Aline, Gloria
and I met together to discuss John Campbell’s 2001 paper ‘Rationality, meaning and
the analysis of delusion’. As a result I think I have a clearer picture of why
I disagree with it than before. The following are thus not my own thoughts
(though neither do I want to saddle - my expression of - them onto either of my colleagues).
Campbell’s paper
divides between two phases of argument. In the first, he deploys a Davidsonian
link between meaning and rationality to press problems with the interpretation
of characteristic expressions of the Capgras delusion. The characteristic type
of utterance – “That woman is not my wife!” - is insufficient to specify an
interpretation since that type of utterance, freed of context, might be used to
flag a mere discovery of illegality in the wedding ceremony. (I worried that by
the end of the paper, Campbell had lost the right to this refutation but Aline
pointed out that the proof of the pudding was in the lack of acceptance by the
Capgras subject of this interpretation.) But the most plausible interpretation –
“This [demonstrated] woman is not that [remembered] woman” - fails because the
subject fails to deploy paradigmatic or canonical forms of checking. They do not do what they ought to do to check such a thought. Given the
meaning-rationality link, this apparent failure of rationality undermines such an interpretation.
The positive
phase aims to respond with a suggestion about the shape, at least, of the thought-content
involved. The very fact of the failure to adopt paradigmatic checking
strategies would be rational if the delusion had the status
of a (third period) Wittgensteinian hinge proposition. So the form of the thought can be identified even
though not the content (in G’s
helpful terminological analogy though it will conflict with my philosophy of content use of ‘content’, sorry).
It thus seems as
though the negative phase presses a failure of rationality and hence a failure
of interpretation in accord with the meaning-rationality link. The positive
phase suggests a ‘sort of’ rationality and hence a ‘sort of’ interpretation that
reaches only as far as the form, not the content, of the thought.
I think this summary of what is going on enables me to state my earlier worry in slightly different terms. If one takes
the negative phase seriously, the positive phase is unavailable. It, the
positive phase, says of we-know-not-what content that it has the form of a
hinge proposition. But surely the form-content distinction is an abstraction
from the motley of thoughts subjects have rather than something independently understandable. (To be
so would require prior commitment to something like the representational theory
of mind in a strong sense of it being independently characterisable and understandable as the a
priori engineering of minds rather than merely a post facto explanation of how they could be possible.) Given the meaning-rationality
link (ie the constitutive ideal of rationality underpinning interpretation through the principle of charity) and given a plausible
additional claim that rationality is not codifiable, drawing a distinction of
form and content would require first articulating thoughts as a piece of
radical interpretation and then abstracting forms and contents (from thought-contents, I want to say, with a danger of ambiguity). So if that
could be done, one would then be in a position to say that delusions have the
form of hinge propositions. But the first phase of Campbell’s paper is an
argument against the possibility of that necessary preliminary work.
To assume access
to the form of delusions without their contents is to assume something about
the shape of their intentional content (in the usual philosophy of content sense of that word). Aside from abstraction from the output
of radical interpretation, the only other route I can see to that would be to
start with a picture of the internal vehicles of content and describe their
functional roles. This approach faces a dilemma. If the functional roles
presuppose the structure of rationality then the approach cannot sidestep the
meaning-rationality link since rationality governs thought-contents. But if
they are just any dispositional causal connections between inner vehicles of content
(whatever the content turns out to be) then this threatens the connection
between what is being described and our ways of making sense of one another since only some connections would be (so much as, as they say in Oxford) intelligible. There
would need to be some reason to think that both structures kept in step. In the absence of that, such an approach seems a non-starter and hence the assumption that delusions are some sort of shaping of thought-content in the form of a hinge proposition despite being inaccessible to rational interpretation looks illicit.
Campbell, J. (2001) ‘Rationality, meaning, and the
analysis of delusion’ in Philosophy
Psychiatry and Psychology 8: 89-100
