This is the second in a series of two posts by Phil Corlett (pictured above) and Sarah Fineberg (pictured below). Phil and Sarah are both based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. In a post published last week, and this post they discuss the adaptive value of delusional beliefs via their predictive coding model of the mind, and the potential delusions have for epistemic innocence (see their recent paper ' The Doxastic Shear Pin: Delusions as Errors of Learning and Memory ', in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry) . Phil presented a version of the arguments below at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 2015, as part of a session on delusions sponsored by project PERFECT. Our analysis depends on two distinct systems for instrumental learning, one goal-directed, the other habitual (Daw et al., 2005 ). The goal-directed system involves learning flexible relationships between actions and outcomes instantiated in the more...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health