PERFECT 2016

Logo of project PERFECT

Project PERFECT wants to promote further investigation into whether false or irrational beliefs can be advantageous. Can such beliefs be biologically adaptive, enhance wellbeing, be conducive to the satisfaction of epistemic goals, or promote some other form of agential success? 

In the existing psychological literature, self-deception, positive illusions, delusions, confabulatory explanations, and other instances of false belief have been shown to be beneficial in one or more ways. However, in the philosophical literature, there has not been yet a systematic study of the role of false beliefs in supporting different aspects of human agency. We are organising a workshop which aims to fill this gap, PERFECT 2016, a workshop on False but Useful Beliefs (see link for a full programme).

Speakers will consider different types of beliefs that have an important role in supporting human agency. Some beliefs make us feel better about ourselves and even enhance our health prospects (e.g., positive illusions); some provide some explanation for very unusual experiences (e.g., clinical delusions); some protect us from undesirable truths (e.g., self-deception); some help us fill existing gaps in our memory (e.g., confabulation); some support a sense of community that improves social integration (e.g., religious beliefs). 

The workshop will encourage a reflection on the relationship among the different types of benefits that such beliefs can have and on the different aims and functions of beliefs. Registration is now open! The workshop will be held at Regent’s Conferences in central London on 4th and 5th February 2016. Keynote speakers include Anandi Hattiangadi, Allan Hazlett and Neil Van Leeuwen.

Please go the University of Birmingham online shop to register as places are limited.

Forthcoming Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Talks

On 30th June 2015, we shall have an exciting Delusions Lunchtime Seminar at the University of Birmingham, jointly organised by the Philosophy Department and the School of Psychology (under the Aberrant Experience and Belief Research Theme), and sponsored by project PERFECT.

The seminar will feature Dr Philip Corlett (Yale University) and Kengo Miyazono (Keio University) who will be talking about their latest research on delusion formation. Talks will be from 12 to 1:30pm in the Hills Building, room 1.20. Corlett's talk is entitled: "Delusions and the Brain: Using Cognitive Neuroscience to Understand Psychosis", and Miyazono's "Prediction-Errors and Two-Factors: A Hybrid Approach".

At 3:30pm on the same day, Kengo Miyazono will also be giving a talk in the Philosophy Department, European Research Institute room 149, entitled: "The Role of Imagination in Philosophical Thought Experiments".

On the following day, Lisa Bortolotti, Richard Bentall, and Philip Corlett will speak at a session on the function of delusions at the Royal College of Psychiatry Annual Congress in Birmingham, chaired by Matthew Broome (University of Oxford), and sponsored by project PERFECT.

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group -- The Predictive Mind chapter 7

Kengo Miyazono

Welcome to the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group hosted by the Philosophy@Birmingham blog. This month, Kengo Miyazono, post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, introduces chapter 7 of Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind (OUP, 2013).


Chapter 7 - Precarious Prediction
Presented by Kengo Miyazono

In chapter seven, Hohwy describes the ways in which perceptual inference is tuned in order to represent the world correctly and the ways in which it goes wrong.

The chapter discusses many different issues, but the central idea is that maintaining the "balance between trusting the sensory input and consequently keeping on sampling the world, versus distrusting the sensory input and instead relying more on one's prior beliefs" (146) is crucial in the successful operation of perceptual inference. Maintaining it is not a trivial task. And, the failure of the maintenance might be responsible for pathological conditions such as delusions or autism.

In principle, the prediction errors that are expected to be precise are allowed to drive revisions of prior beliefs higher up the hierarchy, while the prediction errors that are expected to be imprecise are not allowed to do so. Ideally, we expect high precision in predictions errors and, hence, allow them to drive belief revisions when they are trustworthy and expect low precision in prediction errors and, hence, do not allow them to drive belief revisions when they are not.

But, the process can go wrong. A possibility is that some people expect sensory prediction errors to be much less precise than they actually are. Hohwy suggests that this is what is happening in people with delusions; "a persistent, exaggerated expectation for noise and uncertainty would lead to imprecise sensory prediction errors mediated by low gain on sensory input and heightened reliance on top-down priors. 

Do Delusions Have Epistemic Value?

Kengo Miyazono

In this post Kengo Miyazono, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham Philosophy Department, summarises a paper he presented it at the 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association in Cambridge earlier this month. The paper “Do delusions have any epistemic value?”, co-authored by Kengo and Lisa Bortolotti was presented in the open session.

Delusional beliefs are false in most cases. And, probably, they are unjustified according any interesting accounts of epistemic justification. However, we believe that there are some positive things we can say about epistemic status of delusional beliefs. The aim of the paper (or, strictly speaking, the aim of the longer paper upon which the presented paper is based) is to defend two claims about the epistemic status of delusional beliefs. The claims correspond to two kinds of epistemic evaluations; consequentialist and deontological evaluations. First, delusions can have some good epistemic consequences that are at least indirectly related to the acquisition of true beliefs. Second, people with delusions are not epistemically blameworthy for their delusional beliefs.

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).

Delusion: doxasticity, rationality and normativity

This week, doctoral researcher Rachel Gunn examines the nature of delusions. 

If a subject says they believe something then I am inclined to take this at face value.  The subject usually has other mundane unexamined beliefs (e.g.: I believe that when I turn a tap on water comes out) as well as examined beliefs or opinions (e.g.: I believe that liberal democracy is the best political system).  Against this background of other beliefs it does not seem appropriate to ‘second guess’ the subject about his own experience.  Not everyone would agree with this and some would argue that delusions do not meet the criteria for beliefs as they are irrational, do not necessarily affect behaviour and do not cohere with other beliefs.

Some propose that a delusional subject fails to monitor an imagining as being self-generated (the subject is in some sense not the agent of the imagining).  This mental activity is then mislabelled (representationally) as a belief and somehow ‘given’ as true.  So the delusional person has a thought with content P.  He does not believe P.  He imagines P.  And he believes that he believes P.  In this case some delusions are imaginings with a strong feeling of subjective conviction (Currie and Jureidini, 2001).  This is an intriguing way of describing some delusions and might help us explain why some subjects do not seek to integrate their delusions into their lives or to act on them (we do not routinely act on our imaginings).  However, there are problems here – the most obvious being that there are many examples of people acting on their delusions and integrating them into elaborate belief networks that pervade the rest of their lives - for example, the person who believes he is a millionaire, a general and a senior psychiatrist who regularly phones the bank to check on his millions, attempts to arrange to inspect local military bases and applies for a job as a chief executive of a hospital (Bentall, 2004, pp.295–6). 

The other problem arises from establishing how this characterisation of delusion differs from non-delusional subjects who are ‘believers’.  Our normal propositional attitudes can be manifest as beliefs, which we may not act on, which may not be integrated into the rest of our beliefs and which may also be irrational.  For example I might say that I believe smoking kills people and I do not want to die sooner than necessary yet I continue to smoke.  This series of un-integrated beliefs might include an unexamined belief (or sub-clinical delusion) that I am special and the detrimental effect of smoking will somehow not have an impact on me.  If questioned about it I would probably concede that the (weakly held) belief that I am special is not true, yet I am unlikely to change my behaviour.  Further, one could successfully argue that my behaviour and my thinking in this case is irrational but it is unlikely that one would question the belief status of my statement about smoking.  Some say that delusions are non-doxastic acceptances that do not meet relevant rationality standards (Frankish, 2012) – and here I would have to question what is meant by ‘relevant rationality standards.’  Ideal (normative) rationality is not consistent in human beings and therefore one cannot deny the doxastic nature of delusions simply because they are sometimes irrational (for supporters of this position see Bayne and Pacherie, 2005; Bortolotti, 2010). 

Whilst it might be true that some delusions are not beliefs this does not alter the fact that our ordinary conceptualisation of beliefs sometimes seem to have the same external characteristics as the phenomenon that Currie and Jureidini describe as imaginings mistaken as beliefs and that Frankish describes as non-doxastic acceptances.  Of course, as we are unable to consistently and accurately define or describe beliefs or imaginings, I cannot say more about it here - perhaps beliefs, acceptances and imaginings are complex overlapping forms of mental activity.  For more on delusion see the imperfect cognitions blog.

Other (non-electronic) references:

Bentall, R.P. (2004) Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. London: Penguin

Bortolotti, L. (2010) Delusions and other irrational beliefs. International perspectives in philosophy and psychiatry. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press