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The phenomenological role of affect in the Capgras delusion

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Abstract

This paper draws on studies of the Capgras delusion in order to illuminate the phenomenological role of affect in interpersonal recognition. People with this delusion maintain that familiars, such as spouses, have been replaced by impostors. It is generally agreed that the delusion involves an anomalous experience, arising due to loss of affect. However, quite what this experience consists of remains unclear. I argue that recent accounts of the Capgras delusion incorporate an impoverished conception of experience, which fails to accommodate the role played by ‘affective relatedness’ in constituting (a) a sense of who a particular person is and (b) a sense of others as people rather than impersonal objects. I draw on the phenomenological concept of horizon to offer an interpretation of the Capgras experience that shows how the content ‘this entity is not my spouse but an impostor’ can be part of the experience, rather than something that is inferred from a strange experience.

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Notes

  1. Heal (1995, p. 45).

  2. Cf. Ratcliffe (2007) for a survey and critical discussion of various ‘theory’ and ‘simulation’ theories of folk psychology, and of hybrid theories that involve aspects of both.

  3. See Gallagher (2001, 2005), and Ratcliffe (2007).

  4. Gallagher (2001, 2005).

  5. Some maintain that simulation is not an explicit exercise that people perform but a ‘sub-personal’ cognitive process. However, Gallagher argues that ‘sub-personal simulation’ is better regarded as part of the perceptual process. Thus the perceptual, affective relatedness that he discusses is not something that is facilitated by an additional simulation routine. Cf. Gallagher (2007). Cf. also Ratcliffe (2007, Chap. 5).

  6. Cole (1998).

  7. Hobson (2002, p. 59).

  8. Schutz (1967, p. 163).

  9. Sartre (1969, Part III).

  10. Ibid., p. 222.

  11. Stanghellini (2004).

  12. Sass (2004, p. 128).

  13. Ellis and Lewis (2001, p. 149).

  14. Stone and Young (1997, p. 333).

  15. Young (2000, p. 49).

  16. Given the Davidsonian view that coherence with other beliefs is a necessary condition for something to be a belief, some have argued that the Capgras delusion is not a belief at all. For a discussion, cf. Campbell (2001).

  17. Ellis and Young (1990).

  18. Stone and Young (1997, p. 345). Cf. also Ratcliffe (2004) for a discussion of “affective familiarity.”

  19. Ellis et al. (1997), Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998, Chap. 8).

  20. Ibid., p. 1091.

  21. Ellis and Lewis (2001). As Bayne and Pacherie (2004, p. 8) remark, “monothematic delusions do not have quite the monothematicity that they are often presented as having.”

  22. Malloy, Cimino and Westlake (1992) distinguish ‘primary’ from ‘secondary’ Capgras delusions. The former occurs in patients with a psychiatric history, often involving paranoid schizophrenia. The latter has an identifiable neurobiological cause and, unlike primary Capgras, does not usually involve paranoia and violence.

  23. Fine et al. (2005, p. 149).

  24. Young and de Pauw (2002, p. 58).

  25. Cutting (1991) also notes that Ellis and Young’s emphasis on face recognition is problematic, given that some patients claim that objects and non-human animals have been replaced.

  26. Ellis et al. (1997, p. 1091).

  27. It has also been claimed that some people have the anomalous experience but do not develop the delusion. This is debatable though. Different brain areas may be involved in the two cases and neurobiological differences could be associated with phenomenological differences (e.g. Davies et al. 2001, p. 145).

  28. Maher (1999).

  29. Stone and Young (1997).

  30. Davies et al. (2001).

  31. Campbell (2001).

  32. Stone and Young (1997, p. 327).

  33. Ellis and Lewis (2001, p. 155).

  34. Davies et al. (2001, p. 140).

  35. Bayne and Pacherie (2004, p. 4).

  36. Elsewhere, I use the term ‘existential feeling’ to refer to experiential predicaments that are both ‘bodily feelings’ and at the same time ‘ways of finding oneself in a world’. I also argue that anomalous feeling in the Capgras delusion falls into this category (Ratcliffe 2005, 2008). However, for current purposes, I employ the more commonplace term ‘affect’.

  37. Campbell (2001).

  38. The account offered by William James (1884, 1890) is frequently cited as an example of the view that ‘emotions’ or ‘affects’ are feelings of bodily changes and that these feelings have an exclusively bodily phenomenology. However, James’s view is consistently misinterpreted. In fact, he claims that feelings of the body are at the same time ways in which the world is experienced. For a discussion, cf. Ratcliffe (2008, Part III).

  39. Cf. Ratcliffe (2005, 2008).

  40. Merleau-Ponty (1962, pp. 313–317). See also Ratcliffe (2008, in press).

  41. Campbell (2001).

  42. Hohwy and Rosenberg (2005, p. 145).

  43. Campbell (2001, p. 96).

  44. Maher (1999, p. 554).

  45. Stone and Young (1997, p. 334).

  46. Ellis and Lewis (2001, p. 149).

  47. Husserl (1989, p. 38) (hereafter cited as Ideas II).

  48. Husserl, Ideas II, p. 42.

  49. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 318).

  50. Merleau-Ponty (1964a, b, p. 15). Cf. Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 42–43.

  51. Husserl adds that all acts of perception presuppose a universal horizon or, as Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 330) says, a “horizon of all horizons”, a general possibility space that is taken-for-granted by all our perceptual achievements. See Ratcliffe (2008, Chap. 4) for a discussion of the universal horizon.

  52. Husserl (2001, p. 41) (hereafter cited as Analyses).

  53. Husserl, Analyses, p. 98.

  54. Husserl, Ideas II, p. 61.

  55. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 326).

  56. Husserl, Analyses, Division 1.

  57. Husserl, Analyses, p. 47.

  58. Husserl, Analyses, p. 51. Complementary claims regarding the structure of perception have been made in the context of psychology by Gibson (1979). More recently, similar accounts of ‘enactive’ perception have been proposed, which draw on mainstream philosophy of mind, psychology and the neurosciences. For example, Alva Noë claims that perception involves a tacit, practical knowledge of how various activities correspond with changes in what is perceived. Shaun Gallagher discusses how a tacit ‘body schema’ or set of non-conceptual bodily capacities sets up a possibility space that is integral to perceptual experience. Like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, he claims that this space is inter-modal in character. Cf. Noë (2004), Gallagher (2005, Chap. 6).

  59. Sartre (1969, p. 10).

  60. Cf., e.g., Sass (2004), Stanghellini (2004), Ratcliffe (2008).

  61. Marguerite Sechehaye (ed.) (1970), pp. 55–56.

  62. Ibid., p. 31.

  63. Stone and Young (1997, p. 337).

  64. Ellis and Young (1990, p. 241).

  65. Merleau-Ponty (1964b, p. 172).

  66. Ratcliffe (2007, Chaps. 5 and 6).

  67. Sechehaye (1970, p. 36).

  68. Ibid., p. 37.

  69. Ibid., p. 38.

  70. Malloy et al. (1992, pp. 92–93).

  71. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 334).

  72. For example, Fine, Cragie and Gold ask, “of all the possible explanations of emotional hyporesponsivity, why is the impostor hypothesis the only bizarre hypothesis at which patients arrive?” (2005, pp. 146–147).

  73. Bortolotti (2005), Ratcliffe (2007, Chap. 7).

  74. I owe this example to Peter Goldie, who mentioned it at a 2006 conference in Bonn.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Matthew Broome, Brady Heiner, Louis Sass and to my wife, Beth, for commenting on an earlier version of this paper.

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Correspondence to Matthew Ratcliffe.

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Ratcliffe, M. The phenomenological role of affect in the Capgras delusion. Cont Philos Rev 41, 195–216 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-008-9078-5

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