Abstract
In this paper I claim that concepts taken from Wittgenstein's philosophy can shed light on the phenomenon of schizophrenia in at least three different ways: with a view to empathy, scientific explanation, or philosophical clarification. I consider two different “positive” wittgensteinian accounts—Campbell’s idea that delusions involve a mechanism of which different framework propositions are parts, Sass’ proposal that the schizophrenic patient can be described as a solipsist-, and a “negative” wittgensteinian account, namely Rhodes’ and Gipp’s, where epistemic aspects of schizophrenia are explained as failures in the ordinary background of certainties. I argue that none of them amounts to empathic-phenomenological understanding, but they provide examples of how philosophical concepts can contribute to scientific explanation, and to philosophical clarification respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Eilan (2000).
- 2.
Naomi Eilan also remarked that “it is not easy to get right the kind of understanding that might be brought to bear on such phenomena while at the same time doing justice to Jaspers’ warranted sense of the deep and baffling otherness of the schizophrenic’s sense of the self and the world (2000, 97)”. Her conclusion in the paper is negative—she explains the impossibility of understanding as an impossibility of emotional empathy.
- 3.
See the paper by Anna Boncompagni included in the present volume (Chap. 14).
- 4.
See Henriksen (2013, 107).
- 5.
E.g. a philosophical clarification of knowledge of language, as contained in Wittgenstein (1953), is neither a scientific explanation, nor a phenomenological account.
- 6.
Wittgenstein writes that some propositions are immune to doubts because they “are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (1969, § 341).
- 7.
On this point see Moyal-Sharrock (2003).
- 8.
As Gerrans (2013) remarks, opting for a how-actually model.
- 9.
See also Sass (1994, 6).
- 10.
I acknowledge that the empathic approach and philosophical clarification are difficult to separate in Sass’s analysis. I think, however, that there is a crucial distinction: with a philosophical analysis (such as Sass’s) one can illustrate why empathy is not possible (or possible only to a certain extent), and I think that this is what Sass succeeds in doing. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
- 11.
It might be objected that in a philosophical clarification such as Sass’ endeavour on Schreber, the explanandum is the first-person point of view, just as in empathic understanding. However, the explanans is in terms of concepts and values, rather than in terms of structures of experience. It is an epistemic, rather than experiential, point of view that is explained. This is, to me, the sense of the difference between empathic-phenomenological understanding and this other possible kind of philosophical approach to psychopathology. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
- 12.
Another negative wittgensteinian account of schizophrenia as involving a distorted relationship with common sense is Giovanni Stanghellini’s (2008); Stanghellini moves from this suggestion to a (non-wittgensteinian) empathic-phenomenological understanding that views schizophrenia as a disturbance of embodiment.
- 13.
I quote here a dialogue they have as an example (Rhodes and Gipps 2008, 297): “Researcher: What would you say to someone who said that that could be the product of your mind? That your mind made it up and the mind is a powerful thing, that it was hallucination? James: I’d say no. Researcher: How would you know though? James: Because they took me down there. Both of them were on my arm. I actually walked through a brick wall”.
- 14.
Rhodes and Gipps employ John Searle’s notion together with Wittgenstein’s.
- 15.
Also in Moyal-Sharrock (2003).
- 16.
See e.g. Stanghellini (2008).
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Lalumera, E. (2018). Understanding Schizophrenia Through Wittgenstein: Empathy, Explanation, and Philosophical Clarification. In: Hipólito, I., Gonçalves, J., Pereira, J. (eds) Schizophrenia and Common Sense. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73993-9_15
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