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Today's post is by Adam Andreotta . He earned his PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2018. His research and teaching interests include: epistemology, self-knowledge, the philosophy of David Hume and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.  Here, he introduces his article, " Confabulation does not undermine introspection for propositional attitudes ", that has recently appeared in the journal Synthese. For more of his work, see his PhilPapers profile . Most of us think there exists an asymmetry between the way we know our own minds, and the way we know the minds of others. For example, it seems that I can know that I intend to watch Back to the Future , or that I believe that Australia will win the Ashes, by introspection: a private and secure way of knowing my own mental states. If I want to know whether my friend intends to see Back to the Future or believes that Australia will win the Ashes, I need to ask them or observe their behaviour. This common-sens...

In this post  Kengo Miyazono  (Hiroshima) and  Ryan McKay  (Royal Holloway) summarise their new paper “ Explaining delusional beliefs: a hybrid model ”, in which they present and defend a hybrid theory of the development of delusions that incorporates the central ideas of two influential (yet sometimes bitterly opposing) theoretical approaches to delusions—the two-factor theory and the prediction error theory.  There are at least two influential candidates for a global theory of delusions (i.e., a theory that explains many kinds of delusions, rather than particular kinds of delusions such as persecutory delusions) in the recent literature: the two-factor theory (Coltheart, 2007 ; Coltheart, Menzies, & Sutton, 2010 ; Coltheart, Langdon, & McKay, 2011 ), according to which delusions are explained by two distinct neurocognitive factors with different explanatory roles, and the prediction error theory (Corlett et al., 2010 ; Corlett, Honey, & Fletcher, 2...

We are Iskra Fileva and Jonathan Tresan . Both of us teach philosophy, at the University of Colorado, Boulder and at the University of Rochester, respectively. We recently wrote a paper in response to " Neurosentimentalism and Moral Agency ," by Philip Gerrans and Jeanette Kennett published in Mind in 2010. We summarize our paper " Metaethics and Mental Time Travel " here. When we make moral judgments, we often experientially project ourselves into the past or the possible futures, a capacity dubbed “mental time travel” (MTT). For instance, in judging whether her mom was wrong to keep her away from her dad after the parents divorced, Sally may try to recall what it was like to be her father’s daughter. Was it a good experience or a bad one? Was the mother rightly protective or just trying to spite the dad? Sally’s evaluation will likely be informed not just by propositional memories (e.g., “My father was born in June”) but by richly detailed and vivid first-person...

This is a post by Vaughan Bell and gives a summary of a new pre-printed paper called ‘ De-Rationalising Delusions ’ co-authored with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson .  Vaughan is an Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at University College London, and also works in the Psychological Interventions Clinic for outpatients with Psychosis (PICuP), in South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Nichola Raihani is a Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at University College London, and Sam Wilkinson is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Exeter University.   Historically, delusions have been understood as pathological beliefs that are characterised by their irrationality. Someone who believes, for example, that a camera has been implanted in their tooth and is taking pictures of their mind, would seem, on face value, to have problems in reasoning rationally about the world. This has motivated researchers to look for problems in domain-general reasoning to explain delusions. Th...

In this post, I summarise a paper I recently wrote with Kathy Puddifoot (University of Durham), which appears open access in an excellent new book, entitled 'Why Philosophy?' and edited by Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas. Kathy Puddifoot Philosophical research impacts on our understanding of the world. We argue that empirically informed philosophy can help us both reduce and control the effects of implicit bias on our behaviour, and challenge the stigma associated with the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. In both cases, knowledge of philosophy and practice of philosophy make a significant contribution to the development of a fairer society. Implicit bias Implicit biases are responses to members of social groups (e.g., races, religions, gender, ability groups), associating members with traits in virtue of their social group membership. Biases may occur unintentionally, seemingly without the believer being aware of their occurrence, and are difficult to control. They can lead to...

Today’s post is provided by  Katherine Puddifoot ,  Assistant Professor of Philosophy , Durham University. Here, she introduces her article, " Stereotyping Patients ", that has recently appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy. Should healthcare professionals respond to the social group status of their patients, automatically associating patients of particular social groups (e.g. certain races, religions, social classes) more strongly than they automatically associate patients of other social groups with certain concepts, traits and characteristics? In other words, should healthcare professionals be influenced in their clinical judgement and decision making by automatically activated stereotypes or implicit biases? This can produce unethical outcomes (Matthew 2018 ). Where healthcare professionals associate members of some social groups with certain traits, for example uncooperativeness, this can lead to group members receiving poorer quality treatment. However, the assoc...

This post is by Federico Bongiorno , a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham working primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Earlier this year, he was a visiting research fellow at Yale University. Here he offers an overview of his paper ‘Is the Capgras delusion an endorsement of experience?' which was recently published in Mind & Language . The Capgras delusion is a condition in which a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by an identical or near-identical other (this can take a variety of forms, such as an imposter, clone, alien, robot, etc.). A more careful definition would specify two propositions that the person believes (Aimola-Davies & Davies, 2009 ): the proposition that someone is not a certain known individual (e.g., this man is not my father ), and the proposition that someone has replaced a certain known individual (e.g., this is a replacer of my father ). I name the content of the former proposition misiden...

This post is by Elly Vintiadis , a philosopher based at the American College of Greece  and interested in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In most discussions about the mind and mental disorders the metaphysical framework within which they take place is rarely questioned. It is however, important to check our metaphysical beliefs--including our beliefs about what the world is made up of--because whether they are held consciously or not, they affect the way we understand the world and how we approach it scientifically.  For this reason, in my recent work I explore what seeing the world--and biological organisms in particular--within a metaphysical framework that puts at its centre the notion of a process can add to our understanding of the mind and its disorders. I contend that seeing the world as fundamentally ‘processual’ in nature rather than in terms of substances and things, provides the best explanation of what we know about the mind and mental disorders. In addition, ...

Today we continue our mini series exploring issues regarding technological enhancement in learning and education, featuring papers from the  “ Cheating Education ”  special issue of Educational Theory. T his week, Sophie Stammers discusses her  paper “Improving knowledge acquisition and dissemination through technological interventions on cognitive biases”. When we think about the role that technology could play in enhancing cognition, much of the literature focuses on extending faculties that are already performing well, so that they perform even better. We also know that humans possess a range of cognitive biases which produce systematically distorted cognitions. Could we use technology to erase our cognitive biases? Should we? In this paper I wanted to think about the specific threats that cognitive biases pose to learning and education, and focused on two commonly recognised types of cognitive bias in particular:  1. Confirmation bias, where people are more lik...

This is the first in a mini series of posts exploring issues regarding technological enhancement in learning and education, featuring two papers that have appeared in the “ Cheating Education ” special issue of Educational Theory.  This post is provided by Kathy Puddifoot , Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham and Cian O’Donnell , Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Bristol. They introduce their paper " Human Memory and the Limits of Technology in Education ". Have you ever had the intuition that there are risks associated with students or teachers supplanting traditional methods of learning with the use of technologies that store and provide easy access to information, such as cloud storage, note-taking applications, open access sources like Wikipedia, or social media resources? It can be difficult to articulate exactly what is problematic about the use of such technologies. They provide a way of storing accurate representations of inf...

Eugenia Lancellotta is a PhD student in Philosophy of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Under the supervision of Lisa Bortolotti , she works on the adaptiveness of delusions, especially outside schizophrenia spectrum disorder. In this post, she discusses her paper “ Are clinical delusions adaptive ?” co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti, that recently appeared in WIREs. In popular culture, and even in part of the scientific culture, delusions are still considered as the mark of madness. It would then seem to be counterintuitive to ask whether such bizarre, irrational and often harmful beliefs can be biologically or psychologically adaptive.  A trait or mechanism is considered to be biologically adaptive when it favours the reproductive success and survival of the organism it belongs to (Wakefield 1992). By analogy with biological adaptiveness, a trait is deemed to be psychologically adaptive when it delivers psychological benefits which support the wellbeing and good psychol...

In this post, José Eduardo Porcher , Research Fellow at the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion working primarily in the philosophy of psychiatry and philosophical psychology, outlines his target paper “ Double Bookkeeping and Doxasticism about Delusion ” in the newest issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology. Doxasticism about delusion is the theoretical stance according to which delusion is a kind of belief. Although doxasticism is taken for granted in the psychiatric literature, it has been a major point of contention in the philosophical literature, where it has faced many objections and alternative accounts (see e.g. Bortolotti, 2018 ). In my paper, I show how double bookkeeping , a distinctive characteristic of delusional patients, motivates two kinds of argument against doxasticism. I then examine these arguments and find them inconclusive. So what is double bookkeeping? Consider the following excerpt of an interview with a patient who showed symptoms of Capgr...

Luca Malatesti and Filip Čeč 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 (Grant 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 " Psychopathy, Identification and Mental Time Travel ", that is contained in the collection edited by Filip Grgić and Davor Pećnjak,  Free Will & Action . Psychopaths are characterised by a callous, manipulative and remors...

Today’s post is written by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Here she overviews her paper ‘ Biased by Our Imaginings ’, recently published in Mind & Language. In my paper I propose and defend a new model of implicit bias according which they are constituted by unconscious imaginings . As part of setting out my view I defend the coherence of unconscious imagination and argue that it does not represent a revisionary notion of imagination. Implicit biases have been identified as ‘the processes or states that have a distorting influence on behaviour and judgement, and are detected in experimental conditions with implicit measures’ (Holroyd 2016 : 154). They are posited as items which cause common microbehaviours or microdiscriminations that cannot be tracked, predicted, or explained by explicit attitudes. The canonical view of implicit biases is that they are associations . The idea is that one’s concept of, say, woman is associat...

Tim Fawns is a Fellow in Clinical Education and Deputy Programme Director of the MSc Clinical Education at Edinburgh Medical School at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017, and his primary research interests are memory, digital technology and education. In this post, he discusses themes from his recent paper " Blended memory: A framework for understanding distributed autobiographical remembering with photography " in Memory Studies. Recording live music on mobile phones, posting photos of breakfast on social media, taking the same photo six times when a friend with a better camera has already taken it... these are some of the many idiosyncratic photography practices I have encountered during my research into memory and photography, alongside traditional examples of family and holiday pictures. From reading literature from cultural studies, media studies, and human computer interaction, followed by lots of informal convers...

Nick Byrd is a PhD candidate and Fellow at Florida State University, working in the Moral & Social Processing (a.k.a., Paul Conway) Lab in the Department of Psychology , and in the Experimental Philosophy Research Group in the Department of  Philosophy  at Florida State University . In this post, he introduces his paper “ What we can (and can’t) infer about implicit bias from debiasing experiments ”, recently published in Synthese. Implicit bias is often described as associative, unconscious, and involuntary. However, philosophers of mind have started challenging these claims. Some of their reasons have to do with debiasing experiments. The idea is that if debiasing is not entirely involuntary and unconscious, then implicit bias is not entirely involuntary and unconscious. Sure enough, some evidence suggests that debiasing is not entirely involuntary and unconscious (e.g., Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012 ). So it seems that implicit bias can be conscious and v...