Unreasonable Beliefs Research Articles

For Lack of a Nail

Abstract A few months ago I read a most exciting article in a scientific magazine. It seemed to me that the ideas presented had the potential to revolutionize all of microscopy and I got very excited at the vistas opened by this unexpected departure from the accepted dogma. The article was only a summary of the current status of the research in the field and I resolved to probe deeper. Since I read the piece just as I was ready to go to sleep I trusted my memory in the unreasonable belief that, should my memory fail, I could always access a computer database to retrieve the information when I needed it. I even recollect feeling very virtuous when, the very next morning, I entered the data into my files. At least I think I remember that.

Adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: mother-adolescent interactions, family beliefs and conflicts, and maternal psychopathology.

A group of 83 adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were subdivided into those with ADHD alone (n = 27) and those with ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder (ADHD/ODD, n = 56). They were compared to each other and a community control group (n = 77) on measures of family conflicts, family beliefs, maternal adjustment, and observations of mother-adolescent interactions during both a neutral and conflict discussion. Both ADHD groups had more topics on which there was conflict and more angry conflicts at home than control adolescents on parent reports. Only the ADHD/ODD adolescents reported more such conflicts, endorsed more extreme and unreasonable beliefs about their parent-teen relations, and demonstrated greater negative interactions during a neutral discussion than the control teenagers. Similarly, only mothers of the ADHD/ODD teens displayed greater negative interactions during a neutral discussion, more extreme and unreasonable beliefs about their parent-teen relations, greater personal distress, and less satisfaction in their marriages than the mothers in the control group. Most findings for the ADHD only group were between the control group and the group with mixed ADHD/ODD but did not differ from either group. Results imply that it is the combination of ODD symptoms with those of ADHD that is associated with the greater-than-normal conflicts, anger, poor communications, unreasonable beliefs, and negative interactive styles seen in ADHD adolescents. These same characteristics typify their mothers' interactions as well such that both the adolescents' ODD symptoms and maternal psychological distress (hostility) make unique contributions to the degree of conflict and anger in the parent-teen relations of ADHD adolescents.

Paranoid schizophrenia may be caused by dopamine hyperactivity of CA1 hippocampus

Explicit consolidation of memory, or fixation of declarative belief, appears to be physically represented in changes of synaptic conductances of neurons in the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex (PTO) of the mammalian forebrain. This fixation of belief in PTO is postulated to be critically dependent on a diffuse reinforcement signal via the inferior temporal cortex (ITC) ultimately caused by an increased output of the CA1 pyramidal cells of hippocampus. Analogous to the reinforcing mechanisms of other forebrain systems, this updating of the connection weights of the neural nets in PTO by the output of the critical neurons in CA1 is directly related to concentrations of dopamine (DA). We propose that the delusions (i.e., unreasonable beliefs) of paranoid schizophrenia are caused by a hyperactivity of the same DA-sensitive CA1 neurons that are responsible for the fixation of normal beliefs. The dramatic reduction in delusions with administration of neuroleptics, as DA D2 blockers, in schizophrenics may thus be explained by their acting to ameliorate the hyperactivity of these CA1 DA D2 receptors.

An alternative analysis of knowing

When we say of a man that he knows something we are making a claim that is both descriptive and evaluative. Most philosophers seem to agree that the descriptive aspect of a knowledge claim can be explicated in terms of true belief. There is also considerable agreement that the eval uative aspect is to be explicated in terms of the structure of the justifica tion one has for his belief. During the last decade, epistemologists have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the problem of explicating the evaluative aspect of knowledge claims. They have been inspired, in part, by the highly recalcitrant problems raised in Edmund Gettier's brief but epoch-making paper 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge 7'1 To date, no universally agreed upon theory concerning these questions has been presented. One of my goals in this paper is to present an adequate ex plication of empirical knowledge. In addition to these attempts at explicating the concept of knowledge, many philosophers have worked recently on the logic of epistemic ex pressions, principally on expressions containing 'knows' and 'believes'. A great many insights into the formal characteristics of these expressions have been gained as a result of this work.3 Very little has been done, however, toward combining the results of this enterprise with the results achieved by those who have worked on the explication of the concept of knowledge. A second goal of this paper is to effect such a combination by constructing an explication of the concept of knowledge in terms of some notions which I earlier developed in an essay on the logic of epis temic expressions.4 In that essay, my primary concern was with the con cepts of evident, reasonable, and unreasonable belief. The approach adopted there is intended, however, to provide a basis for a general logic of epistemic expressions. I shall begin by giving a brief account of the basic elements of that approach.