| old_uid | 9917 |
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| title | Delusions, dreams and the nature of identification |
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| start_date | 2011/05/06 |
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| schedule | 14h30-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Over twenty years ago, Ellis and Young (1990) proposed a model for understanding Capgras delusion, which was so well received that it still constitutes orthodoxy (followers include, among others, Stone and Young 1997, Davies et al. 2001, and, to a lesser extent, Bayne and Pacherie 2004). They claim that Capgras patients exhibit “overt” but not “covert” recognition of misidentified loved ones. In other words, the patient sees someone who looks like a loved one, but who fails to feel like a loved one, so they infer on the basis of this evidence that they must not be that loved one.
Here I argue that we would do well to properly understand the notion of identification, above all, how radically distinct in kind and potentially independent in functioning it is from recognition. Task-wise, recognition corresponds to the tracking of qualitative similarity whereas identification to the tracking of numerical identity.
Contrary to what the Ellis and Young model implies, identification neither requires recognition for its epistemic justification, nor does it need recognition for its psychological functioning. This deep difference accounts for the Frégoli delusion and recent work on the content of dreams (Schwartz and Maquet 2002). Given that identification carries with it an inbuilt doxastic commitment, it also plausibly explains the tenacity of delusions without the need for second-factor reasoning deficits or biases. Also, it suggests that the orthodoxy is fundamentally flawed: delusional misidentification does not arise as an inference on the basis of some kind of evidence that is present in the subject’s experience.
Bibliography
Bayne, T., Pacherie, E. 2004. Bottom-up or top-down?: Campbell's rationalist account of monothematic delusions, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 11/1: 1-11.
Davies, M., Coltheart, M., Langdon, R. and Breen, N. 2001. Monothematic delusions: Towards a two- factor account. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 8(2/3): 133–158.
Ellis, H. D., Young, A.W. 1990. Accounting for delusional misidentifications. British Journal of Psychiatry, 157: 239-248.
Stone, T., Young, A.W. 1997. Delusions and brain injury: the philosophy and psychology of belief. Mind & Language, 12: 327–364
Schwartz, S., Maquet, P. 2002. Sleep imaging and the neuro-psychological assessment of dreams. Trends in Cognitive Science, 6(1), 23-30. |
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| responsibles | Pacherie, Dokic, Proust |
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