Professor Lisa Bortolotti from the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (ERC-2013-Co-G) for a project called PERFECT (Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts), which started in October 2014 and ran for five years.
PERFECT will allow Lisa to build a team of three post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students. The project will also involve the participation of Dr Michael Larkin from the School of Psychology.
PERFECT aims to establish whether cognitions that are inaccurate in some important respect can ever be good for us from a pragmatic and an epistemic point of view. Can delusional beliefs, distorted memories, confabulatory explanations, which are frequent in the non-clinical population and also listed as symptoms of psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and dementia, have redeeming features?