Delusion, Proper Function, and Justification
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Delusion, Proper Function, and Justification Parker Crutchfield
Received: 1 August 2019 / Accepted: 21 January 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Among psychiatric conditions, delusions have received significant attention in the philosophical literature. This is partly due to the fact that many delusions are bizarre, and their contents interesting in and of themselves. But the disproportionate attention is also due to the notion that by studying what happens when perception, cognition, and belief go wrong, we can better understand what happens when these go right. In this paper, I attend to delusions for the second reason—by evaluating the epistemology of delusions, we can better understand the epistemology of ordinary belief. More specifically, given recent advancements in our understanding of how delusions are formed, the epistemology of delusions motivates a proper functionalist account of the justification of belief. Proper functionalist accounts of the justification of belief hold that whether a belief is justified is partly determined by whether the system that produces the belief is functioning properly. Whatever pathology is responsible for delusion formation, restoring it to its proper function resolves the epistemic condition, an effect which motivates proper functionalism.
Keywords Delusion . Justification . Proper function . Rationality . Predictive coding
P. Crutchfield (*) Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law, Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, Kalamazoo,
Introduction Among psychiatric conditions, delusions have received significant attention in the philosophical literature. This is partly due to the fact that many delusions are bizarre, and their contents interesting in and of themselves. But the disproportionate attention is also due to the notion that by studying what happens when perception, cognition, and belief go wrong, we can better understand what happens when these go right. In this paper, I attend to delusions for the second reason—by evaluating the epistemology of delusions, we can better understand the epistemology of ordinary belief. Given recent advancements in our understanding of how delusions are formed, the epistemology of delusions motivates a proper functionalist account of the justification of belief. Proper functionalist accounts of the justification of belief hold that whether a belief is justified is partly determined by whether the system that produces the belief is functioning properly. There are several candidate accounts of how delusions are formed. I argue that they all motivate proper functionalism. Further, any account of delusion formation according to which delusions are epistemically inappropriate beliefs that result from dysfunctional neurobiology or cognition motivates proper functionalism.
MI 49008, USA e-mail: [email protected]
P. Crutchfield
The structure of this argument is roughly that proper function figures into the epistemic properties of delusional beliefs; since what we say a
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