Today’s post is contributed by Víctor Verdejo. He is a philosopher of language and mind who has recently published the article “ On the rationality of thought-insertion judgments ”, now featuring in a special collection on delusions in Philosophical Psychology . Víctor Verdejo is currently a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and a member of Logos Research Group. Víctor Verdejo We often think of delusional experience as not particularly revealing with respect to a subject’s rationality. In this paper, I explore a different—some might say daring—approach: what if delusional experience were to illuminate the rational grounds associated with our judgments and concepts? In this work, I focus on the experience of thought-insertion and the first-person concept. Consider what I term the “rationality hypothesis”: this hypothesis holds that when subjects with schizophrenia report thought insertion, they may be expressing fully rational judgments about the ownership ...
Today's post is by Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (University of Marburg) and Christiana Werner (University of Duisburg-Essen) about their recently edited book, Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge 2024). Recent approaches in philosophy of mind and epistemology have shown a growing interest in examining the nature of phenomenal knowledge and the epistemic value of having an experience. The basic idea in these debates has been that having an experience has a unique character and provides the experiencer with a kind of knowledge which otherwise cannot be achieved. As expressed by an ancient proverb: “Experience is the best teacher.” That there is a specific type of knowledge we can only gain by means of experience is a claim defended in the debate about the mind–body problem and consciousness (e.g., Nagel 1974; Jackson 1982), and in the debate on the so-called “knowledge argument” in particular. Christiana Werner Simultaneously, the philosophy of imagination...