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This post is by Anna Ichino, University of Milan. Have you ever visited a Philosophy Museum? I bet not. Apparently, indeed, there aren’t any Philosophy Museums in the world. Or better: there aren’t any yet… But together with my colleagues at the Philosophy Department of the University of Milan we have decided that it is time to build the first one. In this post, I’ll tell you about this exciting project. What we had in mind was not an historically-minded museum collecting relics about the lives and works of important philosophers; but something more dynamic and interactive – built on the model of the best science museums – where philosophical problems and theories become intuitively accessible through a variety of games, activities, experiments, aesthetic experiences, and other such things. Easier to say than to do, no doubt. It’s an ambitious project, and to put it into action we had to proceed gradually. We started with a temporary exhibition, which took place in our University from...

I'm Ryan McKay , Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London , and head of the Royal Holloway Morality and Beliefs Lab (MaB-Lab) . I'm interested in how we form and revise beliefs, including delusional beliefs. This post is a summary of my article “Measles, Magic and Misidentifications: A Defence of the Two-Factor Theory of Delusions” in reply to Phil Cortlett's recent paper discussed on the blog last week . The Two-Factor Theory of Delusions One may (a) interpret data falsely, but also (b) receive false data for interpretation. ~ Southard, 1912 , p. 328. The idea that delusions arise when individuals attempt to interpret “false data” has been incorporated in several theories of delusions. Two-factor theorists, however (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2011; Davies & Coltheart, 2000 ; Langdon & Coltheart, 2000 ), view deluded individuals both as “receiving false data for interpretation” (factor one, which furnishes the content of the delusion) and as “...

Our series on new research on confabulation continues, featuring summaries of the papers contributing to the special issue of Topoi guest-edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. Today's post, the third in the series, is by Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini . Since September 2017, she is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Union College (NY), specialized in philosophy of mind and epistemology. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. My paper “ Confabulating Reasons ” focuses on the confabulatory episodes connected to those mental attitudes (e.g. belief, emotion, intention) whose causes we cannot introspectively access. In the literature, the predominant view is that these confabulations track – or at least attempt to do so – the psychological causes of mental attitudes.  A related hypothesis is that these confabulations are either the result of a general cognitive mechanism that pushes us to understand the world in terms of causal relations (Coltheart, 201...

The Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp held a workshop on the 27th November 2018 on the topic of belief and belief formation. Here’s a brief summary of the excellent talks given at the workshop, kindly written by Dan Williams . Neil Levy (Oxford/Macquarie) gave the first talk, entitled ‘Not so hypocritical after all: how we change our minds without noticing’. Levy focused on a phenomenon that many people assume to be a form of hypocrisy—namely, cases in which individuals come to change their beliefs about, say, politics when popular opinion (or the popular opinion within their relevant tribe or coalition) changes. (Levy gave the example of many ‘Never Trumpers’ who then apparently changed their opinion of Trump when he came to power). Levy argued that at least some examples of this phenomenon are in fact not best understood as a form of hypocrisy; rather, they arise from people forming beliefs “rationally”. Specifically, he drew attention to two important...

On 6th and 7th November, Ema Sullivan Bissett organised a conference on  Belief, Imagination, and Delusion  at the University of Birmingham. The PERFECT team attended the event and this report is the result of their collective effort! Anna Ichino on imagination Paul Noordhof on aim of belief Sophie Archer (Cardiff University) started the conference with a discussion of delusion and belief, inviting us to learn some lessons from the implicit bias literature. When the avowed anti-racist says all races are equal but does not behave in ways consistent to this belief, then we assume that there is an additional mental state (not open to consciousness) that is responsible for those behaviours. Is this additional mental state a belief? Archer argues that it is not. On the background, there is a thesis about belief. Even if a mental state responds directly to epistemic reasons, this is necessary but not sufficient for the mental state to be a belief (Epistemic Reasons). If the mental s...

Today's post is by Neil Van Leeuwen who talks about his recent research with Larisa Heiphetz on the differences in meanings between "think" and "believe". For related research by Heiphetz and Van Leeuwen, see  here ,  here , and  here .  Neil Van Leeuwen Do “think” and “believe” mean the same thing? Consider two sentences: Jill believes that God exists. Jill thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists. Both sentences attribute mental states to Jill. And each breaks down into an  attitude  (thinks/ believes) and a  content  (that God… / that a lake…). So we can sharpen our question: if we set the contents aside, do the words “thinks” and “believes” convey the same attitude type (or manner of processing)? Many philosophers and cognitive scientists talk and write as if the answer were  yes —as if the words “think” and “believe” were interchangeable, at least in propositional attitude reports (i.e., as if “thinks that  p ” and “belie...

Today's post is by Huw Green. Green is a psychologist who recently moved back to the UK after finishing a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a clinical postdoctoral fellowship at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program at Mt Sinai Hospital New York. He is currently full time dad to a toddler and new baby while waiting to become HCPC registered and start clinical work . Various scholars have suggested that psychiatric disorders vary across time, especially in terms of their phenomenology. In a recent paper  appeared in the  Psychiatric Bulletin I offer an account of how this sort of change might come about. I start with the suggestion that changes in psychiatric terminology through history – and in particular the shift toward more homogenous descriptions of psychotic symptoms in formal documents like the DSM – have had an impact on the very experiences that terminology tries to describe. This is not my suggestion; it...

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 thought that...

Stephen Gadsby  is a PhD candidate in the  Cognition and Philosophy lab , Monash University. His research spans a number of topics, including anorexia nervosa, body representation, delusions, psychiatric taxonomy, mental representation and predictive processing. In this post, he summarises his  new paper  "Self-Deception and the Second Factor: How Desire Causes Delusion in Anorexia Nervosa" recently published in Erkenntnis. Research shows that anorexia patients don’t hold extreme body ideals, despite common misconception. Indeed, most patients are thinner than what they judge their ideal size to be. In this paper , I advance a two-factor explanation for why patients believe they haven’t yet reached their ideal size. This account attempts to answer two questions: how the content of this belief arises and why the belief is maintained in the face of contradictory evidence. Following from previous work (Gadsby 2017a ; 2017b ), I answer the first of these question by sugg...

Today's post is by Finlay Malcolm , a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. He is currently researching on the nature, value and epistemology of faith, the ethics of testimony, and non-realist approaches to religion. Imagine that you’re having lunch with a good friend. You’re discussing work and you tell her that you were recently given an award for excellent achievement – something you’re very proud of. She has no reason to disbelieve your testimony: she knows that you’re a good worker, and that you don’t make things up. Nevertheless, she doesn’t believe what you say. What’s more, she explicitly informs you that she doesn’t believe your testimony. Why won’t she believe what you’ve told her? Suppose that her reasons are that she thinks you’re making things up to make yourself sound better at your job than you actually are. That is, she thinks that you’re lying. But of course, she has no good reason to think that you’re lying. The fact that she doesn’t believe you for ...