Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Barbara Gail Montero. I’m a philosophy professor at the City University of New York (with a rather unusual background since prior to studying philosophy I worked as a professional ballet dancer for a number of years). Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press) is a book I’ve written that challenges the widely held view that, once you are good at something, thinking about your action, as you’re doing it, hampers your skill. In it, I argue that experts think in action—consciously, not merely unconsciously—and, when thinking about the right things, this is in no way diminishes their prowess. One of my goals in the book is to dispel various mythical accounts of experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their actions. Those chicken sexers that philosophers are fond of citing who can’t explain why they makes their judgments—they don’t exist. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which supposedly came t...

I am posting this on behalf of David Uings, who received an MPhil for research into linguistic miscommunication, and went on to investigate the implications of split-brain research and the two visual pathways in the human brain for the philosophy of mind. His MLitt thesis was entitled Consciousness and Vision in Man: where philosophy has gone wrong. In this post David is presenting his forthcoming book, Better Than One (Karnac 2014). Better Than One by David Uing We have known for more than half a century that if the link between the two halves of the human brain is severed, the separate halves reveal all the components of mindedness: perceptions, beliefs, desires, memories, thoughts and will. There are significant differences between the two minds of split-brain patients. The left mind uses language to report its perceptions, the right mind cannot. The right mind is good at visual tasks such as pattern matching at which the left mind is very poor. When the right mind acts on a...

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.

Scott Sturgeon, Rae Langton, and Susanna Siegel On 12 th March, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham held a workshop on Belief , as part of the Birmingham workshops in philosophy series. Papers were given by Scott Sturgeon ( Birmingham ), Rae Langton ( Cambridge ), and Susanna Siegel (Birmingham/Harvard).  Sturgeon opened the workshop with his paper ‘Epistemic Attitudes: the Tale of Bella and Creda’. He was interested in three questions. First: which are our epistemic attitudes? Second: Do elements of a given attitudinal space reduce to others in that space? Third: Do elements of a given attitudinal space reduce to others in a different space? Focus was on this third question, more specifically: the Belief-first view (credences reduce to beliefs) versus the Credence-first view (beliefs reduce to credences).

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. 

The Psychosis Research Partnership We, Professor Philippa Garety, Professor Elizabeth Kuipers, Dr Helen Waller and Dr Amy Hardy, are Research Clinical Psychologists based at the Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.  We work with the Psychosis Research Partnership (Professor David Fowler, Professor Paul Bebbington, Professor Daniel Freeman, Dr Richard Emsley & Professor Graham Dunn) on a research programme funded by the Maudsley Charity and the Wellcome Trust.  This research has found it is common for people to have thoughts about others intending to cause them harm, which do not seem to be a valid reflection of the shared reality of others. These can range from fleeting ideas that someone on the street might be laughing at us, to more elaborate and persistent beliefs such as that the secret services are trying to have us killed. Most people experience paranoid thoughts occasionally, but for some the preoccupation, distress and...

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?

 Rachel Gunn I’m a new PhD student at the University of Birmingham studying delusion. I work as a counsellor and psychotherapist in Birmingham, Coventry and Warwick and studied thought insertion for my Masters dissertation at the University of Warwick. (What follows is a very rough summary of some of the findings from my work on my Masters dissertation). While trying to understand thought insertion I became aware of the lack of first person descriptions in the philosophical literature. I didn’t understand the phenomenon and didn’t feel that the philosophical literature helped me, as it was full of contradictions. I felt I couldn’t make progress without more information. In my work in this area I rely heavily on what patients and others say about their experience (using mental health web forums and other first person descriptions) and take their description of their experience seriously. Alienonite from the Crazyboards web forum describes the experience: “Often, in a qu...

Pablo López-Silva I am a current PhD student at the University of Manchester Philosophy Department ( Mind Group ). I’m working on different philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia under the supervision of Dr Joel Smith and Prof Tim Bayne . I became interested in the philosophical discussions surrounding schizophrenia while I was taking my clinical courses for my psychology professional degree in Chile. While attending some patients, I realized that delusions seemed to have a strong adaptive function. Although this is a matter that needs further argumentation, I think that systematic research on the structure of certain delusions can facilitate better understandings of their role ( Roberts, 1992) and, quite importantly, to improve therapeutic intervention ( Guidano, 1991 ). An example of this can be offered by looking at the structure of thought insertion, an abnormal conscious experience commonly regarded as suggestive of schizophrenia ( Mullins & Spence, 2003).   ...