Philosophy of Mind Seminar (Friday - Week 1, HT25)

Abstract: Delusions are currently defined in both diagnostic manuals and psychiatry textbooks as fixed beliefs that a person comes to hold even though they never had any adequate evidence to support them and stubbornly holds onto in the face of manifest counterevidence. This is a conception of a delusion as a type of static condition or psychological state that naturally persists over time. It is also a conception that is engrained in many leading theoretical paradigms in cognitive neuropsychiatry, which, for many years, has developed primarily content-based explanations of various delusions—explanations that appeal explicitly to the delusion’s content. In this essay, I shall argue for a different approach to understanding delusions and recommend that we move past the popular conception of delusion as psychological state individuated by content. Instead, I shall argue that we have compelling theoretically grounded reasons to adopt a far more dynamic conception of what a delusion is.  This dynamic conception of delusion has several philosophically interesting consequences.