Philosophical psychology

Abstract

This chapter examines the philosophy of mind in relation to psychosis. It begins by re-appraising the work of Karl Jaspers. Jaspers has been taken as an apologist for biological psychiatry. However, this is ironic, as Jaspers was, as an existential philosopher, interested in the personal experience of psychosis. His account of the phenomenology of psychosis is reappraised. The philosophical debate about Frith’s comparator model is discussed. Campbell has suggested that it can be defended against the problem of infinite regress implicit in the idea of a homunculus. Campbell suggests that our sense of ourselves as a person depends, inter alia, on our ability to identify and re-identify our mental states and those of others and that if we lost this ability we would lose our sense of identity. McGinn has suggested that delusions are more properly analysed not as failures in information processing but as failures in self-monitoring of imagination. This highlights a general supposition that the mind functions as a computer to analyse data. This model imposes limits on our descriptions of mental functioning. Wittgenstein’s observations on the paradoxes involved in the idea of the “self” are described. Finally, the Kant-inspired model of Peter Strawson in his book “Individuals” is described. “Persons” are logically irreducible parts of our conceptual scheme, which allows us to individuate mental states. It may be that being able to identify our own states of mind is dependent on a conceptual scheme in which bodily criteria are used to identify psychological states. If so then the difficulty for the psychotic person is that they have lost the ability to use this conceptual scheme. This is not exactly not having a “theory of mind”, as “theory” is too intellectual a description.

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