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Transparent Delusion

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Abstract

In this paper, I examine a kind of delusion in which the patients judge that their occurrent thoughts are false and try to abandon them precisely because they are false, but fail to do so. I call this delusion transparent, since it is transparent to the sufferer that their thought is false. In explaining this phenomenon, I defend a particular two-factor theory of delusion that takes the proper integration of relevant reasoning processes as vital for thought-evaluation. On this proposal, which is a refinement of Gerrans’s (2014) account of delusion as unsupervised by decontextualized processing, I can have all my reasoning processes working reliably and thus judge that my delusion is false but, if I cannot use their outputs when revising the thought itself, the delusion will persist. I also sketch how this framework explains some interesting cases of failed belief-revision in the general population in which people judge that ~p but nonetheless continue to believe that p.

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Notes

  1. Parrott (2016, 291–293) allows that there are more than two factors involved in the aetiology of some delusions, but this is tangential to my argument.

  2. This not a complete account of their description of the second-factor but it is its relevant feature.

  3. While Sullivan-Bissett and Noordhof (2019, p. 3) think that to answer whether p is to answer whether it is permissible to believe p, they (2019, n. 11) seem to think that one cannot judge that p while not believing it. Therefore, the existence of transparent delusion spells trouble for their view as well.

  4. The question ‘Why they were left out of this process?’ can only be answered by a future project.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Neil Levy and the two anonimous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments.

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  1. School of Humanities, University of Auckland, 14A Symonds St, Auckland, New Zealand

    Vladimir Krstić

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  1. Vladimir Krstić
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Correspondence to Vladimir Krstić.

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Krstić, V. Transparent Delusion. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 183–201 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00457-6

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