José Eduardo Porcher

Clinical delusions are widely characterized as being pathological beliefs in both the clinical literature and in common sense. Recently, a philosophical debate has emerged between defenders of the commonsense position (doxasticists) and their opponents, who have the burden of pointing toward alternative characterizations (anti-doxasticists). In this chapter, I argue that both doxasticism and anti- doxasticism fail to characterize the functional role of delusions while at the same time being unable to play a role in the explanation of these phenomena. I also argue that though a more nuanced view of belief in which mental states are more or less belief-like instills a healthy skepticism towards the precision of folk-psychological concepts, such a stance fails to be of use in building a theory of delusion that will be able to bridge different levels of explanation, such as the phenomenology and neurobiology of delusion. Thus, I advocate moving past the question ‘Are delusions beliefs?’ and their description as propositional attitudes toward the description of the processes that generate delusion, with a view toward explaining, rather than explaining away, the personal-level aspects of the phenomenon that have been made inscrutable by investing in doxastic terminology.

The traditional conception of self-deception takes it for an intrapersonal form of interpersonal deception. However, since the same subject is at the same time deceiver and deceived, this means attributing the agent a pair of contradictory beliefs. In the course of defending a deflationary conception of self-deception, Mele [1997] has challenged traditionalists to present convincing evidence that there are cases of self-deception in which what he calls the dual belief-requirement is satisfied. Levy [2009] has responded to this challenge affirming that there is at least one real cases of self-deception that meets this requirement, namely, that of anosognosia. In this family of conditions, the patient apparently believes that there is nothing wrong with her while, at the same time, providing behavioral cues that indicate that the patient is somehow aware of his disease. If Levy is right, then traditionalism about self-deception could be vindicated, after having been widely abandoned due to its need to postulate exotic mental processes in order to make sense of the attribution of contradictory beliefs. In this paper, I assess whether Levy’s response to Mele’s challenge is successful by analyzing his interpretation of the empirical evidence to which he appeals. Finally, I attack the cogency of the underlying commitments about the nature of folk psychology to which one is required to defer in order to draw from conflicting evidence the attribution of contradictory beliefs.

I assess Tamar Gendler's (2007) account of self-deception according to which its characteristic state is not belief, but imaginative pretense. After giving an overview of the literature and presenting the conceptual puzzles engendered by the notion of self-deception, I introduce Gendler's account, which emerges as a rival to practically all extant accounts of self-deception. I object to it by first arguing that her argument for abandoning belief as the characteristic state of self-deception conflates the state of belief and the process of belief-formation when interpreting David Velleman's (2000) thesis that belief is an essentially truth-directed attitude. I then call attention to the fact that Velleman's argument for the identity of motivational role between belief and imagining, on which Gendler's argument for self-deception as pretense depends, conflates two senses of 'motivational role'-a stronger but implausible sense and a weaker but explanatorily irrelevant sense. Finally, I introduce Neil Van Leeuwen's (2009) argument to the effect that belief is the practical ground of all non-belief cognitive attitudes in circumstances wherein the latter prompt action. I apply this framework to Gendler's account to ultimately show that imaginative pretense fails to explain the existence of voluntary actions which result from self-deception.

Although delusion is one of the central concepts of psychopathology, it stills eludes precise conceptualization. In this paper, I present certain basic issues concerning the classification and definition of delusion, as well as its ontological status. By examining these issues, I aim to shed light on the ambiguity of the clinical term ‘delusion’ and its extension, as well as provide clues as to why philosophers are increasingly joining the ranks of psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists in the effort to come to a comprehensive understanding of delusion.

Clinical delusions have traditionally been characterized as beliefs in psychiatry. However, philosophers have recently engaged with the empirical literature and produced a number of objections to the so-called doxastic status of delusion, stemming mainly from the mismatch between the functional role of delusions and that expected of beliefs. In response to this, an appeal to dispositionalism about the nature of belief has been proposed to vindicate the doxastic status of delusion. In this paper, I first present the objections to attributing beliefs to delusional patients and the application of dispositionalism in the attempt to vindicate doxasticism. I then assess this application and some responses to the objections to the doxastic characterization. Finally, I offer some conclusions about the limits of folk-psychological concepts in the characterization and explanation of complex psychological phenomena such as delusions.

The question of how psychiatric classifications are made up and to what they refer has attracted the attention of philosophers in recent years. In this paper, I review the claims of authors who discuss psychiatric classification in terms referring both to the philosophical tradition of natural kinds and to the sociological tradition of social constructionism — especially those of Ian Hacking and his critics. I examine both the ontological and the social aspects of what it means for something to be a mental disorder, and how the ontological status of these disorders hinges on social causation. Finally, I conclude by suggesting a way in which the biological and the social may be reconciled in an integrative model of variation in psychiatric disorder.

In this paper I discuss the scientific respectability of delusion as a psychiatric category. First, I present the essentialist objection to the natural kindhood of psychiatric categories, as well as non-essentialism about natural kinds as a response to that objection. Second, I present a nuanced classification of kinds of kinds. Third, drawing on the claim that the attribution of delusion relies on a folk psychological underpinning, I present the mind-dependence objection to the natural kind status of delusion. Finally, I argue that even if delusion as a generic kind stands little chance of being vindicated as a non-essentialist natural kind, we stand to gain from a natural kind methodology regarding subtypes of delusion for which there is evidence of genuine causal signatures and mechanisms.

In this paper, we take our cue from Kevin Schilbrack’s admonishment that the philosophy of religion needs to take religious practices seriously as an object of investigation. We do so by offering Afro-Brazilian traditions as an example of the methodological poverty of current philosophical engagement with religions that are not text-based, belief-focused, and institutionalized. Anthropologists have studied these primarily orally transmitted traditions for nearly a century. Still, they involve practices, such as offering and sacrifice as well as spirit possession and mediumship, that have yet to receive attention from philosophers. We argue that this is not an accident: philosophers have had a highly restricted diet of examples, have not looked at ethnography as source material, and thus still need to put together a methodology to tackle such practices. After elucidating Schilbrack’s suggestions to adopt an embodiment paradigm and apply conceptual metaphor theory and the extended mind thesis to consider religious practices as thoughtful, we offer criticism of the specifics of his threefold solution. First, it assumes language is linear; second, it takes a problematic view of the body; and third, it abides by a misleading view of the “levels” of cognition. We conclude that the philosophy of religion should adopt enactivism to understand religious practices as cognitive enterprises.

This chapter connects the phenomenon of double bookkeeping to two critical debates in the philosophy of delusion: one from the analytic tradition and one from the phenomenological tradition. First, I will show how the failure of action guidance on the part of some delusions suggests an argument to the standard view that delusions are beliefs (doxasticism about delusion) and how its proponents have countered it by ascribing behavioral inertia to avolition, emotional disturbances, or a failure of the surrounding environment in supporting the agent’s motivation to act. Second, I will show how the mismatch between the experience of double bookkeeping and that of having the usual propositional attitudes of folk psychology suggests another, more recalcitrant argument not only against doxasticism but against the very attempt to fit delusion into folk psychology. Third, I will show how phenomenologically inspired theories of delusion, such as the multiple realities hypothesis, bypass the debates above and focus on describing and understanding the disturbances in the structure of experience undergone by patients. I conclude that the philosophical discussions ensuing from an appreciation of double bookkeeping show some of the limitations of the analytic philosophical approach to delusion.

In this paper, we discuss an abductive argument for the existence of God from the experience of awe at natural beauty. If God's creative work is a viable explanation for why we experience awe at natural beauty, and there is no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origins of such experiences, then we have defeasible evidence that God exists. To evaluate the argument's tenability, we assess the merits of the two main theocentric frameworks that can be marshaled to answer the question of why human beings experience awe at natural beauty: (1) taking the experience of natural beauty as resulting from God's design intentions and (2) conceiving experiences of natural beauty as religious experiences in themselves. We argue that the presence of phenomenological content the fine-grainedness of which exceeds our descriptive and conceptual capacities is better accounted for by the latter hypothesis: experiencing natural beauty amounts to experiencing divine attributes. We conclude that the argument's theological premise is tenable and, having previously argued for the empirical premise (Porcher & De Luca-Noronha, 2021), we conclude that awe at natural beauty is best explained by the existence of God.

Self-deception poses serious difficulties for belief attribution because the behavior of the self-deceived is deeply conflicted: some of it supports the attribution of a certain belief, while some of it supports the contrary attribution. Theorists have resorted either to attributing both beliefs to the self-deceived, or to postulating an unconscious belief coupled with another kind of cognitive attitude. On the other hand, deflationary accounts of self- deception have attempted a more parsimonious solution: attributing only one, false belief to the subject. My aim in this paper is to critically examine this strategy and, subsequently, to suggest that its failure gives support to the neglected view that the self-deceived are not accurately describable as believing either of the relevant propositions.

In this paper, we present an abductive argument for the existence of God from the experience of awe at natural beauty. If God’s creative work is a viable explanation for why we experience awe at natural beauty, and there is no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origins of such experiences, then we have defeasible evidence that God exists. To evaluate the argument's tenability, we assess the merits of the two main naturalistic frameworks that can be marshaled to answer the question of why human beings experience awe at natural beauty, Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, and Keltner and Haidt's prototype approach to awe. We show shortcomings of both accounts in explaining the relevant experiences and argue that the reliance of these accounts on an adaptationist reading of our aesthetic appreciation of nature entails a commitment to questionable hidden premises: that affordances themselves can figure in the subject's perceptual experience, and that experiences of awe have adaptive value. We maintain that the argument's “empirical” premise is tenable and conclude with directions for future research regarding the argument's “theological” premise.

Clinical delusions are commonly thought of and characterized as beliefs, both by psychiatrists and by the general population. That fact is encoded in the definition of delusion in the Glossary of Technical Terms of the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders :A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.Although almost every aspect of this definition is debatable, describing delusion as a type of aberrant belief has engendered a specialized discussion in itself, engaging philosophers...

My aim in this paper is to consider the question ‘Why is belief in God not a delusion?’. In the first half of the paper, I distinguish two kinds of religious belief: institutional and personal religious belief. I then review how cognitive science accounts for cultural processes in the acquisition and transmission of institutional religious beliefs. In the second half of the paper, I present the clinical definition of delusion and underline the fact that it exempts cultural beliefs from clinical diagnosis. Finally, I review cognitive models of the intuitive attribution of mental disorders and how they support cultural exemption. Through the comparison of the models of cultural acquisition of religious beliefs and of cultural exemption in the attribution of delusion I intend to make it clear that we can provide an answer to our motivating question: even though some institutional religious beliefs may seem as strange as the most florid delusions, humans can readily recognize that they are not the product of mental dysfunction due to the fact that their acquisition and transmission is embedded within a cultural context.

The doxastic status of delusion is inconclusive. The arguments presented for and against it are not strong enough to clinch the issue and convince everyone of a single, general characterization. But that does not mean that we have not gained any clarity from discussing it. In the few decades since the issue became contentious, philosophers have made great strides, not only in accounting for the nature of delusion as a cognitive attitude, but also in developing theories of what kind of cognitive attitude best exemplifies the functional role delusions play in one’s cognitive economy.As is often the case within philosophical debates, it takes a long time and a major collective effort for us to start to get clear on...

In this paper, I draw on phenomenological analyses of religious voice-hearing and related experiences to elucidate the role of phenomenology in discerning benign from pathological religious experience. First, I present phenomenological discontinuities between cases of benign and pathological voice-hearing by drawing on a study of first-person accounts of voice-hearers within the Pentecostal movement which evinces that voice-hearing is not inherently pathological. Second, I introduce the epidemiological continuity of psychotic-like phenomena by drawing on a study of the contextual and responsive differences between clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers which point to the contexts wherein voice-hearing does not lead to pathology. Third, I present a successful case where the meaning of the anomalous experiences is validated and normalized by drawing on studies of mediumistic experience which illuminate its therapeutic benefits. Finally, I argue that failing to take the voice-hearer’s lived experience into account in the diagnostic moment can result in the pathologization of benign experiences.

In this article, I explore the mythic narratives of the Yoruba-derived tradition of Candomblé Nagô to discern the attributes of its Supreme Being. I introduce Candomblé, offering an overview of its central beliefs and practices, and then present theological perspectives on the Supreme Being in African Traditional Religion as a basis for comparison with the myths I will examine. I consider the primary creation myths of Candomblé, emphasizing references to the tradition's Supreme Being and, analysing these myths, I argue that Candomblé's Supreme Being, as depicted in these narratives, amounts to a limited god. This portrayal accounts for the absence of a problem of evil within the tradition. It suggests the moral ambivalence of Candomblé's Supreme Being and other high deities, as well as the world itself. This exploration sheds light on a lesser-explored tradition and its unique approach to philosophical dilemmas, distinct from the predominantly theistic framework of most philosophy of religion, and evinces that philosophizing through immersion in myths should involve appreciating the complexities and richness inherent in these forms of life, free from the imposition of external assumptions or biases.

In The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs, Hans Van Eyghen challenges Western philosophy's ethnocentrism by examining the justification of beliefs in spirits, exploring neglected religious phenomena like mediumship, possession, and animistic experiences, drawing from various traditions worldwide, including a significant emphasis on Afro-Atlantic religions. The book employs phenomenal conservatism, arguing for prima facie justification of spirit beliefs based on experiences. It addresses metaphysical arguments, examining the connection between God's existence and spirits, as well as attributing unusual events to spirit activity. The author defends these views against counterarguments, offering a nuanced response. Van Eyghen's approach, expanding the discourse while avoiding pitfalls of traditional philosophy of religion, is to be commended. It lays the groundwork for future research programs in the epistemology of religion, providing a clear, well-argued, and accessible contribution to the field.

In The Gut, published in the series Cambridge Elements in Magic, Elizabeth Pérez offers an in-depth exploration of the belly's significance in Afro-Diasporic religions, particularly Cuban Lucumí, Brazilian Candomblé, and Haitian Vodou. The book delves into the cognitive role of the gut in recognizing Black Atlantic knowledge and is organized into eight sections, covering gut feelings, beings within the belly, African precedents, and the offering of guts to deities. Through participant observation and archival research, Pérez connects literal gutting in kitchen spaces to the figurative spilling of guts, challenging the dominance of the head in religious contexts. The Gut also explores the rich pharmacopoeia of Afro-Diasporic healers, addressing ethnosymptomatology and the intricate relationship between somatic signatures, religious cognition, and connections with deities. By highlighting non-Euro-American models along the gut-brain axis, Pérez's work serves as a refreshing counterpoint to the narrowness often found in traditional philosophy of religion.