•  2
    Derationalizing Delusions
    with Vaughan Bell and Nichola Raihani
    Clinical Psychological Science : A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science 9 (1): 24-37. 2021.
  •  16
    Counterfactual cognition and psychosis: adding complexity to predictive processing accounts
    with Sofiia Rappe
    Philosophical Psychology 36 (2): 356-379. 2023.
    Over the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the “atypical” brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the “typical” brain does not generate, either due to a systematic top-down processing bias or more general precision weighting breakdown. Strong at explaining common…Read more
  •  21
    Metaphorical Thinking and Delusions in Psychosis
    In Maxime Amblard, Michel Musiol & Manuel Rebuschi (eds.), (In)Coherence of Discourse: Formal and Conceptual Issues of Language, Springer Verlag. pp. 119-130. 2021.
    This paper explores how metaphorical thinking might contribute to an aetiology of florid delusions in psychosis. We argue that this approach helps to account for the path from experience to the delusional assertion, which, though relatively straightforward for monothematic delusions like the Capgras delusion, has always been difficult to account for in florid delusions in psychosis. Our account also helps to account for double book-keeping and the relative agential inertia of the belief.
  • The Agentive Role of Inner Speech in Self-Knowledge
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy (2): 7-26. 2020.
    Although interpretivists are right to give inner speech a central role in generating self-knowledge, they mischaracterize the precise nature of this role. Inner speech is fundamentally an action, a form of speech, and provides us with self-knowledge not by being something that we perceive (or “quasi-perceive”) and interpret, but by being something that we knowingly do. Once this is appreciated, interpretivism is undermined.
  •  426
    The phenomenology of voice-hearing and two concepts of voice
    with Joel Krueger
    In Angela Woods, B. Alderson-Day & C. Fernyhough (eds.), Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Perspective. pp. 127-133. 2022.
    The experiences described in the VIP transcripts are incredibly varied and yet frequently explicitly labelled by participants as "voices." How can we make sense of this? If we reflect carefully on uses of the word "voice", we see that it can express at least two entirely different concepts, which pick out categorically different phenomena. One concept picks out a speech sound (e.g. "This synthesizer has a "voice" setting"). Another concept picks out a specific agent (e.g. "I hear two voices: one…Read more
  •  66
    Expressivism about delusion attribution
    European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 16 (2): 59-77. 2020.
    In this paper, I will present and advocate a view about what we are doing when we attribute delusion, namely, say that someone is delusional. It is an “expressivist” view, roughly analogous to expressivism in meta-ethics. Just as meta-ethical expressivism accounts for certain key features of moral discourse, so does this expressivism account for certain key features of delusion attribution. And just as meta-ethical expressivism undermines factualism about moral properties, so does this expressiv…Read more
  •  41
    Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis: An Introduction
    with Ben Alderson-Day
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (3): 529-540. 2016.
    In this introduction we present the orthodox account of auditory verbal hallucinations, a number of worries for this account, and some potential responses open to its proponents. With some problems still remaining, we then introduce the problems presented by the phenomenon of thought insertion, in particular the question of how different it is supposed to be from AVHs. We then mention two ways in which theorists have adopted different approaches to voices and thoughts in psychosis, and then pres…Read more
  •  36
    The Representation of Agents in Auditory Verbal Hallucinations
    with Vaughan Bell
    Mind and Language 31 (1): 104-126. 2016.
    Current models of auditory verbal hallucinations tend to focus on the mechanisms underlying their occurrence, but often fail to address the content of the auditory experience. In other words, they tend to ask why there are AVHs at all, instead of asking why, given that there are AVHs, they have the properties that they have. One such property, which has been largely overlooked and which we will focus on here, is why the voices are often experienced as coming from agents, and often specific, indi…Read more
  •  30
    A common and popular option in defending Physicalism against the Knowledge Argument is the “phenomenal concept strategy” . PCS claims that, although ex hypothesi Mary knows all the propositions pertaining to color and experiences of color, there is at least space for the claim that she acquires a new concept, and thereby accesses these propositions under different, phenomenal modes of presentation. In short, Mary acquires new concepts upon her release and that explains her “discovery.” Here I wi…Read more
  •  119
    The status of delusion in the Light of Marcu's "Revisionary proposals"
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 28 (3): 421-436. 2013.
    La concepción de Marcus sobre las creencias se aplica al debate centrado en la cuestión: "¿Son creencias los delirios?" Dos consecuencias que se siguen de ello son: i) que la cuestión "¿Son creencias los delirios?" necesita reformularse, y ii) que la respuesta es: "No, algunos pacientes que sufren delirios no creen lo que, "prima facie", parecen creer"
  •  21
    Distinguishing volumetric content from perceptual presence within a predictive processing framework
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (4): 791-800. 2020.
    I argue for an overlooked distinction between perceptual presence and volumetric content, and flesh it out in terms of predictive processing. Within the predictive processing framework we can distinguish between agent-active and object-active expectations. The former expectations account for perceptual presence, while the latter account for volumetric content. I then support this position with reference to how experiences of presence are created by virtual reality technologies, and end by reflec…Read more
  •  31
    Hearing Soundless Voices
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 26 (3): 27-34. 2019.
    The phenomenon of 'hearing voices,' often viewed as a symptom of schizophrenia, is commonly called, in the scientific and clinical literature, 'auditory-verbal hallucination.' However, reports of hearing soundless voices, voices that are not auditory, which go as far back as Tuttle and Kraepelin and appear in phenomenological interviews and questionnaires are relatively common. What are we to make of such reports?One option is to dismiss these claims: one cannot hear soundless voices. This dismi…Read more
  •  62
    Delusions, dreams, and the nature of identification
    Philosophical Psychology 28 (2): 203-226. 2015.
    Delusional misidentification is commonly understood as the product of an inference on the basis of evidence present in the subject's experience. For example, in the Capgras delusion, the patient sees someone who looks like a loved one, but who feels unfamiliar, so they infer that they must not be the loved one. I question this by presenting a distinction between “recognition” and “identification.” Identification does not always require recognition for its epistemic justification, nor does it nee…Read more
  •  68
    Egocentric and Encyclopedic Doxastic States in Delusions of Misidentification
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2): 219-234. 2013.
    A recent debate in the literature on delusions centers on the question of whether delusions are beliefs or not. In this paper, an overlooked distinction between egocentric and encyclopedic doxastic states is introduced and brought to bear on this debate, in particular with regard to delusions of misidentification. The result is that a more accurate characterization of the delusional subject’s doxastic point of view is made available. The patient has a genuine egocentric belief (“This man is not …Read more
  •  10
    The original version of this article unfortunately has missing statement in the Acknowledgments section.
  •  21
    Are there auditory objects in the auditory domain, like visual objects in the visual domain?
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 16 (1): 9-11. 2010.
    : One can understand the word “object” as a concrete physical object or as that which is on the receiving end of a subject-object relation, namely, that entity which a particular cognitive state or process is “of.” These latter objects are determined by the way our sensory systems exploit the ways elements of the world impinge upon our bodily surfaces. Our visual system exploits light reflected off the surfaces of objects; therefore, the objects of our visual experiences can be physical objects …Read more
  •  17
    Beyond believing badly
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (3): 105-119. 2013.
  •  99
    Two challenges that face popular self-monitoring theories (SMTs) of auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) are that they cannot account for the auditory phenomenology of AVHs and that they cannot account for their variety. In this paper I show that both challenges can be met by adopting a predictive processing framework (PPF), and by viewing AVHs as arising from abnormalities in predictive processing. I show how, within the PPF, both the auditory phenomenology of AVHs, and three subtypes of AVH, ca…Read more
  •  38
    A Mental Files Approach to Delusional Misidentification
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2): 389-404. 2016.
    I suggest that we can think of delusional misidentification in terms of systematic errors in the management of mental files. I begin by sketching the orthodox “bottom-up” aetiology of delusional misidentification. I suggest that the orthodox aetiology can be given a descriptivist or a singularist interpretation. I present three cases that a descriptivist interpretation needs to account for. I then introduce a singularist approach, one that is based on mental files, and show how it opens the way …Read more
  •  13
    A commentary on: Affective coding: the emotional dimension of agency
    with David Smailes and Peter Moseley
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9. 2015.
  •  18
    Thought Insertion Clarified
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (11-12): 246-269. 2015.
    'Thought insertion' in schizophrenia involves somehow experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's. Some philosophers try to make sense of this by distinguishing between ownership and agency: one still experiences oneself as the owner of an inserted thought but attributes it to another agency. In this paper, we propose that thought insertion involves experiencing thought contents as alien, rather than episodes of thinking. To make our case, we compare thought insertion to certain experience…Read more