Imperfect Cognitions

Keith Frankish If psychotic patients did not tell us, would we guess what their delusions were? We might see that a patient was depressed, withdrawn, self-neglecting, and so on, but would it occur to us that they thought they were dead , as Cotard patients do? It is doubtful. Deluded patients are firmly attached to their delusions, but the attachment manifests itself most clearly at the verbal level, in what they say and how they argue, and may not show up clearly in their nonverbal behaviour. Most Cotard patients do not (as one early case did) arrange their own funeral. Why is this? The answer, I think, is that delusion is an attitude closely bound up with language -- an attitude sometimes called ‘acceptance’. To accept a proposition, in this sense, is to commit oneself to arguing for it, defending it, using in reasoning, and acting upon it. This is the attitude a scientist takes to a hypothesis, a lawyer to the claim that their client is innocent, a politician to a policy. It ...

Richard Dub My name is Richard Dub. I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Centre for the Affective Sciences, and I recently received my Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University. In my dissertation, I offered a model of delusions that attempted to answer two questions: What are delusions? How are they formed? Delusions, I argue, are pathological acceptances formed on the basis of pathological cognitive feelings. Neither 'acceptance' nor 'cognitive feeling' is an entirely mainstream concept.  A concern that motivates a lot of my work is that it is procrustean to try to explain all mental phenomena in terms of a select few propositional attitudes.  There is little reason to insist that belief and desire must take their traditional place of prominence.  The mind is lush, not sparse.  The ordinary concept of belief is likely what Ned Block calls a "mongrel concept": a concept that imperfectly picks out various dissimilar cognitive sta...