Delusional Evidence-Responsiveness

Synthese 199 (3-4):6299-6330 (2021)
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Abstract

Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the evidenceresponsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I appeal to a large range of empirical evidence to argue that delusions are evidence-responsive in the sense that subjects have the capacity to respond to evidence on their delusion in rationally permissible ways. The extreme evidence-resistance of delusions is a consequence of powerful masking factors on these capacities, such as strange perceptual experiences, motivational factors, and cognitive biases. This view makes room for holding both that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive and that delusions are beliefs, and it has important implications for the study and treatment of delusions.

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Carolina Flores
University of California, Santa Cruz

Citations of this work

Delusion.Lisa Bortolotti - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Radical psychotic doubt and epistemology.Sofia Jeppsson - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology 36 (8):1482-1506.
Spinozan Doxasticism About Delusions.Federico Bongiorno - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):720-752.
The rational dynamics of implicit thought.Brett Karlan - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (4):774-788.

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Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
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