Imperfect Cognitions

Colin Klein We are philosophers working on various topics that intersect with delusions. Colin Klein works on the philosophy of neuroscience and the application of interventionist accounts of causation to this area, and has also discussed the relation between psychopathologies like somatoparaphenia and his theory of pain . Stephen Gadsby works on distorted body representations and false body size beliefs in anorexia nervosa . And Peter Clutton has defended the doxastic status of delusions—offering a cognitive phenomenological account of delusions (forthcoming)—and explored the status of delusions on the harmful dysfunction account . Peter Clutton Any discussion of delusions needs some criteria by which patients are grouped together as having the same delusion. In our paper, ‘ Taxonomising Delusions: content or aetiology? ’, we compare content-based and aetiological taxonomies of delusions, arguing in favour of the latter. Stephen Gadsby Most authors ta...

Rachel Gunn Some postulate that for certain kinds of delusions sensory input is distorted such that the evidence available to the subject is altered and this evidence is therefore powerful enough to resist counter arguments. In this case the subject employs normal cognitive processes to explain perceptual anomalies and this results in delusion ( Maher 1974 ). If the experience of a subject provides or includes the evidence for a delusion and the experience is anomalous (outside ‘normal’ experience) then a third party cannot hope to grasp the subject’s explanation. Further, as Maher says, there is no point of intervention in any ordinary sense to dispute the subject’s delusion. If this theory holds water it is likely to only apply to a subset of delusional subjects.