This week's post is by Benedetta Cogo from the University of Wollongong. Her interests lie in mental disorders and rationality and in narrative practices in mental health. Benedetta is the author of “Making Room for Narrative Practices in Mental Health” (published in Topoi), coauthored with Daniel Hutto.
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| Benedetta Cogo |
This post is about rationality, persons, and mental disorders. Intuitively, these three terms seem to be interconnected, yet there is no obvious or innocent way to establish that persons are rational, that mental disorders are irrational, that mental disorders affect persons (and not, say, their brains).
For example, let’s consider this question: are symptoms of mental disorders distorted forms of rationality – coherent and reason-responsive in their own, often very idiosyncratic, way? Or are they entirely unintelligible through the lens of rationality?
I like to think that the answer is “both” – and hopefully, at the end of this post, you’ll see why.
So where do we start? Since we’re talking about rationality, persons, and mentality, philosopher Donald Davidson seems to be a good place to start. In fact, Davidson famously argued that we recognise someone as a person only insofar as we can see the rational pattern that connects their mental attitudes and behaviours. For Davidson, every person is a rational agent, and their beliefs, desires, and actions are intelligible only against a background of rationality.
Suppose Davidson is right. Then we should be able to see a symptom of a mental disorder as rational, in some way.
Ok, but how does this work, in practice? Because on the face of it, one might think that a man claiming that a lizard is growing inside of his chest is utterly irrational. Should we think that this man, who is undergoing a delusional episode, is no longer a person? Perhaps not. In fact, if we take a closer look, we learn that this person has a skin condition that makes his arms and legs look scaly. We also learn that he had a very close encounter with a lizard running across his face, 10 years before. And yes, the idea that there is in fact a lizard growing inside of his chest still seems an implausible explanation, yet it’s hard to deny that there is a degree of coherence, in his thinking.
A Davidsonian would say, this instance of irrationality is happening “in the house of reason”. So this man is not completely irrational, and mindless – but can be seen in this light as imperfectly rational.
Nice, let’s say (for the sake of argument) that we like this view. Then we should try to apply this idea of imperfect rationality also to other cases. For example, imagine we encounter this elderly woman, Mrs T, whose degenerative disease causes her to lose all the beliefs she previously held.
There is no coherence, “no background of rationality” against which to evaluate what Mrs T expresses. So much so that even if she sometimes answers the questions she’s being asked, it would be unprincipled to say that she believes what she says.
Mrs T is not imperfectly rational. Unlike the previous case, she does not hold any coherent pattern of beliefs. She does not hold any beliefs. And whatever she expresses, is not intelligible by means of the categories of rationality we apply. In our Davidsonian eyes, she quite literally “lost her mind”. Should we conclude that Mrs T is no longer a person?
In this case, the Davidsonian position becomes hard to support. This second example invites us to significantly rethink the premises of our argument.
I think that, although this path turned out to be a dead end, it was not unfruitful. Let’s see what we gathered on the way: the same argument that allowed us to see a delusional episode as imperfectly rational, would lead us to conclude that Mrs T is not a person. Why this difference?
Perhaps the mistake is assuming that every mental state is that sort of thing that can be rational or irrational. This is true of beliefs, but some forms of mindedness may exist without following standards of rationality.
Admitting that there can be mental states and attitudes that are a-rational, seems to give us more useful resources to accept that in symptoms of mental disorders (much like in ordinary cases, in all truth) rationality can be truncated, or imperfect, or sometimes altogether absent. And when this is the case, we won’t be required to treat the loss of rationality as the loss of the person.
If we accept this, then we can decide to keep living in the “house of reason” ... only after clearing its premises!