Pablo Lopez-Silva

El carácter analítico de Meditationes implica que, por una parte, ninguna verdad puede ser interpretada sin referencia al lugar concreto que ocupa en el orden de razones y, por otra, que no existen en Meditationes ficciones que permanezcan advertidamente como tales. Sin embargo, la presencia de algunas pasiones no ha sido justificada, lo que pone en cuestión el carácter analítico de la obra. Proponemos que tales pasiones son efecto de juicios implícitos. Para poner a prueba nuestra hipótesis, hemos elegido un enigmático párrafo que hemos denominado el “texto de la adoración.”

This paper explores one of the most fundamental philosophical worries underlying the occurrence of delusions, namely, the problem about the specific type of mental state that grounds a delusional report or, as I shall call it, ‘the typology problem’. The analysis is developed as follows: (i) After formulating and circumscribing the target problem, (ii) I explore the main tenets and advantages of the doxastic view of delusions, perhaps, the strongest candidate currently available within the typology debate. (iii) After, I clarify and evaluate four of the main counter-arguments against the doxastic view offering a number of counter replies to these attacks. (iv) Finally, I conclude that the anti-doxastic argumentation offers no good reasons to abandon the doxastic model and that this model does not need to appeal to external resources to reply to such counter-arguments. At the same time, I finalize with some of the challenges that remain open within the doxastic view. Keywords: psychosis, delusions, doxastic view of delusions, typology problem.

An attribution of mental agency is defined as the act of assigning the initiation or authorship of a first personal phenomenal thought to a specific agent. This type of attribution is fundamental for the production of the belief that human beings are rational agents not only in behavioral terms, but also, in a cognitive manner. The top-down approach –one of the dominant theories in current literature– suggests that attributions of mental agency arise as retrospective rational explanations for the occurrence of phenomenal thoughts. Thus, the agency of a thought would not be contained in its most fundamental phenomenal structure, rather, it would be an imposed category. After introducing the most fundamental elements of the debate, this paper evaluates the top-down model in order to identify its argumentative strengths and weaknesses. It is concluded that, although this model possesses a number of merits, it cannot deal in a plausible way with some fundamental conceptual challenges.

The following paper presents and discuses the epistemological premises of one of the relativistic expressions of the so-called constructivism i.e. the social constructionism. Firstly, we trace constructivism’s theoretical origins and later, we distinguish the main ideas of Kenneth Gergen’s social constructionist proposal. The analysis is done in the following way: (a) we analyse the epistemological premises and the philosophical problems arising from them, and (b) we analyse the problematic impact these premises have in the praxis of social sciences. Finally, we conclude that the exclusion of clear philosophical distinctions inside social constructionism undermines social constructionism’s plausibility. El siguiente artículo presenta y discute los postulados epistemológicos de una de las expresiones relativistas del denominado constructivismo i.e. el construccionismo social. En primer momento, se rastrean los orígenes teóricos del constructivismo y, posteriormente, se distinguen los principales postulados del construccionismo social de Kenneth Gergen. El análisis se realiza del siguiente modo: (a) Se analizan los supuestos epistemológicos y los problemas filosóficos derivados de éstos, y (b) Se analizan las consecuencias que los postulados construccionistas tienen en la praxis que llevan a cabo las ciencias sociales. Finalmente, se concluye que la exclusión de distinciones filosóficas claras por parte del construccionismo social le resta plausibilidad al enfoque

Despite the diagnostic relevance of thought insertion for disorders such as schizophrenia, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. This paper claims that in paying exclusive attention to the perceptual and cognitive impairments leading to delusional experiences in general, current deficit approaches overlook the role that affective disturbances might play in giving rise to cases of thought insertion. In the context of psychosis, affective impairments are often characterized as a consequence of the stress and anxiety caused by delusional episodes. However, here I explore some of the conceptual and empirical reasons to think that affective problems might in fact play a crucial doxastic role in the aetiology of thought insertion. Finally, I conclude by proposing a way of integrating the main insights of my analysis with the current ‘two-factor’ deficit approach to thought insertion and I explore the potential adaptive role that some delusions might have within this framework.