Abstract
The principle of charity is most often understood as that which justifies ascribing rationality to every interlocutor, regardless of the agent appears irrational. As such, a recurring question in the field of the philosophy of psychiatry is whether the said principle should be advocated as a way of understanding delusions as rational or should be rejected as a form of over-rationalization. The aim of this paper is to show, by defending an understanding of rationality inspired by the late philosophy of Wittgenstein, that this debate relies mainly on a misconception of the said principle. Indeed, charity does not consist in making the mere hypothesis that every agent is rational, but more simply in acknowledging that rationality is the condition of every form of understanding. As such, the question we should be asking is not so much whether delusions are rational or not, but rather in what sense can speech be judged as irrational within our own norms of rationality.
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Notes
- 1.
To be more precise, Bortolotti also defends that either “rationality is a precondition for the ascription of beliefs” while it is plausible to “find that delusions are not necessarily irrational according to that notion”, or that “delusions are irrational according to a certain notion of rationality, but that, in that respect, typical beliefs are just as irrational as delusions” (Bortolotti 2010, 4). In this sense, a doxastic account acts to support the thesis that delusional speeches are coherent with our norms of rationality if, and only if, these norms are understood as necessary and absolute.
- 2.
The expression of “principle of charity” was originally introduced by N.L. Wilson in his paper Substances and subtrata (Wilson 1959), to which Quine himself refers explicitly (Quine 1969, 2013). However, it was Quine who first introduced the principle to the sphere of the philosophical debate. On this matter see Delpla (2001).
- 3.
This point has most notably been highlighted by Sandra Laugier, who argues that we know what our neighbor means only “because we don’t ask the question, because we stay on board. As soon as we begin to question it, the reference becomes less obvious” (Laugier 1992, 253, our translation). And, in a sense, it may be the case that the only apparent familiarity we perceive in our neighbor’s speech is precisely what disappears in the case of delusional subjects.
- 4.
A potentially more natural candidate might be Donald Davidson who continued the debate opened by Quine and proposed an extended conception of charity. Indeed, as it has been defended by Delpla, “from a limitative and corrective principle, the principle of charity becomes a principle constitutive of any form of intelligibility by which Davidson wishes to refute skepticism regarding other minds” (Delpla 2001, 60). However, by assigning such an extension to the principle of charity, Davidson also renders it useless, as the possibility of irrationality itself becomes unfathomable. On the contrary, if the second philosophy of Wittgenstein is chronologically anterior to Quine’s philosophy, Laugier defended the pertinence of a Wittgensteinian reading of Quine’s anthropology (Laugier 1992).
- 5.
Wittgenstein didn’t name these propositions as coining them this way might lead to misunderstanding. As such, these propositions have been coined sometimes as “framework propositions” (Campbell 2001), and this name was kept in the debate. We adopted the term of “hinge-certainties”, introduced by Moyal-Sharrock (2004), rather than of “framework propositions” for, as she defended, such expression is contrary to the fact that they are non-propositional.
- 6.
The approach of Young is sometimes distinguished from that of Maher as being a “two-factor model” rather than a “one-factor model” (Bortolotti 2010; Bayne and Pacherie 2004). While Maher explains the delusion by the anomalous experience, the two-factor model considers the possibility that experience itself may not entirely explain the delusional belief, and therefore introduces a second factor, such as a cognitive bias. However, to be coherent with the principle of charity (which is our primary focus) this second factor has to stay within the limits of rationality if we are to understand the delusion as a rational response to the experience. As such, the distinction between the “one-factor” and “two-factor” models does not highlight marked differences when it comes to the epistemological problem of charity.
- 7.
We are referring here to “phenomenology” in the broader sense as proposed by Karl Jaspers, for whom “phenomenology only makes known to us the different forms in which all our experiences, all psychic reality, take place; it does not teach us anything about the contents of the personal experience of the individual, nor anything about the extra-conscious” (Jaspers 1912/1968, 1323). This sense is indeed at the heart of Sass’ use of Wittgenstein, as he intends to criticize the idea that “whereas there is disturbance in the content of patients’ world (what they believe and perceive is unrealistic or illogical), the form of those worlds (the overall “structure” or “feel,” the way they believe what they believe) is essentially normal” (Sass 1994, 2). By doing so we do not defend that his understanding of phenomenology can be extended to any other approach claiming itself as phenomenological.
- 8.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, the use made by Sass of Wittgenstein is indeed phenomenological, as he understands Wittgenstein’s analysis of solipsism as “a contextualizing, a phenomenologizing, or even a psychologizing of metaphysics” (Sass 1994, 35). As we will show, this understanding of Wittgenstein can become problematic when the phenomenological aspect of his descriptions is over-emphasized at the expense of the grammatical problems they aim to show.
- 9.
For Sass, the schizophrenic experience can also be understood as a form of solipsism, or rather of “quasi-solipsism” since “the experience is not accompanied by a full and explicit awareness in philosophical terms of the doctrine of solipsism” (Sass 1994, 39).
- 10.
According to Matthew Ratcliffe a convergence between Husserl’s and Jaspers’ account of certainty and Wittgenstein’s “hinge-certainties” can be observed. As such, delusions could be understood as what he calls a “loosening of the hinges” (Ratcliffe 2017); that which was taken for granted and obvious cease to be so. In this sense, delusional speech is thus conceptualized not as being outside the realm of our hinge-certainties, but as lacking such certainties.
- 11.
For a detailed critique of Sass reference to “seeing as” and “secondary meaning” as a way of understanding delusional speech, see Thornton (2004).
- 12.
The degree of generality to which these authors wish to apply their analysis is often unclear. Often, the empiricist analysis restrains themselves to “monothematic delusions” (such as Cotard’s delusion or Capgras’s delusion), without stating clearly whether their analysis could be extended to every nosological entity coined as “delusional” (Young 1999; Bayne and Pacherie 2004). On this matter, Quine’s principle of charity also allows us to make a clear distinction between a conceptual matter (can we understand a speech as irrational?) and an empirical matter (can we consider certain kinds of delusion (Cotard or Capgras) as rational?).
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Frèrejouan, M. (2021). The Myth of Irrationality: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Delusions and to the Principle of Charity. In: Amblard, M., Musiol, M., Rebuschi, M. (eds) (In)coherence of Discourse. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71434-5_7
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