Skip to main content

Is OCD Epistemically Irrational?

Today’s post is by Pablo Hubacher Haerle on his recent paper “Is OCD Epistemically Irrational?” (Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 2023). Pablo Hubacher Haerle is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is on the epistemology and metaphysics of the mind. He is particularly interested in desire, inquiry and the philosophy of psychiatry.

Pablo Hubacher Haerle

On the mainstream picture of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), people experiencing OCD have intrusive thoughts which lead them to form epistemically irrational beliefs. Consider this classic example: 

Amelia is driving in their car. Suddenly, she hears a weird noise which she can’t identify. She forms the belief that she’s run someone over and spends hours looking for the supposed victim.

But it is true that Amelia must have a belief that she’s run someone over? Following recent advances in the literature (Kampa 2020; Taylor 2021), I consider it much more plausible to construe Amelia’s recurrent thoughts as what if questions. This matters for the assessment of rationality, since the rationality conditions for questions are different from those for beliefs. Imagine that you discover an unknown spoor while hiking in the wild. Here, it seems rationally permitted to ask the question whether this means that a bear is near, even though it would be unreasonable to believe that a bear is, in fact, near. Moreover, given how high the stakes are, it might even be mandated to ask that question. 

This doesn’t mean that questions can never be irrational, though. As Jane Friedman (2019) convincingly argues, sometimes reality is so obvious it would be ridiculous to question it. If you’re directly looking at me, it doesn’t make sense for you to ask where I am. But even if you were to think that people like Amelia are irrational because they’re inquiring into questions whose answers are just completely obvious, there are other instances of OCD where the grounds for a charge of epistemic irrationality are much weaker. Consider this case, adapted from a clinical case study (Bhatia and Kaur 2015; Williams and Wetterneck 2019):

For four years, Joseph has had uncontrolled repetitive thoughts about being gay. He is constantly distressed about this. He constantly has doubts about his sexual orientation.

Joseph suffers from the condition of sexual obsessive-compulsive disorder where the object of endless inquiry is not something in the external world, but instead the patient’s own desires. This complicates the assessment of rationality since now we’re not guaranteed an objective viewpoint on how much evidence for this hypothesis Joseph actually has. He might have repressed desires. Moreover it’s unclear we can trust his own testimony because he might be affected by motivated reasoning as a result of homosexuality still being heavily sanctioned in our societies. Thus, it’s not true that Joseph’s inquiry is irrational in virtue of questioning the completely obvious.  

I conclude that so far we don’t know what’s epistemically irrational about this specific kind of OCD. It might be that OCD isn’t irrational after all, or that its irrationality is merely practical, or that there isn’t one form of irrationality common to all cases of OCD. Personally, I believe that what makes OCD epistemically irrational is the fact that it induces unsuccessful inquiries. But whatever conclusion will be reached in this debate, it’s clear that—in line with research by Lisa Bortolotti (2020) and Sahanika Ratnayake (2021)—also in the case of OCD we cannot distinguish between the pathological and the non-pathological by appeal to epistemic irrationality alone.

Popular posts from this blog

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...