Marga Reimer

In his classic paper, “Delusional thinking and perceptual disorder,” Brendan Maher (1974) argues that psychiatric delusions are hypotheses designed to explain anomalous experiences, and are “developed through the operation of normal cognitive processes.” Consider, for instance, the Capgras delusion. Patients suffering from this particular delusion believe that someone close to them—such as a spouse, a sibling, a parent, or a child—has been replaced by an impostor: by someone who bears a striking resemblance to the “original” and who (for reasons unknown) is intent on passing herself off as that individual. On Maher's view, the “Impostor Hypothesis” is the response of a rational agent to the anomalous experience it is invoked to explain. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that Maher's analysis of delusion doesn't work when applied to the Capgras delusion. In this paper, I defend Maher's analysis against these arguments. However, my aim is not merely to defend Maher's analysis, but also to draw attention to some of the methodological problems that have led to its hasty dismissal

Does Keith Donnellan's referential/attributive distinction have ‘semantic significance’? Howard Wettstein has claimed (in several papers) that it does; Nathan Salmon has responded (in several papers) that it does not. Specifically, while Wettstein has claimed that definite descriptions, used referentially, function semantically as demonstratives, Salmon has responded to Wettstein's claims by defending a unitary Russellian account of such expressions, according to which they invariably function as quantifiers. This paper involves a critique of the debate between Wettstein and Salmon, and offers a tentative resolution of that debate: one that favors Wettstein's ‘ambiguity’ account over the unitary Russellian account defended by Salmon.

In Talk About Beliefs, Mark Crimmins claims that de re belief reports are not nearly as common as they are generally thought to be. In the following paper, I take issue with this claim. I begin with a critique of Crimmins’arguments on behalf of the claim, and then follow with an argument on behalf of the opposing claim: that de re belief reports are indeed quite common. In defending this claim, I make some observations about the nature of tacit reference, a phenomenon central to Crimmins’account of belief reports.

Whether your scepticism is as absolute and sincere as you claim is something we shall learn later on, when we end this little meeting: we’ll then see whether you leave the room through the door or the window; and whether you really doubt that your body has gravity and can be injured by its fall—which is what people in general think on the basis of their fallacious senses and more fallacious experience. What Could Be more dissimilar than a well-argued philosophical thesis and a psychiatric delusion? Compare, for instance, Hume’s (1739) view that the self is nothing more than a “bundle” of perceptions with the psychiatric patient’s view that the thoughts in his head belong to someone else. Or, compare the ..

take leave of one’s senses English, Verb. 1. (idiomatic) To go crazy; to stop behaving rationally A Chief concern in “Only a Philosopher or a Madman” was to draw attention to a number of striking yet underappreciated similarities between paradigm psychiatric delusions and standard philosophical doctrines, “nihilistic” as well as “common sense.” The similarities were presented as illuminating given their potential to inform the debate over whether psychiatric delusions are properly (or usefully) conceptualized as beliefs. The paper’s central argument might be summarized as follows: Paradigm psychiatric delusions appear to differ, in particular ways, from ordinary beliefs. In essence, the ..

Medical professionals, including mental health professionals, largely agree that moral judgment should be kept out of clinical settings. The rationale is simple: moral judgment has the capacity to impair clinical judgment in ways that could harm the patient. However, when the patient is suffering from a "Cluster B" personality disorder, keeping moral judgment out of the clinic might appear impossible, not only in practice but also in theory. For the diagnostic criteria associated with these particular disorders (Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic) are expressed in overtly moral language. I consider three proposals for dealing with this problem. The first is to eliminate the Cluster B disorders from the DSM on the grounds that they are moral, rather than mental, disorders. The second is to replace the morally laden language of the diagnostic criteria with morally neutral language. The third is to disambiguate the notion of moral judgment so as to respect the distinction between having morally disvalued traits and having moral responsibility for those traits. Sensitivity to this distinction enables the clinician, at least in theory, to employ morally laden diagnostic criteria without adopting the sort of morally judgmental (and potentially harmful) attitude that results from the tacit presumption of moral responsibility. I argue against the first two proposals and in favor of the third. In doing so, I appeal to Grice's distinction between conventional and conversational implicature. I close with a few brief remarks on the irony of retaining overtly moral language in an ostensibly medical manual for the diagnosis of mental disorders.

The views of Davidson are being talked about, with increasing frequency, in the philosophy of psychiatry literature. His propositional attitude holism, in particular, has been much discussed in recent philosophical work on psychiatric delusions. The consensus is clear: Davidsonian holism, according to which rationality is constitutive of thought, is undermined by psychiatric delusions. The present chapter is an attempt to cast doubt on this consensus. It is argued that, properly interpreted, Davidsonian holism is quite compatible with the psychiatric phenomena invoked to discredit it. Appreciating this compatibility requires careful attention to the irrationality characteristic of psychiatric delusions.

In a recent paper Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore challenge an assumption that they rightly claim is pervasive among contemporary philosophers of language. According to this assumption (MA), an adequate semantic theory T for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of a sentence S in L if and only if in uttering S a speaker says that p. I claim that the arguments of Cappelen and Lepore are based upon an uncharitable interpretation of MA. If ‘saying’ is understood in a roughly Gricean sense, MA emerges as an eminently plausible assumption.