On Anxiety and its Disorders: A Reconceptualization

Patrick Allen

This post summarises the research focus of Patrick Allen, PhD student at the University of Birmingham Philosophy Department, currently supervised by Lisa Bortolotti and soon also by Hanna Pickard.


My research is concerned with investigating and unpacking the premises underlying the psychiatric conceptions of so-called ‘anxiety disorders’. My research begins by assessing the historical trajectory for how we have come to think of anxiety as a psychopathology or a psychiatric disorder that may or may not require psychiatric (medical) attention. By considering how we have come to think collectively of anxiety as a psychiatric disorder (when it could be argued to the contrary), this leads to philosophical problems concerning the validity of the conclusion that anxiety is in fact a psychiatric disorder. To assess validity, I contrast historical turning points, evolutionary theory, usages of language and meaning, and plausible explanations that are in contrast and contradiction to the contemporary psychiatric conception of anxiety as a psychiatric disorder.

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group -- The Predictive Mind chapter 6

Rachel Gunn

Welcome to the sixth post of the online reading group in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology hosted by the Philosophy@Birmingham blog. This month, Rachel Gunn, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, presents chapter 6 of The Predictive Mind by Jakob Hohwy (OUP 2013).


Chapter 6 - Is predicting seeing?
Presented by Rachel Gunn

In Chapter 6 Hohwy asks the reader “does what we believe to some degree determine what we perceive?” (p.118). My initial reaction to this is – yes, of course it does. I believe that many perceptual experiences are cognitively penetrable. It seems straightforward that different people often see different things depending on prior beliefs. A person who believes in ghosts will see their dead mother in the reflection on a darkened window whereas the person who does not believe in ghosts will just see a weird reflection. This may be a similar finding to Hohwy’s reference to people who believe in extra sensory perception seeing more meaningful patterns than others in ‘noisy’ images (p.134).


The other day, looking at an object in the half-light I saw a small bottle or jar that looked like a tiny paint pot or maybe a pill bottle – this experience lasted for 2 or 3 seconds. At a self-conscious level I couldn’t understand what it was or why it was there, once that self-conscious (person-level) knowledge was realised “there is no paint pot/pill bottle like that in this house…” it suddenly looked like what it actually is – a connector for a garden hose. My perception – that it was a pill bottle/paint pot was altered when I applied the new knowledge – it no longer looked like a pill bottle. I wonder if this would this have worked if the knowledge had been supplied by another person – for example, if I’d seen this at someone else’s house I wouldn’t have had the knowledge “there is no paint pot/pill bottle like that in this house…” If someone said to me “…it’s definitely not a pill bottle” would that have been the right kind of additional person-level information to alter the perception? I have a strong intuition that ‘subjective’ information often comes with a higher probability than information supplied by a third party (and this might be important in cases of delusion). I’m not sure how this impacts on PEM or the notion of the Bayesian brain except perhaps to highlight that subjective probabilities are complex and perhaps impossible to grasp except in terms of, in this case, perceptual outcomes.

Epistemic Innocence and Delusion Formation

Ema Sullivan-Bissett

In this post Ema Sullivan-Bissett, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham Philosophy Department, summarises a paper she is currently working on. She presented it at the 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in Cambridge earlier this month. Ema works with Lisa Bortolotti on the project entitled Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions.

 In the paper I argue that that delusional beliefs have the potential for epistemic innocence, irrespective of which approach to delusion formation we adopt. If I am right, whatever implications there are for delusions having this epistemic status, hold for whatever one says about how delusions are formed, that is, whether they are bottom-up and involve one or two factors, or whether they are top down.

I use the notion of epistemic innocence to capture an epistemically poor cognition which nevertheless both confers an epistemic benefit, and for which such a benefit is otherwise unobtainable. I place two conditions on what it takes for a delusion to be epistemically innocent. The first is that the delusional belief confers some significant epistemic benefit onto the subject (Epistemic Benefit). The second is that the epistemic benefit conferred on the subject could not be otherwise had since alternative, less epistemically faulty cognitions, are unavailable to the subject at that time (No Alternatives).

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group -- The Predictive Mind chapter 5

Jona Vance

Welcome to the fifth post of the online reading group in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology hosted by the Philosophy@Birmingham blog. This month, Jona Vance (Northern Arizona University) presents chapter 5 of The Predictive Mind by Jakob Hohwy (OUP 2013).

Chapter 5 - Binding is Inference
Presented by Jona Vance

Part 1 of the book (Chs 1-4) sets out the prediction error minimization (PEM) framework. Part 2 (Chs 5-8) applies the PEM framework to a number of specific problems and phenomena in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. This post is on Ch 5, which addresses the binding problem (or problems). 

Hohwy has two main stated aims in Ch 5. First, he aims to use PEM to give a “reasonably detailed answer” to the binding problem. Second, he aims to use the debate about binding issues and the phenomena it centers on to illustrate how the PEM framework can be applied to various interesting cases. So the chapter aims to use PEM to illuminate how binding works and aims to use binding to illuminate how PEM works.

Hohwy glosses the binding problem in a few ways. On one gloss it concerns “how the brain manages to discern properties of objects in the world and correctly bind these properties together in perception” (p. 101). A second gloss adds that part of the problem is to explain how the brain correctly binds properties “in spite of processing them in different regions throughout the brain” (p. 101). For example, if visual receptors receive information as of something red and as of something round and the olfactory receives information as of something sweet, the brain still has to figure out whether the redness, roundness, and sweetness are properties of the same object or not. And it has to do so despite processing some of the information in different regions.