Abstract
A recent debate in the literature on delusions centers on the question of whether delusions are beliefs or not. In this paper, an overlooked distinction between egocentric and encyclopedic doxastic states is introduced and brought to bear on this debate, in particular with regard to delusions of misidentification. The result is that a more accurate characterization of the delusional subject’s doxastic point of view is made available. The patient has a genuine egocentric belief (“This man is not my father”), but fails to have the commonly attributed encyclopedic belief (“My father has been replaced by an impostor”).
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Notes
I use “often described” because we shall see that that ascription is not altogether optimal.
De Pauw and Szulecka (1988) tell of a young man who decapitated his stepfather, taking him to be a robot, in order to look for batteries and microfilm inside his head.
Indeed this feature of Capgras, has prompted a so-called “two-factor” treatment that appeals to a reasoning bias in addition to the anomalous experience (Davies et al. (2001))
Such revisionism is motivated because the term in question picks out either a natural kind or an entity of fundamental theoretical importance. I think there are especially good reasons for thinking the latter with regards to belief. If belief is thought of as the fundamental informational state, the “taking of the world to be a certain way”, then many cases where we ascribe beliefs to people on the basis of their claims may be cases where they don’t really take the world to be the way their utterances suggest. One example, although there are others, involves claims (e.g. some religious claims) that are partially understood by those who utter them. We therefore might say that some Christians “believe” that “God is three and is also one”. But in what sense do they really take the world to be such that this is the case? Such questions are, however, beyond the scope of this paper.
Some convincing reasons for denying such a relaxed view come, for example, from the recent debate about the “aim of belief” (cf. Wedgwood 2002). If belief constitutively aims at something like truth or knowledge, then ignoring evidence may well preclude genuine believing.
This need not be the implanting of a discrete sentence-like entity, but, for example, the “implanting” (or, better, instilling) of a particular disposition to act.
I can be hesitant, but here I unambiguously manifest the belief that the bridge might break. Whether epistemic modals are built into the content or the attitude is a contentious issue that I won’t get into here. For a neat and plausible treatment of epistemic modals within the possible worlds framework that I favor, see Yalcin (2011).
Egan (2008) recently takes a similar approach, claiming that the delusional patient is in an in-between state of bimagining. An anti-doxasticism of a different flavour is put forward by Sass (1994), where the delusion isn’t genuinely believed, but it isn’t mistaken for belief either. Rather, what we have is the subject engaging in what Sass calls “a solipsistic mode of experience”, which leads to “double bookkeeping”. In other words, the subject doesn’t locate himself in one possible world, but switches readily from one to the other, from the real to delusional realities. I put this to one side because it applies more clearly to schizophrenics than brain-damaged patients. Some of what I say in the conclusion does, however, suggest parallels with Sass’s view.
Although some beliefs cannot be based on perception due to the nature of the properties involved: my belief that Paris is the capital of France cannot be directly based on perception because you cannot perceive “Capitalhood”.
Aren’t egocentric judgements simply indexical beliefs? Depending on what one means by “concept”, there may be nothing incoherent in the notion of a concept, or conceptually mediated information, that is not encyclopaedic (indexical or perceptual concepts, or information conveyed in terms of such concepts, would be a case in point). On this view, the failure of detachability is not due to a failure of conceptualisation altogether, but rather due to not having conceptualised in a way that enables the information to be used in a context-independent way. When, during the perceptual experience, I think to myself “Those are some green eyes!” this is arguably conceptual information, but the content is egocentric insofar as its truth-conditions can only be latched onto in that perceptual context. But I think that there may also be a sense in which there can be egocentric belief, namely, the taking of the world to be a certain way, which need not rely on full-blown conceptual capacities. This is why egocentric judgements are not simply indexical beliefs, although I want to allow that the latter may be a sophisticated subset of the former. One might say that indexical beliefs involve indexical concepts, and as a result they involve conceptual content that can be merely entertained, and subsequently endorsed. With more basic egocentric judgements there may not be this separation between content and attitude: the content can be directly committal (behavior-driving) as when I dodge a lamppost.
To see more of this ambiguity, consider the fact that we can felicitously say of two people that they “share the belief that p”, “have the same belief”, “believe the same thing” etc.
Notice that I can informatively communicate that fact to someone else, for example, a competent English speaker who understands to whom I am referring (perhaps he knows Alexa but hasn’t noticed the color of her eyes).
Even if your conception of them is simply, “that person, whom I do know from somewhere, but I’m not sure where”, it can still be said that you know “who they are” in some sense, and you will in principle be able to have information about them whose provenance is unknown (many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out).
See also Scholl 2007 for a nice review of the ties between philosophical and psychological aspects of object tracking.
A crucial feature of mental files for issues of reference, although this isn’t strictly relevant here, is that the file can have largely incorrect information about the individual but still achieve reference to that individual, since it is the acquaintance relation that caused the opening of the file that fixes the referent, and not the information in the file.
This is deeply reminiscent of something Pylyshyn (2007) writes: “If perceptual representations are to be grounded in the physical world then a causal link is essential at some stage in the process. The usual link that has been assumed is a semantic one—the objects that fit a particular description are the ones picked out and referred to. While this may be generally true this cannot be the whole story since it would be circular. The symbolic description must bottom out—must be grounded in objects or properties in the perceptual world. Recent evidence has suggested that the grounding is done in objects rather than properties”.
Contrast this with delusions that arise from thought disorder (e.g. in schizophrenia) where the content need have nothing to do with something perceived or even perceivable, e.g. “I am the left foot of God” (a claim made by mathematician John Nash, see, Nasar 1994).
This is made nicely explicit in Lucchelli and Spinnler (2007, p.189). When Fred denies that Wilma is his wife, he cites that he “knew [her] very well as his sons’ mother.” Obviously, “mother of my sons” is not a perceivable property, but it is in the “Wilma file”, which is failing to be correctly retrieved.
Another potential difference is that, unlike the Capgras patient, I may have not necessarily “ruled out” that this person is Alexa. I just haven’t “ruled it in”.
Stronger constitutive norms, such as sensitivity to truth or evidence (see fn.5), may rule out a doxastic reading even in this egocentric case.
In fact transcripts indicate that there is lots of use of demonstrative reference to the perceived impostor: “That man is not my father”.
Here is Egan 2008 (I quote this in full because it is a wonderfully clear and explicit expression of the implicit orthodoxy in this debate): “In what follows, I’ll be concerned with characterizing (very partially) the attitude that delusional subjects bear to the contents of their delusions. I’m going to assume that the right way to go about this is to characterize the roles that particular, token mental representations play in the subject’s cognitive economy. So I’ll be assuming that some sort of minimal representational theory of mind is correct—that there is a medium of mental representation, and there are discrete representational items in the head. These representational items are operated on in various ways, and accessed by various systems, in order to regulate both our behavior and the maintenance of other representational items. Believing, desiring, imagining, and the bearing of propositional attitudes in general is a matter of having a representational item with the right kind of content, which plays the right kind of role in one’s cognitive economy.” (p. 262)
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Wilkinson, S. Egocentric and Encyclopedic Doxastic States in Delusions of Misidentification. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 219–234 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0125-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0125-0