The Measure of Madness: Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Delusional Thought

by Philip Gerrans

Overview

Drawing on the latest work in cognitive neuroscience, a philosopher proposes that delusions are narrative models that accommodate anomalous experiences.

In The Measure of Madness, Philip Gerrans offers a novel explanation of delusion. Over the last two decades, philosophers and cognitive scientists have investigated explanations of delusion that interweave philosophical questions about the nature of belief and rationality with findings from cognitive science and neurobiology. Gerrans argues that once we fully describe the computational and neural mechanisms that produce delusion and the way in which conscious experience and thought depend on them, the concept of delusional belief retains only a heuristic role in the explanation of delusion.

Gerrans proposes that delusions are narrative models that accommodate anomalous experiences. He argues that delusions represent the operation of the Default Mode Network (DMN)—the cognitive system that provides the raw material for humans' inbuilt tendency to provide a subjectively compelling narrative context for anomalous or highly salient experiences—without the “supervision” of higher cognitive processes present in the nondelusional mind. This explanation illuminates the relationship among delusions, dreams, imaginative states, and irrational beliefs that have perplexed philosophers and psychologists for over a century.

Going beyond the purely conceptual and the phenomenological, Gerrans brings together findings from different disciplines to trace the flow of information through the cognitive system, and applies these to case studies of typical schizophrenic delusions: misidentification, alien control, and thought insertion. Drawing on the interventionist model of causal explanation in philosophy of science and the predictive coding approach to the mind influential in computational neuroscience, Gerrans provides a model for integrative theorizing about the mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262320986
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	07/11/2014
Series:	Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	656 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Philip Gerrans is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

1 The Measure of Madness 1

1.1 Integrative versus Autonomous Theoretical Explanation 1

1.2 The Basis of Theoretical Autonomy 4

1.3 Jaspers and the inscrutability of Delusion 5

1.4 Meaning Rationalism and Framework Propositions 7

1.5 Neurobiological Eliminativism 13

1.6 Cognitive Phenomenology 20

2 Models, Mechanisms, and Cognitive Theories 21

2.1 Cognitive Autonomy: Models and Multiple Realizability 21

2.2 Causal Relevance and the Personal Level 23

2.3 Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and Neurocognitive Psychiatry 26

2.4 Autonomy Revisited 28

2.5 The Cognitive Economy 33

2.6 Theoretical Definition 35

3 The Processing Hierarchy and the Salience System 43

3.1 The Processing Hierarchy 43

3.2 A Computational Framework 46

3.3 The Salience System and Reward Prediction 52

3.4 Salience and the Adaptive Critic 57

3.5 Dopamine and Delusion 61

3.6 Applications 65

4 The Default Mode Network 67

4.1 Simulations as Narrative Elements 67

4.2 Mental Time Travel and the Default Network 69

4.3 Delusions as a "Mixed Mode" of the Default Network 72

4.4 The First-Person Perspective and Decontextualization 75

4.5 The Default Network and the "Essential Indexical" 78

4.6 Subjectivity, Affective Processing, and the Hub of the Default Network 80

4.7 Default and Decontextualized Processes 83

4.8 A Mundane Example 86

5 Dreaming, Default Thinking, and Delusion 89

5.1 Dreaming and the Default Mode Network 90

5.2 The AIM Model 95

5.3 Feature Binding and the Fregoli Delusion 99

5.4 Context Binding in Dreams and Delusions 108

5.5 Dorsolateral Deactivation in Dreams and Delusions 109

5.6 Are Delusions Dreams? 110

6 The Second Factor: Default or Doxastic Incorporation 113

6.1 Doxastic Theories and the Second Factor 115

6.2 Performance Accounts: Endorsement, Explanation, and Incorporation 117

6.3 Interactionism, Explanationism, and Attributional Style 122

6.4 Attributional Style and the Cotard Delusion 124

6.5 Bias and Default Thinking 128

6.6 Competence Accounts: Deficits of Belief Fixation 130

7 Imagination Incorporated 135

7.1 Incorporating Imagination 137

7.2 Belief and Imagination; Congruence and Incongruence 139

7.3 joint Incorporation 143

7.4 The Metacognitive Account 145

7.5 Delusions and Default Processing 147

7.6 The Dual Nature of Default Thoughts 151

7.7 Imaginative Resistance and the Essential Indexical 154

7.8 Cognitive Therapy for Doxastic Theorists 156

7.9 Imagination and Psychological Structure 160

8 The Sense of Agency, Lost and Found: Experience and Thought in Schizophrenic Delusion 163

8.1 The Sense of Agency, Lost and Found 168

8.2 The Priority of Visual Experience 170

8.3 Predictive Mechanisms and Cognitive Architecture 173

8.4 Experimental Evidence 176

8.5 Awareness of Predictions in Schizophrenia 183

8.6 Passivity and Externality 189

8.7 Mirror Neurons and Other Bodies 192

8.8 Passivity of Thought 197

8.9 External Attribution of Thoughts 201

8.10 External Attribution and Psychological Coherence 204

8.11 Passivity of Experience, Externality of Thought 206

9 Louis Sass and the Schizophrenic Lifeworld 209

9.1 Schreber's Lifeworld 210

9.2 Cognitive Phenomenology 217

10 Conclusion 223

Notes 229

References 231

Index 265

What People are Saying About This

George Graham

A first-rate exploration of how reference to multiple levels of explanation and description, from phenomenology to chemistry, may be assembled into a synoptic theory of delusion. Gerrans offers an erudite, novel, and insightful approach to the whole topic of delusional thought and attitude. This is an important book that deserves to be widely read.

Tim Bayne

An elegant meditation on delusion, dreaming, and default-mode thought. From dopamine dysregulation to delusional mood, from predictive coding to the phenomenology of agency, The Measure of Madness paints a compelling picture of thought gone wrong. This is philosophically informed cognitive neuropsychiatry at its best.

Endorsement

Philip Gerrans's wonderful book not only presents an original and rigorously well-informed account of some of the most persistent and perplexing psychiatric delusions discussed by philosophers and cognitive scientists; it also shows how to develop a philosophical model of the mind that takes into account the functional, neural, and biochemical bases of mental capacities. Writing in an elegant but accessible style, and showing a mastery of the philosophical and the neuroscientific literature, Gerrans advocates an integrative approach to psychological mechanisms, as opposed to seeing the neural and the psychological levels as autonomous and independent of each other. Gerrans has persuaded me that this is the way to understand psychiatric delusions; and his approach to delusions also shows, more generally, the value of the integrative approach to studying the mind. I cannot recommend this book too highly.

—Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

From the Publisher

A first-rate exploration of how reference to multiple levels of explanation and description, from phenomenology to chemistry, may be assembled into a synoptic theory of delusion. Gerrans offers an erudite, novel, and insightful approach to the whole topic of delusional thought and attitude. This is an important book that deserves to be widely read.

—George Graham, Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Faculty, Neuroscience Institute, Georgia State University; author of The Disordered Mind; and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry

An elegant meditation on delusion, dreaming, and default-mode thought. From dopamine dysregulation to delusional mood, from predictive coding to the phenomenology of agency, The Measure of Madness paints a compelling picture of thought gone wrong. This is philosophically informed cognitive neuropsychiatry at its best.

—Tim Bayne, Professor of Philosophy, University of Manchester

Philip Gerrans's wonderful book not only presents an original and rigorously well-informed account of some of the most persistent and perplexing psychiatric delusions discussed by philosophers and cognitive scientists; it also shows how to develop a philosophical model of the mind that takes into account the functional, neural, and biochemical bases of mental capacities. Writing in an elegant but accessible style, and showing a mastery of the philosophical and the neuroscientific literature, Gerrans advocates an integrative approach to psychological mechanisms, as opposed to seeing the neural and the psychological levels as autonomous and independent of each other. Gerrans has persuaded me that this is the way to understand psychiatric delusions; and his approach to delusions also shows, more generally, the value of the integrative approach to studying the mind. I cannot recommend this book too highly.

—Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

Tim Crane

Philip Gerrans's wonderful book not only presents an original and rigorously well-informed account of some of the most persistent and perplexing psychiatric delusions discussed by philosophers and cognitive scientists; it also shows how to develop a philosophical model of the mind that takes into account the functional, neural, and biochemical bases of mental capacities. Writing in an elegant but accessible style, and showing a mastery of the philosophical and the neuroscientific literature, Gerrans advocates an integrative approach to psychological mechanisms, as opposed to seeing the neural and the psychological levels as autonomous and independent of each other. Gerrans has persuaded me that this is the way to understand psychiatric delusions; and his approach to delusions also shows, more generally, the value of the integrative approach to studying the mind. I cannot recommend this book too highly.