Ed Armitage
Affiliation: Aarhus University
Category: Philosophy
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 14:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Thinking & Worrying
Adaptive Irrational Worry
In Armitage (2024) it is argued that worrying is the typical cognitive output of anxiety and is responsive to possible yet uncertain threats. It is constituted either by (1) practical reasoning, aimed at determining ways of avoiding or preparing for possible threats, or (2) epistemic reasoning, aimed at improving one’s epistemic perspective on possible threats. Given this characterization, it is also argued that worry can serve adaptive roles of preparing us or ‘priming’ us for the potential threats it is responsive to. We here want to explore how these adaptive roles relate to the rational status of worry. Ultimately, following the recent work of thinkers such as Bortolotti (2020; Lancellota and Bortolotti 2020) on the potential adaptive roles that irrational beliefs and delusions can play, we will argue that when it comes to worrying rationality does not necessarily correlate with adaptive utility in the way we may assume. In fact, it is plausible that a little irrationality in our worrying can have instrumental value in allowing worry to serve its adaptive roles. This is a conclusion that we think can motivate new perspectives on the apparent irrationality involved in certain mental disorders such as GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder), where irrational - or ‘pathological’ - worrying is taken to be a defining feature (see Hirsch and Mathews, 2012; Ruscio et. al, 2001).
It seems obvious that worrying can be rational or irrational. Sometimes I may be rationally justified in worrying about something, and in others I may not. Understanding worry according to Armitage’s account can help us understand the conditions under which this is true, insofar as worrying is simply understood as a form of affectively motivated reasoning. The practical and epistemic rationality of a given case of worry can thus be evaluated in terms of the practical and epistemic rationality of the forms of reasoning that constitute it. The first part of our talk will involve providing a non-exhaustive account of the kinds of rationality conditions worry is subject to, highlighting what we take to be two common ways that irrationality can manifest in worry. We’ll first argue that worrying can be irrational when it expresses irrational background beliefs, or aims at irrational beliefs. We’ll then argue that worrying can be practically irrational when it is disproportionately ‘intense’ relative to how threatening the potential threat is, i.e., when one worries ‘too much’ about something. This will provide a sketch of some salient conditions under which worrying can be irrational.
With this in place, we then want to explore how the rationality of worry connects to its adaptive roles – as we will show, the respect in which the rational status of worry influences its adaptive utility is not altogether clear. At a glance, we may be tempted to think that irrational worrying is always maladaptive, and that if worrying is to be truly adaptive it should never satisfy the kind of irrationality conditions outlined above. Negative connotations surrounding the idea of irrational worry seem to suggest as much. We want to challenge this assumption. We think that it is plausible that in many cases some irrationality in worrying can actually improve its adaptive utility. For example, spending an arguably irrational amount of time worrying about an exam may very well be conducive to rendering one extremely well prepared for it, thereby improving one’s chances of passing and achieving one’s personal goals. Or, worrying about failing the exam in a way that expresses some irrational background belief about how likely failure is may involve engaging in the kind of epistemic reasoning that ends up improving one’s epistemic position on such a possibility. Cases like these show that irrational worry is not necessarily maladaptive, and that the relationship between these axes of evaluation is not as directly correlative as it may seem. We think such a conclusion is important to improving our understanding of the relationship between rationality and adaptive utility in mental disorders where ‘pathological’ worrying is regarded as a characteristic feature, such as GAD.
Bibliography
Armitage, E. The Nature of Worry(Ing). Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2024 Bortolotti, L. The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs. First edition., Oxford University Press, 2020
Hirsch, Colette R and Mathews, Andrew. A Cognitive Model of Pathological Worry, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2012
Lancellotta, E, Bortolotti L. Are delusions adaptive? WIREs in the Cognitive Sciences, 2020
Ruscio, A. M., Borkovec, T. D., & Ruscio, J.. A Taxometric Investigation of the Latent Structure of Worry, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2001