiences and the inferential processes involved in delusions of thought insertion and alien control. Next week, he will address some theoretical issues with n-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. Both posts will be drawing from his recent paper ‘ Failing to self-ascribe thought and motion: towards a three-factor account of passivity symptoms in schizophrenia ’, published in Schizophrenia Research. In my article I focus on two commonly known passivity symptoms of schizophrenia: thought insertion and alien ...

This post is by  Shaun Gallagher  (pictured above). He is Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. In this post he summarizes his recent article ' Relations between Agency and Ownership in the Case of Schizophrenic Thought Insertion ', published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. In a recent paper I offer a response to some philosophers who have raised objections to the idea that in schizophrenic delusions of control and thought insertion the problem is primarily with the sense of agency. Instead, they argue, it concerns the sense of ownership. Let me start by clarifying the distinction, because in fact it is a double distinction, or a distinction made on two levels. On the level of first-order, pre-reflective experience the distinction between sense of agency (SA) and sense of ownership (SO) can be seen in the contrast between voluntary and involuntary movement. In the latter case, for example, if some one pushes me from ...

This post is by Gottfried Vosgerau  (pictured above), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dusseldorf. Gottfried's research interests are in the philosophy and metaphysics of mind, neurophilosophy, and cognitive science. Here he summarises his recent paper, co-authored with Martin Voss , ' Authorship and Control over Thoughts ', published in Mind and Language.  While there is a considerable consensus that ownership and agency should be sharply distinguished for motor actions, the according distinction for thoughts (thinking actions) is much less agreed on. In our paper we argue that a distinction is needed between the mere occurrence of a thought in my stream of consciousness (thought ownership) and my being the 'source' of a thought (authorship). While it is a conceptual truth that all of my thoughts are mine in the sense of ownership, there are already many examples from (non-pathological) everyday life that this is not the case for authorship. How...

This post is by Pablo López-Silva , a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Pablo (pictured above) works on philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia, and is supervised by Joel Smith and Tim Bayne . Here Pablo summarises his recent paper ' Schizophrenia and the Place of Egodystonic States in the Aetiology of Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.  Paradigmatic cases of thought insertion involve the delusional belief with the content [someone/something is placing a thought with the content […] into my mind/head] (Mellor 1970 ; Mullins and Spence 2003 ). Despite the diagnostic relevance of this phenomenon, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. In this context, two projects can be distinguished. On the one hand, the motivational project characterizes thought insertion as resulting from the mind’s attempt to deal with highly stressing psychological conflicts. On the other hand, the ...

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from The Cognitive Futures conference which took place on 13-15 April at Worcester College, University of Oxford (in the picture). Cognitive Futures in the Humanities is a multidisciplinary conference which aims to bring together literary disciplines, linguistics, theater and the arts, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience for our mutual benefit. The three day conference was held at Worcester College, Oxford and is in its third year, the first being held at Bangor and last year's being at Durham. There were a variety of panels on such diverse topics as narrative, imagination, mirroring and reflexiveness, kinesthetics, memory, embodied cognition, perception and hallucination. In the ‘clinical’ panel I (pictured above) presented a paper on thought insertion ('On thought insertion', forthcoming in a special issue of  Review of Philosophy and Psychology  on Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis) where I used first person narrativ...

The symposium "Re-conceptualising Mental Illness: An Ongoing Dialogue Between Enactive Philosophy and Cognitive Science" was part of the AISB50 (Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour) conference. It took place at Goldsmiths College, University of London over a 2 day period (3-4 April, 2014). It attracted philosophers of mind and cognitive science, as well as psychologists, therapists and other professionals interested in emerging streams of thought, which attempt to overcome the traditional mind-body dualism. Papers invited for presentation at the symposium reflected a wide variety of enactive approaches to human mind, mental conditions and psychotherapy. A common theme seemed to be grounded in the assumption that the mind is dynamic and cognition extends over processes of the brain, to include the entire body as well as affection. Such a view implies necessary alterations in effective treatment. Below you find a short selection of summarized presentations...

Matthew Parrott On April 12, the University of Fribourg will be hosting a one-day workshop on delusions focusing on thought insertion. Gottfried Vosgerau (Dusseldorf) will be presenting a paper entitled 'Introspection and the Delusion of Thought Insertion' and I will be presenting an essay called 'Immunity to Error and the Experience of Thought Insertion'. My essay examines the question of whether the phenomenon of thought insertion puts any pressure on the well-known principle that our first-personal way of knowing about thoughts rules out the possibility of misidentifying the subject of those thoughts. Prima facie, it seems that that a subject who reports an experience of thought insertion knows what she is thinking in a characteristically first-personal way but is wrong about who is thinking the thought ( Campbell 1999 ). If this is right, then it suggests our ordinary first-person access to thoughts may not really be immune to errors of misidentification.

Caitrin Donovan I am a student in the Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney . In my recently completed honours dissertation, I argued that the delusional phenomenon of thought insertion problematises certain aspects of the 'minimal model' of self. Many philosophers now believe that the self is in some way constructed by narrative; through socio-linguistically mediated story-telling, we achieve diachronic unity by taking a reflective stance on our experiences. According to the strong formulation of this thesis, conscious beings only develop selves once they acquire the higher-order linguistic and reflective capacities required for autobiographical self-understanding. 

This post is by Rachel Gunn, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, working on delusion and thought insertion. After introducing the phenomenon of thought insertion in my previous post , here I discuss ownership of thoughts. The impossibility of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) is an established notion in relation to the self. If I have something to say about my experience it is self-evident that I am the one undergoing the experience. I cannot be mistaken.  A subject experiencing thought insertion cannot be mistaken about who is experiencing the thought. Whilst this is true it does not explain what the experience is like. The thought is observed or witnessed by the subject, they have access to the content and have some sort of first-person experience of it. It is not, however, the same kind of experience that they ‘normally’ have. It differs from other thoughts – but in what sense?