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In this post, Phil Corlett replies to Ryan McKay 's summary of his paper " Measles, Magic and Misidentifications: A Defence of the Two-Factor Theory of Delusions ", itself a response to Phil's earlier post on his paper " Factor one, familiarity and frontal cortex: a challenge to the two-factor theory of delusions ". See also Amanda Barnier 's important commentary on the debate, and Phil's reply . Got all that? Right, on with the post! I am grateful to Ryan for his careful and collegial rebuttal of my critique. I am grateful too for the opportunity to respond. Ryan’s response does mollify some of my points. However, I am sure no one will be surprised that I have not updated my beliefs about 2-factor theory. First, Ryan suggests that 2-factor theorists knew about the breadth of the deficits of vmPFC cases, since they were described in Langdon and Coltheart’s ( 2000 ) paper. They were indeed described. Why then, 19 years (and hundreds of theory pape...

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 “...

In this post,  Phil Corlett , Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, discusses some of the ideas in his  paper  ‘Factor one, familiarity and frontal cortex: a challenge to the two-factor theory of delusions’ recently published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Over recent years, Imperfect Cognitions has become the premier hub and outlet for work on the neurobiology and cognitive psychology of delusions. It has featured my work on aberrant prediction error and delusions in schizophrenia (Corlett et al., 2007 ), and work that conceptually replicates it (Kaplan et al., 2016 ). There has been work, also highlighted on the blog, from neurological patients that suggest instead that a 2-factor explanation of delusions may be more appropriate (Darby et al., 2017 ), although that work was not conclusive (McKay and Furl, 2017 ). It has all garnered much interest. Partly because delusions inherently fascinating, I think, and partly because the argum...

In September 2018, a team of Birmingham philosophers, comprising Kathy Puddifoot , Valeria Motta , Matilde Aliffi , EmaSullivan-Bissett and myself , were in sunny Rijeka, Croatia, to talk a whole lot of Epistemic Innocence at the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology . Epistemic innocence is the idea at the heart of our research at Project PERFECT . A cognition is epistemically innocent if it is irrational or inaccurate and operates in ways that could increase the chance of acquiring knowledge or understanding, where alternative, less costly cognitions that bring the same benefits are unavailable. Over the last few years, researchers on the project and beyond have investigated the implications of epistemic innocence in a range of domains (see a list of relevant work here ). Our epistemic innocence symposium at ESPP2018 was a mark of the relative maturity of the concept, and the opportunity for us to start expanding its applications.        ...