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  1. Monothematic delusions are misfunctioning beliefs.Ema Sullivan-Bissett - 2024 - Synthese 204 (6):1-26.
    Monothematic delusions are bizarre beliefs which are often accompanied by highly anomalous experiences. For philosophers and psychologists attracted to the exploration of mental phenomena in an evolutionary framework, these beliefs represent—notwithstanding their rarity—a puzzle. A natural idea concerning the biology of belief is that our beliefs, in concert with relevant desires, help us to navigate our environments, and so, in broad terms, an evolutionary story of human belief formation will likely insist on a function of truth (true beliefs tend to (...)
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  • Thinking in schizophrenia and the social phenomenology of thought insertion.Pablo López-Silva - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Patients suffering from delusions of thought insertion (TI) report that external agents of different nature have placed thoughts into their minds. The symptom involves distressing feelings of intromission and exposition, loss of mental privacy, diminished ego boundaries, and a – often neglected – peculiar “physicality”. A dominant approach within cognitive sciences characterizes TI as involving alterations in the experience of being the author of certain thoughts. For the advocates of this so-called Standard Approach to TI, the absence of a sense (...)
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  • The psychopathology of metaphysics.Billon Alexandre - 2024 - Metaphilosophy 1 (01):1-28.
    According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is somehow shallow and lacking in reality. For all we knwo, the intuition goes, we could be living in a cave facing shadows, in a dream or even in a computer simulation, This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it (...)
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  • Rationalism.Jakob Ohlhorst - 2024 - In Ema Sullivan-Bissett (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Delusion. Routledge.
    This chapter introduces the rationalist model of delusions. It begins by presenting John Campbell’s seminal proposal that delusions are caused top-down by pathological Wittgensteinian framework or hinge beliefs. After presenting Campbell’s rationalist account of delusions, the chapter raises and examines prominent objections by Tim Bayne & Elisabeth Pacherie as well as by Tim Thornton. The former make an important distinction between the aetiological top-down cognitive part and the epistemological rationalist framework part of Campbell’s account. The thesis that delusions are caused (...)
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  • On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments.Víctor M. Verdejo - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Subjects experiencing thought insertion disown thoughts they are introspectively aware of. According to what I call “the rationality hypothesis”, thought-insertion reports are not merely intelligible, but also express, or potentially express, fully rational judgments in the light of highly disruptive experience. I argue that the hypothesis is ethically and theoretically motivated, and provides two insights into the philosophical significance of reports by subjects with schizophrenia. First, the reports can be seen as evidence that rational judgments of ownership of a thought (...)
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  • Certainty and delusion.Rick Bellaar - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (7):1–25.
    Delusions are often thought of as the hallmark of irrationality. Accepted definitions of delusion are cast in terms of epistemic features that reflect irrationality: impossibility or falsity of con...
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  • What is the Point of Persistent Disputes? The meta-analytic answer.Alexandre Billon & Philippe Vellozzo - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Many philosophers regard the persistence of philosophical disputes as symptomatic of overly ambitious, ill-founded intellectual projects. There are indeed strong reasons to believe that persistent disputes in philosophy (and more generally in the discourse at large) are pointless. We call this the pessimistic view of the nature of philosophical disputes. In order to respond to the pessimistic view, we articulate the supporting reasons and provide a precise formulation in terms of the idea that the best explanation of persistent disputes entails (...)
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  • Understanding Delusions: Evidence, Reason, and Experience.Chenwei Nie - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
    This thesis develops a novel framework for explaining delusions. In Chapter 1, I introduce the two fundamental challenges posed by delusions: the evidence challenge lies in explaining the flagrant ways delusions flout evidence; and the specificity challenge lies in explaining the fact that patients’ delusions are often about a few specific themes, and patients rarely have a wide range of delusional or odd beliefs. In Chapter 2, I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of current theories of delusions, which typically appeal (...)
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  • Strange beliefs: essays on delusion formation.Federico Bongiorno Dr - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    This thesis is set out as a collection of self-standing essays. Throughout these essays, I try to illuminate a number of controversies surrounding the way in which delusions are formed, and relatedly, their nature and epistemic standing. In Chapter 2, after an introductory chapter, I flesh out a new ‘endorsement’ approach to the Capgras delusion, the main idea being that the delusion is formed by endorsing the content of a metaphorical-perceptual state in which a loved one is represented metaphorically as (...)
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  • The Certainties of Delusion.Jakob Ohlhorst - 2021 - In Luca Moretti & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Non-Evidentialist Epistemology. Leiden: Brill. pp. 211-229.
    Delusions are unhinged hinge certainties. Delusions are defined as strongly anchored beliefs that do not change in the face of adverse evidence. The same goes for Wittgensteinian certainties. My paper refines the so-called framework views of delusion, presenting an argument that epistemically speaking, considering them to be certainties best accounts for delusions’ doxastic profile. Until now there has been little argument in favour of this position and the original proposals made too extreme predictions about the belief systems of delusional patients. (...)
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  • Do delusions have and give meaning?Rosa Ritunnano & Lisa Bortolotti - 2022 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (4):949-968.
    Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical literature relevant to two claims about delusions and meaning: delusions are meaningful, despite being described as irrational and implausible beliefs; some delusions can also enhance the sense that one’s life is meaningful, supporting agency and creativity in some circumstances. (...)
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  • Psychosis and Intelligibility.Sofia Jeppsson - 2021 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (3):233-249.
    When interacting with other people, we assume that they have their reasons for what they do and believe, and experience recognizable feelings and emotions. When people act from weakness of will or are otherwise irrational, what they do can still be comprehensible to us, since we know what it is like to fall for temptation and act against one’s better judgment. Still, when someone’s experiences, feelings and way of thinking is vastly different from our own, understanding them becomes increasingly difficult. (...)
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  • Delusional Evidence-Responsiveness.Carolina Flores - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6299-6330.
    Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the (...)
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  • The Collective Archives of Mind : An Exploration of Reasons from Metaethics to Social Ontology.Gloria Mähringer - unknown
    This monograph discusses the question of what it is to be a reason – mainly in practical ethics – and proposes an original contribution to metaethics.It critically examines theories of metaethical realism, constructivism and error theory and identifies several misunderstandings or unclarities in contemporary debates. Based on this examination, the book suggests a distinction between a conceptual question, that can be answered by pure first-personal thinking, and a material question, that targets responses to reasons as a natural phenomenon in space (...)
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  • Monothematic Delusions and the Limits of Rationality.Adam Bradley & Quinn Hiroshi Gibson - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):811-835.
    Monothematic delusions are delusions whose contents pertain to a single subject matter. Examples include Capgras delusion, the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor, and Cotard delusion, the delusion that one is dead or does not exist. Two-factor accounts of such delusions hold that they are the result of both an experiential deficit, for instance flattened affect, coupled with an aberrant cognitive response to that deficit. In this paper we develop a new expressivist two-factor account of (...)
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  • Doctors without ‘Disorders’.Lisa Bortolotti - 2020 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 94 (1):163-184.
    On one influential view, the problems that should attract medical attention involve a disorder, because the goals of medical practice are to prevent and treat disorders. Based on this view, if there are no mental disorders then the status of psychiatry as a medical field is challenged. In this paper, I observe that it is often difficult to establish whether the problems that attract medical attention involve a disorder, and argue that none of the notions of disorder proposed so far (...)
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  • The Role of Emotions in Delusion Formation.Adrianna Smurzyńska - 2016 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 48 (1):253-263.
    The text concerns the role of emotions in delusion formation. Provided are definitions from DSM-V and DSM-IV-R and the problems found in those definitions. One of them, the problem of delusion formation, is described when providing cognitive theories of delusions. The core of the paper is a presentation of the emotional and affective disorders in delusions, especially Capgras delusion and Cotard delusion. The author provides a comparison of the kinds of delusions and the conclusions taken from neuroimaging studies. As a (...)
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  • The Doxastic Status of Delusion and the Limits of Folk Psychology.José Eduardo Porcher - 2018 - In Inês Hipólito, Jorge Gonçalves & João G. Pereira (eds.), Schizophrenia and Common Sense: Explaining the Relation Between Madness and Social Values. Cham: Springer. pp. 175–190.
    Clinical delusions are widely characterized as being pathological beliefs in both the clinical literature and in common sense. Recently, a philosophical debate has emerged between defenders of the commonsense position (doxasticists) and their opponents, who have the burden of pointing toward alternative characterizations (anti-doxasticists). In this chapter, I argue that both doxasticism and anti- doxasticism fail to characterize the functional role of delusions while at the same time being unable to play a role in the explanation of these phenomena. I (...)
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  • Monothematic delusion: A case of innocence from experience.Ema Sullivan-Bissett - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (6):920-947.
    ABSTRACTEmpiricists about monothematic delusion formation agree that anomalous experience is a factor in the formation of these attitudes, but disagree markedly on which further factors need to be specified. I argue that epistemic innocence may be a unifying feature of monothematic delusions, insofar as a judgment of epistemic innocence to this class of attitudes is one that opposing empiricist accounts can make. The notion of epistemic innocence allows us to tell a richer story when investigating the epistemic status of monothematic (...)
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  • (1 other version)Basic Self‐Awareness.Alexandre Billon - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (3):732-763.
    Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...)
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  • Can Dispositionalism About Belief Vindicate Doxasticism About Delusion?José Eduardo Porcher - 2015 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 19 (3):379-404.
    Clinical delusions have traditionally been characterized as beliefs in psychiatry. However, philosophers have recently engaged with the empirical literature and produced a number of objections to the so-called doxastic status of delusion, stemming mainly from the mismatch between the functional role of delusions and that expected of beliefs. In response to this, an appeal to dispositionalism about the nature of belief has been proposed to vindicate the doxastic status of delusion. In this paper, I first present the objections to attributing (...)
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  • (1 other version)Basic Self‐Awareness.Alexandre Billon - 2016 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (4).
    Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...)
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  • Delusions, Acceptances, and Cognitive Feelings.Richard Dub - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (1):27-60.
    Psychopathological delusions have a number of features that are curiously difficult to explain. Delusions are resistant to counterevidence and impervious to counterargument. Delusions are theoretically, affectively, and behaviorally circumscribed: delusional individuals often do not act on their delusions and often do not update beliefs on the basis of their delusions. Delusional individuals are occasionally able to distinguish their delusions from other beliefs, sometimes speaking of their “delusional reality.” To explain these features, I offer a model according to which, contrary to (...)
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  • Making Sense of the Cotard Syndrome: Insights from the Study of Depersonalisation.Alexandre Billon - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (3):356-391.
    Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they (...)
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  • Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-Awareness.Johannes Roessler - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (3):541-557.
    This paper has two themes. One is the question of how to understand the relation between inner speech and knowledge of one’s own thoughts. My aim here is to probe and challenge the popular neo-Rylean suggestion that we know our own thoughts by ‘overhearing our own silent monologues’, and to sketch an alternative suggestion, inspired by Ryle’s lesser-known discussion of thinking as a ‘serial operation’. The second theme is the question whether, as Ryle apparently thought, we need two different accounts (...)
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  • A Mental Files Approach to Delusional Misidentification.Sam Wilkinson - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2):389-404.
    I suggest that we can think of delusional misidentification in terms of systematic errors in the management of mental files. I begin by sketching the orthodox “bottom-up” aetiology of delusional misidentification. I suggest that the orthodox aetiology can be given a descriptivist or a singularist interpretation. I present three cases that a descriptivist interpretation needs to account for. I then introduce a singularist approach, one that is based on mental files, and show how it opens the way for different and (...)
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  • A critical perspective on second-order empathy in understanding psychopathology: phenomenology and ethics.Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed - 2015 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 36 (2):97-116.
    The centenary of Karl Jaspers' General Psychopathology was recognised in 2013 with the publication of a volume of essays dedicated to his work. Leading phenomenological-psychopathologists and philosophers of psychiatry examined Jaspers notion of empathic understanding and his declaration that certain schizophrenic phenomena are ‘un-understandable’. The consensus reached by the authors was that Jaspers operated with a narrow conception of phenomenology and empathy and that schizophrenic phenomena can be understood through what they variously called second-order and radical empathy. This article offers (...)
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  • Why Are We Certain that We Exist?Alexandre Billon - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3):723-759.
    Descartes was certain that he was thinking and he was accordingly certain that he existed. Like Descartes, we seem to be more certain of our thoughts and our existence than of anything else. What is less clear is the reason why we are thus certain. Philosophers throughout history have provided different interpretations of the cogito, disagreeing both on the kind of thoughts it characterizes and on the reasons for its cogency. According to what we may call the empiricist interpretation of (...)
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  • Making Sense of an Endorsement Model of Thought‐Insertion.Michael Sollberger - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (5):590-612.
    Experiences of thought-insertion are a first-rank, diagnostically central symptom of schizophrenia. Schizophrenic patients who undergo such delusional mental states report being first-personally aware of an occurrent conscious thought which is not theirs, but which belongs to an external cognitive agent. Patients seem to be right about what they are thinking but mistaken about who is doing the thinking. It is notoriously difficult to make sense of such delusions. One general approach to explaining the etiology of monothematic delusions has come to (...)
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  • Une défense logique du modèle de Maher pour les délires polythématiques.Paul Franceschi - 2008 - Philosophiques 35 (2):451-475.
    Dans ce qui suit, je décrirai un modèle pour la formation et la maintenance des délires polythématiques rencontrés dans la schizophrénie, en adéquation avec le modèle pour les délires décrit par Brendan Maher. Les délires polythématiques y sont considérés comme les conclusions d’arguments déclenchés par l’apophénie et qui comportent des erreurs de raisonnement très communes, telles que le sophisme post hoc et le bais de confirmation. Je décris tout d’abord la structure du raisonnement qui conduit au délire de référence, de (...)
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  • Delusions and Dispositionalism about Belief.Maura Tumulty - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (5):596-628.
    The imperviousness of delusions to counter-evidence makes it tempting to classify them as imaginings. Bayne and Pacherie argue that adopting a dispositional account of belief can secure the doxastic status of delusions. But dispositionalism can only secure genuinely doxastic status for mental states by giving folk-psychological norms a significant role in the individuation of attitudes. When such norms individuate belief, deluded subjects will not count as believing their delusions. In general, dispositionalism won't confer genuinely doxastic status more often than do (...)
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  • (1 other version)Have we vindicated the motivational unconscious yet? A conceptual review.Alexandre Billon - 2011 - Frontiers in Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis 2.
    Motivationally unconscious (M-unconscious) states are unconscious states that can directly motivate a subject’s behavior and whose unconscious character typically results from a form of repression. The basic argument for M-unconscious states claims that they provide the best explanation to some seemingly non rational behaviors, like akrasia, impulsivity or apparent self-deception. This basic argument has been challenged on theoretical, empirical and conceptual grounds. Drawing on recent works on apparent self-deception and on the ‘cognitive unconscious’ I assess those objections. I argue that (...)
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  • A Logical Defence of Maher’s Model of Polythematic Delusions.Paul Franceschi - 2010 - Journal of Philosophical Research 35 (2):451-475.
    We proceed to describe a model for the formation and maintenance of polythematic delusions encountered in schizophrenia, which is in adequacy with Brendan Maher's account of delusions. Polythematic delusions are considered here as the conclusions of arguments triggered by apophenia that include some very common errors of reasoning such as post hoc fallacy and confirmation bias. We describe first the structure of reasoning which leads to delusions of reference, of telepathy and of influence, by distinguishing between the primary, secondary, tertiary (...)
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  • On incomprehensibility in schizophrenia.Mads Gram Henriksen - 2013 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (1):105-129.
    This article examines the supposedly incomprehensibility of schizophrenic delusions. According to the contemporary classificatory systems (DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10), some delusions typically found in schizophrenia are considered bizarre and incomprehensible. The aim of this article is to discuss the notion of understanding that deems these delusions incomprehensible and to see if it is possible to comprehend these delusions if we apply another notion of understanding. First, I discuss the contemporary schizophrenia definitions and their inherent problems, and I argue that the notion (...)
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  • The phenomenological role of affect in the capgras delusion.Matthew Ratcliffe - 2008 - Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2):195-216.
    This paper draws on studies of the Capgras delusion in order to illuminate the phenomenological role of affect in interpersonal recognition. People with this delusion maintain that familiars, such as spouses, have been replaced by impostors. It is generally agreed that the delusion involves an anomalous experience, arising due to loss of affect. However, quite what this experience consists of remains unclear. I argue that recent accounts of the Capgras delusion incorporate an impoverished conception of experience, which fails to accommodate (...)
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  • Bottom-Up or Top-Down: Campbell's Rationalist Account of Monothematic Delusions.Tim Bayne & Elisabeth Pacherie - 2004 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (1):1-11.
    A popular approach to monothematic delusions in the recent literature has been to argue that monothematic delusions involve broadly rational responses to highly unusual experiences. Campbell calls this the empiricist approach to monothematic delusions, and argues that it cannot account for the links between meaning and rationality. In place of empiricism Campbell offers a rationalist account of monothematic delusions, according to which delusional beliefs are understood as Wittgensteinian framework propositions. We argue that neither Campbell's attack on empiricism nor his rationalist (...)
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  • In defence of the doxastic conception of delusions.Timothy J. Bayne & Elisabeth Pacherie - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (2):163-88.
    In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...)
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  • Delusions and the background of rationality.Lisa Bortolotti - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (2):189-208.
    I argue that some cases of delusions show the inadequacy of those theories of interpretation that rely on a necessary rationality constraint on belief ascription. In particular I challenge the view that irrational beliefs can be ascribed only against a general background of rationality. Subjects affected by delusions seem to be genuine believers and their behaviour can be successfully explained in intentional terms, but they do not meet those criteria that according to Davidson (1985a) need to be met for the (...)
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  • Delusional beliefs and reason giving.Lisa Bortolotti & Matthew R. Broome - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (6):801-21.
    Philosophers have been long interested in delusional beliefs and in whether, by reporting and endorsing such beliefs, deluded subjects violate norms of rationality (Campbell 1999; Davies & Coltheart 2002; Gerrans 2001; Stone & Young 1997; Broome 2004; Bortolotti 2005). So far they have focused on identifying the relation between intentionality and rationality in order to gain a better understanding of both ordinary and delusional beliefs. In this paper Matthew Broome and I aim at drawing attention to the extent to which (...)
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  • Spinozan Doxasticism About Delusions.Federico Bongiorno - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):720-752.
    The Spinozan theory of belief fixation holds that mentally representing truth-apt propositions leads to immediately believing them. In this paper, I explore how the theory fares as a defence of doxasticism about delusions (the view that they are beliefs). Doxasticism has been criticised on the grounds that delusions typically do not abide by rational standards that we expect beliefs to conform to. If belief fixation is Spinozan, I argue, these deviations from rationality are not just compatible with, but supportive of, (...)
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  • Is Having Contradictory Beliefs Possible? Discussion and Critique of Arguments for the Psychological Principle of Non-Contradiction.Maciej Tarnowski - 2020 - Studia Semiotyczne—English Supplement 31:91-126.
    The aim of this paper is to present and analyze arguments provided for the Psychological Principle of Non-Contradiction which states that one cannot have, or cannot be described as having, contradictory beliefs. By differentiating two possible interpretations of PNC, descriptive and normative, and examining arguments provided for each of them separately I point out the flaws in reasoning in these arguments and difficulties with aligning PNC with the empirical data provided by research done in cognitive and clinical psychology. I claim (...)
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  • Is the Capgras delusion an endorsement of experience?Federico Bongiorno - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (3):293-312.
    There is evidence indicating that the Capgras delusion is grounded in some kind of anomalous experience. According to the endorsement model, the content of the delusion is already encoded in the Capgras subject's experience, and the delusion is formed simply by endorsing that content as veridical. Elisabeth Pacherie and Sam Wilkinson have in different ways attempted to articulate a comprehensive defence of this strategy, but here I argue that the endorsement model cannot be defended along the lines envisioned by either (...)
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  • Delusional Predictions and Explanations.Matthew Parrott - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):325-353.
    In both cognitive science and philosophy, many theorists have recently appealed to a predictive processing framework to offer explanations of why certain individuals form delusional beliefs. One aim of this essay will be to illustrate how one could plausibly develop a predictive processing account in different ways to account for the onset of different kinds of delusions. However, the second aim of this essay will be to discuss two significant limitations of the predictive processing framework. First, I shall draw on (...)
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  • Psychopathy: Morally Incapacitated Persons.Heidi Maibom - 2017 - In Thomas Schramme & Steven Edwards (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Springer. pp. 1109-1129.
    After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...)
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  • On Mathematical and Religious Belief, and on Epistemic Snobbery.Silvia Jonas - 2016 - Philosophy 91 (1):69-92.
    In this paper, I argue that religious belief is epistemically equivalent to mathematical belief. Abstract beliefs don't fall under ‘naive’, evidence-based analyses of rationality. Rather, their epistemic permissibility depends, I suggest, on four criteria: predictability, applicability, consistency, and immediate acceptability of the fundamental axioms. The paper examines to what extent mathematics meets these criteria, juxtaposing the results with the case of religion. My argument is directed against a widespread view according to which belief in mathematics is clearly rationally acceptable whereas (...)
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  • Understanding Schizophrenic Delusion: The Role of Some Primary Alterations of Subjective Experience. [REVIEW]Sarah Troubé - 2012 - Medicine Studies 3 (4):233-248.
    This paper explores the possibility of understanding schizophrenic delusion through the role of a primary alteration of subjective experience. Two approaches are contrasted: the first defines schizophrenic delusion as a primary symptom resisting any attempt to understand, whereas the second describes delusion as a secondary symptom, to be understood as a rational reaction of the self. The paper discusses the possibility of applying this second approach to schizophrenic delusion. This leads us to raise the issue of the specificity of psychotic (...)
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  • Capgras delusion: An interactionist model.Garry Young - 2008 - Consciousness and Cognition 17 (3):863-876.
    In this paper I discuss the role played by disturbed phenomenology in accounting for the formation and maintenance of the Capgras delusion. Whilst endorsing a two-stage model to explain the condition, I nevertheless argue that traditional accounts prioritise the role played by some form of second-stage cognitive disruption at the expense of the significant contribution made by the patient’s disturbed phenomenology, which is often reduced to such uninformative descriptions as “anomalous” or “strange”. By advocating an interactionist model, I argue that (...)
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  • Interpreting delusions.Matthew Ratcliffe - 2004 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (1):25-48.
    This paper explores the phenomenology of the Capgras and Cotard delusions. The former is generally characterised as the belief that relatives or friends have been replaced by impostors, and the latter as the conviction that one is dead or has ceased to exist. A commonly reported feature of these delusions is an experienced ''defamiliarisation'' or even ''derealisation'' of things, which is associated with an absence or distortion of affect. I suggest that the importance attributed to affect by current explanations of (...)
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  • The psychopathology of metaphysics: Depersonalization and the problem of reality.Alexandre Billon - 2024 - Metaphilosophy 55 (1):3-30.
    According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is, just like a dream, shadows, or a computer simulation, somehow shallow and lacking in reality. This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the (...)
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  • Abnormal Certainty: Examining the Epistemological Status of Delusional Beliefs.Svetlana Bardina - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (4):546-560.
    ABSTRACTThis article intends to reconsider the epistemological status of delusional beliefs on the basis of Wittgenstein’s conception of certainty. Several works over the last two decades have compared delusional beliefs with so-called hinge propositions, which – according to Wittgenstein – function as expressions of objective certainty. This gives rise to a paradox. On the one hand, delusions are compatible to Wittgensteinian certainties in some respects; on the other hand, they contradict beliefs shared by other members of the community, which makes (...)
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