Thought Insertion and the Adaptive Role of Delusions

Pablo López-Silva

I am a current PhD student at the University of Manchester Philosophy Department (Mind Group). I’m working on different philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia under the supervision of Dr Joel Smith and Prof Tim Bayne.

I became interested in the philosophical discussions surrounding schizophrenia while I was taking my clinical courses for my psychology professional degree in Chile. While attending some patients, I realized that delusions seemed to have a strong adaptive function. Although this is a matter that needs further argumentation, I think that systematic research on the structure of certain delusions can facilitate better understandings of their role (Roberts, 1992) and, quite importantly, to improve therapeutic intervention (Guidano, 1991). An example of this can be offered by looking at the structure of thought insertion, an abnormal conscious experience commonly regarded as suggestive of schizophrenia (Mullins & Spence, 2003).

Philosophers have become interested in thought insertion for its puzzling character. For instance, this symptom seems to challenge the immunity principle, and the inseparability thesis. In addition, thought insertion is a challenge to common conceptions regarding the relationship between self-awareness and phenomenal consciousness (Billon, 2013). Roughly speaking, patients suffering from thought insertion complain of being aware of thoughts which are not their own intruding into their mind.

The structure of this abnormal experience is quite complex, however the specificity of episodes of thought insertion offers an interesting opportunity to link delusions with their adaptive role in human psychological life. The idea is that patients experience as alien only a certain kind of thought-content, but not all kinds (Gallagher, 2004). The patients’ experiences seem to be quite specific, and most of the time the contents of them are associated with significant others or with certain themes that are affectively important to their biographies. For instance, Saks (2007) describes her own first episode of thought insertion by making reference to contents that seem to be affectively important to her own personal history (self-image, relationship with their parents, etc.).

The relationship between the specificity of the contents of inserted thoughts with the personal history of the patients seems to suggest that, at least this type of delusion would have something I shall call an 'affective adaptiveness role’ i.e. delusions serve the patient's need to deal with affectively intolerable experiences. It seems plausible to think that some degree of affective significance for the patients may be involved in the genesis of thought insertion and that clinicians and philosophers should explore further this matter in order to improve therapeutic intervention.

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph

Imperfect Cognitions

Search This Blog